Life: I’m moving house — I’ve just filled about 20 boxes, now to get moving them! Sadly, there’s no wifi in range of my new house, so the upshot is I may be offline for a few days. Boo.
Comments closed
Month: November 2004
Patents:
Newsweek: Factory of the Future?:
The dino’s ferociously bared teeth hint at elements of Intellectual Ventures’ bold business plan. Myhrvold and his partner, former Microsoft chief software architect Edward Jung, have created the quintessential company for the 21st century. It doesn’t actually make anything … Only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways. …
Sources familiar with Myhrvold’s strategy say that he has raised $350 million from some of the largest companies in high tech: Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia and Apple. Google and eBay also recently invested. With this large bankroll, the company is out buying existing patents in droves. (Myhrvold won’t comment on these activities, but sources say he has already purchased about 1,000 patents.) The strategy is to set up a sort of patent marketplace. Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. …
“We’re concerned that these giant pools of patent rights are going to prevent entrepreneurs from entering markets, as opposed to being used to promote innovation,” says one worried Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Now that’s scary…
Comments closedSpam: The EFF are a great organisation — damn, I even helped set up an organisation based on its goals in Ireland, back in the day! But this white paper is shockingly clueless.
(Note: this posting has been updated. Original left intact, but there’s an update below worth noting.)
For example:
Spam Assassin, a popular program that does ad hoc pattern matching, assigns ‘points’ to various features of an email to determine whether it is spam. … One of the major problems with this system is that messages from certain countries — like China, for example — can be blocked purely on the basis of where they come from and what language they’re in. The implications for free speech here are very troubling indeed: … thus anti-spam technology unintentionally works as a political censorship mechanism.
SpamAssassin does not give points for country of origin, or language the message arrives in, unless the user explicitly either (a) adds rules from an external source, or (b) modifies the ‘ok_languages’ setting in their configuration, from the default, to specify that they do not want to receive messages in particular languages. No country- or language-blocking happens by default. This is by design.
It’s a shame that the authors felt the need to outright fabricate a danger, here.
The white paper features more broad generalisations about ‘spam filters’, mostly using unsubstantiated friend-of-a-friend stories, without detailed data. And I do know that there have been cases of MoveOn.org, at least, being a source of UBE, in the past — so it’s not valid to claim that this is all a ‘free speech’ issue; political UBE is still spam.
They need to realise there’s a lot of very smart, very reasonable anti-spammers out there, and most of us agree with the rest of their goals, except for their spam position. This is hurting them.
Still, it appears they’re finally getting a clue about requiring subscription requests be confirmed using closed-loop opt-in, so that’s good. More political newsletters, and political campaigns, need to get this clue — just because it’s political speech does not mean it’s not spam. (I have several thousand political spams in my spam folder — most from that German anti-immigration virus from earlier this year.)
Note that Rod is unsure if they’re practicing what they preach…
Update: Annalee Newitz has been in touch, and pointed out that the white paper in fact says ‘mails … can be blocked’, rather than ‘are blocked’ based on country of origin. In other words, it’s purely a matter of this being possible, rather than the default, and that administrators apply these customisations.
In addition, she notes that the conclusions recommend that ISPs and administrators of spam blocking systems allow end users to control their own filtering settings, saying ‘If a user wants to block all mail from China, great. If a sysadmin does it for a bunch of users without permission, then that is a problem in our opinion.’
So I agree with that. Misdirected outrage hereby turned off ;)
(Mind you, I still think they need to work more with the reasonable anti-spammers… and fix that unconfirmed sign-up that Rod mentioned, if it’s really still unconfirmed!)
Comments closedTrips: So I’m just back from ApacheCon 2004, which took place in the lovely Alexis Park building site ;)
Good fun was had — very interesting to meet all the faces behind the names from various mailing lists and blogs, and get the inside track on how the ASF really works… there’s quite a lot you don’t get to understand from the outside, or even from being a committer. So, a useful trip.
Most of the talks were, naturally, very web-oriented — we’ll have to see what we can do about that, next time around! One useful tidbit: I didn’t realise, but found out at the conference, that the ASF ConCom are very generous with paying speakers’ expenses. So maybe next time I’ll join the speaker line-up, too.
A major goal, one we achieved, was an impromptu SpamAssassin developer summit, 5 days sitting down together hammering on bugs and plans, with 4 of the main developers present (myself, Daniel, Theo and Michael). Pretty much achieved, although there were some thorny bugs to deal with… one interesting factor is that we may now be moving towards emulating the Apache httpd’s preforking model to deal with a memory/performance issue we’re seeing in 3.0.x.
Finally — this sequence of photos has been cropping up all over the internets. When I saw it, I immediately thought it looked a lot like Ireland — and Roundstone, Co. Galway, in particular. Sure enough, it appears it is! I guess the Connemara landscape of Roundstone’s bay is pretty memorable, after all…
Comments closedPatents: Patents4Innovation is a new site set up by several European multinational companies to lobby for the legalisation of software patenting in Europe.
Their FAQ is good for a laugh, including an answer that basically says that the Patent Office needs to do a better job, and another which states that opponents of software patents have been unable to demonstrate any ‘convincing’ evidence of swpats causing economic harm (despite the FTC and PriceWaterhouseCoopers reports, which are pretty high-profile organisations).
But the best quote — in fact, the only quote — appears on their Testimonials and Quotes page. Here is in full:
“… successful and profitable high-tech enterprises seem to be characterised by holding patents and copyrights. These instruments might reduce the vulnerability of firms with respect to competition and equip them with a more favourable market position.”
Source: the “Observatory of European SMEs 2002 / No 6: High-tech SMEs in Europe”, commissioned by the European Commission
(My emphasis.) Of course, there’s nothing worse than having to compete on a level playing field. ;)
(Thanks to Christian Beauprez for spotting that!)
Comments closedWeb: The lovely C sent me a link of note — it’s the eglu, ‘the world’s most stylish and innovative chicken house and is the perfect way to keep chickens as pets’. (She has a thing about keeping chickens.)
So I was all set to link to that on NoMoreSocks.newscientist.com, New Scientist’s nifty new xmas-pressies site; but — get this: it will not load in Firefox 1.0PR, 1.0, or Konqueror at all — in fact, using telnet, the site doesn’t actually respond to requests on port 80 from my linux desktop.
The only browser it seems to work with is MS Internet Explorer in VMWare, presumably using MSIE’s psychic powers to contact it without going through TCP/IP.
Mysteriously, it can be lynxed from my server in Ireland, but similarly doesn’t work for C’s Firefox installation on her desktop. How wierd!
1 CommentUsability: So, I’ve just found out about a useless feature of my microwave oven the hard way. The microwave’s manual notes:
Demo Mode
The Demo Mode is ideal for learning how to use the microwave oven. When set, functions can be entered without actually turning on the magnetron. The microwave oven light will come on, the fan will run and, if on, the turntable will rotate.
To Turn On/Off: The microwave oven and Timer must be off. Touch and hold TIMER SET.OFF for 5 seconds until 2 tones sound and ‘d’ appears on the display. Repeat to turn off and remove ‘d’ from the display.
Great! How useful! What a friendly UI! A tiny ‘d’ that indicates that, although your microwave looks like it’s cooking away, it’s actually doing nothing.
If you ever want to prank a friend with a Whirlpool oven, I’d recommend this one ;)
Comments closedPolitics: Global Guerrillas: ‘Networked organizations, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging marketplace of violence. An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century.’
This stuff is scary — and I think it’s right; the author thinks Bin Laden sees the US as an over-stretched 1980’s Russia, vulnerable to economic collapse; his last communique talks about what he calls the ‘bleed-until-bankruptcy plan’.
Bruce Sterling says ‘You ever read my 80s novel ISLANDS IN THE NET? The one with a sinister, imaginary book of military strategy in it called THE LAWRENCE DOCTRINE AND POSTINDUSTRIAL INSURGENCY? Well, this blog feels a lot like I imagined that book would have felt. Kinda floods the mind with creepily subversive 21st century insight.’
Definitely worth reading.
Comments closedSpam: 2 found guilty in first felony spam conviction: ‘LEESBURG, Va. – A brother and sister who sent unsolicited junk e-mail to millions of America Online customers were convicted Wednesday in the nation’s first felony prosecution of distributors of spam.’
Jeremy D. Jaynes, 30, (aka. Gaven Stubberfield) and Jessica DeGroot, 28, convicted to nine years in prison and a $7,500 fine respectively.
Nine years — wow, that’s a serious conviction for spamming… Virginia clearly takes this very seriously, as the home of AOL. Let’s see if this causes any of the remaining spammers to think twice.
Comments closedPolitics: Disaster. I can’t believe it.
- CNN sums it up
- some cute kittens, take your mind off it
