Month: February 2005

Published February 23, 2005

RFID: Over on Adam Shostack’s weblog, in a comment on an entry regarding the plans to mandate remotely-readable RFID passports, Martin Forssen brings up a great idea:

What I want is a device which beeps every time somebody scans me for RFID-tags. I assume this would be fairly easy to construct since the scanner must send a signal of some strength to activate the chip.

I wonder if that’d work? A keyfob, for example, something similar in size to the dinky Chrysalis Wifi Seeker I have on my keyring, would be perfect. It’d be probably pretty cheap to make, would make a great geek toy, and be quite educational too. ;)

Published February 18, 2005

Patents: So the Conference of Presidents has ratified the JURI decision to throw out the flawed software patents directive text. Phew! That’s a lot more pressure on the European Commission. Charlie McCreevy could still carry on his attempt to steamroller European democracy on this one, but it looks likely that he wouldn’t get away with it now — possibly facing sanctions as a result.

Found in a Slashdot comment — an amazing quote from Michel Rocard (former French Prime Minister, now European Deputy), recounting a meeting with Microsoft representatives on the software-patent issue:

“We never could (speak) a common language with the companies representatives we met – in particular those from Microsoft. Speaking about (the free circulation of ideas), free access to knowledge, was like speaking chinese to them. In their way of thinking, everything that is not usable for immediate profit ceases to be an engine of growth. They don’t seem to be able to understand that an invention which is a pure spirit creation (sic) can’t be patented. It’s simply terrifying. Many of us, at the Parliament, agree to say that they never have know such a pressure and such a verbal violence during their parliamentary work. It is a huge case.”

In addition, he takes aim at the Irish Presidency’s tactics:

“To adopt it formally, there is an expeditious procedure — the (A-item) at the Council of Ministers, where the it is adopted without discussion. The Irish and Dutch presidencies attempted this tactic three times, twice at meetings of the (Fisheries Council)! This is simply scandalous.”

Blimey, he’s really pissed off. Great! Go Rocard! ;)

See here for the original interview (in French), and here for a bad Babelfish translation.

In happier news — take a look at some pictures from the presentation of 30,000 verified signatures (and flowers!) from people around the world, thanking the Polish Government for their repeated stands against the flawed directive in December.

Published February 16, 2005

Code: Ugo Cei: Building Interactive Web Programs with Continuations quoting Phil Windley:

This leads to the question: what if I could write programs for the Web that were ‘structured’ in the programming sense of that word? The result would be Web programs that were more natural to write and easy to read. You’d no longer have to maintain the state of your program outside the language and the data could be kept in variables, where it belongs. The answer is: you can.

I hate the ‘save all state’ model imposed by developing for the web, and have been hoping for a way to do this for a while — and now I know what it’s called ;)

It seems Seaside is the leading continuations-based web-app framework, using Smalltalk, and (as Ugo noted) Apache Cocoon has it too, but there’s a whole load more. Can you tell I haven’t been following web-app development techniques much recently?

Never mind those other languages, though — Continuity looks promising as a Perl framework based around continuations. Perl 6 will reportedly have native continuation support, and Dan Sugalski gives a good write-up of how they’re implemented and their ramifications there.

Published February 15, 2005

Patents: Børsen: Bill Gates threatened to kill 800 Danish jobs if Denmark opposed software patent directive:

Danish financial newspaper Børsen reports that Microsoft founder Bill Gates threatened the Danish government in connection with software patents. According to the article, Gates told Rasmussen and two Danish ministers in November that he would kill all 800 jobs in Navision, a Danish company acquired by Microsoft in 2002, unless the EU were to quickly decide to legalize software patents through a directive. Denmark is a country with only 5 million inhabitants and a relatively small high-tech sector to which the loss of 800 jobs would have significant implications.

Lovely — a blunt blackmail attempt. The article goes on:

It would not be the first threat of its kind. A group of large corporations including Philips is reported to have previously threatened European governments to outsource all of their European software development jobs to low-wage countries unless the EU were to allow patents on software through the directive that is currently being worked on.
In January, leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported on a letter addressed by the Polish subsidiaries of Siemens, Nokia, Philips, Ericsson and Alcatel to Poland’s prime minister Marek Belka … it is said to have indicated that the respective companies would reconsider making investments in Poland if the Polish government upheld its resistance to the legalization of software patents in the EU.

Again, note the FUD-busting on this point. I notice that Florian Mueller of NoSoftwarePatents.comhas a a good one-liner response along the same lines — ‘The country in which you develop a technology has nothing to do with where you can take out patents.’ He goes on:

If they move jobs to Asia, they won’t get a single additional patent, neither in Asia nor in Europe. If you warn politicians of consequences that are directly related to a legislative issue, that’s acceptable. If you threaten with causing damage that has no factual connection whatsoever, then it’s blackmail. Plain and simple.

Published February 11, 2005

Patents: an interesting FUD-busting point from the FSFE-IE mailing list today. Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:

Why does the following point keep coming up? Do I misunderstand the issue, or is this just plain nonsense: (quoting this ENN article)
‘Indeed, the big businesses that backed the directive — such as Philips, Nokia, Alcatel and Microsoft (…) also say, in somewhat ominous terms, that without patent protection, big companies will be less inclined to spend cash on European R&D projects, because the governments of Europe cannot offer any guarantees that commercially useful technology will be protected. In the US, those much-needed safeguards are in place, patent supporters note.’
I presume that these big companies will obtain patents in all territories where patents are available, regardless of where the R&D is performed. Unless they are threatening this merely as revenge (and I would think that there responsibility to their own shareholders precludes this), there would be no more or less reason to do R&D in Europe whether software is patentable there or not. Am I wrong?

He’s right; in my experience, software patents are applied for world-wide, in as many regions as possible (and as funds and time permit) — and there’s very little barrier for an inventor in one country to obtain patents in other countries (apart from money to pay for all those billable hours).

However, Fergal Daly had a more interesting additional point:

‘As far as I can see you’re right and in fact this is a plus for Europe, as labs in Europe would be free to use other people’s patents during their research, whereas in other regions they would have to license them before they could implement them, even for private use.’

He’s right, too, as far as I can see. This would be quite a big win for European R&D, since it would also mean they could develop an algorithm similar to a patented algorithm, as long as the patented technique was only implemented in software inside their European labs. This would be illegal to do anywhere else in the world where software patents were legal, hence is a competitive advantage over their international competitors.

In addition, it would mean that in the scenario where a product is produced using a patented algorithm, but the algorithm doesn’t appear in the final product, that would allow them to perform production in Europe without paying the license fees that would be payable elsewhere.

In summary — the ‘patents needed for R&D’ line is FUD, and the reality is in fact the opposite!

Published February 11, 2005

Tech: Bit of a long essay, this one.

World+dog have been linking to this interview with Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield on the O’Reilly Network, so I wasn’t going to bother. But I came across a great illustration of what I think is a very important point:

Koman: In the write-up for your web services session at ETech, you say, Capturing the creative energy of the hive can be scary. It requires giving up some control, and eliminating lock-in as a strategy. Tell me some more about that.
Butterfield: Ofoto is a pretty good example. I don’t want to pick on them too much, but they create a pretty artificial kind of lock-in. When you upload your pictures to them, you might upload a three- or four-megapixel image, but all you can get back from them is a 600-pixel image; if you want to get the original back, you have to buy it on a CD. There’s no way to get it out because if you got it out, then your friends and family could get it out and print it out at home, and they’re in competition with Lexmark and HP as well as the other online photo services. So that’s one aspect of it.
There’s also a tendency to want to capture all the value that’s being generated or will potentially be generated by new business. What I mean by that is, we don’t explicitly allow commercial uses of the API yet, but we definitely plan to. And we know that there are people working on products based on our API that we want to do, but outside developers will get to it first. What letting go in that context means is letting go of all the control you have over users by being the one who owns the database, because other developers can generate businesses and products that hook into you, and that takes some value away.

This is a point that still, to this day, most people miss.

The traditional viewpoint is that, if you’ve got something, you hoard it, and ensure you’re the guy who makes the money from it. So you do what Ofoto do — you keep the full-resolution images, and charge for access to them; or you don’t publish APIs, and keep the data to yourself; or in the world of source code, you hold onto the source so no-one else can see it, because it’s your ‘crown jewels’. Then, the idea goes, you can ensure that you’re the only one who can do prints, or add a feature to the source, or whatever.

But the problem is, you’re not always the one with the idea; or alternatively, every feature request has to go through you, and be implemented by you, on your time. And in the meantime, your users are considering the big question — ‘do I want to get locked in, here? what if he goes out of business? am I a small customer who’s going to be ignored?’

In fact, I’ve been guilty of this myself. When I started writing open-source software, I used the GPL as a license, which prohibits commercial use (mostly) — except by myself or through my explicit permission. I had no intentions of making it available for commercial use, because I couldn’t see the commercial uses.

But that was me being short-sighted — soon, people starting asking if they could license the code for commercial use, or hire me. I realised that I didn’t have the time, or inclination, to go the whole hog, and risk my livelihood on a piece of software — especially risky since I didn’t think that software could support me alone.

So when I wrote SpamAssassin, I picked the Perl dual license, a license that did permit commercial use, while still being an open-source license. By now, there are quite a few commercial versions of SpamAssassin, all making money (I hope!), I’m getting paid to work on SpamAssassin, and everyone’s happy ;)

Perhaps I should have kept commercial rights to myself. But I have no doubt that doing so would have ensured SpamAssassin remained a small-time solution, and would not have received the number of contributors, committers, and patches it has by now. (for example, Matt Sergeant, who was an SpamAssassin committer, joined the project explicitly to use that code in MessageLabs‘ product.)

Plus, at the time, there were already quite a few commercial competitors — and there’s a lot more to being a commercial success than the simple things required to be an open-source success; I’d be dubious that SpamAssassin would have been able to compete as a purely-commercial play, and I’m not sure I’d have been keen to risk my livelihood to do so, anyway. (I’m not really dot-com CTO material, anyway. I like hacking code too much.)

I think things have worked out well: the software’s better, I’m earning a livelihood from open-source software regardless, and the software’s usable for more people. As usual, Larry Wall was right ;)

Published February 7, 2005

Spam: recently, I’ve been getting a lot of spam bounces; that is, messages sent by people’s autoresponders, in response to forged spam claiming to come from my domain. (I have an SPF record, but these autoresponders naturally don’t bother to check that before replying.)

I have a SpamAssassin ruleset which catches these, and it gets rid of the vast majority — but the odd wierd one gets past. This one caught my eye before I deleted it:

On October 5, 2004, I will be going to the Illinois Department of Corrections for approximately 18 months. If you wish to contact me, please snail mail me at: (address deleted)
Your letters will be forwarded to me and I will reply as soon as I receive them! Thanks…and please do write! Mail is vitally important! :-)

… ouch. Good luck to this guy, whoever he is…

Published February 4, 2005

Spam: Should ISPs Be Profiting From Knowingly Hosting Spam Gangs? — a new article up on Spamhaus.org, well worth a read. Some snippets:

So where is this stealth proxy spamware sold and distributed from? For Send Safe the answer is, www.send-safe.com, hosted by MCI Worldcom.
… MCI executives have refused to stop providing service to these gangs, insisting that the sale and distribution of stealth spamming software is not against MCI’s policy.
… It’s no surprise therefore that MCI has consistently occupied first place in Spamhaus TOP 10 World Worst Spam Service ISPs chart, with over 200 spammers and spam gangs on the MCI network in full knowledge of the security managers and the General Counsel.
… MCI Worldcom’s official position on the issue is that MCI can’t stop their spam gangs selling proxy hijacking spamware from MCI’s network as that would be ‘censoring’ the distribution and sale of illegal proxy hijacking software.

Published February 3, 2005

Antarctic: It seems that Ernest Shackleton, during his exploration of Antarctica, relied heavily on ‘Forced March’ tablets:

Reportedly ‘sold over the counter at Harrod’s until 1916’, these were primarily cocaine-based.

Published February 2, 2005

Patents: FFII are reporting that ‘the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) has decided with a large majority to ask the Commission for a renewed referral of the software patents directive. With only two or three votes against and one abstention, the resolution had overwhelming support from the committee, and all-party backing.’

Michel Rocard MEP gave a very strong speech at the meeting with the Commissioner. Apart from noting several “inelegancies” by the Commission, such as not taking into account any of the Parliament’s substantive amendments in its recommendation to the Council, he also took issue with the Dutch and German governments ignoring their respective parliaments, the Irish Presidency’s sponsorship by Microsoft and the attempted ratifications of the political (dis)agreement at several fishery Council meetings.
He mentioned that at a meeting with the Polish government, the industry players confirmed that the Council text allowed pure software patents, and wondered how the Commission could continue claiming the reverse. He was also curious about how the Commission’s perfectly tautological definition of the concept “technical” could help in any way to distinguish between what is patentable and what is not. Despite his own abstention when voting on the restart later that day, the fact that almost everyone else supported it is probably his personal achievement.
The Commissioner made clear that “any agreement will need to strike a fair balance between different interests”, and that “a constructive dialogue between the Council and Parliament will be vital for an agreement”. He does have the option to deny a new first reading. But given the strength of feeling in the Parliament and the concerns of so many member states in the Council, the Parliament request looks like the best way to achieve a clean way forward for this Directive that everyone has been looking for.

This is good news for the anti-swpat side. Nul points for the Irish Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, who ‘had in the morning assured the JURI Committee that the Council would finally adopt its beleaguered Common Position text. He announced that “the Luxembourg Presidency has now received written assurances concerning the re-instatement of this issue as an A point at a forthcoming Council”. Given that A points are to be adopted without discussion, this left no possibilities for renewed negotiations in the Council’.

Published February 1, 2005

Networking: Donal Cunningham, president of SAGE-IE, mails to note an interesting talk on in Dublin next week:

The System Administrators’ Guild of Ireland and Dublin University Internet Society present…
What : From the ground up; a greenfield deployment in Liberia
Who : Comdt. Kieran Motherway, Corps of Comms. and IS, Defence Forces
Where: Walton Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, TCD
When : Tuesday the 8th of February, 7 p.m.
Why : The Irish Defence Forces deployed to a greenfield site in Liberia in 2004, and had to build Comms/IT infrastructure from the ground up. Comdt. Motherway will talk about the Irish Army’s experiences with this deployment, and just how far removed from an air-conditioned, climate-controlled comms room you can get…

Sounds like fun, and I know a few taint.org readers will be interested ;)

Month: February 2005

RFID Scan Detector

Amazing quotes from Michel Rocard

Continuations in perl

BillG threatens to shut down Denmark’s tech sector if he doesn’t get his way

Open APIs, Open Source, And Giving Away The Crown Jewels

A highlight (or low-light) from the world of spam bounces

Spamhaus article on ISPs hosting spam gangs

interesting Antarctic factoid

EU Software Patents law back to square one

interesting sysadmin talk next week in Dublin