The flip side

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I’ve installed ‘Tiger’ — code for version 10.4 of Mac OS X on two of our home machines, and the installation went just fine and both computers are happily chuntering away. (I’m too rattled by Quentin’s experience to entrust my PowerBook to it yet.) One of the nice things about the new version is ‘Spotlight’ — an amazing desktop search program that indexes the entire contents of your hard drive and finds things instantly. But there’s an unintended side-effect of this — neatly captured in a wry email from a friend:

There is a downside to everything. This is the one for Spotlight: suddenly you see how much you have forgotten. I was busy writing a lecture. Looked for something on Spotlight. And discovered that I had written something very similar a year ago. Completely forgotten. Shocking.

Well, yes. But isn’t it better to be reminded? Besides, great things come from faulty memories. Tim Berners-Lee was motivated to invent the Web partly because he had such a terrible memory and kept losing track of information! Full story on page 233 of this. (Health warning: shameless plug!)

DIY declassification

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Ho, ho! The Pentagon released a heavily-censored PDF version of its report into the shooting, by US troops, of the Italian secret agent who was escorting a freed hostage to safety. But it turns out that you could make the blacked-out paragraphs in the classified document, containing top-secret details (such as the name of the soldier who fired the deadly rounds of ammunition) reappear by cutting and pasting them from the site into a Word document! More exquisite details from Corriere della Sera here.

Night flight

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“It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home, people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness … the flame of the poet, the teacher, or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men …”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, writing about his first night-flight over Argentina in the prologue to Wind, Sand and Stars.

Penguin remix competition

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On May 9th Penguin launches Penguin Remixed, an innovative competition which invites musicians, professional and amateur, the opportunity to sample some of the best lines in literature to create new tunes. Audio samples from thirty Penguin titles will be available for download from the www.penguinremixed.co.uk website and entrants will be invited to submit their tracks to win MP3 players, subscriptions to Audible’s digital audiobookstore and the top prize of publication in a Penguin digital audiobook.

James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity

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Another terrific FT column by James Boyle, dissecting the imbecility of our IP lawmaking regime. Sample:

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here. 

It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them?

Learning from eBAY

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From my column in today’s Observer…

Amid all the ponderous guff in the election campaign about ‘trust’, one interesting fact has been strangely absent from the discussion. We are all agreed that politicians rank low in public esteem, down there with estate agents, property developers and other kinds of spiv. But there is another occupational group that ranks even lower than these creatures of the deep. I refer, of course, to journalists. We are despised by the public – yet the fact that we shape the public’s attitude toward politicians remains unremarked. Thus we have a really weird vicious circle.

The public reviles politicians on the basis of images and impressions that are exclusively mediated by people who are widely regarded as equally loathsome and contemptible. This reduces the election to something akin to choosing a bride using reflections in the distorting mirrors of a funfair.

Los Alamos bloggers turn nasty

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Well, well. There’s trouble in the US’s premier nuclear weapons lab. According to the New York Times, staff are so fed up with their new Director, G. Peter Nanos, that they are posting vitriolic messages on an internal Blog.

The blogging comes at a delicate moment in the 62-year history of Los Alamos. The University of California, which has helped run the laboratory for the government since the days of the Manhattan Project, faces close scrutiny in Washington as to whether its contract should be renewed. And resignations and fears of a mass exodus have recently roiled the waters. Some analysts believe that now, given the public outcry, the university will have to abandon Dr. Nanos in order to make a credible bid to keep its contract.

Dr. Nanos would not comment. A spokesman for Los Alamos, Kevin Roark, said false rumors of the director’s resignation had circulated for months. Mr. Roark added that Dr. Nanos was extraordinarily proud of what he had accomplished at Los Alamos, which employs 14,000 people on an annual budget of $2.2 billion.

Mr. Roark called the vitriolic blogging unrepresentative of the majority of employees and said it often had the tone of a sophomoric Halloween prank. “Everybody, I think, was a little surprised at how mean it got,” he said.

Several outside experts said that the director’s quick departure was inevitable and that the blog’s attacks were playing a significant role.

Slashdotted!

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Since there are no Nobel prizes in my line of business, the next best thing is to be Slashdotted. And it happened today! That’s twice in one lifetime (the first time was when I wrote about the leaked Microsoft memos on the threat to Redmond’s business model posed Linux and Open Source software). Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead!

Later: And now we’re on BoingBoing. Verily, my cup runneth over.