Jeff Nichols: Tech

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 14:37:42 GMT

Hilary Rosen Is A Dangerous Moron

Today's Wired article covering Ms. Rosen's idiocy is quite a read. I particularly liked this bit, wherein security consultant Robert Farrell gives Hilary the what-for:

"Well, Ms. Rosen, I'll tell you what: You forward all your e-mail unedited to a public mailing list, scan and post all your private written correspondence to the same list, give us all-read access to your hard drives and post 24-7 webcams in your boudoir and bathroom, and then I'll believe you understand the invasion of privacy your shrill insistence on flushing what's left of the Constitution down the toilet entails," Ferrell suggested.

What is it with women named Hilary, by the way? Yikes!

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 15:26:27 GMT

Perhaps this will be my last DMCA-bashing post of the year. Or perhaps this post will force me, my ISP and Radio Userland (the weblog's host company) to shut down.

This article from Wired is as depressing and frightening as anything I've seen all year. To me, it's every bit as frightening as watching the towers fall on 9-11-01.

The article describes how Dow Chemical took offense to a site making fun of them, and used the DMCA to force the site to shut down. Because of a stupid move on the parody site creator's part, I think Dow was within their rights to do so (the creator registered the domain with Dow's President). What happened next is the scary part. The top-level ISP (Verio), scared of Dow and the DMCA, shut down the entire web hoster and all its clients - it cut them off from the Internet, effectively shutting down hundreds of people and businesses having nothing to do with the conflict. The Wired article included this quote from the web hoster:

"One of my users said it's as if an offensive poster mocking a company was put up on a building, and when the company's lawyers couldn't reach the building owner immediately, they got a bulldozer and knocked down the whole neighborhood," Staehle added.

Freedom of speech is possibly the most powerful political idea ever created. It's possibly the major reason our nation has ascended to the top of the world heap. And yet we have pissed it away in a single law created to protect the music and movie industries - the DMCA. Thank you, President Clinton.

If we generalize the events described in the article just a bit, we'll find that:

A corporation lampooned by Saturday Night Live or Mad TV could demand that the show or perhaps the broadcast network be shut down
Individuals using encryption for private email or chat could be prosecuted and jailed
Public speeches or presentations that use content from a corporation to make a negative point about that corporation could be prosecuted

After that, who knows. The sad irony is that the owner of the site described in the Wired article is looking to re-host the site in Europe. Think about that - in Eurpope! At this moment there's more freedom of expression in the European community than in the US, at least online.

So this will be my one New Year's resolution for 2003: To get more informed and to get more involved in the fight to protect personal freedom in the US, particularly freedom of speech. I'll write, I'll contact Congress-critters, and if I can find an organization that is doing something constructive about all this, I'll join it. It appears to me we've taken the first couple of steps toward becoming a police state as bad as anything seen since the Cold War, and we now have technology that gives a bad law very, very long arms.

I still have faith that we'll get turned around as a nation - that we'll preserve the creative chaos that made us great - but it's a dark time at present.

Sun, 22 Dec 2002 15:47:22 GMT

My email is now officially a mess. The domain "nicholsgrp.com" is somewhere in DNS hell. Verisign *may* be in the process of moving the hosting site, or may just have edited the DNS entry and pointed the domain into the bit bucket. We'll see.

Sat, 21 Dec 2002 15:00:17 GMT

It seems I'm not alone in problems transferring domains from Verisign's grasp. From supportem.com:

"It has come to our attention that Verisign (was Network Solutions) has
some 'unoffical' polices to make it difficult to transfer domains 30
days before expiring. Previously VeriSign has tried other questionable
business tactics and has made it very difficult to transfer domains away
from them. We are recommending if you are thinking of moving your
domain away from VeriSign start the process as early as possible to
prevent transfer denials.

Of course you can transfer to any registrar you like but we also offer
domain registration/renewals and are more than happy to help you with
the process.

For some of the sample of issues with Verisign you can read this
article:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/04/15/020415opgripe.xml "

Sat, 21 Dec 2002 14:56:50 GMT

Adam Curry: "Is it just me, or is iCal an incredibly good looking piece of crap?" [Scripting News]

No Adam, it's not just you. So far, iCal is just that. Disappointing.

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 16:08:25 GMT

Did you notice that the DMCA is going down? Well, it is.. Some nice evidence here. [The Doc Searls Weblog]

This would be a very fine Christmas present. The DCMA is horrific, and deserves to be put down. Thanks, Doc.

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 15:56:15 GMT

My friend Matt beat me to the punch on this one. According to the NYTimes, the DoD is looking to regulate WLANs, as they might interfere with military weapons and comms systems.. Great, that's all we need - take the one Next Big Thing that tech has produced in the last two years and kill it in the name of Defense. I'm with Matt - if the DoD can't work around 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz, then we're in real trouble.

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 15:37:46 GMT

Sharp piggybacks WLAN for PDA voice service. Cool [The Register]

I really think this is the architecture for the future. WLAN is the perfect last mile connection, and why not pipe voice *and* data through it? Cable companies and telcos should be slugging it out to offer the best neighborhood WLAN possible if they want to be the transport for the future. And, they won't have to dig up our streets again.

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 14:21:32 GMT

Here's a cool new thing in the world: Froogle.

Sun, 15 Dec 2002 15:57:55 GMT

Keeping Track of John Poindexter. Online pranksters have turned the tables on the man behind the government's controversial Total Information Awareness effort. They are posting his personal information on hundreds of sites. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]

This seems a little harsh, but it sure gets the point across. TIA is a nightmare; 1984 come true. Our best hope is that the work being done on TIA will take 10 years and become mired in government procurement and management processes.

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 15:58:23 GMT

Doc on blogs:

"Anyway, pardon me for being a humanities major and all, but what blogs are about isn't complicated.

Simply put, they're journals, and the category they're changing most is journalism. Here's what I said about it to a Stanford class not long ago in an interview.

Of course I might change my mind after this conference we're talking about. I have no idea, which is exactly the idea."

I like the way this guy thinks.

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 15:55:12 GMT

Bloggers and Loggers

This is pretty wild. A blog originating from the top of a tree in Nocal, where the author is protesting the cutting of old growth forest by camping out in the canopy. Not your usual "the weather today is fine..." personal blog, to be sure. Worth following.

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 15:24:02 GMT

Met two ladies yesterday who share a job, and it was a surreal experience. They've been doing this for quite a while - each one works three days, and they overlap on Wednesdays. The cool thing is their job is a knowledge worker kind of job, not answering phones or assembling widgets. They've developed all sorts of little methods to transfer knowledge and context to each other at the weekly handoff. But the weird part was talking with them, together. They always say "...we think this...", or "...we feel very strongly about...". They finish each others' paragraphs. They act as a single person, only in two bodies. Weird. Everybody refers to them as EMB, for "Elaine and Mary Beth". There's a doctoral thesis in here somewhere.

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 15:05:28 GMT

Something's been wrong with the Userland news aggregator lately. Nuts. I've come to depend on its distillation of things that interest me. Back to manual surfing.

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 15:20:09 GMT

Lots of good news in Silicon Valley News. My favorites:

Related, I met a guy yesterday who has the same setup as me - a Winblows laptop for working with clients, and a Mac OSX box for himself. At least it makes sense to one other person.

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 06:11:16 GMT

Jon Udell: Scripting Groove Web Services. [Scripting News]

For all those who say web services aren't real or ready for prime time, read Jon Udell. This is the future of enterprise computing, period.

It's great when you see the future so clearly. Doesn't happen often.

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 05:58:07 GMT

Looks like I've got the OK to run with Groove as the collaboration tool for the new project. Cool. Now if the tool lives up to the hype...

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 19:18:33 GMT

In between phone calls and real work, am attending the Supernova conference by proxy, tuning into Dave and Doc's real-time blogs of the proceedings. It's not as good as being there, but it's a damn site better than reading the post-conference articles.

Better, I can check the blogs tonight when I get to my hotel - I can "attend" in timeshifted mode. Feels like Tivo.

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 14:46:00 GMT

Sodomites overrun Amazon.com [The Register]

I had to read this just for the headline. You gotta love The Register.

There's a more serious story here for geeks. Personalization engines are dumb, really dumb. They make recommendations with way too little data. It's as if you met someone wearing a green jacket and assumed you knew about their religion, tastes in wine, and sports affiliations because you know those things about someone else with a green jacket.

Sun, 08 Dec 2002 15:15:17 GMT

There's a new trend out there, driven by innovation and integration of wireless networking and digital imaging. Consider:

This camera from Ricoh, combining digital camera, web server, and WLAN link (via John Robb)
This camera, setting a new size record (small) and truly cool new imaging technique
The millions of phonecams now in use by teenagers and geeks, used for IM-like communications via images

All this JPEG content being driven onto the web will be the replacement for the bandwidth demand we lost when Napster and p2p music died. This content and bandwidth demand will grow geometrically, so in a year or two...wow! Now if the ISPs carrying the bits can just get healthy with the new demand.

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 15:38:36 GMT

MS servers cheaper to operate than Linux?! IDC has sold their soul with this report, just out. They key is that it's a "sponsored report", meaning that MS paid for the research and the foregone conclusion.

I remember the TCO wars of 1994-1995, wherein NT replaced Novell as the defacto network operating system platform in corporate America. This time the MS foe is a little tougher - a federation of companies with IBM at the front. It'll be an interesting fight.

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 13:05:57 GMT

Also found via Doc Searls: Geekmaids. I'm not sure what to think about this. First reaction, cool. Second reaction...why? Simply a result of the dot-bomb? If so, they give a whole new meaning to "...we also do Windows".

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:48:45 GMT

This definitely makes my Christmas list.

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:37:39 GMT

From Doc, just heard the new acronym that describes the base technical architecture for cost-effective systems: LAMP, for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and (Perl or Python or PHP). I find it interesting that we're now in the age where we specify the software platform rather than the hardware - it wasn't so when I started out, at the dawn of computing.

Fri, 29 Nov 2002 12:46:13 GMT

Absolutely great article about Google and their unique view into the world's online consciousness. It's been said that there's nothing new under the sun, but I think this qualifies - no one's ever had this view of mankind's interests before.