Oblomovka

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<<Jun  Aug>>

2001-07-30»

Off freeing Dmitry.

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!