Currently:
2002-12-17»
Elcomsoft innocent!»
Here, I think, is the key quote, from the jury foreman, Dennis Strader:
The defense argued that the program merely enabled owners of Adobe eBook
Reader software to make copies of e-books for personal use. If an owner
makes a backup copy of an e-book or transfers it to another device he
owns, they argued, that is permitted under the "fair use" concept of
copyright law.
Jury foreman Dennis Strader said the argument made a big impact on the
jurors, who asked U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte to clarify the
"fair use" definition shortly after deliberations began.
"Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had
trouble with that concept," said Strader.
(From the Associated
Press
story)
That Creative Commons' animation»
The excellent Creative Commons animation I mentioned is right here. It's
brilliant. But what license is it? I'm worried that Junell's Web server will
get killed by too many people linking to it, and I'd like to co-host it here.
Hmmm...
Okay, I've watched it right through to the end, and it looks like it's
under an attribution, sharealike, non-commercial license. So I can mirror the movie with a
clear conscience! Excellent. This really works!
Back from Creative Commons' launch»
I got to the Creative Commons launch late (Q and I had to apply CPR to a
dead server in Portland), and had to stand near the back, near the avocado
dip. My summary of the speeches, therefore, has to be "Mumble mumble mumble
(LOUD CRUNCHING NOISES OF MY OWN MOUTH) (APPLAUSE)". Some elements I gathered
through the static: Lessig, to follow up on his triumph of getting Milton
Friedman and Ursula Le Guin to join forces in Eldred, got video pledges of
support from John Perry "Intellectual Property is an Oxymoron" Barlow
and Jack "I 0wnz0r Y0ur C0mm0nw3al" Valenti. Together - AT LAST. DJ
Spooky spoke, then played something Quinn described as "19th Century
Koyaanisqatsi" and therefore I liked. It is under the MUMBLE MUMBLE CRUNCH
license. Aaron Swartz managed to
explain RDF well, even as his presentation AV morphed behind him into
/dev/random piping into video memory. The Creative Commons team also showed a
fantastic Flash movie that explains the whole concept far better than
any echo-mumbling I could muster. I can't find it on the site, but oooohhh
when I do, it is so getting redistributed. The brie was nice.
Our replacement Roomba (the previous one died in protest of our lifestyle)
arrived. We're looking for someone else in the area to play Two Robot Vacuum
Cleaners Enter, One Robot Vacuum Cleaner Leaves. This is where two Roombas
are placed back-to-back in the middle of a room, and set running. First to
escape through the one open door wins. Also, when we're drunker, we're tying
pens to them and making automatic art on the kitchen floor.
2002-12-16»
Black belt in Idea-fu»
Matt's amazing warchalking meme makes it
into New York
Times Idea of the Year list (I am so proud I got to be the first to rub my
hands in glee). It's a great list, incidentally - as it would have to be,
with "Pokemon
Hegemon" as one of the headings.
2002-12-14»
Family matters»
One more thing I'm going to have problems explaining to my daughter: what
"cc:" stands for.
Peppercoin»
Hmmm. Some buzz going about Ronald Rivest's new startup, a
cryptographically secure micropayment
protcol. My spider-sense is tingling about online payment systems in 2003.
Oh, boy, another opportunity to look stupid in twelve month's time. Scott
Loftesness is a good news-aggregating blogger on
this topic and quite a few others.
2002-12-12»
RSI»
So, last week's ST column was
about RSI (I'm slowly crippling myself with mouse shoulder, so I'm trying to
stop doing Bad Things). Gary Marshall wrote a very kind mail listing all the
trick he's been doing to fend it off. I said that it'd be great if he through
it up on the Web, and he did, so I'm linking to it: Gary Marshall's Guide to
RSI.
Too Much Information»
Great short
piece from the New Yorker wondering what Philip K. Dick would make of the
Total Awareness Office. I came because the title of the piece - Too Much
Information - which is fun. I blogged because of the fantastic payoff
in the last paragraph. Sometimes you suspect people write whole columns just
to be able to finish them on flourishes like that. Or, as in this case, you
just know they did.
Google News bookmarklet, contd.»
Small tweak to the bookmarklet below - I've stuck in an escape
function call to cope with news URLs with GET parameters. The bookmarklet will
still have problems with URLs that willfully stick in user information into
the URL (like MSNBC), but it'll do much better with quite a few others.
Hooray for the Lazyweb, part 2313812»
Here's your Google
News bookmarklet, courtesy of the amazing (and currently not quite as
lazy) Rod
Begbie.
2002-12-11»
Let Google News do your background research»
Another (slightly trickier) URL hack. Bookmark this
google news bookmark in Moz, and give it a shortcut (as in the last
entry) - say "gn". Now, if you're at a news article, and you want to see what
other news sources have to say about it, just replace the "http://" bit of the
URL with "gn ", hit return, and Google News will spew out the cluster of news
stories that are similiar to your news article. So, if you were at "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm",
a news story about Yemen, change the URL to
"gn news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm" would take you to http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cluster:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm
which is the index page for all the news stories Google knows about this
topic.
This could probably do with turning into a platform-independent bookmarklet. Any volunteers?
Secrets Of The Idiot Overlords»
Bookmark this link
in Mozilla or Phoenix, and then go to "Bookmarks/ Manage Bookmarks", select
the new bookmark, choose "Edit/Properties..." then give the damn thing the
keyword "ntk". Then, whenever you type in "ntk foobar" into the location bar,
you'll search NTK for foobar. Here's another one for Oblomovka.
Yet another reason to buy BBEdit»
They're giving the EFF ten dollars for
every copy sold until the end of December. (From Doc's weblog).
2002-12-10»
The Dangers of Total Information Awareness»
The always excellent c't magazine analyses
the hypotheticals of
the Dutch IP-surveillance scandal:
According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all
tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping
equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information
to Israel. How difficult is it to make a back-door in the Dutch Transport of
Intercepted IP Traffic system?
Another Minuteman firework show, maybe»
Lloyd keeps
sending me advance notice of West Coast missile
launches from Vandenberg and I keep forgetting to blog them. Heads up, as
it were:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 04:22:20 -0800
From: Brian Webb
To: SeeSat-L@satobs.org
Subject: Vandenberg AFB Missile Launch
Resent-Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:19:42 -0500
Resent-From: SeeSat-L@satobs.org
Hi All:
Be advised that a modified Minuteman II missile will be launched from
Vandenberg AFB on California's central coast several hours from now.
The vehicle is scheduled to leave northwest Vandenberg on Wednesday morning,
December 11 at 00:01 PST (right after midnight), the start of a four-hour
launch window. This translates to DEC 11 08:01 to 12:01 UTC.
Following launch, the vehicle will fly a ballistic trajectory and send an
unarmed warhead and decoys to the central Pacific as part of a missile
defense test. Several minutes later, an interceptor launched from the
Marshall Islands will attempt to kill the warhead.
The Minuteman launch should be visible at least as far away as Phoenix,
Arizona; Saint George, Utah; and Reno, Nevada. Look for a bright orange
"star" in the direction of Vandenberg. If you have binoculars or an
astronomical telescope, you might want to use it to view the launch (the
view could be impressive).
If you see anything tonight, let me know.
Regards,
Brian Webb
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petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.
