Microsoft’s er, ‘generosity’ spurned by Namibia
Register story.

“The African nation of Namibia is large in area and small in population with considerable distances between communities. Imagine the challenges of getting its schools wired to the Net. SchoolNet Namibia, a chiefly volunteer organization, struggles to do precisely that with a free ISP and numerous other initiatives to get the nation’s schools, many of which lack any library resources at all, on-line.

Imagine the pleasure with which SchoolNet would initially have confronted a charitable overture from Microsoft involving free software. Now imagine the disappointment of learning that accepting the ‘gift’ would entail outlays of money in the range of fifteen times the value of the M$ Trojan horse….”

The weakest link in computer security — as ever
Economist piece.

No — it’s not your Microsoft operating system (though of course that also figures in the calculation). It’s humans. In one survey, carried out by PentaSafe Security, two-thirds of commuters at London’s Victoria Station were happy to reveal their computer password in return for a ballpoint pen.

Jeffrey Rosen on the Eldred case

Interesting and insightful commentary on Larry Lessig’s case against the CTEA. “In Congress, defenders of the CTEA came up with only one argument for how the act might promote creativity. They testified that the act could encourage major studios to digitize hit films from the ’20s and ’30s by extending their economic value. But this argument is not convincing. As the head of The Hal Roach Studio–the leading restorer of Laurel and Hardy and other films from the ’20s and ’30s–argued in a principled brief that clashed with his financial interests, the CTEA extends the copyright for 19,000 films made between 1923 and 1942. Of these, only 5,000 continue to earn royalties, which means that the remaining 14,000 have little economic value but are of great historical interest. Many of these are “orphan” films whose copyright holders are very difficult to track down today. The CTEA makes restorations of such films economically prohibitive by requiring nonprofit restorers to hire private detectives to track down the lost copyright holders for the music, the credits, and so forth. As a result, the orphan films will continue to rot unwatched in the Library of Congress. And even if the CTEA actually did increase the incentive to restore these films, as Congress unconvincingly concluded, the preservation of 14,000 films hardly justifies the removal of more than 400,000 other creative works–books, poems, songs, and photographs–from the public domain. ”

Meshing the future

I’ve been reading an advance copy of a DEMOS paper, “The Politics of Bandwidth”, and pondering the phenomenon of disruptive technologies. For me, WiFi (or 802.11b networking) is a classic example. But its true disruptive potential has yet to be revealed — which is why mesh networking is so interesting. The neatest thing about the mesh idea is that the more devices there are, the better the service gets. Much better than 3G.

A question

A friend sends me an SMS: “What’s the diffference between prophecy and predictive text?” What indeed?

Daft corporate names department

After Accenture, here comes KPMG Consulting’s new moniker: “Bearing Point”. Eh? It’s a post-Enron byproduct of the scramble to disengage KPMG’s consulting arm from its auditing wing. But you’d have thought that an outfit which is supposed to have a high collective IQ could come up with something more inspired.

Root Servers under attack

According to this report, nine of the 13 Root Servers came under sustained DoS attack last Monday. Details are sketchy, for obvious reasons. Here is the Washington Post account, which claims that all 13 servers were attacked and that there was more than one attack. The Register has the most detailed report. “In a distributed denial of service attack that began 5pm US Eastern time Monday and lasted one hour, seven of the 13 servers at the top of the internet’s domain name system hierarchy were rendered virtually inaccessible, sources told ComputerWire.”

“It was the largest and most complex DDoS attack on all 13 roots,” a source familiar with the attacks said. “Only four of the primary 13 root servers were up during the attack. Seven were completely down and two were suffering severe degradation.”

The source said each of the servers was hit by two to three times the load normally born by the entire 13-server constellation. Paul Vixie, chairman of the Internet Software Consortium, which manages one of the servers, said he saw 80Mbps of traffic to the box, which usually only handles 8Mbps.

Bruce Schneier on the so-called ‘National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace’

As usual, Bruce is right on the button. “For some reason, Richard Clarke continues to believe that he can increase cybersecurity in this country by asking nicely. This government has tried this sort of thing again and again, and it never works. This National Strategy document isn’t law, and it doesn’t contain any mandates to government agencies. It has lots of recommendations. It has all sorts of processes. It has yet another list of suggested best practices. It’s simply another document in my increasingly tall pile of recommendations to make everything better. (The Clinton Administration had theirs, the “National Plan for Information Systems Protection.” And both the GAO and the OMB have published cyber-strategy documents.) But plans, no matter how detailed and how accurate they are, don’t secure anything; action does.” Amen.

Google News…

… is the most interesting Web development since, well Google Web APIs. I’ve just written an Observer column about the new News service.

My verdict on Birt

For many years I was a TV critic with a ringside seat watching what was happening to the BBC under its controversial Director-General, John Birt. Now he’s published his memoirs and the Observer asked me for a verdict. Here it is.