At last — common sense on patents

Terrific, level-headed article by Craig James.

George Bush’s CV — online!

Yep. Would you buy a used presidency from this man?

After SPIM (Spam over Instant Messaging), what?

Why SPIT of course — Spam over Internet Telephony. As VoIP spreads, spammers are seeing it as an opportunity to send unsolicited voicemail ads to your computer. Eric Hellweg has an interesting piece about it in the MIT Technology Review. Here’s an excerpt:

“Most of the industry leaders and observers I speak with acknowledge the threat of spam over VoIP, but knew of no wide-based industry effort to address it. That’s disconcerting. […] Jeff Pulver, CEO of Free World Dialup (FWD), says someone tried this summer to send spit to his company’s subscribers. He was able to thwart the effort, however, by blocking the IP address of the sender — similar to how e-mail spam is often stopped today. As a result of this attempt to send unsolicited advertising at FWD, Pulver created a new tool called the Pulver Communicator, which will be unveiled in about two weeks. The tool allows FWD users to select people who can call them from a buddy list of sorts. ‘Users can set rules as to who can call them,’ says Pulver. It’s a very smart approach, combining elements from social networking programs such as Friendster and instant message buddy lists. It’s the kind of endeavor that others in the industry would do well to replicate. But no one else seems to be talking about the issue much — and this is the time when such efforts should be underway.”

Hallweg does have some good news though — for example that certain VoIP services, such as Skype, AT&T’s Callvantage, Vonage, and Comcast, would be largely immune to such attacks because portions of those networks operate over a closed system that the SPITters would have to hack.

However, he concludes,

“FWD and others have only a brief window of time in which to create ways to block voice-spam. The laws of economics are on their side — for now. Simply put, there aren’t enough people using open VoIP right now to justify voice spammers’ efforts to pitch them. Until that critical mass is reached, voice spam likely won’t become a serious problem. But VoIP is marching toward widespread adoption; research firm IDC predicts that by 2008, the U.S. consumer market for VoIP will reach $5.6 billion, up from $320 million this year. And as VoIP becomes more commonly used, the window of opportunity for stopping spit will slam shut.”

The Blue Screen of Death — for real

Every Windows user is familiar with the ‘blue screen of death’ — what you see when Windows crashes. For most of us (well, most of you, dear readers — I don’t use Windows) this is irritating or infuriating, but not life-threatening. But now a Channel Four News investigation has revealed that Britain’s Royal Navy has chosen the Windows operating system for the war-fighting computers of its latest destroyers. And the Ministry of Defence is considering using Windows for the submarines which fire the UK’s nuclear weapons. So what will we do when a nuclear exchange is inadvertently triggered by a buffer overflow? Press the Start button? It brings an entirely new meaning to the ‘Fatal Error’ dialog. Thanks to Roger Houghton for the link.

How to censor the Web

I’ve been arguing for years that ISPs are ludicrously timid when faced with a lawyer’s letter, but this is ridiculous. Here’s the Slashdot summary of a fascinating — and sobering — experiment.

“Members of the Bits of Freedom group conducted a test to see how much it would take for a service provider to take down a website hosting public domain material, and have published their results. They signed up with 10 providers and put online a work by Dutch author Multatuli, who died over 100 years ago. They stated that the work was in the public domain, and that it was written in 1871. They then set up a fake society to claim to be the copyright holders of the work. From a Hotmail address, they sent out complaints to all 10 of the providers. 7 out of 10 complied and removed the site, one within just 3 hours. Only one ISP actually pointed out that the copyright on the work expired many years ago. The conclusion of the investigation is definitely worth reading. The three providers who didn’t take down the material are XS4ALL, UPC and Freeler. The company that came out the worst was iFast, who forwarded all the personal details of the site owner to the sender of the fake takedown notice without even being asked to do so.”

Today’s Observer column…

… on the significance of peer-to-peer networking is here. Audio version here. (MP3, 4.91MB)

Understanding the impact of the mobile phone

Fascinating essay by Christine Rosen in The New Atlantis. Quote:

“Although [Irving] Goffman wrote in the era before cell phones, he might have judged their use as a ‘subordinate activity,’ a way to pass the time such as reading or doodling that could and should be set aside when the dominant activity resumes. Within social space, we are allowed to perform a range of these secondary activities, but they must not impose upon the social group as a whole or require so much attention that they remove us from the social situation altogether. The opposite appears to be true today. The group is expected never to impinge upon — indeed, it is expected to tacitly endorse by enduring — the individual’s right to withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses: cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, DVDs screened on laptop computers. These devices are all used as a means to refuse to be ‘in’ the social space; they are technological cold shoulders that are worse than older forms of subordinate activity in that they impose visually and auditorily on others. Cell phones are not the only culprits here. A member of my family, traveling recently on the Amtrak train from New York, was shocked to realize that the man sitting in front of her was watching a pornographic movie on his laptop computer — a movie whose raunchy scenes were reflected in the train window and thus clearly visible to her. We have allowed what should be subordinate activities in social space to become dominant.”

This is a long piece but worth it — the most perceptive piece I’ve read on the way the mobile phone has changed behaviour.

Checking the facts

Here’s a terrific idea — an independent website that checks the ‘facts’ spouted by US politicians. We could use one of those in the UK. I hadn’t heard of it until Dick Cheney mentioned it during his debate with John Edwards. (He suggested that anyone making allegations about his time in charge of Halliburton should go to FactCheck.org.) Here’s what the site has to say about this:

“Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted “for the war” and “to commit the troops, to send them to war.” He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry’s proposals”

It’s also critical of John Edwards:

“Edwards  falsely claimed the administration “lobbied the Congress” to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.”

The Creative Commons idea in a Flash animation

Lovely animation from South Africa.

The Mac effect

Cory Doctorow: “Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.”

It’s true: every non-business event I go to is like that.