Tim Berners-Lee gets a gong

He’s now Sir Tim. Long overdue IMHO. BBC report here.

John Gregory Dunne is dead…

… at the age of 71. Sigh. I loved his stuff. And he was Irish too. NYT obit here.

Coolidge re-interpreted

Until Dubya happened along, Calvin Coolidge was the most ridiculed American president, torpedoed by the famous exchange between Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker:

Benchley: Calvin Coolidge is dead.
Parker: How can they tell?

(Actually, there is an interesting story about this. Benchley replied “He had an erection”, but this was deemed too scandalous for public repetition, and so was airbrushed from the record. But it rankled with Benchley’s widow to her deathbed that Parker and not her husband had received the credit for the punchline.)

But I digress… One of the reasons Coolidge was ridiculed by posterity was his apparent indolence and inactivity during the furious speculative boom which led to the Wall Street Crash after he left office. But a recent psychiatric biography by Robert E. Gilbert — The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death, and Clinical Depression shows that there was a good reason for this lassitude. Basically Coolidge ceased to function as President after the tragic death of his sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr. There’s a nice review by Jack Beatty in The Atlantic.

Mozilla Firebird

I thought that Safari was the best browser I’ve ever used, but yesterday downloaded Firebird from Mozilla. It looks really good. I’ve only just started using it intensively, so it’s early days, but so far it suggests that great free code continues to exist and work its magic. (Thinks… How I can make a contribution to the Mozilla effort to show my appreciation and support.)

Just found the answer — make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation.

Blogspam — the latest form of pollution

The News Group system — which was the glory of the early Internet — was undermined by spam and flaming. Blogging seemed to be a way of overcoming that, because Bloggers retained complete control of their space. But then (for the very best of reasons — to encourage conversation and discussion) some Bloggers started to allow readers to comment on their posts. You can guess what’s happened — Blogs are beginning to suffer from comment spamming. See this thoughtful posting on the problem by Simpson Garfinkel — plus some helpful comments from people who’ve been tackling the problem.

Die Broke — a new four-part financial plan

My late and revered colleague Roger Needham gave away a lot of money to our Cambridge College and to the University. When I asked him what motivated him to do this he said, “Well, my wife and I have no children and no relatives, so we figured why should our Executors have all the fun!”. I’ve just discovered (thanks to Kevin Kelly) an interesting book — Die Broke: A Radical Four-Part Financial Plan by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine — which Roger might have enjoyed. Here’s an excerpt:

“You are not a corporation – you are a human being. Your money shouldn’t outlive you. You should exit life as you came into it: penniless. Your assets are resources to be used, for your own benefit and for the benefit of those you love. Every dollar that’s left in your bank account after you die is a dollar you wasted. Use your resources to help people now when you know they need it, when it will do the most good, rather than hoping they’ll be helped when you’re dead. The last check you write should be to your undertaker … and it should bounce.

* Inheritance is a terribly inefficient way to pass wealth to others.

* You need to shift to a more flexible view of work and career, one that abandons the ultimatum of retirement – a false choice between full-time and no time….Similarly you need to shift to a less rigid approach to earned income. No longer can you look at your earned income as continually increasing up until age sixty-five, at which pint it will stop entirely. From now on you need to approach earned income as you do unearned income. It may grow, it may be stagnant, or it may decrease, all depending on market conditions and your own choices.

* The best metaphor I can think of for today’s pursuit of retirement is of a mass of lemmings busily struggling up a steep cliff and then jumping off the cliff into the abyss.

* Dying broke means living well.”

Camera-controlled games come to the Mac

The gizmo that has most enthused my kids this Xmas is EyeToy, a wonderful game released by Sony for the PlayStation2. Now comes news that someone has developed a similar type of game for the Mac, using the iSight camera. I’ve just downloaded the demo. Wonder if it will persuade the kids to stop lusting after a PS2.

Update:It works, but isn’t as slick as the Sony product, so the pressure from the kids will doubtless continue.

Ralsky swears he’s going straight

There’s a story in today’s NYT in which Adam Ralsky, one of the US’s most notorious spammers, says the new anti-spam law has forced him to rethink his business plans. According to the article, “He stopped sending e-mail offers for everything from debt repayment schemes to time-share vacations even before President Bush, on Dec. 16, signed the new Can Spam Act, a law meant to crack down on marketers like Mr. Ralsky.

He plans to resume in January, he said, after he overcomes some computer problems, and only after he changes his practices to include in his messages a return address and other information required by the law, the title of which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.

That is quite a switch for Mr. Ralsky, who has earned a reputation as a master of cyberdisguise. By his own admission, he once produced more than 70 million messages a day from domains registered with fake names, largely by way of foreign countries – or sometimes even by way of hijacked computers – so that the recipients could not trace the mail back to him….”

Post-restante on the Net

What a neat idea — a place where you can drop off files for others to pick up at their leisure (well, within 48 hours actually). It’s called Dropload. Thanks for Larry Lessig for the link.

Jon Johansen finally cleared

The preposterous DMCA-driven prosecution of Jon Johansen has finally collapsed. According to this report, “an Oslo appeals court cleared a 20-year-old Norwegian man of DVD piracy charges on Monday in a new setback for Hollywood studios, which say unauthorized copying costs them billions of dollars a year.

Upholding a verdict by a lower court in January, the court said that Jon Johansen had broken no laws by helping to unlock a code and distribute a computer program on the Internet enabling unauthorized copying of DVD movies.

The U.S. movie industry, which says that piracy costs $3 billion a year in lost sales, had accused Johansen of theft in cracking the copy-protection code when he was 15 and appealed against the January acquittal.

Johansen, called “DVD Jon,” had pleaded not guilty to charges that he broke Norwegian law by helping break the code on commercial DVDs. The original court said that he was free to do what he wanted with DVDs he bought legally.

Prosecutors, who appealed against the original verdict, had urged a suspended 90-day jail term for Johansen.

“The appeal is rejected,” Judge Wenche Skjeggestad told the court.”

Yippee!.