taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Yes, I’ve been growing a beard. Strangely, it seems to be going quite well! Here’s a good pic of beardy Justin, standing on a bridge over the Merced river in Yosemite:

Lots more pics from the holiday should be appearing here shortly, if you’re curious.

Tags: beard, beardy, bridge, holiday, merced, river, standing, strangely, yosemite

Patents: I’m just back from a fantastic holiday weekend, totally offline, hiking through Catalina Island. I’m a little bit sunburnt, my nose is peeling, but it was great fun. I got a fantastic picture of the sun setting over hundreds of boats bobbing at their moorings in Two Harbors, which I must upload at some stage.

Anyway, it seems that over the weekend, the EU software-patents debate has swung back heavily towards the anti-swpat side. Fingers crossed — the vote is this week.

Also, today, EUpolitix.com has an interview with Charlie McCreevy, quoting him as saying:

‘The theme, or the background music, to both of these particular directives (the CII and Services Directives) you could see as part of, anti-globalisation, anti-Americanism, anti-big business protests – in lots of senses, anti-the opening up of markets’

This is standard practice for the Irish government — they did exactly the same thing with the e-voting issue, painting the ICTE as ‘linked to the anti-globalisation movement’. (I have a feeling they think that any group organised online must be ‘anti-globalisation’, at this stage.)

Of course, with these accusations of being anti-free-market, it’s important to remember that a patent is a government-issued monopoly on an invention (or in the software field, on an idea), in a particular local jurisdiction. If anything, being against software patenting is a pro-free-market position, one shared by prominent US libertarians; and nothing gets more pro-free-market than those guys. ;)

Tags: bit, fun, hiking, holiday, nose, offline, patents, software, stage, sunburnt, weekend

Quickies: I like Thanksgiving! A holiday based around a roast fowl and some booze; can’t go too far wrong with that. Thumbs up.

FrodoPalm — run C=64 games on your Palm handheld. Insanely cool. (via /.) I wonder what the controls are like, though — that can totally kill a game’s playability.

Escape From Woomera — nice press-grabbing idea, but I can’t imagine that the game will be too hot, though. (via Boing Boing)

The Bearer of This Card is a Genuine and Authorized Tsar, via Blather Shitegeist.

ABC.net.au: push for ‘open source’ biotech. I was just thinking about this last week; interesting to see this happening.

‘Biotechnology, the way it is right now, is needed in the developing world like a screen door on a submarine,’ said Jefferson. ‘What it really needs is what good science can do in biology, in biotechnology. And that means a different agenda and a different group of innovators.’

‘He added such tools could also help us understand and improve agricultural management systems such as organic approaches. An example of this would be the development of new ‘bioindicator’ plant varieties that would tell farmers about their soil nitrogen levels.’

Fantastic idea. I hope this takes off…

Tags: biotechnology, boing, booze, fowl, game, holiday, idea, quickies, roast, thanksgiving, thumbs

BoingBoing, back in December, forwarded this snippet: ‘A report issued by UK-based Infrastructure Forum (’TIF’) says spam-savvy thieves are using info from ‘out of office’ email autoresponders and cross-referencing it with publicly available personal data to target empty homes.’

Criminals are buying huge lists of email addresses over the internet and sending mass-mailings in the hope of receiving ‘out of office’ auto-responses from workers away on holiday.

By cross-reference such replies with publicly available information from online directories such as 192.com or bt.com, the burglars can often discover the name, address and telephone number of the person on holiday. Tif is advising users to warn their staff to be careful of the information they put in their ‘out of office’ messages.

“You wouldn’t go on holiday with a note pinned to your door saying who you were, how long you were away for and when you were coming back, so why would you put this in an email?” said David Roberts, chief executive at Tif. (via VNUNet)

My take on this? Bullshit.

I mean, how many house burglars (a) have the know-how to set up a fast internet connection, get hold of an addresses CD, and send a spam; and then (b) how often does a Reply-To address on a spam stay active once it’s sent — assuming it ever worked in the first place — before the ISP whacks their account? I would guess 6 hours at the most, and most spam runs wouldn’t even be halfway through by that stage (from what I hear).

Self-promoting bullshit of the highest order I reckon.

Tags: boingboing, bullshit, com, email, holiday, information, internet, office, spam, tif

The mother of all package tours: With the world expecting an attack on Iraq any time now, no one in their right mind would take a holiday there - would they? You’d be suprised, says Johann Hari (Guardian).

A fascinating article, from so many angles — First, the tourists:

I met Julie and Phil. They seemed an almost comically suburban couple: polite, a little posh, all golf jumpers and floral smocks. But then Phil mentioned that his last holiday had been to North Korea. “Yeah, I’ve been twice since they opened the borders to tourists. I’m a bit of a celebrity there now. People come up to me in the streets and say, ‘Why have you come to our country twice?’.” …

Then there was Hannah. How to explain her? A frightfully well-spoken Englishwoman in her early 50s. When we first met, she dispensed with the small talk to say: “I think Saddam is a great man and the USA is a great big global bully. My theory is that he should be given Kuwait. It’s perfectly logical if you look at the map.” “I think he’s rather handsome too,” she went on. “Every woman does really. I’d rather like to inspect his weapon of mass destruction myself.”

And the politics:

Talking politics in Iraq is like a magic-eye picture, where you have to let your brain go out of focus, not your eyes. One very distinguished old man in a Mosul souk welcomed me warmly and told me how much he had loved visiting London in the 1970s. After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, “I admire British democracy and freedom.” He held my gaze. “I very much admire them.”

… As we wandered around, looking at the grim exhibits, one of the soldiers on duty guarding the museum told me that three of his brothers died in that war. Everybody in the country lost somebody - yet it is almost impossible to get anybody to talk about it. They speak in a small number of bloodless stock-phrases.

After more than 10 such encounters, it suddenly hit me that the people of Iraq are not even allowed to grieve their huge numbers of dead in their own way. They are permitted only a regulation measure of state-approved grief, which must be expressed in Saddam’s language: that of martyrdom and heroism, rather than wailing agony about the futility of a war which slaughtered more than a million people yet left the borders unchanged and achieved nothing.

Thanks to Ben Walsh for the forwardy goodness.

Tags: admire, attack, country, holiday, man, mind, mother, package, time, world