An Unprintable Me Jobs You Standardizing

I must be one of the few people who actually enjoys getting spam. Not, I hasten to add, because I wish to avail myself for any of their services, but for the insights they give into both the transient fads and enduring preoccupations of the general public.

The best spam provides valuable insight into what makes people tick - and what makes them click. Even if, like me, you never do the latter, you can still admire the enormous cunning that spammers manage to squeeze into a subject line. I read spam every day, and write about its dangers frequently, but I am forced to admit that I'm often nearly taken in by some of the stuff I receive, so plausible is it.

But better more than the ever-evolving marketing skills on display, it is the sheer poetry of some of this stuff that captivates me.

As everyone who receives spam will have noticed, it is vital for spam to beat the spam filters. To do this, it frequently employs random words and phrases in an attempt to fool the software into thinking that it is human generated (a sort of Turing test writ small).

Sometimes these are random single words, sometimes they are gobbets of text torn bleeding from online sources (it's always interesting to Google these in order to find out where they come from). But occasionally, you get something special: words that have a real poetry of their own.

I received one of these recently; it's so good, I just have to share it.

I normal of whisde a conversed the stomping is imperial
She witnessed was waves of jumping it lifelong uselessly
Me destitute embracing is need of production a recompensed
A this? the tucked tempting it materials she howled
You broken of reaches the series and fourthlargest or stratagem
Not kicking you afternoon and choralsinging me burningly starts
No gateways is limited this stained of exposed the drawers?
If very we prophet of amidst a sources is candy
An unprintable me jobs you standardizing she vertically openly
Have veering influence of ribbons it riffraff was package
Was disciple not occupant damned a twanged or chances
And wetted epigraph is coffee of lighting an country

Just one question: who owns the copyright for this stuff?

Boons and Banes of Firefox and Thunderbird

Among the many boons of Firefox and Thunderbird are the powerful keyboard shortcuts; among the banes - trying to remember them.

Now you don't have to. Thanks to the selfless work of Leslie Franke, you can download two indispensable cheatsheets, which conveniently fit all the main commands on one page each. There's one for Firefox and another for Thunderbird; both are available as HTML or PDF. Thanks, Leslie.

Time for Mac users to see the OSS light?

The good news just kept on coming in Steve Jobs's recent MacWorld speech: $5.7 million revenue in the last quarter for Apple; 14 million iPods sold during the same period; a run-rate of a billion songs a year sold on iTunes. And of course some hot new hardware, the iMac and MacBook Pro. What more could Mac fans ask for?

How about an office suite whose long-term future they can depend on?

Microsoft may have announced “a formal five-year agreement that reinforces Microsoft’s plans to develop Microsoft Office for Mac software for both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs,” but Mac users would do well to consider the company's record here, as its has progressively shut down its line of Macintosh software. First, it dropped its MSN client, then Internet Explorer and more recently Windows Media Player.

Microsoft has good reason to hate Apple. Steve Jobs and his company represent everything that Bill Gates and Microsoft are not: hip and heroic, perfectionist yet popular. Apple has always been Microsoft's main rival on the desktop, but the appearance of Intel-based Macintoshes will make the company more dangerous than it has ever been. Probably the only reason that Microsoft has kept alive its Macintosh division is that it looks good from an anti-trust viewpoint: “See? We're not abusing our position – we even support rivals...”. The Macintosh version of Office may bring in money, but it's a trivial amount compared to the Windows version, and hardly worth the effort expended on it.

This means that the future of Microsoft Office for the Mac can never be certain. The agreement with Apple might be extended, but knowing Microsoft, it might not. At the very least, Microsoft is likely to ensure that the Windows versions of Office has advantages over the one running on the new Intel Macs – otherwise the incentive to buy PCs running Windows will be reduced even more.

So what should concerned Mac users do? The obvious solution is to move to an open source alternative. An important benefit of taking this route – one often overlooked when comparisons are made with proprietary offerings – is that free software is effectively immortal. Sometimes it goes into hibernation, but when the code is freely available, it never dies.

Just look at the case of the Mozilla Application Suite. The Mozilla Foundation decided not to continue with the development of this code base, but to concentrate instead on the increasingly successful standalone programs Firefox and Thunderbird. Had Mozilla been a commercial outfit, that would have been the end of the story for the program and its community. Instead, some hackers were able to take the old Mozilla Application Suite code and use it as the basis of a new project called SeaMonkey.

A similar desire to get things moving outside existing structures motivated the creation of the separate NeoOffice project, the port of the free OpenOffice.org office suite to run natively on MacOS X (there is also a version that uses the X11 windowing system). As the FAQ explains: “The primary reason that we stay separate is that we can develop, release, and support a native Mac OS X office suite with much less time and money than we could if we worked within the OpenOffice.org project.” This is hardly an option for the Mac Office team at Microsoft; so when Gates and Ballmer give Mac Office the chop, there will be no Redmond resurrections.

It is true that NeoOffice is not yet quite as polished as the versions on other platforms. And maybe Microsoft Office is superior – at the moment. But there is nothing that some hacking won't fix, and with serious support from the Macintosh community (and perhaps even financial help from Apple) any outstanding issues would soon be resolved. The emergence of OpenDocument as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office formats only strengthens the case for switching to free software.

The wild excitement generated by Steve Jobs's MacWorld announcements is understandable, but also dangerous. Mac users may be so focussed on the hot new hardware as to forget something crucial: that, ultimately, it is the application software that counts. Macintosh enthusiasts should refuse the poisoned chalice that Microsoft is offering them with its generous offer to keep Office for the Mac on life support for a few more years, and instead should channel some of their famous passion into supporting the creation of a first-class, full-featured open source office suite.

Real-time, voice-activated blogging

By their very nature, blogs have a real-time element (the "log" in "weblog"). The reverse chronological nature of them means that as they are updated every day or two, you are aware of time passing.

I've noticed that beyond this common kind of daily blogging, another significant element for some sites is a schedule based on hours or even minutes. These are typically when an important event is breaking, and represent a new kind of online reporting. A good example is the coverage of Steve Jobs' MacWorld announcement.

What is particularly interesting about this - aside from the sense of excitement that it can generate - is its dependence on a good wireless connection. You can't really follow events if you're plugged into an ordinary network. This explains why many of these up-to-the-minutes blogs make reference to the presence, absence and quality of the local WiFi connection.

Taking this a step further, it occurs to me that mobiles will be even more suited to this kind of blogging on the move. All that is needed is some good voice recognition software that can transcribe your words - and ignore the extraneous noises - as you pursue your topic, both literally and metaphorically.

What we need is a name for this kind of real-time, voice-activated blogging: any suggestions?

Firefox 2.0

I commented earlier on how Firefox's market share seems to be soaring; clearly the organisation is beginning to gain some serious momentum in the market. However, Internet Explorer 7.0 is slouching towards Redmond to be born, and will finally offer features that have been available from Firefox and Opera for some time. Potentially this could stunt further growth for the open source browser, and even pull back some of its market share.

The news that Firefox 2.0 is well on its way shows that the Mozilla organisation and Firefox coders are well aware of the threat. Releasing 2.0 so soon will keep the pressure up on Microsoft, and those share figures rising, one hopes.

OSSS: Open Source Software in Syria

This story about the use of free software in Syria pairs up nicely with the one about Nigeria I discussed a few days ago. The difference is that where those in Nigeria see open source as a better option than proprietary software, Syrian users of free software have no choice. Politics meets programming, yet again.

Fighting DRM - Digital Rights Minimisation

The National Consumer Council sounds like one of those nebulous bodies full of the occasional sound and fury, but signifying not a lot. To prove otherwise, the NCC has issued a surprisingly switched-on call for new laws to protect consumers' rights to digital content.

The problem centres around Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is one of the great misnomers of our time, since it is about taking away rights - ours - and giving a disproportionate amount of control to the owners of creative materials (note: to the owners, not the creators, who rarely get much benefit from these schemes). Digital Rights Minimisation would be a better description.

You can read the full report, which is mercifully short and easy to understand. Well, it was written for submission to an all-party group of politicians....

Fab Firefox Figures

The Fox just keeps on flying.

Latest figures from the French research company Xiti show that across Europe Firefox now commands 20% of the browser market. The even-better news: weekday usage nearly matches weekend use, suggesting that businesses are big converts, too. The bad news: the UK lags miserably, with just 11% usage. Come on, what's wrong with you lot?

On Social Bookmarking, Spam - and Steganography

A fine analysis of the threats posed to social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, digg.com etc) from Alex Bosworth. But for me, the real corker is his idea of steganographic spam.

Steganography involves hiding something in a message so that it is not even apparent there is hidden content - unlike cryptography, where the content is obscured but its presence is obvious. This might be achieved by hiding a message in the pixels of a picture - few enough for their presence not to be obvious to casual observers - that can be extracted using the appropriate software running the right algorithms.

Bosworth would have us imagine steganographic spam - so subtle, we are not even aware that it is there. Fiendish.

Who Needs Software Patents?

Not my question, but that of Sir Robin Jacob, a judge at the U.K.'s Court of Appeal who specializes in intellectual-property law, during a seminar he gave. What's amazing is not that he framed it, but that the points he raises are so spot on. It gives you renewed hope for the judiciary.

Oh, the Irony

It seems a reporter working on a dead-tree newspaper has been dismissed because his

Stories contained phrases or sentences that appeared elsewhere before being included, un-attributed, in stories that ran in the Star-Bulletin. The stories did not include inaccurate information or any fabrications.

The phrases and sentences apparently came from Wikipedia, which also detected the borrowings.

Of course, this is precisely what open content is for. If the newspaper article had been available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), with a link or two, everything would have been fine. Maybe there's a lesson for the newspaper as well as the journalist.

One More Reason for Open Source

Among the many reasons for choosing open source software, one that is often overlooked is that it is much harder to hide things in code that can be inspected. There's bound to be some hacker somewhere with too much time on his/her hands who will take a look at the source code (and make sure that the source code compiles into the binary provided).

This makes adware/spyware far less of a problem for open source code than for your usual binary blob of freeware/shareware, which might contain anything. Anyone who is tempted to download some of the latter may care to peruse this report first. Then go and find some open source instead.

Microsoft's Next Desperation?

One indication of Microsoft's inability to handle the threat of the free software model is that fact that it keeps changing its strategy.

Back in 1999, it tried to show that Windows was more powerful than comparable GNU/Linux systems. It commissioned some research from a company called Mindcraft, which showed that Windows was indeed faster for many tasks. There were bitter arguments about the validity of these tests and their results, and several re-runs as each side tried to bolster its own position.

But what is interesting about this episode is that the weaknesses that were exposed in the GNU/Linux system were simply fed into the development process and fixed in the next release. This indicates one of the great strengths of open source. Solving problems is just a matter of skill; what is hard is pinning them down in the first place. Ironically, Microsoft did the Linux community a huge favour by spending lots of money finding the weak areas of its rival, which were then fixed.

Since GNU/Linux was soon manifestly as good as Windows in terms of performance, Microsoft was forced to change tack. In June 2001, Steve Ballmer famously told the Chicago Sun-Times that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". However, the business world was clearly less impressed by Ballmer's verbal tantrums than the his sales teams, and the outburst backfired badly. It merely showed Microsoft to be running scared.

More recently, the company has apparently adopted a more conciliatory attitude to the free software world - a recognition of the fact that its customers are using it. But clearly, in closed rooms around the company, it is still searching desperately for something it can against open source.

One emerging tack was evident in a fascinating article that appeared in a magazine aimed at Microsoft Certified Professionals. In it, there was a glimpse into how the Microsoft world views the free software threat. Of particular note is the assertion that "Microsoft invests north of $6 billion a year on R&D", and that "nobody in the Linux world" does anything comparable. The implication would seem to be that Microsoft is therefore a hotbed of creativity and innovation, whereas all free software can do is limp along with tired old tricks.

An extensive and thorough debunking of this assertion came from D C Parris in LXer. All the points he raises are good ones, but I'd like to focus on one in particular.

The statement that Microsoft is serious spending sums on research is true: you only have to look at Microsoft's Research division to see the wide range of work going on. Moreover, to Microsoft' credit, much of this work is made freely available in the form of published papers.

But the second part of the argument - that open source companies taken together spend nowhere near as much as Microsoft - is specious. The whole point about free software is that it represents the communal efforts of thousands of people around the world, most of whom receive no remuneration for their work. Indeed, money probably couldn't even buy the kind of obsessive attention to detail they routinely provide: it comes from passion not payment.

The new argument that the quotation from the above article is putting about comes down to this: that something given freely is worth nothing. In a way, this is the fundamental error that those who do not understand the open world make. In fact, the issue is much larger, and goes to the root of most of the key problems facing the world today. Which is why the "opens" - open source, open genomics, open content and all the cognate approaches - are so crucial: they lie at the heart of solving those same problems.

Chile Turns up the Heat on WIPO

Good to see another country standing up for open content/public domain (via Open Access News). One of the key issues in tackling the unbalanced nature of the current copyright/patent laws is getting the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to recognise that its job is bigger than simply protecting today's IP fatcats.

Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org Are Go

Version 1.5 of the open source email client Thunderbird is now available for download. This is a major release of an important program, even if it tends to be overshadowed by its bigger sibling, Firefox.

Thunderbird matters because it forms part of the key trio of browser, email and office suite that together satisfy the vast bulk of general users' computing needs. Now that Firefox is widely accepted as the best browser around, and with OpenOffice.org 2.0 increasingly seen as on a par with Microsoft Office, the only missing piece of the (small) jigsaw puzzle is email.

Like the other two, Thunderbird is available for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux. This platform-independence means that users can start using the three programs on Windows or Macintosh, say, and then be discreetly slid across to running them on GNU/Linux when they are ready. They probably won't even notice.

I've been running Thunderbird for some time now, and I find it powerful yet easy to use. It's got intelligent spam-filtering built in, and takes a safe approach to displaying dodgy images and attachments. It works with POP3, IMAP, Gmail and other email services, so there's no excuse not to switch - now.

Closing off Microsoft's Patent Options

Patents are boring - but important. They are the chokepoint for much intellectual activity - especially the kind discussed in these pages - so anything that can be done to loosen their grip on the free interchange of ideas is welcome.

Against this background, the announcement by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that it has "created a partnership with the open source community to ensure that patent examiners have access to all available prior art relating to software code during the patent examination process" is an encouraging step, since software patents are some of the most problematic of all (see Richard Stallman's brilliant explanation of why). However, this is a statement of intent, rather than a concrete move, and it remains to be seen what practical effect it will have on stemming the flood of trivial or downright bad patents being granted by the USPTO.

Meanwhile, the USPTO has upheld Microsoft's patent on the File Allocation Table (FAT) storage technology. This is bad news: it represents both a direct defeat for the open source world, which sought to overturn it, and a sword of Damocles that henceforth will hang over the entire free software movement. The danger is that Microsoft will demand royalties - maybe even "reasonable and non-discriminatory" ones - that will be impossible for free software projects that use the FAT technology to pay.

Update: On the other hand, maybe it's not over yet...(who said patents were boring?)

Update 2: For a view on the USPTO initiative from inside one of the companies helping to make it happen - IBM - see this excellent post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Anyone who's read my Rebel Code will know that he was the man who essentially turned Big Blue onto GNU/Linux. This means that he is someone with his finger on the pulse, and that his blog is well worth following.

In the Vanguard

What is exciting about this piece in the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard (link from Open Access News), is that it puts all the pieces together so well: how open source and open access relate to intellectual property regimes, AIDS, poverty, ecology and - inevitably - global politics.

As the article concludes:

Open the source code of innovation, and we’ll change the planet.

Truly, the way forward.

Wikipedia, Science and Peer Review

Last week, Wendy Grossman wrote a wise article about how all those making a fuss over Wikipedia's inaccuracies and lack of accountability forget that precisely the same charges were levelled against the Web when it rose to prominence around ten years ago. (Parenthetically, it's interesting to note more generally how Wikipedia is in some sense a Web 2.0 recapitulation of those early Web 1.0 days - a heady if untidy attempt to encompass great swathes of human knowledge).

It seems to me that another story, on BBC News, which considered the fate of the peer review process in the wake of Dr Hwang Woo-suk's faked stem cell papers, is relevant here.

Many of Wikipedia's critics claim that everything would be fine if only it added some rigorous peer review to the process, just like science does when papers are published. But as the BBC item explains, the peer review process employed by Science magazine (where most of Hwang's apparently ground-breaking papers appeared) signally failed to spot that Hwang's papers were frauds (it also explains why, in any case, this is probably asking too much of peer review).

These recent problems with scientific peer review re-inforce Grossman's point about Wikipedia: that we should stop worrying about the inaccuracies and instead learn how to live with them, just as we do for the Web. Far better to develop a critical sense that submits all results - wherever they come from - to a minimum level of scrutiny.

Blogs and Open Government

The indispensable John Lettice (don't miss his repeated skewering of the UK's idiotic ID card plans) makes a nice connection between blogging - in particular the extraordinary sight of UK Home Office Minister Hazel Blears' blogging - and a more open form of government. Well, potentially, at least....

Gnashing and Wailing

The GNU Project is working on a full-featured, completely free, Flash player, called Gnash. I suppose they had to do it, because for them the problem is the proprietary nature of the main Flash player.

But for me, the problem is Flash, full stop.

Open Source's Big Blunder

It is easy to be fooled by the success of open source software. High-profile applications like Apache and Firefox are routinely cited for their absolute market dominance or relative technological superiority. GNU/Linux is going head-to-head with Microsoft Windows Server, while many are predicting that 2006 will be the year GNU/Linux on the desktop makes its breakthrough (just like 2005 and 2004). The bitter fight over the OpenDocument Format in Massachusetts is an indication that for the first time there is real rival to Microsoft's Office formats, and the Eclipse development platform continues to gain support among coders, corporate IT departments and software companies.

So what's missing from this rosy picture of free software's inexorable rise?

The one area that everyone seems to forget about is education. While it is true that GNU/Linux and open source applications are popular among the more tech-savvy users at university, younger students are exposed almost exclusively to Microsoft's products (except in a few enlightened regions of the world).

The failure of open source to devote significant energies and resources here is a serious problem. As Microsoft learned from Apple, whose initial rise was largely thanks to the widespread use of the Apple ][ in education, if you get them young, you get to keep them (most of them, at least). It is all very well trying to put open source solutions on the desktop, but if the people coming through the educational system have been conditioned to use only Microsoft's products, they will resist any moves to force them to touch anything else. The users become Microsoft's fiercest advocates.

The corollary is that broadening the use of free software in schools will automatically lead to increased use in the home and business markets. Indeed, there is a double benefit if schools routinely deploy programs like Firefox, OpenOffice and GNU/Linux. It ensures that tomorrow's consumers, workers and leaders will be completely comfortable using them, and encourages today's parents to find out more about the software that their children are using at school. One of the huge advantages that open source software enjoys over proprietary applications is that parents can make free copies of a school's software, rather than "borrowing" office copies, say, of Microsoft's products.

Against this background, it is heartening that the UK government body BECTA is carrying out a review of the licensing programme it signed with Microsoft in 2003. Significantly, the report will examine the risks of "lock-in" to Microsoft's products, and "focus on ways to improve access to alternatives to Microsoft products to ensure that there is a freedom of choice". This review therefore takes place in a very different context from the one in which BECTA negotiated its previous deal. In 2003 there was no question about changing supplier - it was taken for granted that Microsoft was the solution: the question was the price reductions that could be won from the company.

As I've noted elsewhere, Microsoft is very adept at bowing to "pressure"” and making "sacrifices" during negotiations. In this case, BECTA could proudly announce that its 2003 deal would save the UK taxpayer £46 million. But for this sum, Microsoft not only retained it grip on the British educational system, but had that stranglehold more or less enshrined in official policy.

It remains to be seen what BECTA comes up with, but its two previous reports in this area, on the use of open source software in schools, and on the possible cost savings of doing so, were notable for their intelligence and even-handedness. This gives some hope that open source may at last be given the opportunity to prove its worth in the British schools.

Helpfully, BECTA has said of its work that "“recognising the increasing relevance of this issue to educators in the EU and indeed globally, an international exchange of views will be facilitated."” This "exchange of views" might provide those living in other areas where there is no significant use of free software in schools with a good opportunity to push for similar reviews in their own countries.

One thing seems certain: if something is not done soon, an entire generation will grow up around the globe that equates the Web with Internet Explorer, email with Outlook, productivity software with Office and computers with Windows. In such a world, open source will at best be marginal, and at worst, irrelevant.

Closed Source, Open Can of Worms

This is about openness, oh my word, yes.

Great reporting. But rather frightening.

Update: no, the link isn't broken, it's been disappeared. However, you can read the previous stories in this saga here and here - catch them before they, too, mysteriously vanish from the Net....

Google: Friend or Foe?

"Don't Be Evil" is the company motto: but is Google for us or against us?

I'm not talking about justifable concerns that it knows far too much about what interests us - both in terms of the searches we carry out and (if we use Gmail) the correspondence we send and receive. This is a larger issue, and relates to all the major online companies - Microsoft, Yahoo, even Amazon - that mediate and hence participate in much of our lives. What concerns me here is whether Google can be considered a friend of openness.

On the one hand, Google is quite simply the biggest open source company. Its fabled server farm consists of 10,000s/100,000s/1,000,000s (delete as applicable) of GNU/Linux boxes; this means that anyone searching with Google is a GNU/Linux user.

It has a growing list of code that it has open-sourced; it has sponsored budding hackers in its Summer of Code programme; and it keeps on acquiring key open source hackers like Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python) and Ben Goodger, (Firefox lead engineer).

On the other hand, Google's software is heavily weighted towards Microsoft Windows. Programs like Google Earth and Picasa are only available under Windows, and its latest, most ambitious foray, the Google Pack, is again only for Microsoft's operating system. This means that every time Google comes out with some really cool software, it is reinforcing Microsoft's hold on the desktop. Indeed, we are fast approaching the point where the absence of GNU/Linux versions of Google's programs are a major disincentive to adopt an open source desktop.

This dilemma is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, since Google clearly wants to serve the largest desktop market first, while drawing on the amazing price-performance of free software for its own computing platform.

But there is another area where it has the chance to play nice with openness, one that does not require it to come down definitively on one side or the other of the operating system world.

Another Windows-only product, Google Talk, is the subject of a lawsuit alleging patent infringement. However, closer examination of the two patents concerned, Patent Number 5,425,085 - "Least cost routing device for separate connection into phone line" - and Patent Number 5,519,769 - "Method and system for updating a call rating database", suggests that one of the best ways Google could show that it is a friend of both open source and proprietary software is by defending itself vigorously in the hope that the US Patent system might start to be applied as it was originally envisioned, to promote innovation, not as an easy way of extracting money from wealthy companies.

Update 1: Google has come out with a Mac version of Google Earth. It's a start.

Update 2: There are rumours about Google working on its own desktop GNU/Linux. Frankly, I'll believe it when I see it: it's a poor fit with their current portfolio, and the margins are terrible.

Update 3: Comfortingly, these rumours have now been scotched.

Not Your Father's/Mother's Tripos

At Cambridge University, the examinations are known as the Tripos - a reference, it is thought, to the three-legged wooden stool that candidates originally sat on during their orals.

Now the P2P Foundation has come up with another "three-legged stool", one of whose legs (number 2: open "everything") is not a million miles from the page you are reading. Great minds, etc.

A Smidgeon Too Open, Perhaps

I'm all in favour of openness, but maybe this is taking things a little too far....

More seriously, it does show the tension between openness and privacy - and how a balance needs to be struck in some cases. Here, though, there seems to be no possible justification for exposing mobile 'phone users in this way - sorry, "greed is good" doesn't cut it.