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Underway in Ireland
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30 June 2002 |
Independent.co.uk -- John Cage's 4'33", a lengthy silent track on one of his avant-garde albums, constitutes an original work for copyright purposes. This means that other composers who include silent tracks have made a derivative work from Cage's silence. Cage's representatives have served producer Mike Batt with a legal nastygram asserting that he infringed on Cage's copyright with his 60-second silent track on the latest Planets album.
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facetious
x: 125
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 KILKENNY, Ireland -- While most people in Ireland won't pay to read news, an equally interesting fact is that most Irish papers check your cookies before letting you read the news. While I understand many of the reasons why new media publishers require registration, the cookie process interferes with automatic harvesters (like blog xml feeds) from reading news sources.
x:125
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WINDLEY.com -- Rob Flickenger explains the benefits of long-haul Wi-Fi and captive portals in PC World magazine. The article explains benefits of sharing and extending bandwidth via Wi-Fi and simple technologies.
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BoxesAndArrows.com -- Nathan Shedroff writes about computer-human values. When producers of the first personal computers initially launched them into the market over 20 years ago, they could think of no better use for them than storing recipes and balancing one's checkbook. They couldn't predict how deep computers (and related devices) would seep into our lives.
x:125
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NPR.org -- NPR realized that having people ask for permission "was not really in step with reality." The blogger community pointed out the travesty of the NPR ask-to-link policy.
x: 143
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29 June 2002 |
TWENEY.com -- Dylan Tweney thinks "the problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don't get to decide what runs on your computer -- Microsoft does. You can't even open files unless you've been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. And that puts a huge amount of power into the hands of these corporations."
x: 26121
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Tim O'Reilly has written a hell of an editorial by way of introduction to the festivities at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source convention in San Diego. He talks about the current state-of-the-industry, the fallacies that led up to the great crash and the enduring truths that survived it. Most of all, he addresses the ongoing clash between free software/open source advocates and the proprietary software world, as epitomized by the most recent, rotten FUD from Microsoft and their sock-puppet analysts.
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RADIO.WEBLOGS.COM/0107233 -- Enjoy inspiring dog tales. Then head over to Irish Animals and donate a corner of your home to a real pet.
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IRISHWAN.org -- There's a lot of cross-talk about providing free hotspots. And a lot of support for those who do. I think it's important to note the ethical considerations of providing others with free connectivity off the back of your personal internet connection. Once you start to supply downstream parties with services, you become a subsidiary of an ISP. You probably violate your terms and conditions. If you do that in my neighbourhood, my service slows down and you become no better than the guy who splices into my cable TV connection. You probably also complain to the All You Can Eat Buffet when they evict you for sharing your plate with 20 strangers. We all have to eat out of a small ISP pipe so there has to be some control of the free stuff.
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OPEN -- JMCC reports that one of Eircom's homegrown spammers is at it again. "This is the same scumsucking bottom feeder who has been spamming from Eircom servers for a few weeks. This spam purports to be from Patrick McCann, aka Patrick From Ireland. Now the git has forged one of my domains in order to send is rubbish and in this jurisdiction that is a criminal act. Eircom by taking no action is basically aiding and abetting such activities.
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I don't need a smart agent Sterling on Ubiquitous Computing and the canard of stalled innovation. Sterling's sent out the text of the speech he gave this week to the CRA Conference on Grand Research Challenges in Computer Science and Engineering in DC. Mostly, it's about ubiquitous computing, a subject near and dear to my utility-fogged heart, and that stuff is extremely choice, in high Sterling style:
I don't need a "smart" package or an "agent" package. I don't much want to "talk" to a package. I don't want a package tugging my sleeve, stalking me, or selfishly begging for attention and commitment. If a package really wants to please me and earn my respect, it needs to tell me three basic things: What is it? (It's the very thing I ordered, hopefully). Where is it? (It's on its way at location x). And what condition it is in? (It's functional, workable, unbroken, good to go). The shipping company already needs to know these three things for their own convenience. So they might as well tell me, too. So I don't have to swallow my ubicomp like castor oil. My ubicomp arrives in a subtle way, as a kind of value-added service.
So the object arrives in my possession with the ubicomp attached. It's a tracking tag. When I sign for that object, I keep the tracking tag. It's mine now. Ho ho ho!
Let's say that it's something I'm really anxious to have: it's a highly evolved mousetrap. The mice in my house are driving me nuts, because I'm a programmer. I eat nothing but take-out Szechuan food, and everything in my house is fatally disordered.
Luckily my new, computer-designed mousetrap quickly and horribly slaughters all my mice. Not one vermin is left alive. That's great service, but now I'm anxious to get rid of it. I really don't need a super-mousetrap attracting attention, if I get lucky and a hot date comes over to help me play "The Sims."
Given that I'm a congenital slob, of course the mice soon return. But by then, I've already forgotten my mousetrap. Out of sight, out of mind. I paid a lot of money for it, but I already forgot where I put it. This is just the opening of a long, funny and thought-provoking riff on what a smart environment means, and it's very good indeed.
But Bruce opens with something that I think is dead-wrong, retrograde -- something that he talked about during our joint keynote at SXSW, that I've been thinking about ever since.
The computer is a gizmo, and it's a great gizmo, but it's not an ultimate gizmo. Computer science has been the slave of metaphysics ever since Alan Turing invented the Turing Test, but a computer is not a metaphysical entity. It's not free of objective reality. Its bits are bits of atoms. The only ultimate gizmo is a clock. The clock never stops ticking. The clock has been ticking for the computer for quite a while.
It's not just that the pace of basic innovation has slowed in your field, although it has. It's not just that computers have lost the lipstick of their geek gadget romance, although they have. That which was accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s is under attack. There is a backlash.
This ought to be obvious to anybody who uses the Internet. All you need to do is examine your email. Where is Al Gore's idealistic, civilized Information Superhighway? It's a red-light district. A crooked flea market. A nest of spies. An infowar battlefield. That is the state of cyberspace 2002. There are fire sales on every block. It has anything but grandeur. It's decadent and sinister.
I've had the same email address for 13 years, and I'm not budging. That's where I staked my little claim on the electronic frontier, and by gum, I remember the Alamo and I ain't a-goin' to go. Therefore, my email in 2002 is full of 419 fraudsters from Nigeria. And unsolicited porn ads. And a galaxy of farfetched medical scams from malignant, unlicensed quacks peddling Viagra and growth hormone. With unreadable, unicode, collateral bomb-damage from the gigantic spam mills in China, Korea, Thailand and Taiwan. I think Bruce is way off base here. The computer isn't a gizmo -- a particular computer may be a gizmo, but the computer is a universal machine. It's Turing's (or Von Neumann's) marvellous insight made real: it is as important to assisted cognition as the written word is. The fact that Universal Machines were constrained by their relative lack of power made it seem as though there was fundamental innovation taking place when machines got faster and smaller, but that was an illusion. Depending on your PoV, the innovation took place in Turing's day and stopped, or it has been continuous ever since, but the drop off Bruce describes just didn't happen.
The Internet is an insight as key as the computer. The Internet is a system for connecting anything to anything else. It is the sum total of millions of gentle-persons' agreements to follow some basic protocol, but beyond that, it is nothing more than a design philosophy.
There's a convenient way of visualizing the net: a cluster of thick "backbone" trunk-lines mated to one another with core-routers, ramifying into ever-finer pipes, down to the whiskers of copper that joins the "core" to the "edge" over the "last mile."
Like Newtonian physics, this is so much bullshit. Occassionally useful, but still: so much bullshit. The fundamental rule of the Internet is that any two points can talk to one another -- the end-to-end principle. What's more, anyone can join up, attach a computer to the network without securing permission from a central authority, and once connected, can talk to anyone else. The Internet's role in our world is to connect any two points. There is no "last mile" of the Internet, only millions (and soon, billions) of first miles.
The Internet isn't shaped like a tree. It's shaped like a bush that's contorted into Klein-bottle topology, a continuous plane whose every edge is mated to another edge.
On the Internet, we exchange messages with one another: please send me this file; please search for this record in your database, please display this file in your browser-window.
On the Internet your right to swing your fist never stops, because it only hits my nose if I execute the "hit your nose" instruction you sent me. On the Internet, it's my responsibility to decide whose instructions I want to execute.
Mozilla was designed for use by people who live on the net. It was written by people who live on the net. And because it was designed by the net/for the net, it has excellent features that would never make it into a technology designed by someone who gave a festering shit about "business models." Chief among these is the ability to right-click on any banner ad and select "block images from this server" from a pop-up menu. A little judicious right-clicking on the sites you visit most frequently and the Web is transformed in a kind of anarcho-utopoic marketing-free-zone. Where a decade ago, Mozilla's coders might have been publishing zines like AdBusters, today they're simply busting the ads.
This works because I can tell my browser to simply ignore the directives in the files that some Web server has provided me with. Those directives aren't orders, they're suggestions.
If Bruce is buried in spam, it's not because there are too many criminals sending out dumb come-ons; it's because Bruce has decided to execute the directives those criminals have sent his way. I don't execute those directives. I use Vipul's Razor and SpamAssassin; my inbox has virtually no spam in it (despite the 500-700 spams sent my way every day) because I take part in a collaborative filter, enabled by the network that lets anyone to talk to anyone else, which allows us all to aggregate unnoticeable wisps of effort that tracts the untractable. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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28 June 2002 |
wastrel
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GEORGE MASON UNIV -- The Robert H. Smith School of Business has created the Business Plan Archive (BPA) to collect business plans and related documents from the dot com era. These plans often laid out the assumptions and strategies of Internet entrepreneurs.
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 SIGHTING -- Apple iPod. Dave Winer was amazed to get one from the Radio UserLand community. Now he needs to find a 6-wire to 4-wire Firewire lead to make the thing work with his laptop's IEEE 1394 Firewire port.
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DISCUSSIONS.WSJ.COM -- According to most of those commenting on the demise of Enron and WorldCom, there's more to come because the accounting profession accepted creative ways in the documentation of business during the heady days of the 90s.
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McKinseyQuarterly.com -- Artificial Intelligence is ready for the business.
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NEWSANDPUBLISHER.com -- Steve Outing writes an excellent essay, arguing that the news media owes its public weblogs in its online space.
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DAVID POGUE -- I concur with Pogue's column in the NYT, the beneficiary of the new program is Microsoft, not the customer.
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27 June 2002 |
The broadband market reached a nadir with WorldCom's $4bn accountancy irregularities.
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BeyondValueInvesting -- Was WorldCom a pyramid scheme? Bob Hiler's essay suggests that it was.
Here's how the Pyramid worked, step by step:
1. WorldCom reports great results in the carriers' carrier market.
2. New entrants raise money, pointing to WorldCom's revenue and stock price
3. These entrants buy Dark Fiber from WorldCom, as they play Telecom Monopoly to build out their global networks
4. WorldCom reports improved fundamentals -- driving its stock price up further.
Then the cycle repeats itself:
1. More entrants raise money, using WorldCom's highflying stock price to justify raising more money at higher valuations in the private and public markets. WorldCom raises money too.
2. New entrants build out their own networks with all the capital they've raised
3. Everyone buys excess dark fiber capacity from each other.
4. Everyone's fundamentals and valuation improves, for a time...
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AllNetDevices -- The PalmSource OS subsidiary has inked a deal with Insignia Solutions to push Java capabilities for Palm developers and customers in the consumer, wireless and enterprise markets.
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26 June 2002 |
CNET.com -- A California congressman wants to make it legal for studios to hack P2P networks.
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hirsute
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JEREMY LOCKHORN -- I agree with Jeremey: Flash is evolving into the operating system of interactive advertising.
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 SONYSTYLE.com -- If you're selling products over a bistro table, you need this colour handheld, with integrated audio, on-board camera and a 66MHz chip that can play kewl animations and video clips along with MP3s.
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INFOWORLD -- Dublin's Iona Technology (IT, get it?) spawned a bunch of clever start-ups, including Cape Clear. The Cape Boys announced support for JMS and MQSeries. They're going to turn a profit with their coding. While over in Zenark, they're adding to their cash pile by churning out intelligent search technologies. Funnily enough, it's so corporate that it's not on the radar scopes of most journos.
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MATT MOWER -- His Live Topics are the business. You can't help but scroll through his stuff and get curiouser and curiouser.
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25 June 2002 |
MozDev -- Check out 70 projects related to Mozilla. Projects include an alternate user interface, a Mozilla/Blogger component, and a spellchecker.
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MICROSOT.com -- Expect to see Microsoft Tablets before Christmas. Tablets from Toshiba, Acer and Fujitsu are in beta now. They're no more than modified sub-notebooks, with a wireless dimension. In demonstrations, most people like Microsoft's electromagnetic pen. It can can move the cursor when it hovers above a Tablet PC and can create an ink-like line when it touches the screen.
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REGISTER.co.uk -- Microsoft has a Secure OS Skunk Works Project with DRM built-in on the back of a hardware/software solution.
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MOBY -- If you're in the music industry, you probably don't want your fans to be technically savvy. That's the point Moby makes when reflecting on a slump in CD sales. Technically savvy fans rip, burn and share. That behaviour doesn't help sell CDs.
x: 128
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Warchalking Runes 1.0.  Matt Jones, inventor of "war-chalking" -- hobo-runes that WiFi activists chalk on the sidewalk when they encouter a wireless netwok -- proposes a set of simple symbols.
I'd like to point out that while I haven't invented anything quite so fabulous as war-chalking, I did come up with the blogger gang-sign. Hold out your left hand, palm up, then grab your left forearm and make a moue of pain as you massage away invisible RSI cramps -- dude, you're throwing signs! Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
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24 June 2002 |
INFORMATION ARCHITECTS -- Excellent discussion on Webgraphics about table-less full CSS versions of Amazon and Yahoo!. Amazon renders perfectly with CSS, making browser detection a smart move for anyone involved in front end work.
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CONTRACABAL.org -- A 68 year old man, with some serious illnesses, can
no longer tolerate solitary confinement. In addition, he cannot continue his work from jail. This ruling is fucked up.
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MSNBC -- Police say the operators of Bigdoggie.com, a Florida Web site that served as an international advertising hub for prostitutes, have been arrested following a two-year investigation. [link]
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23 June 2002 |
CNET.com -- Wharton experts think third-generation wireless technology could be a waste of money for governments, carriers, consumers and applications developers.
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 In addition to her imaginative animations, Ruth Maher became distinguished for being a Dub, and along the way earning her the sobriquet "Roo".
x: 350
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22 June 2002 |
ARLINGTON, Virginia -- Vint Cerf, co-developer of the Internet's basic communications protocols, told attendees at the annual Internet Society Conference that big, traditional businesses could gain unprecedented control through technical manipulation of the next-generation, high-speed services that are delivered over cable and phone lines. Cerf thinks companies inhibit innocation when users receive information faster than they can send it.
x: 26121
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KILKENNY, Ireland -- Nobody gets Rusty Foster's nickname. Rusty. Corrosion. Kuro5shin. Get it? Then why not donate so he can keep his worthwhile site online.
x: 125
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WIRED -- Lakshmi Sandhana asks, "Have you seen the Port Meadow Spider? The Brighton Elephant? They're part of the landscape, if you know how to look." I recommend you start at the GPS Drawing Project.
x: 1631
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BOING BOING BLOG -- Cory Doctorow calls NPR's policy on permission-based linking "brutally stupid" and he compares the nonprofit organization's actions to those of KPMG, the multinational tax and audit firm that informed a handful of webmasters last year that they needed a "formal agreement" to link to the company's site. I got a polite reply to the e-mail I wrote to the NPR ombudsman but I still think the policy is ill-conceived.
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LOCKERGNOME -- DOWNLOAD - 50 Tips for only $3. if you wanna make money off of them, just link to them with your Amazon affiliate account (if you have one). Cool, huh?
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CNET News.com -- As software maker MediaFour readies to launch its Windows-to-iPod software, a Needham analyst says Apple won't be far behind with its own.
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moribund
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eChannelLine -- Ten wireless security tips.
- Put the access point in the right place.
- Use MAC to stop a hack.
- Manage your wireless network ID by changing the default SSID.
- Use WEP
- Don't put all your encryption eggs into the WEP basket.
- Set up VPN.
- Leverage existing RADIUS servers.
- Integrate wireless and wired policies.
- Know that not all WLANs are created equal.
- Don't allow rogue networks.
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Internet music broadcasters and the recording industry, opponents in the debate over online music royalties, are both unhappy with a government decision setting rates for webcasters.The U.S. Copyright Office unfortnuately decided Thursday to charge webcasters 70 cents per song heard by 1,000 listeners, or half of what a government panel had proposed in February. This royalties case simply kills almost all Net radio. Like Dan Gillmor says, "It's another victory for the greed-mongers who control popular music." It stimulates the pirate radiohead in me.
x: 129
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ECONOMIST -- Smart antennas are already in use and mesh networks are starting to appear, while ad hoc architectures and ultra-wideband are still largely restricted to the laboratory. But each challenges existing ways of doing things; each, on its own, or in combination with others, could shake up the wireless world.
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21 June 2002 |
persiflage
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SALON.com -- A researcher says male ejaculate may act as an antidepressant -- but other scientists aren't swallowing his theory. The theory appears in The Archives of Sexual Behavior this month in which it is hypothesized that women who enjoy sex au natural are less depressed than those who use condoms. The reason: semen may be an antidepressant.
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20 June 2002 |
WIRED -- Teachers believe that handhelds, not laptops or desktop PCs, provide the best way to achieve a one-to-one ratio of students to computers.
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KURO5HIN.org -- Rusty sets the standard for running a community web site. He posts his financial target, discloses how its derived, answers flak, and asks readers for donations. He collected almost half his annual budget after two days. He won't be financing his holidays with this plan, but he will keep the K5 community lights. As Adam Curry points out, even if he fails to achieve his goal he will have established a trend for Open Source Bookkeeping.
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19 June 2002 |
INTERNET WORLD -- In reaction to today's persistently downturned economy, resourceful business technology leaders are turning to Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) as a promising path back to desperately needed gains in productivity.
BPMS is a single, unified modeling, integration, and execution environment that can be applied to the implementation of literally any business process. Writing for the Internet World online magazine, BPMS experts Howard Smith and Peter Fingar describe BPMS as an "engine for processes." The BPMS they say "provides the mechanisms to stitch application components together to automate and share strategic and operational business processes, in a manageable and flexible way." Much in the way that the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) enables the sharing of business data among applications and companies (using a common language known as SQL), the BPMS enables the sharing of business processes (using a common language known as BPQL). Smith and Fingar go on to explain that "the BPMS separates out functional components from traditional packaged applications in much the same way that the database management system separates out data from applications into a shared repository to better manage their use." Business Process Management bis expected to become the business platform of choice for Global 2000 organizations, and the BPMS will be its technology engine.
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turpitude: Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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REASON.com -- Lawrence Lessig visited Temple Bar in late 2001. He mentioned many things then that he repeats in the Reason interview. "The thing I'm most worried about is what happens as the network moves from an essentially common carriage-regulated medium to pipes that are unregulated and increasingly encouraged to discriminate for or against the content they serve."
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CNET.com -- HP plans to roll out a top-end server that runs 50 percent faster than the current model. The company also plans a new "premium" model that's 90 percent faster.
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WIRED -- Paul Boutin reviews 802.11b base stations. Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishman adds his two cents.
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18 June 2002 |
TANSTAAFL /tan'stah-fl/
From TUXEDO.org -- [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know."
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KURO5HIN.org -- When facing the reality of going offline for lack of funds, Rusty the K5 founder writes "Advertising is not a means of supporting media. Media is an excuse for presenting advertising."
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17 June 2002 |
INFOWORLD.com -- Google's search appliance is gaining traction.
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 SLASHDOT.org -- After Slashdot reported the E-Bone/KPNQwest Network was shutdown, two consortia bid for the bulk of the network of bankrupt telecoms firm. The two consortia include telecoms companies, financial investors and some technology providers. A separate deal for the central European network will likely be concluded this week and Lehman Brothers is the most likely buyer. TheE-Bone/KPNQwest network carries between 25% and 50% of European Internet traffic.
x: 26121 |
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IMAGESTATION.com -- What would you make of an advertisement that heralded a camera "small enough to sneak into any event?" The advertisement claims the megapixel camera packs "hi-end features that'll make the difference between so-so concert bootleg shots and the ones worthy of being printed on giant posters." I like the new Sony DSC-P7. It handles 3.2 MegaPixel for 2048x1536 images,3 MPEG Movie Modes for video, and multi-burst mode.
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Programmers are a bit Weird OPEN -- Tom Murphy: "Programmers are also almost always a bit weird. Usually they experiment with drugs, alternative lifestyles, ideologies, sexualities, fashion (or anti-fashion), and music. It's not that they like to break boundaries, in my experience its that they honestly haven't realised there are boundaries."
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16 June 2002 |
ERNIE THE ATTORNEY -- Have you considered the costs of storing documents? Here's what it means to Ernie the Attorney. "Four boxes of documents that are scanned = one CD-ROM (almost 1 GB). So in a little $400 external hard drive that weighs about 2 pounds you can keep the equivalent of 640 boxes. The 640 boxes would weigh about 12,000 pounds (i.e. each box weighs about 20 pounds). So you can carry around 6 tons of documents, or try to store them, or copy them. Or you can carry around a 2 pound hard drive. It's up to you."
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| WOD: aesthete -- One having or affecting great sensitivity to beauty, as in art or nature. Ballymun, with its stolid, square buildings and endless ribbons of tarmacadam roads, feels like the mistake of a novice county planner, while Kilkenny's medieval architecture and delightful laneways feel like the plan of an aesthete. |
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| ASAHI.com -- Current trends in Ireland prove that downloading ringtones makes money for the wireless networks, creatives, and musicians. In Japan, music lovers download more than 60m ringtones each month. Every time a song is downloaded from a Japanese ISP onto a mobile phone, the provider pays royalties to JASRAC, which distributes the money to copyright holders.
x: 109 |
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FAST COMPANY -- Google's intranet uses Xerox PARC's Sparrow collaboration program to track most commonly discussed ideas as a way of determining what's worth implementing. The software followed some Googlers from Stanford, where the Web Team uses Sparrow.
x: 119 |
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15 June 2002 |
SALON -- Economist Stan Liebowitz says music piracy should be hurting the recording industry, but it isn't -- and he doesn't know why.
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Forbes ASAP: The Smother of Invention. Branches of the government are intervening where they never have before. Opposing camps, many with money and influence, are forming. Small inventors are diverted from where they can make the greatest contributions. And a culture of litigation, circumvention, and secrecy has evolved from an area where openness and law had long ruled. [Tomalak's Realm]
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Meg Hourihan, author of an upcoming O'Reilly book on Weblogging, gives some insight on this blogging thing. She looks beneath the content of weblogs, observing commonalities.
Format: The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences. It differentiates between the myriad content produced for the Web. Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal. They can be characterized by their conversational tone and unlike a more formal essay or speech, a blog post is often an opening to a discussion, rather than a full-fledged argument already arrived at.
Updates: Bloggers frequently update content. The blogging publishing mechanism makes it easy to do.
The Collection: Blog posts appear in reverse chronological order. Newest info is at the top. It attracts through its immediacy.
The Anatomy of a Post: A weblog post has a date header, a time stamp, and a permalink. Oftentimes the author's name appears beneath each post as well, especially if multiple authors are contributing to one blog. If commenting is enabled (giving the reader a form to respond to a specific post) a link to comment will also appear.
The Links: At a time when newspapers kill links, blogs include them as the distinguishing characteristic. Blog scrapers use the trail of links to tell the community the most popular topics and blog sites. Blog systems, like UserLand, LiveJournal and Blogger, enable us to quickly write, link, and assume part of a dynamic.
The Time Stamp: By its very presence, the time stamp connotes the sense of timely content; the implicit value of time to the weblog itself is apparent because the time is overtly stated on each post. Without the time stamp, the reader is unable to discern the author's update pattern, or experience a moment of shared experience.
The Permalink: The permalink (the link to the permanent location of the post in the blog's archive) plays a critical role in how authors participate in distributed conversations across weblogs. The permalink allows for precise references, creating a way for authors to link to the specific piece of information to which they're responding.
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Declan McCullagh has Wired News to assume a new job as CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He continues working in Washington DC, writing on the same topics in the ever-growing intersection of technology, law, and politics.
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14 June 2002 |
Blog Tools Promote Free Speech Megnut wrote the blogging piece we've been waiting for. "As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it." Yes. [Scripting News]
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OPEN Mailing List -- The gap between how most Web surfers think and how most Web designers work frustrates both camps. According to a study at Kansas State University, when surfers looked through a Web site and then drew a diagram of how it was organized, the resulting drawings were for the large part inaccurate. Most surgers often grouped together similar bits of information rather than reflecting the real layout of the site. The reviewing psychologists think people remember categories better than they remember individual pages.
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Industry analysts (like Alex Slawsby and Adrian Weckler) believe there are no compelling reasons to ditch their current mobile phones and buy a new one. But even the next generation of phone services aren't compelling enough to suggest a new wave of buying is imminent. As a result, manufacturers will have to cut costs and lay off workers (about 20,000 at Ericsson, and twice that many at Motorola).
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Digital Camera Features Some digital cameras have features you gotta see, like diopter adjustment. This allows shooters the opportunity to adjust the optical viewfinder for nearsightedness or farsightedness. In Ireland's shops, the Nikon, Casio, Leica and Panasonic models offer this important feature.
Then there are panorama features offered by the Casio, Nikon, Olympus and Canon cameras. You can take sequential photos, turning your body a little each time. The camera's screen helps you line up each new photo with the previous one. When you've transferred the photos to your computer, the software helps stitch the shots together into one wide, amazing-looking panorama.
Almost all new 4-megapixel cameras offer nighttime shooting modes, letting you soak up as much light as possible. You can create lovely shots of car taillights making colored trails across the frame. But the Nikon, Minolta, Olympus and Sony cameras also remove the tiny, random color dots that often mar nighttime digital photos.
Tripod mounts are important with panoramas or night shots. A tripod mount that's centered with the lens (as well as front to back) is ideal, which is yet another reason to like the Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Leica and Canon models.
Web Links:
www.steves-digicams.com, www.dpreview.com, www.imaging-resource.com, www.dcresource.com.
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In New York State, five thousand education leaders are using Palm handhelds as part of a three-year grant intended to explore technology's role in organizational and student development.
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Ireland Needs Properly Capitalised Broadband Policy KILKENNY, Ireland -- Many SEISS committee members believe the Irish government has to articulate a properly capitalised national broadband policy.
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The makers of digital video recorders have two different approaches for dealing with advertising. SonicBlue, which makes ReplayTV 4000, is in a court battle now that will decide whether it is committing copyright infringement by allowing viewers to skip commercials that have provided support for the programs they're watching. TiVo, on the other hand, is more advertiser-friendly, and does not allow viewers to skip commercials entirely, but only fast-forward through them. TiVo's chief executive says, "We found that despite the fact that people fast-forward through commercials, the retention of commercials is quite high. When they hit play again, the brain has taken in what has gone by, even at high speeds." And TiVo is encouraging advertisers to develop longer and "more creative" spots that that people would actually want to watch -- and re-watch.
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What is Ray Ozzie reading to make sense of a dangerous world ? Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. The book argues that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda are near-perfect embodiments of a networked organization. Ozzie explains: In the battle against small, dispersed organizations, it is unlikely that the massive, centralized organization will achieve success -- but neither will the wholly decentralized organization. The winning formula is a combination of the two: an organization that can use tremendous force when necessary, even as it enables specialist groups to work together in a decentralized manner. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]
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13 June 2002 |
Spend Most of the Time in the Wild The Search-Engine Getaway. The Internet can be a vast brochure for anyone planning a hiking expedition or fishing trip. The trick is figuring out how to spend more time in the wild than on the Web. [New York Times: Technology]
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Tasty Kit from Smart Bridges SmartBridges introduces a sub-$400 customer-premises outdoor generic Wi-Fi bridge: we'll be hearing a lot about this device as it meets virtually all of the needs of wireless ISPs as they attempt to inexpensively serve their customers from a few hundred feet to tens of miles away. It's a device intended to be placed at a customer's location (CPE or customer premises equipment), and it's ruggedized for outdoor performance in sub-zero to supra-100 temperatures at claimed distances of up to 21 miles line-of-sight. [80211b News]
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DUBLIN, Ireland -- Walking in Arthouse in Temple Bar and you wonder what interests twentysomethings today. I wonder if the late-Goth dressed in the open air of the Arthouse coffee bar are interested in the same things that intrigue the rest of the worl. One way to find out is to check out the Google Zeitgeist page which identifies subjects, people and languages that are gaining most in popularity, based on how many Google users search on specific terms. Then compare these results to the opinions of the Arthouse crowd. I think there would be marked distinctions. This week, Google's top three search terms are "world cup," "miss universe" and Oxana Fedorova, the Russian beauty recently crowned Miss Universe 2002. Meanwhile, fading fast are Eurovision, David Blaine and Natalie Portman.
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DUBLIN, Ireland -- Sitting in Molloy's Pub in Christchurch and having a coffee with some red-eyed Java programmers, we talked about fighter pilots and competitive strategy. A quarter-century ago, fighter pilot and strategist John R. Boyd talked about the OODA Loop, where OODA stood for "observation, orientation, decision, and action. Long used in the armed services, Boyd's philosophy is rooted in the idea of beating your competitor by destroying his frame of reference, and making him fight the battle without realizing that the terrain has changed on him. One Boyd admirer says, "In Boyd's notion of conflict, the target is always your opponent's mind," by making rapid moves to disrupt his orientation. This works in the combative business arena.
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DUBLIN, Ireland -- While visiting the offices of Zenark Ltd in Christchurch, I conclusively form the opinion that Web services is an important trend shaping the future of e-commerce. Web services, like those designed by Zenark, offer modular open-standard software built on XML -- software that enables development of modular projects that do not require the services of a legion of custom programmers to connect nonstandard systems. Most companies should discover they can get more bang for the buck now that cheaper software and cheaper hardware options exist, allowing organisations to spend far more for e-business applications than before.
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SANTRY, County Dublin -- Several of us are talking about technologies that give businesses a competitive edge. Many Irish companies have recognised the need to position themselves as high up as possible on the knowledge economy ladder. These companies know they need a Learning Management System (LMS) that provides an integrated, scalable learning technology platform capable of managing all organizational processes and activities. Employees use their LMS to channel knowledge into ideas and use those ideas to create business competencies. Forward-looking managers will use an LMS to serve as the infrastructure or framework used to track, support, manage and measure all learning and training systems, whether they are computer-based training (CBT), web-based training (WBT), document-based training (DBT), instructor-led training (ILT), or blended training methods (BTM).
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12 June 2002 |
Dynamic Content KILKENNY, Ireland -- Sitting in the Newpark Hotel with Frances Buggy, we finish a SEISS planning session by underscoring the statement that "unless there is dynamic content upgrade, the portal dies."
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Successful Blogging Elevate one of the staff weblogs to the main site (by then its flow would probably be almost as big as the rest of the publication). Go back to all the editorial people who haven't started weblogs, and invite them again. Wait a few more months. Here's the New Economy bad news (sorry) -- cut the people who aren't participating in the new network. My bet is that the community gets energized by the new participatory journalism and the former reporters, who now are editors, talent scouts and teachers, are also energized, doing what they wanted to do when they got into journalism. Now ask the community what they're willing to pay to keep the system working and growing. I know I'm naive and unrealistic, but this is how I think it will work. Another source of revenue. Charge local businesses to place their weblogs on your network. This is advertising turned around. No more interstitials and ads that interfere. If people aren't interested in your business, maybe it's time to find a new business. News drives interest. Minds, not eyeballs. Real issues not puffery. New products that meet people's needs and wants. No limits on where we go. [Scripting News]
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Personalised News Aggregator A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page." It's important to consider that 'set of news sources' could also mean reports generated by your accounting software, status of your servers, posts in a discussion group, orders from your e-commerce site, updates from your co-workers workflow management software. [Scripting News]
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11 June 2002 |
Radio Community Server Sighting: Radio Community Server. If you need to serve up intranet information for a private group, you should examine the Radio Community Server.
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I think Adam Curry has the right take on convergence. He writes, "Convergence did finally happen. But it didn't unfold in favour of the incumbent media entities. Convergence happend at home, on the desktop, where all the personal horsepower resides to Rip, Mix, Burn. We're now making our own entertainment. The revolution will be decentralized.
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You Still Need Masts The Earth's a Big Blue Broadband: IBM decides that it should simply impose a technically excellent solution to bind all wireless networks into a seamless virtual LAN. Yeah, sounds great. Dismissing Boingo and other players, IBM's advance guard marches bravely into the quicksand, choking out a merry song as they vanish without a trace. If the industry to date has taught us anything, it's that there is no industry: no monolithic presence that dominates any part of wireless public space hot spots. Rather, many companies working independently and occasionally in concert will build the backbone of this new entity, and Boingo and others will bind together the infrastructure. Cell companies and deep-pocketed others may arrive and buy up chunks or spew hot spots out with a vengeance, throwing 1,000 up in a quarter. But real estate is still real estate: you can't cover everywhere; no one can afford that, and no one has access to everywhere. Wave to the nice people at IBM: buh-bye, buh-bye. [80211b News]
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Adam Curry: I'm trying out slam's new activeRender beta. Now the state of my outline's nodes are preserved when upstreamed. awesome! I totally rely on outlines for my "radio show", makes production a snap, especially with a live show where the rundown can change at any time.
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Phil Wolff: blogging : journalism :: garage bands : symphonic music
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Copyseal spftware lets people see Web documents in HTML but not copy the text to another site or print it. The sw works by inserting random characters into the documents makes the text illegible if the pages are printed. The text will notreproduce on another Web site even though the characters are invisiblein the original document. The technology corrupts the text rather than destroying it, making it possible (if infeasible) to read the Copyseal-protected document. Adobe Acrobat documents can be set up to work the same way.
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Recommended: Radio UserLand Tools Ed Cone reviews Radio: "I would recommend Radio to both the power blogger and the hobbyist. And I would recommend it to business users looking for ways to reach their customers, partners, etc. I would also recommend that UserLand continue to make the product simpler and more intuitive, and the help files easier to use for the mass-market audience." [Scripting News]
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Avi Adelman: If the Web's creators hadn't wanted linking, "they would have called it the World Wide Straight Line." Adelman is involved in a dispute over linking to The Dallas Morning News.
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10 June 2002 |
Doc Searls: "Blogging is a form of journalism that is proving very, very hard for mainstream journals to cover."
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Kilkenny, IRELAND. A few of the guys on the Irish WAN Board have looked at Etherlinx and think they're modifying PC cards, not access points. Intersil chips are almost certainly at the center of their product. They're probably microcoding the lowest-level radio layer. 80211b News also thinks they're using Wi-Fi in one radio to handle the local network, and another radio is running a variant on 802.11 using frequency hopping.
ref: 1482 |
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Building a WiFi Mesh Network
WiFi, it's a wave you just can't duck away from. I don't know if Furrier will be able to make money on this, but I sure hope so. And that he shares his technology so it can be adapted widely. With enough nodes the networks can be meshed. I believe this is one way local broadband flow will be created without the local telcos. Time to bring back mbone! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
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Flash-Based Weblog Browser
The First Movement is a Flash-based weblog browser. Nice. It displays RSS feeds. It'd be interesting to see what my new RSS feed looks like in this browser. [Scripting News]
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And What Makes Ken Layne an Expert?
To be honest, until this piece was written I had never even heard of Ken Layne. That's how big the world is. I'll start reading his site now, and see if there's anything interesting there, and I'll let you know what I think. ";->" [Scripting News]
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GO UPSTATE -- There's a new blog at GoUpstate and its insightful comments include testimonies to the A-List. "In real life, the TechGoddess is Jenny Levine.." Jenny's Shifted Librarian is one of my favorite weblogs, and GoUpstate is doing some very interesting stuff in their community with Radio. Andy Rhinehart works the Radio in South Carolina. Dave Winer thinks South Carolina may be the most weblog-wired state in the union in a few months. I think it's going to be California.
Scripting News
The tech goddess in my life is Ruth Maher
x: 137
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Making DSL Obsolete
NY Times: "Etherlinx has taken the 802.11b standard and used it to build a system that can transmit Internet data up to 20 miles at high speeds -- enough to blanket entire urban regions and make cable or DSL connections obsolete." [Scripting News]
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Audio Blogs
Dave Winer and I have been talking about audio blogs and how to set them up so that publishing an audio post will be as simple as a written weblog post.
We both agree that the telephone is the obvious interface for this, but we need a service that handles the audio.
The hardest part is not sounding like an idiot when doing a solo-post. I can see interviews working much better.
Anyway, I gave it a shot at about 1:30am and couldn't get it into an mp3, but if you're interested, check out the .au Audio Blog Post (about 800k) let me know what you think. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
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Properly Disposing of Old Computers
WASTE - Mine it. Mark Small has a radical solution for dealing with the glut of old computers, cell phones, DVDs and other electronic waste: mining. [Lockergnome Bytes]
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The WIPO panel considering Jerry Falwell's attempt to strip Gary Cohn of his parody web site has ruled that Cohn is entitled to keep his domain names.
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Make Your Mobile a Gaming Console
GAMES - Going mobile. A British company is looking to woo mobile phone makers with technology it says can turn handsets into portable games consoles. [Lockergnome Bytes]
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Palm OS5 Ships to Developers
Palm pins hopes on beefed-up OS. Palm has shipped OS 5 to developers. The new operating system runs on more powerful ARM microprocessors and can handle richer audio and graphics, support wireless networking, and allowing multiple programs to run simultaneously. It will begin appearing in retail stores over the course of this summer.
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High School Senior Charged for Writing Porn
ALBANY, NY -- Student Charged for Writing Fictional Porn.
A Shenendehowa senior faces up to a year in jail for allegedly depicting fellow students and at least one teacher engaged in sexual activities in a pornographic story posted on an Internet site. Vincent Fuschino, 18, was charged last month with second-degree aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor, after an underage female at Shenendehowa High School filed a complaint with the State Police. She allegedly identified herself as a character in the 40-page story.
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Irish WiFi Nodes Expanding
CELBRIDGE, CO KILDARE -- Irish WiFi nodes continue springing up. I wouldn't say that IrishWAN.org has a the details on everything, but message board traffic suggests new nodes are appearing weekly.
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Interference in WiFi Land
802.11b: "Other uses of the 2.4 gigahertz band that's the home of Wi-Fi may result in such widespread interference that Wi-Fi networks won't be possible indoors or outdoors in many urban areas." [Scripting News]
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09 June 2002 |
Morning coffee notes.
Based on emails I'd say that many professional journalists, maybe even most, got into journalism for the same reason people start weblogs. Hoping to make a difference. To have an intellectual life. To be where the action is. Idealism.
For many, becoming a reporter was a very positive thing -- but being a reporter meant understanding that the publisher must make money. Compromise. Conflicts. In the heart of such a reporter, the Web was a rallying point, it was a return to their beginning, it called up their inner true believer. But the Web created a conundrum. Try as hard as you can, it's very hard to make a buck selling the written word. Try to skirt the issue. It's in your face.
As a software developer turned public writer, it's hard not to be sympathetic, even though many of the same people wrote us off, either because we were Mac developers when that was presumed to be a lost cause; or a Mac-Windows developer when Java was presumed to rule the world; or a commercial developer during the open source mania. To have been ignored in our struggle, brings up bitterness -- these people didn't help us when our basic business model was (unfairly) undermined. Regardless, I am sympathetic. I want the pros to stay in business, and keep publishing to the Web, creating a trail of knowledge, so we can learn from our mistakes, and point to them, so perhaps we don't have to make them again.
On the Poynter discussion board, one of the Knight Ridder people asks that we be gentle with their new content management system. Oh does that ring a bell. Of course I understand that. I make software for a living. A new software product is a fragile thing. If not properly cared for, it dies. When something new comes along, truly new, it should be cared for, not undermined. It's no surprise to me that a hard-working engineer wants his or her product to become something. That's natural, sensible, and right.
Back in the early 90s, before the Web became the thing, the talk of the industry was a concept called convergence. The media industry and the tech industry would become one and the same. Today that's been realized, and what a mess it is. Now they know what it feels like to be on our side of the fence, and we're getting a taste what it's like from their point of view. The hope is that this increases understanding. Perhaps we can find new ways to work together, don't just believe and repeat the hype, think, evaluate, take a different course this time. Remember the Golden Rule and practice it.
There's a new frankness and humility on all sides. Let's make the most of that. [Scripting News]
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08 June 2002 |
WiFi Must Hop the Band Put it another way with another metaphor: when this planet is too polluted to live on, we all hop on our rockets and fly to the next one. Over the next few months, we will see many examples of dual-band radios that will incorporate both 802.11a and 802.11b/g. These radios will be both in PC cards, PCI cards, and access points. If 2.4 GHz becomes untenable, we may find ourselves already with enough equipment to make simple transitions up the spectrum. [80211b News]
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Alan Reiter and WiFi WiFi, Weblogs, Conferences and Journalism
I'm heading out on Sunday to attend the 802.11 Planet Conference and Expo in Philadelphia where I'll be doing two presentations. One presentation will be on June 10, 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m., discussing how the combination of 802.11 and Weblogs are changing the dynamics of conferences and journalism.
I was a journalist -- focusing on wireless -- for a long time until I became a full-time wireless data consultant in 1996. There is simply no doubt that 802.11 is changing the dynamics of conferences and journalism. At computer and wireless conferences, conference organizers are already getting grief from attendees if they don't have WiFi access. Indeed, at the first 802.11 Planet conference in Santa Clara last year, some attendees were complaining because WiFi was available only in the exhibit hall, not in the meeting room.
Many hotels and conference centers are looking at installing 802.11 in these facilities, but the business models can be difficult. I'm involved in evaluating this and it's more difficult to craft the right business models than you might suspect. I can't/won't reveal confidential information, but it's easy to discuss installing WiFi everywhere when you're not the one having to pay for it and generate revenues! There are many business issues to consider and there aren't quick or assured solutions for some of them.
For a preview of what I'll be discussing, check out today's article about "WiFi Changes Meeting Dynamics," at 80211-planet.
WiFi and cellular
At last year's 802.11 Planet conference I did a two-hour presentation about the new realities of wireless in light of the September 11 attacks and also discussed in detail the entry -- potential entry -- of the cellular industry into the WiFi business. I got good reviews, I believe, for the presentation, but some people wondered whether it was appropriate for me to discuss the mindset and strategies of cellular operators at an 802.11 conference.
Well, times have changed and no one anymore is wondering about the appropriateness! Sprint PCS has invested in Boingo Wireless. VoiceStream has purchased MobileStar. BT [formerly British Telecom] is putting in hotspots around the U.K. In Korea, two carriers are installing a total of 25,000 hotspots. In Scandinavia there are hundreds of hotspots. In Japan, NTT Communications, NTT DoCoMo and Softbank, among others, are installing hotspots. There are many more examples.
My second presentation for 802.11 Planet on June 12, 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m., is entitled "Carriers Get Into 802.11: Will They Catalyze Your Business Or Crush It?" The roundtable discussion will feature experts in the cellular industry who will discuss the impact of cellular operators on the WiFi business. Representations from T-Mobile Wireless Broadband (MobileStar under VoiceStream), Telia HomeRun and GoAmerica will be participating.
If you're going to be at the 802.11 Planet event, please stop by to say hello. [Alan A. Reiter: Wireless Blogging]
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Will the music industry turn into the book industry?. Very thought-provoking Michael Wolff article on the theory that the music industry will turn into the book industry; smaller numbers, reduced circumstances, fewer gazillion-sellers. A fair number of book-trade people read Boing Boing -- whatcha think?
In other words, there'll still be big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen King), but even if you're fairly high up on the music-business ladder, most of your time, which you'd previously spent with megastars, will be spent with mid-list stuff. Where before you'd be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone. Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry. Link Discuss (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog]
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07 June 2002 |
Blogging in Mainstream Academia Wired: Berkeley offers course in Blogging. Adam Curry recommends checking out SchoolBlogs.com, a fine example of weblogs in education.
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Boingo Pays Boingo will pay you $1.00 every time a Boingo member connects to one of your hot spots. Boingo will pay you $20 every time you sign up a Boingo subscriber who remains a member for 60 days.
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Making Money on the Web Stephen Whitehouse: At the height of the dotcom frenzy when advertisers were throwing stupid money at anything on a Web screen, Mr. Man made 10 cents a click. Now he's making 0.1 cents a click and that's not enough to nurture a creative new media industry.
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06 June 2002 |
Pirates Because You're Digital I'm in Annecy (France) at the European Animation Festival. Some developers are interested in protecting their stuff from digital pirates. Listening to the discussion, I have to say that it's wrong to assume everyone who tries to send content on the Internet is a criminal. Yet that's the undertone of the message coming from people like Disney.
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05 June 2002 |
Boxes & Arrows: Opening Pandora's Box: Special Deliverable #1. The parallel processes of creation and documentation feed off each other. Through the documentation, we come to a better understanding of our own conception of the system. As we develop a clearer vision of the system through the documentation, we find ways to improve the system.
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When students outline and then post their comments, they learn to express direct thoughts under pressure. Radio Outliner helps new college students to structure their thoughts, as well as teaching them to support their ideas. Plus, the Outliner makes revision of thoughts easy.
The publicly posted work is taken seriously. There are some other advantages.
When you post in public, you're less likely to plagiarise the work. Students working in your group will make helpful comments since they can see your work.
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Seeing a WiFi Card for $30 makes me wonder how low the prices can go. No wonder WiFi is being built into many new laptops.
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Howard Rheingold: The Internet was created for the most part by people in their 20s, not the phone company. They didn't know what the tool was for, but they knew that other people would invent uses -- they built the Internet without a central control, to enable innovation.
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Mapping your Wireless Community Sweet app that mates your GPS-equipped laptop to your NetStumbler 802.11b network-detector and a satellite, stylistic or aerial map, automatically plotting all the WiFi base-stations you discover as you war-drive/walk through your environs.
mapserver.zhrodague.net is a tool for visually displaying position and signal-strength of WiFi (802.11b) Access-Points. Pittsburgh Wireless Community is still in development, but their stuff works. Their website shows maps and documents that the community actually use the technology.
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Shiny balls of mud take Japan by storm. The latest Japanese schoolyard trend is hikaru dorodango (shiny balls of mud). Children painstakingly shape mud into near-perfect spheres, then polish them. A research scientist with an electron microscope uncovered the secret of their lustre.
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04 June 2002 |
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Lockergnome points out Sony fights piracy by enlisting the content-trackers to ferret out the file sharers.
Sent aboard Irish Rail at Cherry Orchard
from Radio TransNote using Vodafone HSD. ref: 21621 |
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Will MMS Overtake SMS?
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Will multimedia messaging (MMS) overtake SMS within the next three years? That's the hype in messages from Ericsson. SMS continues its success story. It's been around for about five years, accounted for an estimated 102.9 bn messages sent last year, and that number likely will increase to about 146 bn in 2002, according to Gartner Dataquest. Gartner says SMS will peak at around 168 bn in 2003 before declining. Meanwhile, revenues from mobile messaging are expected to almost double to $22.3 bn by 2006 from $13.4 bn last year. Currently, only SonyEricsson has an MMS-capable handset on the market, but Nokia is set to launch its latest model later this year.
Sent from Inchicore aboard Irish Rail by
Radio TransNote using eircom ISDN. ref: 26121 |
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Open: Fatwa Against Piracy
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Feargal McKay reflected that the edict issues against piracy by the Sunni Islam leaders simply makes software piracy against their religion. McKay "grew up believing that not paying a TV licence was a sin, not paying taxes was a sin. Times don't change much, do they?"
Sent in Heuston Station Dublin with Radio TransNote and Vodafone HSD. ref: 268 |
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Trawling for Illicit Images |
| I get at least a half dozen unsolicitied porn images into my e-mail in-box every day. Some of these images purport to come from myself. If the Irish police encounter this defense from suspected collectors of child porn, they will need smarter technology to catch the real paedophiles. It wouldn't be hard to arrange for the image copyright monitors to look for this kind of content. Digimarc started this and at least one other California company is in this space as well.
Sent aboard Irish Rail with Radio TransNote and Vodafone HSD. ref: 261519 |
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ablution is the act of washing or cleansing.
Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. |
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SIGHTING: Little Green Footballs runs a sweet script that shows the site's last 50 referrers.
Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 143 |
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I need to convert some of my old cassettes in CDs and there's a MacWorld article that shows how.
Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 350 |
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| IBM and Inktomi have teamed up to provide high-bandwidth applications. The companies will help clients build enterprise CDNs (content delivery networks) in which data from various facilities can be delivered to sites across a network, on time and in the right form. Inktomi software running on IBM xSeries servers forms the core of the offering, and IBM will provide systems integration services and in some cases storage gear.
I am working on a project that requires the caching of video content in different locations around a network, then changing it over time. This new partnership helps me to ensure the versions are synchronized, available bandwidth is used intelligently, and the end user gets the right quality of service. Part of the optimised service traces to the intelligence of the server-based software. It helps overcome bandwidth constraints without adding more capacity or upgrading routers.
Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 109 |
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Thanks to Dave Winer, I now now have my own Weblog Neighbourhood And it works from a bookmarklet. Neighborhoods of Jon Udell, Jake Savin, Dave Winer, John Robb, Steven Kroeker, Joseph Ruvel, Scott Greiff, Jeff Cheney, Sam Ruby, Marc Barrot, Lawrence Lee, Jenny Levine.
Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 143 |
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Everyone Needs a Good NAGGIE Jon Udell: "The raw output of the online news collective is filtered for me by people doing what they do best: spotting patterns, alerting the tribe." Like Ernie the Attorney, I call my News Aggregator my NAGGIE, and it helps me wade through 26 news sources. It's not to be confused with my ZAGGIE, which I'll reveal here in August when I explain how it trawls more than 2600 news sources.
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03 June 2002 |
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| I need to learn to program with the Google Web APIs service, if only to discover those who read me. By using Google APIs, software developers can query more than 2 bn Web documents directly from their own computer programs. Google uses the SOAP and WSDL standards so a developer can program in his or her favorite environment - such as Java, Perl, or Visual Studio .NET.
Sent from Garringreen from Radio TransNote over eircom ISDN. ref: 143 |
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Sighting: Nokia 9290 |
| Sighting: Nokia 9290. Nokia shipped their colour communicator into the States. It combines cellular and PC/PDA functionality, built-in keyboard, and GSM network compatibility. If you use it, take time to back it up. I lost loadsamail several times with its older brother, the Nokia 9210, last year.
Sent from Garringreen with Radio TransNote over eircom ISDN. ref: 1334. |
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Another Corporate Does Weblogs There are weblogs on MSNBC: Eric Alterman, Chris Matthews, Michael Moran, Alan Boyle, Jan Herman. No calendars or permalinks, so they can't really network. The URLs redirect to pages on the MSNBC site, which makes it difficult to point to them or to have them participate in weblogs.com. Are those page numbers permanent or will they change? I wonder how they write these weblogs. Is that really Chris Matthews writing? How many levels of editing does it go through? Looks like they use a home-brewed CMS. I can't see where they have an archive.
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Dinosaurs in the Film Industry
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Jack Valenti, in 1982: "We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright." Valenti is saying the same thing in 2002, to everyone who is listening.
Sent from Celbridge, Co Kildare with Radio Transnote over Vodafone HSD.
Apologies for broken pages due to broken FTP connections. ref: 125 |
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Patents Damage Innovation
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Ron Cahill: [op-ed masquerading as news] Ron takes the side of legalists. The reality: Patents do not enable innovation. Creativity enables innovation. Patents enable creative legal exercises. If you trust lawyers to safeguard and nurture creativity, then only lawyers will be able to create. That creates a Net Zero.
Sent from Celbridge, Co Kildare, with Radio TransNote and Vodafone HSD.
ref: 26121 |
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Is Google Censoring Content?
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Anita Roddick: "Google's policy of not allowing political advocacy ads is misguided, impossible to administer with any kind of fairness, and a scary step toward restricting the free marketplace of ideas." I don't know about that, but I do feel Google is listening to lawyers.
Sent by Radio TransNote over Vodafone HSD in Celbridge, Co Kildare.
ref: 26121 |
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02 June 2002 |
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SIGHTING: RSS Auto-discovery
During the June Bank Holiday Weekend, the worldwide weblogging community coalesced around a good idea (originally proposed by Matt Griffith) and a good implementation (by Mark Pilgrim). The next release of MovableType, Radio, Manila, Drupal, and Blosxom will all include the LINK tag in the default templates. (Manila already generates it automatically and doesn't require any further action by existing Manila users.) Syndication and wire services like Syndic8, NewsIsFree, and Meerkat support it on all their news pages. On 31 May 02, Mark Pilgrim's article, More on RSS auto-discovery, hit #1 on Daypop and #1 on Blogdex overnight. Thousands of weblogs now support the LINK tag, and even a few non-weblogs are jumping into the action.
Sent over eircomm ISDN from Garringreen. ref: 125
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I like Discoverable RSS, so I'm putting Radio into my HEAD elements. This will link my Weblog to lots of other blogs. It's easy for Radio users, and automatic for (most) Manila users. Newbies will have discoverable RSS out of the box. I'm also looking forward to this same functionality with news aggregators. Radio has the largest installed base of aggregators. You can see the trail of aggregators on the Weblogs page, by viewing the top 100 most-subscribed-to feeds. If you cross-reference the Weblogs feed with the UserLand List you can quickly see the number of people who are getting news from which sources. This is a v.nice way of seeing what's being talked about.
Sent over eircom ISDN from Garringreen. ref: 125 |
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Radio's Applications Make the Difference
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There are several reasons I use Radio as my main web tool now. First, it's easy. Yet it's a complex software system. Second, it puts most of the things I need to read and edit into one lightweight space. That means other like-minded people have looked at how to get people to actually use Radio tools. Brent Sleeper also notes that apps make a difference, and web services that are not app-driven are meaningless. Dave Winer appreciates UserLand being cited, pointing out it would be just as fair to cite Blogger.
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| | Lockergnome: Internet and telecommunications companies have seen a surge in law enforcement requests to snoop on subscribers. That's no surprise in Ireland, as last week most counties featured Gardai (police) raids for child porn downloads. The tip-offs came as a result of following up on credit card billings.Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 26121. |
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FLICK - Piracy is up. Viant Corp. (VIAN.O), a research company tracking Internet piracy, on Wednesday estimated between 400,000 and 600,000 film copies are illegally downloaded daily on the Internet. [Lockergnome Bytes]
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01 June 2002 |
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SIGHTING: Great Web Log.
It's Ernie the Attorney and if you are following the saga at Treasury Holdings, you would do well to read through Ernie's trademark findings. For his part, Ernie claims he's interested in visiting Ireland. It's a great time to visit right now. The Kilkenny Cat Laughs Comedy Festival is running during the first week of June and the Kilkenny Arts Festival starts on 9 Aug 2002.
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Anyone serious about the software business has to plan for piracy. You would have to have your head in the sand to think that everyone using your program will buy your program. Ireland's Business Software Alliance has found more 57 percent of all Web users have downloaded copyrighted works (including software) without paying for it. Viant, a research company tracking Internet piracy, believes between 400,000 and 600,000 film copies are illegally downloaded daily on the Internet. I can't see how that is going to change.
Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 125. |
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Radio Communicator
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I love using my Radio as a full-fledged communication environment. I like it best because it merges the Web and XML. Now Radio has a potent outliner, interlaced to its natively extensible programming enviornment. Several programmers have taken the next step, by combining all of these ingredients to create Instant Outlining. The tool merges instant messaging and outlining.
Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 143 |
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