taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

It appears a public relations firm, Edelman’s, recently performed a phone survey which concluded that bloggers are the “least trusted” group of authority figures source of information in Ireland. This has been widely reported:

on Edelman Dublin’s blog:

When we consider who we trust the most as a spokesperson in Ireland, the most trusted sources of information include, financial or industry analysts at 62%, followed by a doctor or healthcare specialist at 57%, an NGO representative at 57% and academics at 53%. Bloggers are the least trusted at 7%.

at Silicon Republic:

Bloggers have emerged as the “least trusted” group in the country.

and on ElectricNews.net:

“What has been interesting to note in this year’s findings is the apparent low standings of bloggers and social media in general,” said [Mark Cahalane, managing director of Edelman Dublin]. “One interpretation of the survey would be that bloggers have now entered the mainstream and people no longer distinguish between blogs and ordinary websites. This is also reflected by the fact that numerous high profile bloggers are widely quoted in the media.”

However, as Damien noted, Piaras Kelly raised a very significant point about this – ‘the people surveyed for the research had to fit a certain demographic, including having to be aged between 35-64.’ [...] ‘A Generational gap is evident.’ This press release corroborates that. Sure enough, most blog readers (and writers) would tend to be of the younger generation — a pretty key point, one would assume, but one that most of the non-blogger coverage has omitted ;)

(Update: the term “authority figure” wasn’t quite correct; replaced with what Edelman themselves use, “source of information”.)

Tags: age, blogging, blogs, crumblies, edelmans, generation-gap, ireland, surveys

Patents: The Washington Post gets it. ‘The country “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law,” said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. “It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”‘

BTW, one thing people say is that software patents are fine, as long as the technique is novel and new. What that misses is that novel, new techniques quickly become commonplace and standard infrastructure; consider image/audio/video compression, general compression techniques, cryptography, and so on. Those were all high-tech, super-complex schemes 5 years ago. Nowadays, we have JPEG, gzip, openssl, ssh, and all these other standard tools that are just part and parcel of our basic infrastructure. In software, ‘new and novel’ becomes ’standard infrastructure’ remarkably quickly, and that’s what’s driving software innovation.

Tags: age, compression, country, infrastructure, novel, patent, patents, post, software, system, washington

Voting: Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)

First off, this Debian-news posting notes some snippets from an Age article by Nathan; Here’s some longer excerpts. It features some great quotes: ‘the only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).’

And this one:

‘Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds,’ Jones said. ‘We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates.’

He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not.

This letter to LWN notes: ‘You might be interested to know that some of the work on this project is being done by ‘big name’ open source people, including Andrew Tridgell (aka Mr Samba), Dave Gibson (orionoco wireless LAN driver), Martin Pool (apache), and Rusty Russell (netfilter and other gross kernel hacks)’, and links to the code’s CVS repository!

It seems those guys performed the work on behalf of a Canberra open-source consultancy group, Software Improvements; Here’s the product brochure.

This posting to iRights gives a few more details.

It all looks like an excellent job all ’round, as far as I can see.

Tags: act, age, code, debian-news, evacs, paper, source, system, voting, work

Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)

First off, this Debian-news posting notes some snippets from an Age article by Nathan; Here’s some longer excerpts. It features some great quotes: ‘the only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).’

And this one:

‘Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds,’ Jones said. ‘We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates.’

He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not.

This letter to LWN notes: ‘You might be interested to know that some of the work on this project is being done by ‘big name’ open source people, including Andrew Tridgell (aka Mr Samba), Dave Gibson (orionoco wireless LAN driver), Martin Pool (apache), and Rusty Russell (netfilter and other gross kernel hacks)’, and links to the code’s CVS repository!

It seems those guys performed the work on behalf of a Canberra open-source consultancy group, Software Improvements; Here’s the product brochure.

This posting to iRights gives a few more details.

It all looks like an excellent job all ’round, as far as I can see.

Tags: act, age, code, debian-news, evacs, paper, source, system, voting, work

Nathan Cochrane writes in The Age: ‘Opponents of a Canadian company’s patent to tax online transactions believe they can stop it before it is granted by the Australian patents office.’ This is the DE Technologies patent I blogged about before, which they hope to license under some hefty terms; ‘annual licence fees of $US10,000 ($A15,324) each, plus 1.5 per cent a transaction and $0.11 cents each time a document, such as an invoice, is generated.’

At FightThePatent.co.nz, they note that the NZ government plans to amend its patent law to make it much harder to file such patents in future. They also link to another Age article which says the patent has already been granted in Oz as of ‘February of this year, according to IP Australia’.

An Aussie tech executive called Matthew Tutaki is planning to try and have it quashed. The situation can be followed on FightThePatent.co.nz. Unfortunately, in turn it seems DE Technologies are planning to fight back.

Tags: age, cent, company, fightthepatent, licence, office, online, patent, time, transaction

Nathan Cochrane has a weblog. He’s a clueful journo who writes about technology for The Age, the Melbourne newspaper – thumbs up for that; I read plenty of The Age during my sojourn in Melbourne, it’s the best newspaper in Oz. (Plus it recommends using Sitescooper and Plucker in their Handheld Howto page, so that’s always going to get a +1 from me ;)

But anyway, a very clueful weblog; lots of good journalism straight from the source. Recommended.

LinMagAU.org: Integrating SpamAssassin with MailMan. I really must get around to getting our server upgraded to MailMan 2.1 so we can apply this; I have one list that’s getting about 5-10 spams a day, and even with ’subscriber posting only’ set, MM 2.0’s admin interface is very clunky for dealing with that.

Does anyone know if there’s a usable tool to automate Mailman admin BTW? Or give it a good UI?

Tags: admin, age, journo, mailman, newspaper, plenty, plus, sojourn, technology, weblog

William Gibson, talking about why he uses all-caps book titles, gives a short history lesson regarding the rendering of book titles, back in the age of the mimeograph:

Much of my earliest typewriting experience had to do with mimeography, a pre-thermocopy form of reproduction once fairly universal in the world’s offices. You typed, once, on a waxed paper ’stencil’, clipped this over a silkscreen device with a moving pad or drum of ink behind it, and your mimeograph ran off (or silkscreened, really) as many copies of your document as you required. Owing to the physical peculiarities of the medium, though, it was unwise to underline too frequently on a mimeograph stencil: the single unbroken line was particularly prone to tear, producing leaks and smudging.

People who liked books, and frequently wrote letters, on typewriters, to other people who liked books, tended, free from the constraints of an academic stylesheet, to render titles in all-caps. People who wrote about books for publication in amateur journals (mimeo was an authentic medium of the American samisdat) rendered titles in all-caps in order to avoid stencil-tears. At various times, I was both.

It’s such a pleasure having this kind of stuff to read every day!

Tags: age, book, experience, history, lesson, medium, mimeograph, mimeography, rendering, stencil

Great article on practical counter-terrorism in Salon today:

Ask now of any action you mean to take — bombing, assassination, ground war — whether it means there will be more or fewer terrorists when the children who are now in preschool grow up to fighting age. This is not an argument against the use of violence. Violence is absolutely essential; but it has to be used so that it conveys the right political message to the people who might become terrorists when they grow up. The state has to become as good at theater as its enemies. There’s a short version of this lesson: “Don’t shoot the boys throwing stones.”

Tags: action, age, article, assassination, bombing, ground, salon, today, violence, war