(Things I found interesting recently.)
Tech: ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center. Great panel weblog, with some of the big names in the research field, dealing with several security issues quite nicely.
Found from a link to Simon Byers’ 2003 roundup of information leakage, which notes an interesting case I hadn’t heard of — a TechTV presenter accidentally posting topless photos of herself, due to a bug in Photoshop!
(link via Liudvikas Bukys)
Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’
I’d guess that was our fault, moving SpamAssassin CVS to subversion at apache.org ;) Happy to oblige, Rod!
If I wasn’t so jet-lagged (still!), suffering from a cold, and busy with the day job, I’d be having that fun myself; SVN is very, very, very nice from what little I can tell so far. Only time will tell if it can beat the lovely Perforce, though, the virtues of which I have extolled on many occasions (earning myself a freebie T-shirt in the process, payola!).
But yeah, SVN looks really cool.
Tolkien: The Encyclopedia of Arda — great for settling those insanely geeky Lord of The Rings arguments, of which there have been loads recently. ;)
For example, yes, Gandalf does wear one of the elf-rings — and this is shown in the ‘sailing of the ring-bearers’ scene in the third movie. (The elf-rings are only intermittently visible in the movie — presumably because only other ring-bearers can see them, or something like that. Ben?)
I’m looking forward to the extended edition of Return of the King already…
Free Software: Ciaran O’Riordan has just announced the launch of IFSO, the Irish Free Software Organisation:
With Ireland holding the presidency of the EU for the next six months, political lobbying in Ireland will be of increased importance. The fate of the software patentability directive is still undecided, and we now also have the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive to deal with. In the coming months, members of IFSO also plan to work on spreading education and adoption of Free Software in Ireland. Once we have a proven track record, we hope to become an associate organisation of FSF Europe.
He also notes: ‘by no coincidence, today is also the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the GNU project.’
Go IFSO!
Funny: Lobster Barbie outfit turns out to be a lifesaver: ‘Practical jokers Jim Bright and Chris Costello never imagined that their idea of dressing a female lobster in a Barbie outfit – accessorized with pink high heels – would save her from the steam pot. But it did – at least 10 times.’
Software: some interesting bits on how piracy affects the small software developer from PeerFear (the developer of NewsMonster), Nick Bradbury (Feed Demon), and Ambrosia Software — all small-scale commercial software developers.
Nick notes that when he uploaded a fake ‘cracked’ version to a warez site, he found out that more people used the warez in a few weeks than had ever paid for it. Amazing.
For a while now, I’ve been keen on shareware. I’ve paid for the shareware software I use (like iSilo), purely because I like the shareware model — and the software, of course. ;)
I prefer free software, but I understand some people need to make money from what they’re writing directly in this way, and aren’t writing the software as a kind of hobby or with a ‘public good’ motivation (which is pretty much what drives me to write free software). I even experimented with publishing as shareware myself at one stage.
I found, however, that open source suits me better; I like the way it builds a community of trust around the code, seems to gain better mindshare, reduces the bottleneck on the software developer himself, and generally is more how I’d like to do it. Plus, nobody’s going to pirate code they download for free anyway so I never have to worry about adding DRM-like stuff and accidentally annoying legit users with painful registration codes and so on ;)
With any commercial software, commercial support is required; thoughts about how to pay for it is required; and the developer has to make a commitment to the users in many ways. It’s hard work, and a full-time job. For the software I write in my free time, I can’t provide this support, so free software is the appropriate way to release it.
Vacation: We’re back. Well, technically, my body is back, but the silver thread is reeling in somewhere over Greenland. So I’m pre-classifying my mail and looking for urgent stuff with my eyes glazing over instead of doing anything more useful.
Scams: Interesting Wired News article: ‘Cyber-blackmail artists are shaking down office workers, threatening to delete computer files or install pornographic images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom’. ‘The e-mail typically contains a demand that unless a small fee is paid … they will attack the PC … or download onto the machine images of child pornography.’
Of course, it’s simply spammed out, and they phish in anyone who is dumb enough to take it seriously and reply. But it does raise an interesting point, which I read about last week in this interview with Pete Townshend:
‘Perhaps Townshend (was) thinking of a case at Southwark Crown Court in 1998, in which the judge made it clear what constituted possession: that you were in possession of child pornography not just if you actively downloaded it, but if it appeared on your computer screen at all.’
So that sounds like, if child-porn images are found on a PC — and it doesn’t matter how they got there — the PC’s owner is liable. So theoretically this could be exploited to cause serious legal difficulties to a UK resident with a lack of computer literacy, or a bad email client that displays images in messages from unknown senders without user approval first. Another bad law.
Funny: Andy Kershaw in North Korea: songs about revolutionary cabbage-growing.
SpamAssassin: The 2003 OSDir.com Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source. Woo!
Editor’s Choice for Best Application (Top 5 environments):
Email: SpamAssassin (Double Winner)
SpamAssassin keeps keeps me out of Anger Management classes. If you are not running SpamAssassin get thee to SpamAssassin.org. Now. If you need your friendly neighborhood system administrator to do it.. start sending flowers or Scotch today with a nice little note asking to get SpamAssassin going medieval on your mail server.Miscellaneous Editor’s Choice:
Can’t Live Without: SpamAssassin
The fact that this doesn’t have to be explained says it all.
Code: OOP over the top: a hilarious dissection of some of the most monstrous ‘how to rewrite OO-style’ I have ever seen — take a 15-line if/elseif/else clause and rewrite as a thoroughly over-engineered unmaintainable 7-class, 15-method disaster, using the Singleton and Factory patterns. The rewrite in the original article is intended seriously, as far as I can tell.
As the xmldatabases.org article says: ‘this is really a general problem with OO development. Fancy object oriented architectures have become the goal and this article maybe makes that point more clearly then anything I could ever say. It’s representative of the thinking from a few years ago (written in 2000), and shows us just how much damage we now have to undo. It basically says that the simple solution that just works is wrong and will be unmaintainable. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not, nowhere does the article consider the question of whether or not that code actually needs to be that generic. It simply says that the simple solution is bad and that the seven class monster they came up with is the right solution. Talk about doing a disservice to students trying to learn how to build solid computer systems.’
(Found via sourcefrog.net — Martin Pool’s weblog, great for Linux and code bits).
WebMake: linux.com: An introduction to building sites with WebMake. W00t! Let’s hope nobody asks any questions while I’m away for xmas ;)
Innovation: Maciej posts a fantastic look back on the Wright Brothers from an interesting angle — their patent-related antics.
The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn’t what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.
Fantastic article. If you’re curious about the history of patenting, and its many fundamental failures, I can’t recommend it enough.
Weblogs: Guardian’s ‘best of British blogging’: good set of winners this year.
Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.
Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.
‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)
Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.
Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.
A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!
Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.
Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.
Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.
‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)
Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.
Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.
A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!
Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.
Security: Bruce Schneier points out some interesting angles on the official report into the US power blackout of Aug 14th:
Why the tortured prose? The writers take pains to assure us that the power generation and delivery systems were not affected by MSBlast. But what about the alarm systems? Clearly, they were all affected by something–and all at the same time.
To be honest, it sounds pretty damn close to me, as I’ve said before.
Ireland: Apparently, the Internet Society of Ireland (ISOC) has set up its first Chapter working group to establish a consensus on best principles for governing the .IE registry.
Should be some fireworks, I hope ;)
Ireland: Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!
Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:
Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT – The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.
KATE THORNTON:
Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.SAMUEL L.JACKSON:
Really? Only in the UK?KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.
SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.
KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)
SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)
KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.
SLJ: Ok good.
KT: As are you.
SLJ: Yeah all right.
KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?
SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.
KT: So you checked him out?
SLJ: Yeah
The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?
Yours sincerely,
Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com
Health:
Revealed: how drug firms ‘hoodwink’ medical journals (Observer) — an
amazing attempt to mislead scientific progress for short-term commercial
gain. (via forteana):
Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals. The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. …
Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for ‘lending’ their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed. …
(One) email, seen by The Observer, said: ‘In order to reduce your workload to a minimum, we have had our ghostwriter produce a first draft based on your published work. I attach it here.’ The article was a 12-page review paper ready to be presented at an forthcoming conference. Healy’s name appeared as the sole author, even though he had never seen a single word of it before. But he was unhappy with the glowing review of the drug in question, so he suggested some changes. The company replied, saying he had missed some ‘commercially important’ points. In the end, the ghostwritten paper appeared at the conference and in a psychiatric journal in its original form – under another doctor’s name.
Spam: This is funny — via IP, ANNOUNCING: The amphibious transport dock and spam relay:
(USS San Antonio) supports the Marine Corps ‘mobility triad,’ the LCAC (Landing Craft Air Cushion vehicle), the ‘Triple A-V’ (AAAV – Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle) and the MV-22 (Osprey tiltrotor aircraft), and … spammers in Guangdong, Red China.
Ah, the perils of COTS.
Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!
Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:
Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT – The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.
KATE THORNTON: Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.
SAMUEL L.JACKSON: Really? Only in the UK?
KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.
SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.
KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)
SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)
KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.
SLJ: Ok good.
KT: As are you.
SLJ: Yeah all right.
KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?
SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.
KT: So you checked him out?
SLJ: Yeah.
[….]
The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?
Yours sincerely,
Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com
Software: Joel on Biculturalism: ‘What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.’
I’m not sure I agree; I’ve met lots of Windows programmers who take what Joel calls the ‘UNIX’ orientation, and even a few Unix people who are as user-oriented in their coding as what Joel calls the ‘Windows’ way.
But, talking of the Unix/Win divide — it seems that Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, is joining MS, who have something called SharePoint Team Services, an editable-web group sharing system as part of Front Page.
If you ever wanted to see an illustration of a Windows-Unix divide in the web age, it sounds like this is it: Wiki has quick-and-dirty links in FuglyBouncingCaps, is text-heavy, has obscure text markup formats, has little in the way of roles, access control, or a workflow model, and has some odd magic pages that live in the same namespace as everything else despite being different.
SharePoint, by contrast, is integrated with everything in Office, is a great success where the MS Kool-Aid is viewed as tasty, uses role-based security and a workflow, and seems to be generally reviled elsewhere.
No better illustration. The only thing that could improve that would be if SharePoint has a talking paperclip I’ve missed.
Fun: 
C just got her xmas present; a digital camera,
the Sony DSC P10 to be exact. Results to right ;)
Good: Sony’s easy-to-use use of USB mass-storage and open formats (GIF, JPEG, and MPEG). pnmstitch.
Bad: having to upgrade my kernel to 2.4.23 to get the bloody thing mounted! (Of course, iPhoto recognised it right away.)
Spam: Let me take this moment to welcome our UK friends to the ‘spam now illegal’ club; unlike the US, the European and Australian anti-spam laws seem to be shaping up nicely, requiring opt-in before ’email marketing’ can be sent.
This actually happened in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, but I think I forgot to mention it here, so here’s the details:
Announcement, full text, full text as HTML. (It’s section 13 you want to read. Note that OpenOffice seems to have miscounted the bullet points in the HTML version ;)
The good stuff:
forging/disguising of originating header info is prohibited.
The bad:
won’t be any good against US-based spammers. No surprise there. HOWEVER it may be useful against large multinational companies taking advantage of CAN-SPAM’s relaxed regime to indulge in a little spamming, if they have an Irish office.
And, of course, it’ll mean that Ireland won’t develop Florida’s reputation any time soon, which is a good thing.
Will it be useful against spammers in other parts of the EU? That’s another question. Anyone know? I know of a bunch in France I’d really like to deal with.
Brian Nisbet reckons it may.
I was reminded by this letter from the Department of Communications received by UCC , which notes:
But the Minister has announced that he intends using Ireland’s Presidency of the EU to initiate global partnership in clamping down on ‘spam.’
Global? Just don’t ask for any help from the Florida state government. ;)
Spam: Other (big) spam news: ‘Gaven Stubberfield’ arrested for ‘falsifying his identity so that his e-mails could not be traced’. SBL say that Jeremy Jaynes, aka ‘Gaven Stubberfield’ is the eight-most prolific spammer in the world, and is ‘notorious for ‘horsey porn’ spam’.
Irish: Irish WWW pioneer Peter Flynn now has a weblog, it seems. As far as I can tell, Peter was responsible for much of the good stuff at celt.ucc.ie, which reminds me to post this link to Pangur Bán I’ve been meaning to post.
Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindan:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu memna céin im saincheirdd.
In my case, it’s mise agus Bubba Liath, otherwise pretty close despite the intervening 11 centuries…
Patents: The Washington Post gets it. ‘The country “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law,” said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. “It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”‘
BTW, one thing people say is that software patents are fine, as long as the technique is novel and new. What that misses is that novel, new techniques quickly become commonplace and standard infrastructure; consider image/audio/video compression, general compression techniques, cryptography, and so on. Those were all high-tech, super-complex schemes 5 years ago. Nowadays, we have JPEG, gzip, openssl, ssh, and all these other standard tools that are just part and parcel of our basic infrastructure. In software, ‘new and novel’ becomes ‘standard infrastructure’ remarkably quickly, and that’s what’s driving software innovation.
Software: There’s a certain frisson to be had when you find out that your software is running somewhere really cool; I got this when I found out that PLP was being used in McMurdo Base, Antarctica and SpamAssassin as The Well‘s spam filtering system (SpamAssassin‘s now even more widely deployed, which is amazing — but this was the first ‘woo!’ moment).
However, I think Justin Frankel of WinAmp has got me well beat — the International Space Station. Bloody hell.
Aside: I wonder if they need a spam filter up there? ;)
Funny: We Love The SCO Information Minister. ‘Their assertions are incorrect. The source code is absolutely owned by SCO.’
Spam: 2 South Florida men agree to post $1 million bonds before spamming in future after an FTC bust — looks like a mortgage-scam spam team. Yay FTC!
The two portrayed themselves as mortgage lenders in unsolicited commercial e-mail, the FTC said, but their 30 Minute Mortgage operation was in fact not a lender and did not offer 30-year loans at 3.95 percent, as advertised.
Instead, the two were interested in getting potential customers to divulge their Social Security numbers, income and other sensitive financial data, which they then tried to sell to others, the FTC charged.
Here’s a hot UL that’s floating around the irish web right now —
In a British program about Samuel L Jackson and Colin Farrell’s lastest movie SWAT presented by British presenter, Kate Thornton, the following exchange occured:
Thornton: What was it like working with Colin (Farrell), cos he is just so hot in the U.K. right now?
Jackson: He’s pretty hot in the U.S. too.
Thornton: Yeah, but he is one of our own.
Jackson: Isn’t he from Ireland?
Thornton: Yeah, but we can claim him cos Ireland is beside us.
Jackson: You see that’s your problem right there. You British keep claiming people that don’t belong to you. We had that problem here in America too, it was called slavery.
… yeah, right. ;)
(Update: Actually, believe it or not, that’s more or less how it really went. Here’s the transcript.)
Some commentary at
TheReggaeBoyz.com (quote: ‘I NEARLY DEAD TO RASS!!!!’) and
Kuro5hin.
It looks like the TV programme does exist; no scripts online, unfortunately, so we’ll never figure out if this one really happened, I think.
IMO, it’s made up for sure. That last line is just a little too harsh for a primetime schmooze-a-gram, at the very least. Plus, it’s the kind of thing only an Irishman would give a shit about — the perpetual adoption of Irish celebs and worthies by the UK media is a continual source of irritation for the Irish — as Dervala puts it:
‘No, Oscar Wilde was ours. You put him in jail, though. And Shaw was ours. And Yeats. And Johnny Rotten.’
Spam: Yoz comments on the bizarre new names appearing in spam, linking to a 2lmc spool entry and this entry at rereviewed.com, featuring such beauties as:
Me, I’m looking forward to getting spam from Collately Sisters with the international finance arse and Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan on new Euro-quota rates.
Oh look, I’ve found some war:
MORRIS: Back live now, progress on The Day Today smart bomb – Jonathan! Get rid of Hurd! Thanks!
(Hurd vanishes from a monitor, replaced by a bomb’s eye view of the war zone.)
MAN WITH GLASSES: Well, Chris, as you can see there’s the missile, cruising at around 2000 per second trying to locate the target the soldier it’s aimed at – there’s the soldier, it goes in through the mouth, down through the oesophagus, into the stomach and there’s the explosion. (The camera enters the gob of a surprised trooper before the picture turns to static)
MORRIS: Absolutely bang! That’s The Day Today bringing you another tear on the face of the world’s mother! Alan! Sport!
Irish: Sarah Carey‘s back — good to see it. Delivering a prime piece of moral outrage regarding malls (or ‘shopping centres’ as they’re quaintly called on the eastern shores), and their intolerance of political speech.
Politics: WorldChanging.org
on open source: ‘we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that
several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing,
they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the
world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?’
‘… as William Gibson reminds us, the future is here, it’s just not well-distributed yet. The answer to our problems is not to redistribute wealth, it’s to redistribute the future. In very practical terms, that’s what the open source (OS) movement is doing.’
Great article — and great picture from the CSMonitor (copied above) to illustrate it!
Music: Warren Ellis on pop:
The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.
He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)
The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.
He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)
Environment: (the built one, that is): LA Observed links to a couple of stories about kayaking the grim concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River. Well worth a read, and don’t miss the 1999 LA Weekly story, in which the journalist makes it to the sea before being picked up by police.
The LA river was once a real river, but due to its tendency to flash-flood, was turned into a trickle in a concrete trench back in the 1930s. Since then, it’s starred in a wide variety of movies and TV; the ones I can remember from the top of my head are Terminator 2, Earthquake, and V (which hilariously stole the river scenes directly from Earthquake, the cheapskates).
BTW, one interesting factor of living in the LA area is that you realise just how much of the TV and film of your childhood is taken directly from these surroundings; last time I was at the local train station, I looked out over a patch of sun-baked scrub and a couple of warehouses, and could clearly see The Six-Million Dollar Man running across it in my mind’s eye — wakka-wakka-wakka.
All along, I’d assumed these great sets were chosen for a particular reason, not just because they were right around the corner from the studio ;)
Talking of my local train station, here’s a good article about a very Irvine situation; it seems people keep a second, clunker car at the train station, due to the shortcomings of the Southern California public transit system.
Patents: Wonder why MS is just now starting to monetize^W’liberalise’ its patent portfolio, starting with a VFAT royalty fee for digital cameras?
Here’s a possible reason why — they’ve hired Marshall Phelps, from IBM, the executive who began IBM’s aggressive patent-based revenue program in 1985.
Microsoft has reached a point, (Eben Moglen) says, where the company can no longer enjoy the same annual revenue growth that it did in the 1990s. Like IBM in the eighties, it’s now looking for ‘creative’ ways to keep the shareholders happy.
CDWow: Anti-IRMA, pro-CDWow leaflet to print out and post somewhere (link via Donncha).
Spam: Spamcop.net on securing MS Exchange systems against relaying. If you run an Exchange server that’s accessible from the net, this is a must-read. Summary:
Spamcop.net on securing MS Exchange systems against relaying. If you run an Exchange server that’s accessible from the net, this is a must-read. Summary:
E-Voting: Very interesting page reproducing a translation of part of an expert report detailing an incident that occurred during an ‘electronic election’ in Belgium on May 18th 2003.
The latest EDRI-gram notes:
The total number of preferential votes cast on a specific candidate was higher than the total number of votes for his list. A series of tests was conducted on the computer of the president of the voting committee, but the error could not be reproduced. The difference in votes was exactly 4096, leading the research-team to the conclusion that the error was probably due to a spontaneous inversion of a binary position in the read-write memory of the PC.
This serves as a pretty good pointer to how, even if the software is audited to death and pronounced reliable, the hardware can still trip you up. Computers are fundamentally unreliable.
The solution? Why, a Voter-Verifiable Audit Trail of course. ;)
Books: Smartypants, the book! I’m there.
Music: So the current news on the Irish web scene is the Irish Recorded Music Association, Ireland’s very own mini-RIAA, attempting to sue cheap CD vendor CDWow.ie out of the Irish market.
CDWow sell CDs cheap, by shipping from Hong Kong. Yes, the price differential between Hong Kong and Europe is so big that even considering the shipping costs, it works out significantly cheaper for the consumer.
The IRMA page on the issue is hilarious, with vague threats of ‘credit cards floating through cyberspace’ (whatever that means), and comments like: ‘Remember every CD Wow purchase is a nail in the coffin of an Irish job’, because so much of the bland, multinational, big-music-industry output is produced in Ireland. Suuuure.
Read on at the Boards.IE discussion. ‘Doctor J’ on that forum notes:
I saw a Ween cd, manufactured in the USA, on sale in HMV for EUR44.99 last night.
- CD Universe – EUR14.99
- HMV.co.uk – UKP17.99
- Tower.co.uk – UKP9.41
Are IRMA seriously suggesting it is in the interests of the Irish consumerto be ripped off by almost EUR30???
ADORABLE KITTENS TALK ABOUT POLITICS
Funny: Best commentary I’ve read all week: ADORABLE KITTENS TALK ABOUT POLITICS: