taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Net: WINW Is Not WASTE: ‘WINW is a small worlds networking utility. It was inspired by WASTE … (WINW) has diverged from its original mission to create a clean-room WASTE clone. Today, the WINW feature set is different from that of WASTE, and its protocol is incompatible with WASTE’s protocol. However, WINW and WASTE achieve similar goals: they allow people who trust each other to communicate securely.’

Not quite there yet — just a Windows version with no sharing — but actively under development. One to keep an eye on…

Tags: clone, feature, mission, net, networking, protocol, today, utility, waste, windows, winw

Weblogs: Greenpeace: Mysteries of the Deep — ‘the SV Rainbow Warrior left Auckland, New Zealand, on a voyage around the surrounding waters. Our mission: To highlight the irreversible damage caused to deep sea life by bottom trawling.’ Official weblog maintainer for the voyage: one Daev Walsh. Nice one Daev!

Tags: bottom, daev, damage, greenpeace, life, mission, rainbow, sea, voyage, warrior, weblogs

Iraq: OK, I’ve been keeping quiet on the whole Iraq thing — so far, it’s pretty much turned into what I was suspecting would happen once GWB declared ‘Mission Accomplished’, and now there’s lots more people saying what I previously felt wasn’t being said. However, I’ve just heard something that really winds me up.

Richard Perle was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM show about the torture at Abu Ghraib. He made a comment to the effect that ‘at least the Abu Ghraib incidents weren’t as bad as Saddam’s use of the human shredder’.

First off, two wrongs do not make a right, and the neocons needs to stop assuming that this is an excuse.

Secondly, the human shredder story is uncorroborated rumour from a single person in Northern Iraq, and no evidence has ever found to support it. All evidence points to the opposite.

But if we let it pass without debunking, this one’s going to go down as ‘history’, alongside the ‘babies thrown out of incubators’ story from Gulf War I, and the ‘bayoneted babies’ story from 1914.

Tags: abu, accomplished, evidence, ghraib, gwb, iraq, mission, shredder, story, the, thing

USPTO seeks to block WIPO open source meeting.

(WIPO) is not the place for discussions about ‘open source’ software (…) a senior U.S. official argued on Monday. Reviewing the original mission of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said Lois Boland, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) acting director of international relations, it is ‘clearly limited to the protection of intellectual property. To have a meeting whose primary objective is to waive or remove those protections seems to go against the mission.’

Boland was referring to a July request by a group of scientists, academics, open-source advocates and others for a meeting at WIPO on ‘open and collaborative projects,’ including open-source software. The WIPO secretariat initially replied favorably to the idea.

Well, that’s a shame. Let’s hope WIPO reconsider, because it really would be an interesting idea to have everyone involved talking about this stuff.

Tags: idea, meeting, mission, official, place, property, software, source, uspto, wipo