Patently Odd

I came across this story on LWN.net:

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software, today filed a brief with the United States Supreme Court arguing against the patenting of software.

In the case Microsoft v. AT&T, the Supreme Court will decide whether U.S. patents can apply to software that is copied and distributed overseas. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized patent court known for allowing patents on software and business methods, originally decided in favor of AT&T, expanding the international reach of U.S. software patents.

Well, to coin a phrase, I bloody well hope not.

But aside from the worrying implications of this kind of extra-territoriality, and the fact that the Software Freedom Law Center is supporting Microsoft in this case, I found the following statement from the amicus brief a little odd:

One could not send or receive e-mail, surf the World Wide Web, perform a Google search or take advantage of many of the other benefits offered by the Internet without Free and Open Source Software, which also includes the Linux operating system that is today’s strongest competitor to Petitioner’s Windows operating system.

Er, sorry Eben, that wouldn't be the GNU/Linux operating system, by any chance? You remember, the one that Richard can get a little funny about when he sees it described as the Linux operating system...?

The Second Million is the Hardest

News that the total number of Second Life signups has breached the two million mark comes at a time when such figures are being heavily criticised.

Of course, the two million figure does not reflect the true number of SL users. But think of it as a proxy for the real number - a kind of SL index. The fact that the index has doubled in a couple of months is the real news; even with a retention rate of "only" 10%, it's the rate of growth that matters.

What we are seeing is Second Life and the virtual world idea begin to break through into the mainstream. Even if the two million number were "real" it would be footling compared to the size of the Net; but even 10% of it is not footling compared to zero.

As to criticisms it's VRML all over again - and speaking as someone who wanted to believe in VRML, but never quite could because it was so obviously limited - SL is something else, for a reason that has nothing to do with SL's technology, cool though it is.

Unlike ten years ago, broadband is available and relatively cheap today. I have a line that regularly gives me 4 Mbit/s and over for a very reasonable price; this means that I simply never have to think about bandwidth anymore. Speeds will continue to rise, and virtual worlds will be able to take even more bandwidth for granted, with a resultant improvement in experience.

If Second Life can do this well in today's computing environment, it will do even better in tomorrow's.

Real and Virtual Pirates

Far be it from me to give any publicity to the arch-enemy Disney (hawk, spit), but this story about the latter's plans for a MMORPG spin-off from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" film is of note. It shows clearly how virtual worlds are entering the mainstream alongside traditional, "physical" merchandising.

Avatar Liberation Movement

Interesting:

"Mii" avatars for the Wii console have been given a license to travel, thanks to a "How To" article published by LiquidIce's Nintendo Wii Hacks. Using the built-in Bluetooth capabilities of the Wiimote control device, a Bluetooth-capable PC, and a program called MiiTransfer, Mii avatar data can be scraped from the Wiimote to the PC, then shared through web sites such as the Mii Transfer Station (see the article for details).

I don't know if this is the first such case of avatar liberation, but it certainly won't be the last.

MyPassword

In case you hadn't noticed, we live in a digital world cordoned off by passwords. Nearly everything online requires them, so you are faced with the classic dilemma: use one, hard-to-guess, hard-to-remember one for everything, or use lots of easy-to-remember, easy to guess ones - or maybe just one easy-to-guess.

This fascinating analysis by Bruce Schneier of a clutch of compromised passwords from MySpace is slightly better news than you might have expected:

We used to quip that "password" is the most common password. Now it's "password1." Who said users haven't learned anything about security?

But seriously, passwords are getting better. I'm impressed that less than 4 percent were dictionary words and that the great majority were at least alphanumeric.

The story has some good links to historical studies of passwords, as well as the usual sharp Brucie thoughts. Alas, these include the following:

None of this changes the reality that passwords have outlived their usefulness as a serious security device. Over the years, password crackers have been getting faster and faster. Current commercial products can test tens -- even hundreds -- of millions of passwords per second. At the same time, there's a maximum complexity to the passwords average people are willing to memorize (.pdf). Those lines crossed years ago, and typical real-world passwords are now software-guessable.

"Hundreds of millions of passwords per second"??? Gulp.

Google Does Patents...

...in the nicest possible way, with Google Patent Search:

As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, we’re constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patent Search, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.

Speaking up for the Commons of Silence

Try explaining to people that silence is a commons that needs to be defended, and you will get some blank looks, I suspect. But put in these terms, and they might begin to understand the issues:

Christmas music in shops is "torture", the "forgotten pollutant" which shop workers must be able to silence for the sake of their sanity, according to activists, trade unions and a peer. The government is being asked to investigate the problem.

TechCrunch UK Gets Crunched

I don't normally comment on these kind of in-house spitting matches, but I can't help feeling that five years down the line, this will turn out to be quite a pivotal moment.

The Editor of TechCrunch UK, Sam Sethi, about whom I know nothing, has been fired by the TechCrunch god, Michael Arrington. You can get the official TechCrunchy story here; speaking as a UK journalist, ex-publisher and nascent blogger, I have to say it is about as convincing as Tony Blair's explanations of why we need ID cards. But what's really interesting is that it touches so many nerve points.

For example, we have the rather droll sight of Arrington accusing his employee of "crossing the line" on ethical behaviour. Since TechCrunch is one of the most supine blogs in the Web 2.0 world, I can only assume that this means it crossed the line by becoming too critical. Judging by the very restrained comments about Le Web 3, this certainly looks to be the case: as a Brit hack, I have to say this is very mild stuff about what seems to have been a pretty poor conference.

Moreover, as several of the more perceptive comments to Arrington's post point out, there are important cultural, not to say legal issues, here: you can't just fire people on the spot for anything less than gross misconduct, which certainly hasn't taken place as far as I can tell, and using all normal definitions of "gross".

The whole affair is particularly amusing because Arrington has managed to break three cardinal rules of blogging. First, you don't delete blog posts. It just isn't done, unless there are legally compelling reasons to do so. Second, you certainly don't try to defend your deletion in another blog post, since this will only amplify the maladroitness of the initial action.

And finally, you must never think to punish a really a good blogger by firing them, for the simple reason that they will simply go elsewhere and do it on their own (benefiting from all that lovely free publicity you've just given them), leaving you looking stupid, and them clever.

The fact that Arrington seems not to understand these issues speaks volumes about the exclusive world of venture capital-backed blogs - and the fact that in the near future, some of them are going to come a cropper, as good bloggers find that managing other bloggers ain't so easy. Not so much the beginning of the end, but certainly the end of the beginning.

Update: Michael Arrington has more on his side of the story.

Is Ryzom.org Going to Be Massive?

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about attempts to take the MMORPG Ryzom open source; now it seems that these have received a big boost from a surprising quarter:

Free Software Foundation announces that it will officially support the Free Ryzom campaign (www.ryzom.org) with a pledge of $60,000.

The Free Ryzom campaign was established to purchase the online game and universe known as Ryzom, property of the now bankrupt Nevrax company, and release the entire game as free software.

As stated by Peter T. Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, the FSF considers the Free Ryzom campaign "a high priority project for the free software movement". The aim of the campaign is to publish the source code to the entire game under the terms of the widely-used GPL, as well as publishing all of the artwork and other content under similar free licenses.

The Free Ryzom campaign represents a unique opportunity for the free software movement and the emerging free gaming field. A fully free MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) engine and client/server architecture would allow the development of a myriad of universes, each one evolving its own philosophy and unique content - but sharing in general technical improvements. If successful, this campaign would allow any user to create their own universe and produce their own content based on the Ryzom/Nevrax architecture.

What's particularly interesting about this move is that it confirms how MMORPGs and virtual worlds are moving into the mainstream: after all, the FSF has only limited resources, and would not choose to spend its hard-earned dosh on anything that it does not perceive as pushing forward its cause in a major way.

Mr. Ubuntu Discovers Second Life

Mark Shuttleworth, he of VeriSign and Ubuntu, has noticed Second Life:

Second Life of course brings a new twist to the idea of immersion, though for now it’s immersion on the virtual side of the looking glass. What interests me are the ways in which there is cross-over between the virtual world and the real world. When I’m walking around town, does my mobile phone alert me to changes in the virtual world? And when I’m working at my PC, how much can I stay focused on work, say, while my PC also keeps me abreast of what’s going on with my avatar?

I think there’s going to be a need for innovation around the ways we blur the lines between real and virtual worlds, and this is again one of those places that I think the free software community cold steal a lead on the proprietary world.

Well, yes; or maybe no. (Via tuxmachines.org.)

Open Source Laser Business???

Maybe you can push a meme too far:

We are publishing how to use the high powered laser system, set up, techniques, business practices and templates. You could start your own laser business, we'll even help you.

(Via Slashdot.)

Vive L'Open Source

This is worrying: politicians have discovered that open source is vaguely, well, groovy:

"I am very impressed with the phenomenon of open source software. In the wiki logic, there is a capacity to share and cooperate on research and economic activity. This is a crucial moment of the history of humanity."

Yikes.

The Real Crowdsourcing

Tuangou 团购 - not sourcing from crowds, but sourcing for crowds:

for tuangou, it's all about shopping, aggregating enough people to be able to get a discount or better terms on everything from cars to home remodelling materials to real estate.

This post also has a good picture of the physical reality of tuangou.

Not-So-Sadville

Here's an interesting piece of research that attempts to get some (relatively) hard facts about residents of Second Life. It's only an indication, of course, but it certainly gives the lie to many misconceptions about the place:

Respondents who claim to feel happy in Second Life, also feel happy in the physical world: this hypothesis does not hold for those who spend more than 30 hours a week in Second Life and feel unhappy in the physical world. The relation is strongest for the 18-30 hrs group: the happier they feel in real life, the happier they feel in Second Life. The relation is weakest for the under 18 hrs group. The hypothesis that the more hours one spends in Second Life, the unhappier one feels in the physical word, does not seem to hold. The socially skilled, who feel comfortable in the real world, also feel most comfortable in Second Life.

Update: And talking of hard facts, here's a new page of Second Life numbers. What's most interesting is that they are all showing the same shape.

OpenServing

How can I resist a pitch like this?

Openserving extends the essence of the open source model — free software and content — to all aspects of web-based computing.

You can set up your own collaborative blogging site.

All articles are sorted democratically.

Sound good?

Here's a bonus: keep 100% of the ad revenue for yourself.

Highly laudable, but it's this bit that worries me:

Wikia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales said, "Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago. People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident – as we always have been – that the wisdom of our community will prevail."

I see: so you mean that although you lose money on every user, you make up on volume?

God Bless Bickering

Poor Charlie:

The EU Internal Markets Commissioner has warned that Europe is about to miss out on a chance to forge a pan-European patent disputes forum because of long-standing international bickering on what a system might look like.

Following further fruitless discussions between European countries this week, Charlie McCreevy has warned that the entire plan could stall. “Anything remotely concerning this patent area is fraught with minefields at every turn of the road,” McCreevy told the Financial Times.

Welcome to Iconistan

I'm such a sucker for clever neologisms:

There's a turf war heating up over a strip of web real estate called "Iconistan."

You won't find this mythical land on a map, as Iconistan exists only at the bottom of blog posts. It's where that little crowd of icons gathers, begging you to post a bit of news to Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and various other social news and community sites.

Digital Mozart and Our Open Future

One of the key ideas that underpins this blog is that one day all knowledge will be freely available online. Open source is the means, and open content/open genomics/open data etc. will be the result.

Clearly, there is a long way to go, but it is important to keep things in perspective. Ten years ago, Wikipedia did not exist; today, it provides an unparalleled collection of knowledge, for all its faults. Looking just a little further back, say 15 years ago, the Web consisted of a few servers worldwide, and GNU was kernel-less - Linux had only just come into existence. We have gained much in those ten and fifteen years.

And now here's another straw in the wind, a sign from the future: the complete works of Mozart available online, free:

Starting on December 12, 2006 the ISM and the Packard Humanities Institute will make the complete musical texts of the NMA available to everyone for private, scholarly, and educational use as NMA Online. Free access will be provided on the Internet at http://dme.mozarteum.at/. The music pages are linked with the scans of the NMA’s critical reports. Comprehensive search capabilities allow users to easily find, study, and print any of Mozart’s works as PDF files. The NMA Online is the first extensive, up-to-date complete works edition that is available to everybody at no charge.

This is a wonderful resource, if rather slow because of the huge interest it has provoked. But that's a detail: this is the open future, and it's coming.

5 Things I've Learned From a Year's Blogging

Today is the first anniversary of opendotdotdot. Since this fact is of little interest to anyone but myself, I thought it might be useful to extract what pearls of wisdom I can from the experience of writing 1,260 posts in that time.

1. Google is your friend

Over half the traffic that arrives on these pages comes from Google. Moreover, the absolute number of visitors directed here by the Google machine just keeps on going up. I can only presume that the more posts you make, the more Googlejuice you generate, and the more you move up the ranks. Indeed, when I take a look at some of the keywords people enter in Google before arriving here, it is gratifying to find this blog pretty highly placed, albeit for some pretty wacky terms (like "wackypedia" and "seed gestapo") as well as a few surprisingly mainstream ones (like "philip rosedale interview").

2. Yahoo and MSN are a waste of time

I'm constantly amazed at how utterly Google dominates the search engine field in terms of the visitors it provides. I had expected MSN to be way behind, but not Yahoo; in fact, I get more visitors from MSN than Yahoo, which barely registers at all. Maybe this says something about the kind of readers/searches that end up at my blog, but it also emphasises the importance of Google. Interestingly, Technorati also generates far more leads than either Yahoo or MSN.

3. People like tags

The first version of the blog had no tags, for the simple reason that Blogger did not offer the facility, and I was too lazy to do it by hand. But when the new Blogger beta came out with tags, I dutifully employed them. I'm glad I did, because people really like using them to search within the blog. In fact, like me, people are lazy: they just can't be bothered entering a search term in the blog search box, but they can summon up the energy to click on one of the tags. One consequence of this is that I intend to go back and tag all of the older posts, since it clearly is something people find useful.

4. People like weird stuff

I am resigned to the fact that I am completely unable to judge which posts will be popular or not. Sometimes I spend ages crafting some witty/profound/novel/hot post, only to have it roundly ignored by almost everybody. Equally, I've often knocked out a trivial/pointless/content-free post only to find everyone and their dog rush to admire its insights. Sigh.

5. It gets easier

In many ways, the most important lesson that I take away from a year's blogging is that the more you do, the easier it gets. This is not just because you learn to type faster, but also because I've found that blogging helps me think faster and maybe even better. It's also a direct consequence of the fact that it's such damn good fun.

Larry's New Code

As the author of two books with the word "code" in the title, I naturally gravitate to other tomes that also draw on this word. But Larry Lessig's Code is rather special: it's one of the definitive texts of the Net age. I remember reading version 1.0, when it came out; and now, following a suitably wikified genesis, here's Codev2. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Towards the Bio-Fabber

One of the reasons I think copyright issues regarding text, images, music etc. are important is that they are a foretaste of when things will get really interesting, in two quite separate spheres.

The first is that of virtual worlds, where everything is digital, and therefore potentially able to be copied. The CopyBot incident in Second Life was a hint of what is to come there. Perhaps even more disturbing is the second: once three-dimensional fabbers are perfected and become cheap, and you can start copying physical objects, so-called real-world economies are going to have a lot of problems.

But it looks like there's a stage even beyond that. New Scientist reports that a kind of Bio-Fabber is already in the early stages of development:

An inkjet device that prints tiny “bio-ink” patterns has been used to simultaneously grow two different tissues from the stem cells of adult mice. Surgeons could one day use the technology to repair various damaged tissues at the same time, the researchers say.

Now, put together copyright with issues of privacy and identity....

Update: Here's a rather deeper meditation on the same subject, with a rather wittier title: "Bioprinters vs. the Meatrix".

Solveiging a Publishing Problem

What do you do if your publisher never actually publishes the book you have written about OpenOffice.org for them? Easy: buy back the rights and self-publish:

I had it done in May, but there was much dithering at Prentice Hall. It's not just them -- lots of publishers are facing the fact the publishing is different now, and book contracts have been getting cancelled all over the place. I had the opportunity to get the publication rights back, so I jumped at the chance and ha've self-published the Guidebook.

The author, Solveig Haugland, probably knows more about using OpenOffice.org than anyone, so the book is highly recommended. She's even made available some sample chapters so you can try before you buy.

Now is Our Summer of Code Made Glorious Winter

After the Summer of Code, now the Winter of Code:

The South Korean government and local tech companies have started an open source student developer contest, similar to Google's Summer of Code.

Dubbed Winter of Code, the competition will begin during Korea's winter recess in January next year. Organized by Korean games publisher NCsoft, local IT firms and the Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency, the contest aims to nurture new developers and promote open source software development in the country.

Telling the Truth About a Telling Fact

Rob Weir has a characteristically sharp and original analysis of the recent approval by ECMA of Microsoft's Open Office XML:

Thus the remarkable achievement of Microsoft and Ecma TC45, who not only managed to create a standard an order of magnitude larger than any other markup standard I've seen, but at the same time managed to complete the review/edit/approve cycle faster than any other markup standard I've seen. They have achieved an unprecedented review/edit/approval rate of 18.3 pages/day, 20-times faster than industry practice, a record which will likely stand unchallenged for the ages.

I think we would all like to know how they did it. Special training? Performance enhancing drugs? Time travel? A pact with the Devil? I believe you will all share with me an earnest plea for them to share the secret of their productivity and efficiency with the world and especially with ISO, who will surely need similar performance enhancements in order for them to review this behemoth of a standard within their "fast track" process.

I am optimistic, that once the secret of OOXML's achievement gets out, the way we make standards will never be the same again.

Code is Law, Code is Power

Yup:

Ministers were today urged to consider abandoning the multi-billion pound Joint Strike Fighter project unless the United States agrees within weeks to share sensitive technology.

...

Ministers have previously threatened that the UK could pull out of plans to buy up to 150 of the military planes for the RAF and Navy unless America agreed to transfer secrets about its software that Britain argues are needed in order to operate and maintain them independently.