Our borrowing culture

One of the things that most exasperates me about the copyright industry’s crazed drive towards the propertization of everything is how self-defeating it would be if it is allowed to go unchecked. Every cultural artefact that our civilisation has valued is the result of an artist’s conscious and unconscious borrowing from the works of others. Lock down the borrowing and you lock down our culture. Why can’t people see this? It’s not as though it’s a difficult idea. (I tried to express it in my rant to the Westminster Media Forum.)

I found a lovely phrase in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (one of my favourite books), which expresses the same idea beautifully. “Masterpieces”, she writes, “are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

So where’s the spittoon?

Macintosh for dental hygeniests.

Click here if you’re daft enough to want one. You’ll be taken to a clueless website which omits to mention the only interesting thing about this upholstered absurdity — the price.

Regrets

From the Blog of someone whose server was comprehensively hacked…

“Okay, so how did the guy get in? No idea. The logs were gone. My best guess is a PHP CLI script I had running which allowed a Flash IRC app to re-route through my server to the freenode IRC servers. It was probably running as root and hackable as hell. I’ve also been playing with Apache and PHP 5 lately, so that was running on port 8080, and I really hadn’t made any effort to secure it. Or it could have been any number of exploits out there that I never bothered to patch, or it could’ve been a bad password. We’ll never know. Whatever it was, it was my fault for not maintaining my site better.”

Nigerian widows celebrate first anniversary of US anti-spam act

This headline from Good Morning, Silicon Valley reminds me that it’s a year since the US anti-spam act came into force. And guess what? Spam has increased substantially since its passage. “Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.”

To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules.”

How to have your Abstract rejected

Hilarious — and very sound — advice from Xerox PARC. Sample:

“Submit incorrectly. The device of sending abstracts to the local arrangements chairman is overused. Try something fresher. Send your abstract to last year’s program chairman. Send it to this year’s in care of the school where he did his undergraduate work or, better yet, to the school that turned him down for tenure. Send it to someone whose name sounds a little like his. Under any circumstances, be sure to send it postage due.”