2001-07-29»
I spent all yesterday coding WAT, my textfile todo
handler with Palm synchronisation. This is why I'm not a
programmer.
Excellent
commentary by John "Catweazel" Gilmore on the DMCA.
EFF won't be able to take every case that comes along. The
community's donations to EFF have been gratifying, useful, indeed
essential. But there is far more money going into rabid company
lawyers than is going into EFF or anywhere else for DMCA legal
defense. It's classic public choice economics -- the benefit of the
DMCA is concentrated in big profits to small numbers of companies,
while the harm of the DMCA is spread widely through society. The
companies will spend a lot to get those profits, while relatively few
people will want to spend much to defend against them. EFF will have
to pick which cases to focus on: ones where we can set precedents and
get good leverage that will ultimately help the most people. But some
people -- I predict many people -- are going to twist in the wind or
in prison for years, before the courts or Congress are pushed into
fixing the havoc caused by rabid copyright maximalists. So what if it
decimates our profession? We're a tiny minority of society, and we
don't bribe any legislators. They'll only notice that we matter after
we're gone, when their security infrastructures fall to bits.
Hailstorm explained:
c/o
slashdot
2001-07-27»
»
Back from Africa. Feeling fitter, somewhat lighter headed. Caught up in
Dmitry-saving, Co-located server mechanics, and reignited local
friend-making.
But first, as ever: it's the Call of the Know!
I think I'd be more annoyed about being 7,000 miles away if it wasn't for Cook'd and Bomb'd's rip of the
new Brass Eye
Her Brittanic Majesty's Secretary of State Requests And Requires that you
give Paul Ford a
temporary home.
How long has it been since I was supposed to improve my Crash Into My House
Flash file?
Got a UNIX system? Receiving dozens of SirCam e-mails? Join in the fun, and
decode those private documents with these commands:
In mutt, select the second attachment,
then hit pipe (|), and enter:
dd bs=512 skip=268 > ~/tmp/filenamehere.ext
You might need to use
skip=280 if that doesn't work. More
suggestions in
this
USENET posting by Ronan Keryell.
They didn't Free
Dimitry. Which is, horribly, a slight relief for me, because I have a
column about the situation coming out on Sunday.
Another EFF Project, hosted at Harvard Law school: Chilling
Effects Clearing House:
We will be gathering cease and desist notices sent to Internet users, and
will analyze those letters in issue-spotting FAQs (informal memos) to be
posted on the site.
I have a very crude spam filter: I send anything that isn't from a known
mailing list, and doesn't have my name in the From: header, into a suspected
spam mailbox which I rarely visit. This works very well, except for mailing
lists that I've forgotten to add to the master list. I've just realised that
including a
:0:
* ^Precedence:.*bulk
misclist.mbx/
entry into my procmailrc should take care of that. It works because spam is
the only bulk mail that doesn't admit that it is bulkmail. D'oh!
