Well, well. How times change. Sun Microsystems is rolling out a new range of low-end servers running, er, Linux.

Elegant piece of ego-puncturing reportage by Michael Kinsley on the ‘Davos’ summit which, for some mysterious reason, this year took place in New York. This is what journalists are for — to point out the nakedness of wannabe emperors.

BT claims to have invented (and patented) the hyperlink long before the Web existed. Now the debt-laden behemoth is going to law in the US to test its claim in the US courts. Given the fact that Ted Nelson invented hyperetext and Doug Engelbart demonstrated a hyperlinking system in action in the Fall of 1968, the claim seems fatuous. So why is BT pursuing it?

law.com: Bigger Not Better With Copyrighted Web Photos. Setting parameters for copyright infringement on the Internet, the court found that reproducing photographs to create thumbnail images is a fair use of the material, but displaying full-sized images violates the copyright owner’s exclusive right to publicly display his works. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Useful references on business patents. the Internet Law Journal, a useful Washington Post piece and the Salon piece about Jay Walker’s patent mania.

Interesting and disturbing piece in today’s New York Times about the implications of a world in which machines can always locate one another — and determine what they are being used for at any moment.

This is a posting fromt he Smithsonian. Explanation. I was lecturing about threats to the Net to an audience in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and I wanted to illustrate one of the magical aspects of the Net — the way it allows anyone to become a global publisher. So I used Radio as an illustration — typed the above string (complete with typo), then hit ‘post and publish’ button and then held my breath. (Well, you know what live demos are like.) But it worked like a dream. Within seconds the posting was up on the Net. The audience — mostly non-techies — had never seen anything like it. Wish Dave Winer could have seen it.

First posting (by email) from a freezing Washington. Walking from my hotel to a restaurant the other side of Dupont Circle made me feel like an extra from Shackleton. This morning is crisp and freezing. Just read the Washington Post over breakfast. Full of stories about Bush’s budget proposals (‘wrapped in the American flag’ is how the Post describes it) and the Powers report into the Enron scam. Funny to see the high priests of capitalism scrambling to reassure everyone that the system is okay, really.

Splendid! Nottingham City Council has started ‘fining’ its staff for incorrect use of the apostrophe. A marvellous idea. If only they would do the same thing in schools… [Status-Q: Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s notepad]

In the meantime, teachers can sign up for the Apostrophe Protection Society!

More on the copy-protected CD issue. Excellent article by Neil McAllister in SF Gate. Some quotes:

“The market for digital audiotape (DAT) was the first to feel the AHRA’s effects [AHRA=Audio Home Recording Act of 1992]. Once it passed, vendors were forbidden to manufacture DAT decks without technologies that prevented tape-to-tape copying. Some say it was this fact that doomed DAT to failure as a consumer audio medium. If a consumer wasn’t free to record things with a tape deck, then what use was it?”

“The same rules applied to all digital audio media, including the later digital compact-cassette format (remember those?) and even Sony MiniDiscs. It wasn’t until Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio MP3 player that a consumer-electronics device would escape the AHRA’s restrictions. Diamond successfully argued that the Rio wasn’t a digital recording device as defined under the AHRA, because it wasn’t actually capable of creating MP3 files itself — you needed a PC for that.”

“Unfortunately, PCs themselves can’t be classified as digital audio devices. They may be that, but they’re also much more, meaning they aren’t governed by the AHRA. So now the recording industry has come up with a solution for this problem, as well. It’s taking the battle straight to the source: By creating a disc that’s unreadable by the CD-ROM drives of most PCs, it can effectively disable most of the MP3 encoding software out there. But the question remains: Will it work?”