Microsoft's Eternal Cheek

This is rich:

In this culture of instant information, some Microsoft Corp. researchers are pursuing a radical notion -- the concept of saving messages for delivery in decades, centuries or more.

The project, dubbed "immortal computing," would let people store digital information in physical artifacts and other forms to be preserved and revealed to future generations, and maybe even to future civilizations.

So, the company that more than anyone has tried to lock people into opaque, closed formats that will be unreadable in a few decades, let alone a few millennia, and which even now is trying to foist more of the same on people, suddenly discovers the virtue of unconstrained accessibility.

But to add insult to injury, it then tries to patent the idea. Earth to Microsoft: this is called openness, it's what you've been fighting for the last thirty years. There's a fair amount of prior art for the basic technique, actually.

The Coming Java Tsunami

I think this is just the first of many such decisions, all born of Sun's enlightened choice of the GNU GPL for Java:

Python was originally the language of choice for OLPC [Open Laptop Per Child] but with the announcement of the open sourcing of Java, Blizzard said that the OLPC may move to Java as it is close to native speeds thanks to Java's jit (Just in Time) compiler and Python's interpreter being rather slow. One imagines that with the restricted hardware available that a slow interpreted language is the last thing you want, even if it is an exceedingly easy and powerful one. This is also the first impact I have seen from the open sourcing of Java.

Have Pity on the Orphans

Oh dear, Larry's still having no luck rolling back US copyright law:

In a move that's a blow to the U.S. movement to reform copyright law, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle, in his lawsuit to allow orphaned works into the public domain.

Rejecting the argument of Larry Lessig, the court decided the case was too close to Lessig's Eldred copyright suit of 2002, and that's settled business

Slaiku

When SL is down
We are virtually certain
To find strange beauty

MMORPG in a Box

Raph Koster points out that setting up a MMORPG is pretty cheap these days: even the top-end SmartFox system, which is Java-based, costs just 2000 Euros. Already there's a number of games based on the code. And, of course, all this will run on a GNU/Linux box also costing peanuts. The only downside is that, like many online games these days, the SmartFox approach is to use Flash.

Not Hoping for Misery

This reminds me why I'll never learn Esperanto.

GPL > BT?

As an ex-victim of British Telecom, I have to say that to see it apparently humbled by the forces of light in this way is doubly delicious:

BT's wireless broadband router Home Hub may be in breach of the terms of Linux's General Public License, after it emerged the device runs on open source code.

...

BT responded quickly and posted an admission that it was using open source software and made it available to download late last week. However, investigation by the Freedom Taskforce, the part of Free Software Europe which deals with licensing, said BT had not in fact published the complete code.

The saga is clearly not over yet, but what's significant is that a very large multinational like BT would at least want to look like it's complying: that's power. And if you don't believe that there's something new in the air, here's exhibit number 2.

Can ICANN Open Up?

I've been fairly hard on ICANN on this blog - hard but fair, given it's pretty appalling track record in terms of openness. But lo! two glimmers of light on the horizon. ICANN has suddenly got intelligent, and appointed the fine UK hack Kieren McCarthy as General Manager, Public Participation (sounds so grand). It also seems to have sprouted a blog. Here's hoping.

Will the Pleiades Be an Open (Content) Cluster?

According to Wikipedia:

The Pleiades (also known as M45 or the Seven Sisters) is the name of an open cluster in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest to the Earth of all open clusters, probably the best known and certainly the most striking to the naked eye.

So let's hope the this exciting new Pleiades is also fully open:

Built atop the open-source Plone Content Management System and hosted by the Stoa Consortium, Pleiades will provide on-line access to all information about Greek and Roman geography assembled by the Classical Atlas Project for the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (R. Talbert, ed., Princeton, 2000. Pleiades will also enable large-scale collaboration in order to maintain and diversify this dataset. Combining open-content approaches (like those used by Wikipedia) with academic-style editorial review, Pleiades will enable anyone — from university professors to casual students of antiquity — to suggest updates to geographic names, descriptive essays, bibliographic references and geographic coordinates. Once vetted for accuracy and pertinence, these suggestions will become a permanent, author-attributed part of future AWMC publications and data services.

(Via Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog.)

Open Source Bacteria

Another reason to understand openness:

When a team of geneticists unlocked the secret of the bug's rapid evolution in 2005, they found that one strain of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii carries the largest collection of genetic upgrades ever discovered in a single organism. Out of its 52 genes dedicated to defeating antibiotics, radiation, and other weapons of mass bacterial destruction, nearly all have been bootlegged from other bad bugs like Salmonella, Pseudomonas, and Escherichia coli.

In the open source world of bacteria, everyone is working for the resistance.

Linden Lab: Yes, They Really Get It

Further to this post, here's conclusive proof that the people behind Second Life get it:

Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody. Indeed, any competent attorney is well aware that the outcome of sending a cease-and-desist letter regarding a parody is only to draw more attention to such parody, and to invite public scorn and ridicule of the humor-impaired legal counsel. Linden Lab is well-known for having strict hiring standards, including a requirement for having a sense of humor, from which our lawyers receive no exception.

In conclusion, your invitation to submit a cease-and-desist letter is hereby rejected.

CrowdSpirit

Crowdsourcing in the French Alps:

Our business model is simply to design innovative electronic products by “you” for “you” and to reward the best “you” based on the products sales revenues& in practice “you” will be made by a community. CrowdSpirit will provide the means for this community to design, invest, produce, market, distribute and support the products that make business sense. To conclude, the community will assist and participate in every step of the product cycle and will earn money from these products based on each person’s contribution.

Dunno if it works, though.

Acoustic Ecology and the Commons of Silence

Some interesting information about the Acoustic Ecology Institute:

a New Mexico-based non-profit working to "increase personal and social awareness of our sound environment, through education programs in schools, regional events, and our internationally recognized website," and to build "a comprehensive [online] clearinghouse for information on sound-related environmental issues and scientific research."

Am I Dreaming?

Dreaming in Code: a book about Chandler.

Chandler? Out of several hundred thousands pieces of free software he choose Chandler??? A project that after nearly four years still has not yet got to a 1.0 release? A project that, though started with the best intentions (which I applaud) is essentially irrelevant now that we have Lightning, based on a program (Thunderbird) that is already widely used?

Great title: pity about the subject-matter.

The (Other) Foundation

As a big fan of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, I was delighted to learn that the Linux people have done their psychohistorical calculations, and realised they need to create one themeselves.

Why Don't You Get a Life?

This is good.

This is better.

Hrant Dink's Memorial

Surprisingly, there is tiny consolation to be found in the murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish Armenian shot dead outside his newspaper's office last week.

The killer presumably hoped to silence Dink from speaking his wise, calm words about the genocide of over a million Armenians at the hands of the Young Turks in 1915, and of the need for reconciliation, not recrimination.

And yet Dink's death has probably done more to highlight that genocide than any of his words. A casual search for "armenian genocide" on Google News turns up well over a thousand hits over the last few days. At least in the age of the Internet, the truth about such things, once exposed, is not so easily hidden.

This is Dink's memorial.

Citizendium Unforks

Citizendium is a wonderful test of many things, and it just became even more interesting because it has decided to unfork itself from Wikipedia:

After considerable deliberation, indicating broad support, we have decided to delete all inactive Wikipedia articles from the Citizendium pilot project wiki. This will leave us with only those articles that we’ve been working on. The deletion will take place on Saturday at noon, Eastern time.

This is an experiment. In other words, we’re quite seriously thinking of not forking Wikipedia after all. If we see more activity on the wiki, which is what I expect, then the Wikipedia articles will stay deleted.

(Via Open Access News.)

The Smell of Conspiracy Theories in the Morning

Lovely:

The truth can now be told. We have a nine-floor complex beneath Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Dick Cheney's home state. We employee three-hundred Oompa Lumpas, ostensibly here on student visas, to read through the 6,000 page OOXML specification. They then input their concerns into a massively parallel computer, based on the old Deep Blue chess computer that beat Gary Kasparov. The computer takes the objections, formats them into English, inserting random literary quotes from The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, and then posts them in blogs and press articles. The computer can express these objections in the form of sonnets, haikus, or even as crude limerick. Every year on January 14th (Thomas J. Watson's Birthday) at 3:14am the Oompa Lumpas come to the surface, smear their bodies with blue paint, dance around a bonfire, howl at the moon and entreat the gods to vanquish their foes, mainly Microsoft, who canceled their favorite application, Microsoft Bob. Rob Weir doesn't really exist. He is just a subroutine. As they say, "On the internet, nobody knows your are a subroutine processing data input by Oompa-Loompas working for IBM underground in Wyoming"

But is it just coincidence that the time quoted in this extract - 3.14 - happens to be precisely the Köchel number of the Flute Concerto by Mozart that is almost certainly the lost Oboe concerto written for Ferlendis? I don't think so....

The Richard Stallman of Water

Heavy, man:

Late last year, I had a lunch meeting in New York City with the president of a foundation associated with a national protestant denomination. When the waiter came by to ask if we wanted a bottle of water, my lunch partner responded, “Tap water will be fine. I don’t drink bottled water.”

Don’t drink bottled water? I couldn’t remember the last time I heard someone say that – especially in New York City. I began to explore the issue with him and learned that he and many others in his church no longer drank Dasani (bottled by Coca-Cola) and other commercial bottled waters because they see the privatization of water resources as an intensely moral and political issue.

Obvious, when you think about it.

Indies not so Independent

When I saw this:

The world's biggest record label, albeit a "virtual" one, emerged today at the Midemnet conference in Cannes.

Indies have found themselves treated as second class citizens or ignored altogether in the era of digital music. The new organization Merlin will act as a global rights licensing agency, and represents the growing influence of the independent sector acting collectively.

My heart leapt. Could it be, I said to myself, that we might see some independent thinking in the music biz at last - you, know, no DRM, sensible pricing, that kind of stuff?

Nope:

Alison Wenham of the UK-based Association for Independent Music (AIM) confirmed that indies would demand the removal of content from sites such as YouTube if they didn't cut Merlin a similar deal to the one negotiated by Universal Music, the world's biggest label.

Clearly, this Merlin the wizard ain't so wise: YouTube = free publicity = more sales.

Convergence of the Ads

Not quite the kind of convergence I was hoping for, but indicative of the way things are going:

Google is about to buy its way into in-game advertising, paidContent.org has learned, and WSJ is also reporting the same. It has been in talks to buy a small in-game advertising firm AdScape Media, in an attempt to bring its technologies, mixed with Google’s own contextual technologies, into the console and casual games market.

A Confederacy of Dunces

It's amazing how dim clever people can be. Here's a piece in the Washington Post from some apparently clever chaps about net neutrality. But listen to this:

Blocking premium pricing in the name of neutrality might have the unintended effect of blocking the premium services from which customers would benefit. No one would propose that the U.S. Postal Service be prohibited from offering Express Mail because a "fast lane" mail service is "undemocratic." Yet some current proposals would do exactly this for Internet services.

Metaphors are so seductive because they can be grasped more easily than the matter to hand. But they are dangerous because of the potential imperfection of the comparison. In this case, there is a fatal flaw in the metaphor: net neutrality is not about blocking "fast lane" postal services. Proponents of net neutrality have pointed out time and again that anyone is welcome to buy faster Net connections if they need them.

The real comparison is if a postal service were offered that guaranteed faster delivery for letters that contained a particular kind of content. This would act as a barrier to someone "inventing" new kinds of content for letters. Net neutrality is about ensuring that the playing-field is level for everyone - that anyone can invent new kinds of content, so that users can then decide which to use without other biases coming into play. It is not about blocking generic "fast lane" services.

The point is that even if there are cases that could be pointed to where priority might seem be beneficial, the overall impact is negative: once you start giving network providers the power to discriminate, they will - and not in the ways that will be good for the network. If priority is needed, it should be provided - and paid for - on a generic basis.

In the Shade of the Commons

One of the central themes of this blog is the commons, and how it's often helpful to re-frame discussions about software, content, the environment etc. in terms of this idea. So I was delighted to come across an entire collection of essays taking this approach. It's called In the Shade of the Commons,and it's freely available.

David Pogue Meets The Pogues

This fine piece of doggerel deserves to become No. 1.

It could do with a catchier title, though: instead of "Ode to the RIAA", how about "pogue mahone"?