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Month: May 2004

Snippets

Published May 28, 2004

Photos: the view out to sea from Seal Beach, just south of LA. (duh. thanks Ben, I’d b0rked the link earlier.)

Patents: via the FFII Kwiki, here’s 2087 Microsoft USPTO software patents viewed roughly by subject matter. The ‘Web’ selection is particularly interesting.

Terror: The Atlantic: All you need is love — how the terrorists stopped terrorism. Amazing — marry them off!

Tourism: Pictures from Bangkok’s new ‘Sky Bar’ — open-air dining, 63 floors up, with no walls apart from 1.5-metre-high glass.

new terror indicators

Published May 28, 2004

Funny: NYPD alerts cops to ‘terror indicators’.

The NYPD has ordered its patrol force to be more vigilant about spotting and reporting possible signs of terrorism, including individuals who “express hatred for America.” …. The cards advise them to contact counterterrorism investigators when they have suspicions over anyone who is, among other things, carrying driver’s licenses from different states, videotaping utilities and tunnels or wearing fake uniforms.

Sounds like the Village People won’t be playing NYC any time soon, then ;)

Language registration: en-Spam-porn

Published May 24, 2004

Funny: via swhackit! — Language registration: en-Spam-porn:

‘One is very much tempted. It is certainly a unique orthography.’

Indeed. When I was offered “[t]ons of dwolnaoadble mvoies, pohtos and sotires”, I quickly read past “mvoies” and “pohtos”, but was stumped for a while by “sotires”. Perhaps I was blocked by interference from “satires”.

But I think that registration will fail, because there are no descriptive works provided for the Language Tag Reviewer to consult.

a new use for the ‘Terrorism Quotient’

Published May 24, 2004

Marketing: It appears that MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange) at one stage did — and may still — include a ‘terrorism quotient’ field, representing ‘a statistical likelihood of (people) being terrorists’.

Seisint, the company providing the system, is a Boca Raton, FL company founded by Hank Asher, previously of Database Technologies, the company that ‘stripped thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter rolls before the 2000 election, erroneously contending that they were felons’. Lovely.

Boca Raton, eh? Yep, there’s a spam connection — Hank Asher also, apparently, bought eDirect.com from noted Boca-based spammer Steve Hardigree (ROKSO record).

The email in the linked article goes on to note that Asher and Hardigree had ‘disagreements’ regarding ‘how eDirect should position itself in the Direct Marketing Community’, so I doubt Asher might have necessarily approved of spamming — but it does appear he had interests in Direct Marketing.

Given that, I suggest a new spin-off strategy for Seisint’s ‘terrorism quotient’ field, courtesy of my mate Luke: terrorist-targeted direct marketing!

Those turrists are in the market for lots of high-profit-margin goods:

  • AK-47s (OK, not a very big margin there)
  • chemical weapons instructions (just download from the internet! but don’t tell them that)
  • weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-like-activities

All Seisint have to do is SELECT Name,EmailAddress FROM MATRIX WHERE TQ > 120, do a mail run, then watch those non-consecutively-numbered US dollars roll in. Easy!

Caesar’s Palace open wifi

Published May 24, 2004

Tech: I should note this here just in case anyone finds it useful. A handy tip for anyone visiting Caesar’s Palace; their ‘Business Center’ doesn’t have wifi yet, but (cough) one of their neighbours certainly does ;)

‘Papers!’ and the Hass

Published May 24, 2004

Travel: I’ve just spent a week in the UK; much culture was imbibed, I got to see Michael Landy’s Semi-detached at the Tate, met up with some good mates including the pregnant Lean, and was a happy camper overall.

Then I had an 11-hour transatlantic flight, stuck in the middle of a 5-seat row with pointy elbows on both sides; then, best of all, arrived at US Immigration and found myself fingerprinted and had my photo taken, in accordance with their new policies under the US-VISIT program.

Apparently the biometrics equipment providers are a company called Cross Match Technologies. Fingers crossed (arf!) they have better false positive rates than their competitor, Identix.

I’m looking forward to seeing similar false-positive-prone usage of biometric data, for US visitors to other countries in response. (With hilarious results!)

Aside: I wonder how href=”http://use.perl.org/%7eMatts/journal/18915″>Matt’s cooking-related-program-activities injury will affect his biometric profile?

Also of relevance — apparently Boston are introducing random spot-checks of passenger’s papers on their metro transport.

It’s interesting that travel by train requires a passport, driver’s license, or similar heavyweight documentation — but one can zip around the country unimpeded by road. Of course, all of this is moot, seeing as the 9/11 hijackers had perfectly-in-order documentation, including driver’s licenses, and travelled extensively under their real names and passports. One wonders what exactly all this has to do with the War Against Terror, given that.

Funny: Knight Foundation, featuring a downloadable David Hasselhoff Paper Plane! Don’t forget, the song ‘Hot Shot City’ is particularly good.

The ‘as such’ loophole

Published May 21, 2004

Patents: According to Ciaran O’Riordan of IFSO, one key aspect of the EU Council’s meeting on the software patent legalisation proposal hinged on the use of the phrase ‘as such’, to effectively sneak a loophole past the Council members:

I recommend that everyone listen to the recordings of the Council’s meeting. Transcripts are also linked from there, but the tone of voice etc. is interesting.

Anyway, basically, the people in the room didn’t understand the implications of the text (that’s our fault).

Bolkenstein added an amendment: “computer programs will not be patentable as such” – this (rightly) fooled most people into thinking that software would not be patentable. Really, it just means you can’t patent software as software, you have to patent “software running on a computer”. I think the rejected part of the German amendment would have closed this loophole. …..

Anyway, the point is that the Council members were on our side, we just hadn’t told them precisely what we want …. We told them “no to software patents”, and they think they’ve done that. We should have said “no to ‘as such”‘, and similar textual lobbying rather then implication lobbying.

Yahoo! release DomainKeys

Published May 19, 2004

Spam: Yahoo!’s DomainKeys proposal for sender auth.

I’m in the UK this week, so commenting in detail isn’t too easy right now. But briefly, the big problem I foresee for DK is dealing with mailing lists and forwarders.

I did spot this oddity in the patent license, though:

Yahoo! will grant a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license under any Yahoo! patent claims that are essential to implement or use any Implementations so that licensees can make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or yodel Implementations; provided that the licensee agrees not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other Yahoo! licensees of Implementations, any patent claims of licensee that are essential to implement or use any Implementations.

My emphasis. “Yodel”? ;)

But seriously — patents will make implementation of this tricky for open-source projects, unless those terms are extended to allow the license to be transferable and usable indefinitely.

Patents: argh. That’s all I can say for now. :(

IFSO talk update

Published May 18, 2004

Ireland: Update update! The Stallman talk is now free (-as-in-beer), apparently. No more updates, any further news will just be on their site. ;)

Compare and Contrast

Published May 17, 2004

Compare this recent statement from Minister Mary Hanafin, Minister of State with Responsibility for the Information Society, and this extract from ‘Why Microsoft Wins’ advertorial written by a Microsoft product manager, Sunday Business Post, 2004-05-02:

ILUG have already written an article in response to this pretty obvious prompting of a government minister by a commercial interest.

(thanks to ompaul at lwn.net for pointing that out.)

Stallman Speaking in Dublin

Published May 14, 2004

GNU: Hey, Dublin-based people! Richard Stallman will be giving a talk titled ‘The Dangers of Software Patents’ in Dublin on May 24, at 19:30. It’ll be in the TCD Hamilton building, right beside Pearse St. DART station. I’ve never seen him speak, but I hear it’s definitely worth attending, and his message needs to get out there, further into the Irish software industry and political circles.

Also on patents: good news via groklaw.net — Germany has stated they plan to vote against the Irish software patent legalisation plan, and some French ISVs are asking Chirac to do likewise.

Newseum link fixed

Published May 13, 2004

News: Oops — I’ve just realised, that Newseum site I linked to a few days ago actually does change the URLs frequently for those front-page PDFs. However, the changing is limited to using the day of the month in part of the URL, as far as I can see.

So here’s bookmarklets that’ll do that:

Also — Breedster explained: Frequently Asked Questions On Viral Marketing. ‘Viral’, geddit?

Sky News Ireland needs a guidebook

Published May 12, 2004

Doh: Garret Collins on the IE-rant mailing list points out a notable ‘oops’ moment in Sky News Ireland’s new promo:

(Original here.)

Debunking the ‘make the patent examiners work harder’ myth

Published May 12, 2004

Patents: There’s a good discussion over at Joi Ito’s weblog on software patents.

Unfortunately, there’s a persistent, and popular, fallacy that crops up quite frequently in these discussions, and does so here in the comments:

‘much of the processing of patents has been, to use understatement, deficient. An invention that is ‘silly or obvious’ will likely not pass the approrpiate legal test – if this test is applied by people who understand the inventive technology …. while I agree with most of your observations about deficiencies, I fail to see the logic in your solution (to simply outlaw these kinds of inventions).’

So, what the commenter is saying is that the patenting of software and business methods would be acceptable, if only the ‘inventive bar’ was raised so that trivial patents were not granted.

The problem with this is that:

  • it ignores the fundamental problem with these kinds of patents, which is

    • that they patent ideas instead of physical inventions.

      A parallel would be to allow the patenting of plot-lines in fiction, meter in poetry, or combinations of ingredients and cooking methods in recipes. These are all ideas, transformed into output ‘products’ by performing them as input on a set of hardware (books, cooking equipment), in the same way as software patents and business method patents are abstract ideas that operate on input, generating output, when implemented on a CPU. So, should they be patentable, too?

      Patenting of physical designs is fundamentally different from patenting of abstract ideas in one key way. Physical designs must function correctly under real-world physics, and this requires extensive up-front design and prototyping, before they can be turned into mass-produced products.

      Abstract ideas can be developed mentally, and the up-front work required before the idea can be put down on paper is trivial by comparison.

      Consider these EPO patents: EP0807891 (Sun’s ‘shopping cart’ patent) or EP0689133 (Adobe’s ‘tabbed palette window’ patent). The up-front work required to devise these applications is trivial to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of UI design; the hard part appears to be writing the legalese, and I understand the patent lawyers take care of that part. ;)

      Compare with US patent D0450164, a design patent for a Dyson washing machine. The level of detail, and extensive specifications, is massive, and it’s clear a lot of work had gone into the process before the patent application was filed.

      • In addition, the commenter assumes that extensive prior art searches really do take place. From what I’ve heard from patent applicants, and from what I’ve observed in the range of granted software patents, this is cursory at best, and generally performed by the patent lawyer and the examiner, not the applicant themselves.

        I’ve even observed a few patents where prior art, cited in the patent, implemented exactly what was claimed!

Breedster, and a Joyce domain

Published May 10, 2004

Toys: My Breedster profile Argh, I’ve been infected by the Breedster STD!

Apparently, though, there’s a way around it through reincarnation, or — rumour has it — through touching Asriel, the bug with the power to heal.

In the meantime, paranoia reigns, and this time of crisis has brought out the worst in some bugs:

It’s an interesting piece of emergent net-art, if you ask me, but the STD is pissing me off. (it’s itchy!)

Literature: Ulysses:

The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

— Mkgnao!

— O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

— Milk for the pussens, he said.

— Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

— Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

— Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.

mrkrgnao.com is available ;)

Open Voting Consortium

Published May 9, 2004

EVoting: I didn’t realise it, but the Open Voting Consortium‘s ‘EVM2003’ e-voting system looks excellent. Here’s the key point: it produces printed ballots, unlike the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) systems. Those are what’s counted, and those are what the voter verifies. And it’s open-source, too, so the source is available.

Here’s a good intro from the Baltimore Sun:

Although it’s far from a finished product, the system retains what’s good about current electronic voting systems. It’s voter-friendly, easier than older systems to administer, and accessible to blind voters without assistance.

It also addresses the concerns of today’s critics. First, it uses open-source software that’s available for public inspection – eliminating the secrecy that outrages critics of today’s proprietary “black box” systems.

Second, the software is free and can run on a variety of computer platforms, which makes the system cheaper to acquire and maintain. Third, it creates a paper trail of printed ballots that can be counted by hand or machine in case of disputed elections – without compromising privacy for the blind.

Instead of printing a “receipt” that confirms a ballot cast electronically, it’s based on the quaint notion that the best ballot is still a paper ballot. “We didn’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel,” said Fred McLain, the project’s lead software developer.

The ‘Human Shredder’ Rumour

Published May 8, 2004

Iraq: OK, I’ve been keeping quiet on the whole Iraq thing — so far, it’s pretty much turned into what I was suspecting would happen once GWB declared ‘Mission Accomplished’, and now there’s lots more people saying what I previously felt wasn’t being said. However, I’ve just heard something that really winds me up.

Richard Perle was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM show about the torture at Abu Ghraib. He made a comment to the effect that ‘at least the Abu Ghraib incidents weren’t as bad as Saddam’s use of the human shredder’.

First off, two wrongs do not make a right, and the neocons needs to stop assuming that this is an excuse.

Secondly, the human shredder story is uncorroborated rumour from a single person in Northern Iraq, and no evidence has ever found to support it. All evidence points to the opposite.

But if we let it pass without debunking, this one’s going to go down as ‘history’, alongside the ‘babies thrown out of incubators’ story from Gulf War I, and the ‘bayoneted babies’ story from 1914.

good interview with Philip Greenspun

Published May 7, 2004

Open Source: ITConversations: Doug Kaye and Philip Greenspun (via Tony Bowden).

Very interesting interview overall. Philip notes that he didn’t see weblogs coming because ‘it never occurred to me that relatively minor changes in how you allow people to author would cause such a revolution’. I must admit, I was the same. As far as I could see, it was just another HTML page, being updated frequently — it took me quite a while before I realised the social aspects, of conversations taking places in a group of weblogs, was making a whole new thing.

Also, there’s a great few paragraphs where he discusses how sensitive to supply-side economics the whole ‘building a business on open source’ thing is. Search for ‘a dollar cheaper and a day faster’ to find it.

‘The EU is a democracy only on paper’

Published May 7, 2004

Patents: The Irish EU Presidency keeps on rolling.

FFII notes that ‘this Wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries – including Belgium and Germany – showing resistance. (This ‘compromise’ is the most pro-patent text yet,) discarding all the amendments from the European which would limit patentability. Instead the lax language of the original Commission proposal is to be reinstated in its entirety, with direct patentability of program text fragments added as icing on the cake.’

‘The proposal is now scheduled to be confirmed without discussion at a meeting of ministers on 17-18 May, unless one of the Member States changes its vote. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all groups across the political spectrum are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.’

Some quotes from MEPs about this behaviour:

  • Daniel Cohn-Bendit, chairman of the Greens/EFA Group: ‘The national patent officials in the Council do not want “harmonisation” or “clarification”. They merely want to secure the interests of the patent establishment. If they don’t get what they want, they simply bury the directive project and try to find other ways to get around the existing law.’
  • Anne Van Lancker, a Belgian MEP of the Socialist group: ‘the current Council proposal was written behind closed doors by patent office administrators.’
  • Piia-Noora Kauppi, Finnish MEP of the European People’s Party: ‘the Council is not taking the will of Europe’s elected legislators into account.’
  • Pernille Frahm, Danish member and Vice-Chairwoman of the GUE/NGL group: ‘The patent administrators in the Commission and Council are abusing the legislative process of the EU.’
  • Bent Hindrup Andersen (MEP, DK, EDD): ‘The approach of the Commission and Council in this directive is shocking. They are making full use of all the possibilities of evading democracy that the current Community Law provides.’
  • Johanna Boogerd-Quaak (MEP, NL, ELDR): ‘the Irish Presidency has buckled under the interests of American Companies. A handful of big American Companies may actually profit from software patents, but it is a very bad deal for innovation in European SMEs. Additionally, the Council is showing contempt for parliamentary democracy. We must make sure that after the elections there will again be a majority in the European Parliament that is willing to show its teeth.’

Amazingly, the Council proposal documents aren’t even being released to the public, ‘due to the sensitive nature of the negotiations and the absence of an overriding public interest’; the FFII got hold of them via a leak.

There’s still a chance that this can be reversed; this still needs to be confirmed at the Competitiveness Council of Ministers on 17-18 May. This isn’t a dead cert just yet. As a result, FFII are proposing more demonstrations and another ‘net strike’.

It’s unclear whether writing to anyone will make a difference, at least for people in Ireland, however; everything I’ve read seems to indicate that our representatives on the EU Competitivity Council are not on our side.

Specifically, the only names I can find regarding this Council are Mary Harney, pro-business, anti-regulation right-wing leader of the Progressive Democrats and ‘President-in-Office’ of this committee; and the staff of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment’s Intellectual Property Unit.

(Of course, Harney at least can always be voted out at the next elections, and I’d strongly suggest anyone working in the field bear that in mind if this gets passed!)

Newspaper front pages from Around the world, as PDFs

Published May 7, 2004

News: Newseum: Today’s Front Pages (Flash map view). A great site;
the best thing about it is, a double-click on each newspaper’s ‘dot’ will pop up their front page as a larger image in a new window, and give you a URL for a full-page PDF file.

Best of all, those full-page PDF links update every day with that day’s front page… for example, these are eminently bookmarkable:

Excellent!

A bit like The Guardian’s Digital Edition, but a whole lot cheaper and simpler.

E-Voting debacle gives us the first F-word in the Dail

Published May 6, 2004

EVoting: No ducking the f*ing question . . . did he say it? (Irish Independent) (reg req’d, see bugmenot):

A direct transcription of Mr (Michael) Smith’s comments reads: “Let them, f* it, we’ll say no more – we’ll say no more.”

Given the barrage of taunts he was facing in the Dail at the time, it is quite plausible – and in context – if the ‘eff it’ is replaced in the sentence by ‘duck it’.

The Opposition was continually interrupting Mr Smith when he was trying to put a brave face on the Government’s squandering of EUR 52m on e-voting. Ill at ease and clearly keen to avoid the onslaught from the Opposition, the minister seemed to know he was on a hiding to nothing.

Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, who has made baiting Michael Smith a career work-in-progress, was pursuing his quarry with noticeable effect. Mr Smith’s eyes narrowed as his mouth tightened in frustration, he turned to address his frontbench colleagues, and uttered the sentence that has turned him from Tipperary choirboy to bad-boy rapper.

It seems that the F-word isn’t specifically prohibited in the Dail — “the ‘Salient Rulings of the Chair, Second Edition’, the book which governs behaviour in the Dail, doesn’t specifically forbid the use” of the word. It does, however, apparently prohibit the words “brat, buffoon, chancer, communist, corner boy, fascist, gurrier, guttersnipe, hypocrite, rat, (and) scumbag.” (‘corner boy’?)

Some history: Unisys and the GIF patent

Published May 6, 2004

Patents: I’ve just come across Tim Oren’s page on the Unisys GIF patent furore of 1994-5. Tim used to be VP of ‘Future Technology’ at CompuServe.

The GIF furore, in case you missed it, was one of the most far-ranging software patent debacles to date. Here’s what happened…

Compuserve was one of the biggest online services at the time. In 1987 they’d created GIF, an efficient image file format, for public use, with a very liberal license. As a result, everyone and their dog wrote software to read and write GIF files (including myself ;).

GIF, like many other tools of the time, used the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) file compression scheme, which had been widely published without any indication that it was considered proprietary. LZW was pretty much the de-facto standard for file compression in the early 90s, in the same way that ‘gzip’ is nowadays.

However — 7 years later, in 1994, Unisys suddenly announced that they had filed for, and eventually received, a patent on the LZW algorithm. As Tim wrote at the time, this was a ‘submarine’ patent. (Unisys had owned that patent since 1985, and pursued hardware licenses — but all and sundry believed that the patent didn’t cover software-only implementations.)

Unisys shook downbrought an infringement suit against Compuserve, who had published the GIF standard and implemented it widely in their software. Compuserve had ‘no recourse but to settle’.

(Interestingly, it appears that at the time, Unisys seemed to think that GIF decoders needed licenses as well — popular thinking nowadays is that only GIF encoders need licensing, but Unisys didn’t think so at that stage at least.)

There is a happy ending — thankfully, free software saved the day. ;)

As Tim writes, Thomas Boutell, Jean-loup Gailly and others came up with PNG; Jean-loup and Mark Adler wrote GZIP; and LZW was consigned to the dustbin of unusable technology for most new projects. Old projects, of course, had to go through some redesign pains to achieve the same goal.

BTW, it’s worth noting that, even though the Unisys patent has expired, it’s still not safe to dust off LZW. GNU (and others) believe that there’s another patent filed on the same algorithm independently by — guess who — IBM, which doesn’t expire until 11 August

  1. The thoroughly-competent USPTO strikes again ;)

The lesson: be careful when implementing published standards. Nowadays, the IETF requires that contributors disclose ‘the existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the contribution that are reasonably and personally known to the contributor’. But in this case, the patent was owned by another body, Unisys, and the contributor (CIS) didn’t know that, so that wouldn’t have helped.

So, the real lesson: Just Say No to software patents ;)

BBCtorrents and some bits

Published May 4, 2004

Television: Tony Bowden: BBCtorrent? ‘Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet.’ I have my fingers firmly crossed here. This could be really excellent news. Of course, not being located in the UK could make it not-so-easy to actually watch them from here, but the underlying thinking is really cool.

Tech: LayerOne. Weekend conf in LA, with Danny O’Brien — think I might just tag along!

Patents: Posting this here so I can find it in future. Here’s a /. comment saying ‘if it becomes impossible to safely develop software in the US and EU due to patents, innovation will move to India and China’. This isn’t quite true anymore — my response, noting the Brazil/Glaxo/AZT case.

MS sponsoring the Irish EU Presidency

Published May 4, 2004

Europe: Given the Irish EU Presidency’s recent passing of the IP Enforcement Directive and the second attempt to get the Software Patents directive through using the EU Council of Ministers, is it really appropriate for Microsoft to “contribute” to the Irish EU Presidency?

MS reportedly see software patents as a very important part of their strategy to deal with open source, as they noted way back in 1998 in the leaked Halloween I document.

MS is reportedly applying for 10 new patents a day (or is it per week? eWeek can’t decide. anyway.)

It’s pretty clear that MS want to ‘de-commoditize’ open standards, using software patents; they said so in the Halloween doc. Their XML Word-processing patent, which claims to patent the use of two open standards (XML and XSD) in a word-processing file format, is a great example of locking up an open standard as a patented, proprietary format.

As a result, they’d have a vested interest in helping the EU Presidency to decide that software patents should be legalised in the EU. A more conspiracy-minded type than myself might read something into their ‘contributions’ accordingly ;)

Now, it could be all touchy-feely niceness from MS. This eWeek article quotes David Kaefer, Microsoft’s director of business development for intellectual property:

According to … Kaefer, “We’ll make our IP available to all comers, open-source or not.” Kaefer added that Microsoft isn’t focused on what garage-shop developers are doing …

Sounds lovely, except it didn’t happen in this case, where MS threatened an open-source developer with patent litigation:

Today I received a polite phone call from a fellow at Microsoft who works in the Windows Media group. He informed me that Microsoft has intellectual property rights on the ASF format and told me that, although I had reverse engineered it, the implementation was still illegal since it infringed on Microsoft patents. … At his request, and much to my own sadness, I have removed support for ASF in VirtualDub 1.3d, since I cannot risk a legal confrontation.