taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Web: i caught sight of (8 June 2005, Interconnected), on the geographical insularity of the dot-com boom. A good read:

The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and - just by coincidence - happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived.

Lots to think about. He’s spot on, of course — many of the web’s big commercial success stories are almost shamelessly US-oriented, and if they work outside that, it’s purely by accident.

I’d love to see more web businesses that work well for other parts of the world, but that’ll take money — and from what I saw in Dublin, the money either (a) just isn’t there, or (b) frequently goes to the companies that talk the talk, but then piddle it away on ludicrous ‘e-business architectures’ and get nothing useful out the other end.

On both counts, Silicon Valley has an ace up its sleeve. The VCs are smart and well-funded, and the developers have experience, and know which tools are right for the job.

I’d be curious to hear how other high-tech hotspots in the US (Boston, for example) find this.

Tags: boom, influx, insularity, interconnected, june, money, read, sight, talk, web

Web: the June part of the contest is over, but given that there’s a July part still to go — here’s a ‘Nigritude Ultramarine‘ link to Anil Dash.

I wasn’t really bothered at all about this, until I came across this guy, whose technique involved spamming third-party Wiki sandboxes with backlinks. His excuse? ‘A Sandbox (is) a part of a system in which everybody is urged to play around freely. Usually for testing purposes. You can post headings, paragraphs, lists and links here. The content in return will be indexed by Google.’

As this forum thread points out — ‘The SandBox page is there for a purpose: to allow users of the wiki to learn to use the software. It is
not meant to be “a place where anyone can create backlinks.”‘

Sorry, that’s spam in my book.

Tags: anil, contest, july, june, link, nigritude, part, sandbox, ultramarine, web, wiki

Patents: lyranthe.org notes that the EU elections are coming up this Thursday, 11th June. Accordingly, here’s a single-issue roundup of the candidates, from what I’ve heard:

• The Labour Party, sadly, haven’t yet come up with a concrete policy on the issue — but the Dublin candidate, Ivana Bacik, has (verbally) stated her opposition.
• The Greens, however, are actively campaigning against them, their candidates clearly understand and have communicated with voters on the issue in the past, and the cross-Europe party policy is clearly stated.
• Eoin Dubsky is an independent candidate, standing on a primarily anti-war platform. He’s stated his opposition to software patenting clearly and publically. He’s also a total techie — with RSS feeds and a Redbrick account! ;)
• FG’s position is totally unclear, as usual… ;)
• And in the other corner: FF and the PDs are whole-heartedly supporting software patenting; in fact, they’re the ones running the EU Council which just pushed through software patenting law despite the democratic mandate from the European Parliament. boo.

(PS: these are my opinions, not those of my employer. ;)

(updated: I’d left out Eoin Dubsky! my bad, now fixed.)

Tags: candidate, issue, june, lyranthe, opposition, org, party, patents, policy, software, thursday

eVoting: Success! The use of e-voting systems for the June elections in Ireland has been abandoned, after a severely critical report from the Commission on Electronic Voting. Take a look at the report here. Some bits:

• They particularly do not like the continual revision of the software, noting the ‘large number of new versions of the software since the original … review’ and ‘the fact that new versions of the software continue to be issued in the run-up to the June elections’.
• ‘as the software version proposed for use at the forthcoming elections is not as yet finalised, it is impossible for anyone to certify its accuracy’. (my emphasis)
• They were not given access to ‘the full source code’.
• They found a bug! ‘certain of the tests performed at the request of the Commission identified an error in the count software which could lead to incorrect distributions of surpluses’.
• ‘experts retained by the Commission found it very easy to bypass electronic security measures and gain complete control of the hardened PC, overwrite the software, and thereby in theory to gain complete control over the count in a given constituency’.
• And they raised the pre-arranged-transfer-pattern hack: ‘publication of ballot results in full is a valuable aid in checking the accuracy of the results but this can in theory reveal deliberate voter signatures of low-preference votes which could allow voters to identify themselves in a context of corruption or intimidation’.

The use of VVAT, and changes to the counting procedures to remove randomisation, was outside the terms of reference, unfortunately, so it’s not totally over yet. But I can’t see the government getting away with re-introducing e-voting without VVAT now.

Finally, the opposition political parties are calling on the Minister to resign.

I’ve got to say — nice work to all the concerned citizens who’ve achieved this, despite the government’s continual stonewalling and secrecy.

Tags: accuracy, commission, control, count, evoting, june, report, software, theory, use, vvat

IrishWAN are holding a national conference:

IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.

There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.

Full text here.

Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 10:58:15 -0000
From: Robert Fitzsimons (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: IrishWAN National Conference

IrishWAN National Conference

IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.

There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.

The conference is open to anybody who has an interest in building or using the IrishWAN network, and is an ideal opportunity for existing and new members to get together to talk about wireless technologies. There will be a 5 Euro charge at the door to pay for the room.

The conference will start at 12:00 and should finish up at 17:30 on Saturday 28th of June, the location will be The Two Mile Inn, Ennis Road, Limerick.

More up-to-date details and the agenda are available at <URL:http://www.irishwan.org/board/showthread.php?threadid=996>.

Hope to see you all there.

Robert Fitzsimons DublinWAN Chairperson (spam-protected) http://wwww.irishwan.org/

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ISOC Ireland members mailing list (spam-protected) http://ireland.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/members

Tags: community, conference, goal, group, irishwan, island, june, national, network, saturday