… in 1977, Elvis Presley died at Graceland at the ripe old age of 42.
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Naturally speaking
The only reason I ever run Windows is because I sometimes use Dragon Naturally Speaking, the only dictation software I’ve used which does what it says on the tin. I was therefore touched to find this ingenious application of the software described in a message to David Pogue and reproduced in his New York Times column.
My wife and I discovered Dragon NaturallySpeaking about 8 years ago, and have been using it successfully ever since– not for dictation, but as a communication aid. My wife is deaf; her hearing loss began about 25 years ago (we are in our late 60’s) and she has become a skillful lip reader to compensate. That works pretty well in face-to-face communication, but is not helpful in many other situations, such as when we are driving; when I drive, I give her a side view, which isn’t clear enough.
I’ve made brackets to hold a laptop both in our car and motor home. I use a lapel mike to speak; NaturallySpeaking transcribes what I say. She reads what I’m saying, and then responds by voice. When we got this working, it was the first time in 15 years that we could converse on the road. We are now using version 9, having upgraded several times, and based on your report, we will watch for version 11!
The Clinton Memos
Fascinating peek into the infighting and backbiting of Clinton’s failed campaign.
Open Source has legal protection
From the New York Times…
SAN FRANCISCO — A legal dispute involving model railroad hobbyists has resulted in a major courtroom victory for the free software movement also known as open-source software.
In a ruling Wednesday, the federal appeals court in Washington said that just because a software programmer gave his work away did not mean it could not be protected.
The decision legitimizes the use of commercial contracts for the distribution of computer software and digital artistic works for the public good. The court ruling also bolsters the open-source movement by easing the concerns of large organizations about relying on free software from hobbyists and hackers who have freely contributed time and energy without pay.
It also has implications for the Creative Commons license, a framework for modifying and sharing creative works that was developed in 2002 by Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford.
That license is now used widely by organizations like M.I.T. for distributing courseware, and Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia. In March, the rock band Nine Inch Nails released a collection of musical tracks under a Creative Commons license.
The ambiguity facing open-source licensing has been one of the hurdles facing the movement, said Joichi Ito, the chief executive of Creative Commons.
“From a practical business perspective when big companies and their legal teams look at Creative Commons there are a number of questions,” he said. “It’s been one of the things their legal teams throw at us.”
Microsoft supports Olympics in usual way
Other pictures here.
eBanking for the rural poor
Strange but true: one of the things we learned on the Ndiyo Project from our project in Bangladesh is that the people who may have most to gain from electronic banking are the rural poor of the developing world. David Talbot has an interesting post in Tech Review which illustrates this.
Kasaghatta, India: It’s a 90-minute walk from this southern Indian village–one of 730,000 in India–to Doddabenavengala, the nearest town with a bank branch. Until a few months ago, Karehanumaiah, a 55-year-old agricultural laborer, had no bank account, which also meant he had no access to formal credit. (He would have to pay 10 percent monthly interest to informal lenders to, say, borrow $45 to buy a goat.) But that all changed in recent months…
Video here.
Modern warfare: first DDOS, then tanks
From John Markoff in the New York Times Blog…
The Georgian government is accusing Russia of disabling Georgian Web sites, including the site for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Because of the disruption, the Georgian government began posting the Foreign Ministry’s press dispatches on a public blog-hosting site owned by Google (georgiamfa.blogspot.com) and on the Web site of Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski.
Separately, there were reports that Estonia, which was embroiled in an electronic battle with Russia in May of last year, was sending technical assistance to the Georgian government.
The attacks were continuing on Monday against Georgian news sites, according to Jose Nazario, a security researcher at Arbor Networks, based in Lexington, Mass.
“I’m watching attacks against apsny.ge and news.ge right now,” he said. The attacks are structured as massive requests for data from Georgian computers and appear to be controlled from a server based at a telecommunications firm, he said…
Meanwhile Google has been stung into denying that it had erased maps of Georgia. It never had them in the first place, it claimed.
Hmmm…
Later: ArsTechnica has a thoughtful post saying that the evidence that the Russian military were behind the attacks is not convincing.
According to Gadi Evron, former Chief information security officer (CISO) for the Israeli government’s ISP, there’s compelling historical evidence to suggest that the Russian military is not involved. He confirms that Georgian websites are under botnet attack, and that yes, these attacks are affecting that country’s infrastructure, but then notes that every politically tense moment over the past ten years has been followed by a spate of online attacks. It was only after Estonia made its well-publicized (and ultimately inaccurate) accusations against Russia that such attacks began to be referred to as cyberwarfare instead of politically motivated hackers. Evron writes:
“Running security for the Israeli government Internet operation and later the Israeli government CERT such attacks were routine…While Georgia is obviously under a DDoS attacks and it is political in nature, it doesn’t so far seem different than any other online after-math by fans. Political tensions are always followed by online attacks by sympathizers. Could this somehow be indirect Russian action? Yes, but considering Russia is past playing nice and uses real bombs, they could have attacked more strategic targets or eliminated the infrastructure kinetically.”
Arbor Networks’ Jose Nazario offers additional proof of Evron’s statements, writing: “While some are speculating about cyber-warfare and state sponsorship, we have no data to indicate anything of the sort at this time. We are seeing some botnets, some well known and some not so well known, take aim at Georgia websites…These attacks were mostly TCP SYN floods with one TCP RST flood in the mix. No ICMP or UDP floods detected here. These attacks were all globally sourced, suggesting a botnet (or multiple botnets) were behind them.”
Still later: Tech Review is reporting that the USAF is considering mothballing its nascent Cyberspace Command. Another report here. Bad move, IMHO.
What’s happening to Internet data traffic?
From Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS):
In spite of the widespread claims of continuing and even accelerating growth rates, Internet traffic growth appears to be decelerating. In the United States, there was a brief period of “Internet traffic doubling every 100 days” back in 1995-96, but already by 1997 growth subsided towards an approximate doubling every year, and more recently even that growth rate has declined towards 50-60% per year. South Korea, which along with Hong Kong appears to be the world champion in Internet traffic intensity, experienced its brief burst of “Internet traffic doubling every 100 days” around the year 2000, when broadband was widely deployed. It then appears to have had several years of annual traffic doubling, but currently (based on anecdotal evidence) is also growing at about 50% per year.
Traffic growth rates of 50% per year appear to only about offset technology advances, as transmission capacity available for a given price steadily increases. Thus although service providers are pushing to throttle customer traffic, an argument can be made that they should instead be encouraging more traffic and new applications, to fill the growing capacity of transmission links…
Interesting. But the MINTS researchers’ reservations about the reliability of their methodology makes one conclude that nobody really knows what’s happening.
Poynter Online – Forums
The Manaing Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer has sent a memo to all staff. It reads, in part:
Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print. We’ll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.
For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson…
This has caused quite a stor in the blogosphere. For example, Jeff Jarvis writes:
Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management:
You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves…
The lessons of history
This morning’s Observer column…
Forty years ago this week, a British scientist named Donald Davies unveiled one of the great technological ideas of the 20th century. He called it ‘packet-switching’, which must have sounded odd at the time because it was a way of enabling computers to communicate with one another. But it turned out to be the basis for all modern digital communications and it’s the technological foundation on which the internet is built…