A Series of Tubes

Now this is what I call a real distribution network:

The London Book Project is a free book exchange on a massive scale. Using the London Underground as a high speed distribution network, we aim to bring real literature to London's commuters. Scrap the freesheets - read a free book instead!

Over the next two weeks we'll be distributing thousands of second hand books across the tube and we want YOU to get involved. If you see one of our books, please pick it up! Then read it and replace with any book of your choice. Let's make the tube a giant, free library! Meanwhile, browse our website to find out more about the London Book Project and some alternative reporting about the world's most diverse capital city.

(Via Boing Boing.)

No Xmas Cards for Xandros

Well, it looks like the world of free software can cross another company off its Christmas card list:

Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros announced on Monday a technical and legal collaboration, the latest step in the software giant's ongoing program to partner with open-source companies.

Over the next five years, the two companies said, they will work on improving interoperability between their servers to improve systems management.

The pact calls for Microsoft to provide patent covenants for Xandros customers that ensure they are not infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property, according to the companies.

Er, didn't another company recently do something similar? With rather negative consequences...?

Web 2.0 Start-ups by Numbers

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Guy Kawasaki, but these figures about his new Truemors site are interesting, not least this one:

7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

Life is indeed good because of open source - it's holding up practically the entire Web 2.0 edifice.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Openness

How's this for a stunning demonstration that the UK Government has something to hide on ID cards?

Treasury officials are ordering the immediate destruction of "Gateway" internal reports into risky government IT schemes to prevent information on the projects being leaked.

...

The order for the destruction of final reports will fuel suspicion that they identify fundamental flaws in some major government IT-based projects.

The paper also tells civil servants they must securely dispose immediately after delivery of the final Gateway report “all supporting documents”.

The Information Commissioner ruled last year that early Gateway reviews on ID cards should be published, arguing that it should be public knowledge whether the programme was feasible and being well managed. The OGC appealed – and lost. It is now to fund a third appeal hearing, this time to the High Court.

Openness? We don't need no stinkin' openness.

You'd Be Nuts Not To...

Bill Hooker points out that there is an important petition to establish a self-archiving open access mandate for Brazilian research circulating - and that anyone may sign it. So why not join in (Bill's post has a translation)?

Taking Liberties...

...With openness and much, much else.

Spread the word.

Open Source Policing

Is this perhaps one answer to open source war/criminality?

Waleli's idea is to harness the power of picture messaging (MMS) to catch the crooks. A witness sends a photo or video from the cameraphone using MMS-witness which then goes straight into a crime database.

...

Given that Garner has estimated that there are 295 million cameraphones already out there, that's an awful lot of potential crime scene photographers.

Visualising DRM

Having problems getting your head around that tricky concept of DRM? Try this. (Via Boing Boing.)

GNU GPLv3 - Nearly There

The final draft of the GNU GPLv3 is out, together with copious explanations. If it's just a little too copious, you might try Matthew Aslett's excellent analysis of what it is all likely to mean for the Novell-Microsoft deal.

Maybe Genomics is Getting a Little Too Personal

So Jim Watson's genome will soon be made public. But not all of it:

the only deliberate omission from Watson's sequence is that of a gene linked to Alzheimer's disease, which Watson, who is now 79, asked not to know about because it is incurable and claimed one of his grandmothers.

The trouble is, the better our bioinformatics gets, the more genes we will be able to analyse usefully, and the better our ability to make statistical predictions from them. Which means that more and more people will be snipping bits out of their public genomes in this way. And which also means that many of us will never put any of our genome online.

Reed-Elsevier to Pull Out of Arms Fairs

Well, since I've criticised my old employer Reed-Elsevier in the past for having blood on its corporate hands through its involvement in the shame that is the arms trade, it's only fair that I should point out and applaud the following news:

Reed said earlier it would sever its ties to arms fairs, bowing to pressure which included complaints from customers, shareholders and academics writing for its major titles.

What's interesting, of course, is that this is as a direct result of cumulative pressure applied from all sorts of quarters. See, o ye sceptics, this people-based stuff can work.

Virtual GNU/Linux

Virtual Windows systems are familiar enough, but how about this: LINA, a virtual GNU/Linux environment?

With LINA, a single executable written and compiled for Linux can be run with native look and feel on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems.

Released under the GNU GPLv2, LINA sounds pretty interesting. Due out this month. (Via DesktopLinux.com.)

Fake or Fact?

This is really cool.

A little while back I wrote about Ed Felten's generator of 128-bit numbers. Lots of people were using this to "claim" certain numbers - just like the AACS people were misguidedely trying to do. It turns out that one of those numbers claimed there was really the next AACS key that can be used to unlock DVDs. Fiendishly cunning or what?

Google's Gears of War

Gears is a browser extension that we hope -- with time and plenty of input and collaboration from outside of Google -- can make not just our applications but everyone's applications work offline.

Well, not exactly gears of war, not least because Google has wisely made the code freely available under an open source licence:

We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone.

But certainly likely to represent the start of a skirmish or two in the field of offline working.

Once More unto the Breach

For all you Brits out there, something to ponder and then expatiate upon (nicely, mind):

OpenXML is an ECMA standard which has been submitted to ISO for endorsement as an international standard using the "fast-track" procedure.

...

The relevant BSI Technical Committee has set up a special panel to consider the UK position on the document and to submit technical comments. If you wish to submit comments, download your FREE copy please use the link below.

Download Draft International Standard ISO/IEC 29500 DPC here.

Please return the comments form electronically by 30 June 2007 to:

csc@bsi-global.com

So you know what to do. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

IE Indeed

Sigh. Tell me again why people are still using Internet Explorer:

It turns out the link installs a malicious post logger that transmits all information submitted through Internet Explorer to a website controlled by the attackers.

After reverse engineering the rogue browser helper object that attaches itself to IE (the malware doesn't work on other browsers), Stewart says he was able to locate a site that stored detailed information on some 1,400 executives who fell for the scam.

When will they learn? (Via Mobile Open Source.)

Mozilla Trumps MSN

The virtual tracks left by people as they change jobs delineate the shifting patterns of the business world: a concentration towards or away from a company speaks volumes about the subtle and mostly invisible dynamics that lie below. So this news truly speaks volumes:

Li Gong, the former top executive for MSN in China, has joined Mozilla's Chinese subsidiary, Mozilla Online, as its chairman and CEO.

Microsoft, are we worried yet?

The Wisdom of Pubs

Thanks, Luke: I may well borrow that one....

Patents Are the Enemy, Not Enabler, of Innovation

As patent problems become ever-more prevalent in computing, it's important to emphasise that not only are they innappropriate for software, since the latter essentially consists of mathematical algorithms, but they are damaging even in the wider world. James Watt's use of patents to stifle the development of steam engines (yes, you read that correctly) is perhaps the best-known example, but here's another, more recent one:

For Memorial Day this past weekend, the Associated Press ran an article all about the sudden rise in popularity of infrared grills for home use. Despite the technology first being invented in the 60s (for drying paint on cars), it was a very limited market until the key patent expired in 2000 and real innovation could occur that would allow such grills to be produced economically for backyard use.

Time to kill those patents, people.

Will Microsoft Be Assimilated?

I knew that I knew nothing about aQuantive. Here, for example, is something rather important that I didn't know I didn't know:

Information available from Atlas' Web site indicates the Internet software company employs extensive use of open source software including Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Solaris.

Software engineers at Atlas' Raleigh office do client/server development in C and C++, software maintenance and "scripting", and developing and maintaining custom reporting capabilities.

Other sought after skills include Unix development, JavaScript, and those for Windows software administration like SQL Server and IIS.

The use of open source is not confined to Atlas with the second significant business unit Avenue A Razorfish boasting "we also frequently utilize open source technologies".

There was a similar situation when Microsoft bought Hotmail, which was running on Apache and FreeBSD for a long time after acquisition. Since aQuantive is much bigger, we can presumably expect Microsoft to have even more difficulty assimilating it.

The Wisdom of Metrics

I like reading Nicholas Carr's stuff because it is often provocative and generally thought-provoking. A good example is his recent "Ignorance of Crowds" which asserts:

Wikipedia’s problems seem to stem from the fact that the encyclopedia lacks the kind of strong central authority that exerts quality control over the work of the Linux crowd. The contributions of Wikipedia’s volunteers go directly into the product without passing through any editorial filter. The process is more democratic, but the quality of the product suffers.

I think this misses a key point about the difference between open source and open content that has nothing to do with authority. Software has clear metrics for success: the code runs faster, requires less memory, or is less CPU-intensive, etc. There is no such metric for content, where it essentially comes down to matters of opinion much of the time. Without a metric, monotonic improvement is impossible to achieve: the best you can hope for is a series of jumps that may or may not make things "better" - whatever that means in this context.

This is an important issue for many domains where the open source "method" is being applied: the better the metric available, the more sustained and unequivocal the progress will be. For example, the prospects for open science, powered by open access + open data, look good, since a general metric is available in the form of fit of theory to experiment.

Microsoft Backs Open...Spectrum

Interesting:

Today UK regulator Ofcom released its review of the ~750 responses it received during a public consultation earlier this year on reallocating the "digital dividend" (frequencies released by the switch-off of analog TV broadcasts).

The exceptionally large number of responses shows that the public recognised the importance of this consultation. It also shows that Ofcom's proposals were controversial. Many commenters question whether auctions of service-neutral licenses can ensure that non-economic factors are considered in the redistribution of spectrum.

Ofcom's review of the responses gives a surprising amount of space to Microsoft's submission, which was only 8 pages long. Since that response argued strongly for license exempt use of the "dividend" we find it especially interesting, too.

I've been remiss on this one - in fact, mea culpa, I didn't even get around to making a submission myself (shocking, I know). So it's great to see Microsoft doing it for me....

Openness is Hard-Wired in the Brain

Altruism, which lies at the heart of true openness, is hard-wired, it seems:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Now there's a surprise. Not.

More Google Desktop Moves

Google's story that it's really, really, really not competing with Microsoft gets thinner by the day. Apparently, it's just bought a very interesting security company called the GreenBorder Technologies:

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, GreenBorder Technologies was founded in 2001 to bring a new approach to enterprise security. GreenBorder, the industry’s first Desktop DMZ software for Windows, keeps Internet invaders out and enterprise data in. It allows users to safely connect anywhere, go to any website, open any Internet email or attachment, and use any downloaded files without worry. GreenBorder’s unique, signature-less approach never needs updating and provides continuous protection against corruption, theft and invasion of business data systems.

I wonder when Microsoft is going to take Google seriously.

MySpace - Closed, Facebook - Open

A little simplistic, perhaps, but it captures the spirit of the direction of both outfits, I think. Certainly, Facebook's decision to provide an API to third-party developers should provide a perfect test of the closed vs. open approach. I don't use either, but my money's (obviously) on Facebook. Should be interesting.