taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Patents: This has come up twice recently in discussions of software patenting, so it’s worth posting a blog entry as a note.

There’s a common misconception that a patenter does not necessarily need to enforce a patent in the courts, for it to remain valid. This isn’t true in the US at least, where there is the legal doctrine of ‘laches’, defined as follows in the Law.com dictionary:

Laches - the legal doctrine that a legal right or claim will not be enforced or allowed if a long delay in asserting the right or claim has prejudiced the adverse party (hurt the opponent) as a sort of ‘legal ambush’.

The Bohan Mathers law firm have a good paragraph explaining this:

…the patent holder has an obligation to protect and defend the rights granted under patent law. Just as permitting the public to freely cross one’s property may lead to the permanent establishment of a public right of way and the diminishment of one’s property rights, so the knowing failure to enforce one’s patent rights (one legal term for this is laches) against infringement by others may result in the forfeiture of some or all of the rights granted in a particular patent.

See also this and this page for discussion of cases where it was relevant. It seems by no means clear-cut, but the doctrine is there.

Tags: blog, claim, doctrine, entry, laches, law, patent, patents, property, right, software

Tax: Following on from the previous entry, I’ve had a stroke of luck. It turns out that I did indeed quality as a US resident for tax purposes, and therefore could use Turbotax.

20 minutes later, both state and federal forms were e-filed with the very minimum of fuss — computers and the net illustrating their worth as labour-saving devices quite nicely. ;)

(Oh — also — a PSA for Google’s benefit: I’m pretty sure that form 6251 had incorrect instructions. It claims that the items it refers to in form 1040, can also be referred to in form 1040NR by the same numbers. In fact, parts of 1040NR are radically different in numbering than 1040. It’s a bug in the form!)

Tags: entry, form, luck, minimum, quality, resident, state, stroke, tax, turbotax

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. ;)

Tags: comment, device, entry, idea, rfid, rfid-tags, scanner, somebody, time, weblog

Spam: I was just looking back through the archives here on taint.org, and noticed this entry from December 2 last year:

A huge 300 ft. high ocean wave is moving towards your continent. Your and many other cities are in a real danger. Approximate wave moving speed is 700 km/h. cmoym eaaa yypbzz

Please read more about this catastrophe here: (link)

We are strongly urging you to evacuate yourself and your family as soon as possible, even though you may live far away from your city. The tsunami will reach the continent in approximately FOUR hours.

It appears that the spam was a phish attack — the site in question is full of Internet Exploder exploits. It was ‘targeted’, at least as well as such things ever are, at Australian readers. AUSCERT issued a warning about it at the time.

But how’s about that for timing? Spooky! What did those phishers know?

Tags: approximate, continent, danger, december, entry, ocean, org, spam, taint, wave, year

Literature: So, more on this entry — believe it or not, there’s a Japanese Sourceforge project implementing a Wiki called ‘mrkrgnao’. Japanese Joyce fans!

Tags: entry, japanese, literature, mrkrgnao, project, sourceforge, wiki

Open Source: A good entry at sourcefrog.net describing some reasons people are driven to use open source — the closed-source component library one, in particular, drives me nuts.

I’ve run into this in the past — here’s an example I can point to. That’s a fixed version of Java 1.0’s java.util.StreamTokenizer class, to fix a bug where space cannot be treated as a special character. (Hopefully it’s now obsolete, seeing as I wrote that 9 years ago!)

Note that I probably do not have permission to use and redistribute that class. Also note that the bug fix I submitted to Java 1.0 probably never made it into the code, because I was an individual user and not a major corporate client. The bug may have been fixed independently, however, given that StreamTokenizer still exists, but I doubt my fix ever got near the dev team. (However it still means I can say I fixed a bug in James Gosling’s code ;)

Invariably, getting access to source, and being allowed to fix bugs in it, is a key issue — and one that continually drives developers to open source/free software libraries. RMS has been saying this for years, of course.

Music: A massive selection of links to mp3 blogs. gabba > Pod looks very interesting… they even had a copy of Egyptian Empire’s Horn Track recently, one of my favourites.

Tags: bug, class, code, component, entry, fix, java, open, source, sourcefrog, streamtokenizer

Spam: Yoz comments on the bizarre new names appearing in spam, linking to a 2lmc spool entry and this entry at rereviewed.com, featuring such beauties as:

• Inflorescence B. Afghan
• Petards Q. Blinkers
• Foobar Economides
• Hillock H. Fossilized
• Hotel K. Primate
• Networked T. Crowley
• Jitterbug I. Catastrophes
• Pragmatism O. Playhouses

Me, I’m looking forward to getting spam from Collately Sisters with the international finance arse and Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan on new Euro-quota rates.

Oh look, I’ve found some war:

MORRIS: Back live now, progress on The Day Today smart bomb - Jonathan! Get rid of Hurd! Thanks!

(Hurd vanishes from a monitor, replaced by a bomb’s eye view of the war zone.)

MAN WITH GLASSES: Well, Chris, as you can see there’s the missile, cruising at around 2000 per second trying to locate the target the soldier it’s aimed at - there’s the soldier, it goes in through the mouth, down through the oesophagus, into the stomach and there’s the explosion. (The camera enters the gob of a surprised trooper before the picture turns to static)

MORRIS: Absolutely bang! That’s The Day Today bringing you another tear on the face of the world’s mother! Alan! Sport!

Tags: bomb, day, entry, hurd, lmc, soldier, spam, today, war, yoz

Funny: Mick @ P45 has a good entry today on plagiarism. He notes that an academic pal once wrote a program to test for plagiarism by his students:

It uses a fairly rough and ready ‘brute force’ approach. Nonetheless, it can identify significant strings that have been regurgitated from Text A in Text B.

Anyway, he decided just for fun to fire the program at the website’s astrology predictions for the previous 18 months or so. The program churned away, and duly spat out the results. And - well heavens above - hadn’t the astrologer been copying and pasting very large chunks of his own predictions, apparently at random and nothing to do with ‘Uranus being in the ascendent’ or other such drivel that horoscopes concern themselves with.

Tags: approach, entry, force, fun, funny, pal, plagiarism, program, text, today, website

Life: so myself and C took a one-night-only trip up to Idyllwild this weekend, hiking up to that rock formation and camping overnight. Great fun.

The rock is called ‘Suicide Rock’. It’s good to see morbid naming is international, but I should note that the prize for best placenames has to go to Victoria, Australia’s Mount Buggery, though.

(I drove past Mt. Buggery last year, and, disappointingly, it seems they’ve renamed it on the official maps. But the other ‘I can’t believe we’re still crossing this bloody mountain range and haven’t made it to Melbourne yet’ placenames still exist.)

Language: Riverbend blog notes interesting trivia in passing: Winnie the Pooh, in Arabic, is ‘Winnie Dabdoob’.

Open Source: GROKLAW on the WSIS fiasco earlier this summer. Briefly, the WSIS — the World Summit on the Information Society — came out with a position pro-open-source, and quite a few large companies seemed to say ‘eek!’ and promptly lobbied as hard as they could to give that line a vasectomy.

Interestingly, they did the same to the spam-related positions, cutting ‘a number of proposals, including prosecution of spammers’ down to a watery ‘take appropriate action on spam at national and international levels’. Snore. Fantastic work, guys.

Weblogs: When did Boing Boing stop taking comments? (looks) seems to be around about this entry of Sep 10. As far as I can see, this is the last comments page.

Shame — I’m with Jeremy on this one.

Dublin: is this entry, by London’s 3W the real winner of the competition to design the new U2 studio in Dublin’s Sir John Rogerson’s Quay?

Tags: boing, entry, formation, fun, hiking, idyllwild, life, rock, trip, weekend, wsis

I’ve just copied in a new image for the blog entry on the Joyce bridge; this one’s much sharper.

Ah, hell, might as well reproduce it here again, it is very pretty after all:

Isn’t that lovely?

Tags: blog, bridge, entry, hell, image

Life imitates Father Ted. It seems the Irish Eurovision entry sounds very similar to the Danish entry from 2000, which, if true, is almost exactly the subject of a classic episode of cult comedy TV show Father Ted, My Lovely Horse.

Dougal: ‘So we wouldn’t be stealing the song then?’ Ted: ‘No, it’d be more like we were keeping their memory alive.’ Dougal: ‘So if we won we could give the prize money to their relatives?’ Ted: ‘Yeah, we’ll play that by ear.’

The full low-down on the episode is here. Classic…

Anyway, I’m now in sunny SoCal, set up with more bandwidth than I’ve had in over a year. In fact, I’m swimming in bandwidth. Plus a decent pair of speakers for the ol’ MP3 collection, at last (my last set are in storage and have been for 3 months)… happy happy joy joy.

Myself and my cat had a 16-hour flight, and somehow or other, he seems satisfied. Well, I suppose as long as the catfood and lots of petting is forthcoming, life is grass for this fella. Easily satisfied!

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 17:09:01 +0000
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: My Lovely Horse

http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=428546

Real life repeat of Father Ted feared

By Staff reporter

IRELAND’S Eurovision hope Mickey Joe Harte has rubbished claims that his song bears a close resemblance to Denmark’s winning entry of 2000.

Eurovision fans were complaining of deja vu yesterday when listening to We’ve Got the World, which will be sung by the Lifford father-of-two. The song - written by Mark Brannigan and Keith Molloy

• is said to sound eerily like Fly on the Wings of Love, sung by the

Danish Olsen Brothers three years ago.

Mickey Joe last night said he ‘honestly couldn’t see the similarity’, but added that the first line of the chorus could be said to resemble the Danish entry.

Phil Coulter, one of the judges who watched thousands of young hopefuls perform in RTE’s You’re a Star talent show - which Mickey Joe won on Sunday night - also insisted any similarity between the two songs was purely coincidental.

But RTE’s Joe Duffy radio programme was inundated with calls from listeners who were terrified that Ireland was setting itself up for a Father Ted-like fiasco.

Listener Frank O’Reilly told Duffy that his daughter Claire, a Eurovision fanatic, spotted the similarity immediately and revealed that the words of one song could be sung over the melody of the second.

A second listener, called Margaret, also said she and her children had started singing the Danish song in their sitting room on the first night they heard We’ve Got the World.

Ironically, an episode of the hit Channel 4 comedy Father Ted featured the title character, played by Dermot Morgan, and his sidekick Fr Dougal, bidding for Eurovision glory with a ‘borrowed’ song from another Scandinavian country in a previous year.

Phil Coulter admitted that the Irish song was reminiscent of the Olsen ditty, but insisted there ‘was nothing intrinsically original’ about the Danish song.

‘There is no question that there is going to be any kind of objection and there is no question that any objection would be upheld,’ he added. – Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk

Tags: bandwidth, dougal, entry, episode, eurovision, father, joy, life, show, song

If you’re wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US’s ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O’Brien’s blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov’s evidence.

Tags: afoul, blog, copyright, dmca, elcomsoft, entry, look, non, trial, us-resident

Wow. A truly neat, cross-platform, text entry widget in HTML that updates as you edit. Check it out (quick though — it’s a FilePile URL).

Tags: entry, filepile, html, text, url, widget

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is on fire today. I was tempted to forward on an entry or two, but by the time I got to the end of today’s updates, I think the only thing a reader can do is just go there and read ‘em: Quake players on drugs, Dance Dance Resurrection, and EMI uploading their own music to Gnutella…

Tags: boing, cory, dance, doctorow, end, entry, fire, thing, time, today