UK ID Cards DOA?

Regular/long-suffering readers will know that I am an implacable foe of the UK Government's scheme to make everyone in the country carry ID cards. As well as being a huge waste of money (all £19 billion of it), they will inevitably make us less secure (just ask Bruce Schneier).

So I was delighted to come across this fantastic scoop by The Sunday Times, which suggests that the scheme is much closer to collapse than even I might have hoped. This is based on some killer emails that were leaked to the newspaper by senior civil servants involved in the doomed project.

A sample of their candid views:

This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality.

...

I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.

...

Just because ministers say do something does not mean we ignore reality - which is what seems to have happened on ID Card

And don't miss John Lettice's usual lucid analysis of what all this really means.

A Defence of the Intellectual Commons

Use rights over cultural and scientific information are of fundamental political importance to citizens everywhere. These rights will be deeply affected by the kinds of intellectual property rights we allow to develop. This article argues for positive intellectual commons as a means of increasing freedom and diversity in information societies. Selforganized, positive intellectual commons will become more prevalent as citizens conclude that governments, will not deliver the institutions of knowledge that citizens want.

Which is of course what I have been saying for a while in this blog. But this paper by Peter Drahos puts it rather well; moreover, his background makes him rather better-qualified than I am to give some serious academic justifications for the ideas we share. Do read it. (Via Open Access News.)

The Rules of Open Source Marketing

Over on LWN.net I've an article grandly entitled "The birth of the open source enterprise stack", which has generated a fair amount of comment on the site. At the end, I write:

a subsequent feature will explore the surprising richness of the upper layers of the emerging open source enterprise stack, in areas such as systems management, customer relationship management, business intelligence, enterprise content management, enterprise resource planning and communications.

One of the companies I shall be discussing in the context of enterprise content management is Alfresco, so I was intrigued to come across an extensive think-piece by that company's marketing director, Ian Howells.

It, too, has a rather grandiose title: "10 Rules of Open Source Marketing". It draws heavily on Geoffrey Moore's ideas, but contains some interesting insights of its own. The one that I particularly liked was the following:

Rule 9: Your Software Infrastructure is Key
Dell transformed the PC industry not by selling cheap PCs but transforming the whole value chain and supply chain for PC production. From an operational perspective Open Source isn't about cheap software but about transforming the whole value chain for software across development, testing, translation, product management, marketing, sales and support.

The number of people downloading your software, asking questions, accessing your Web site, accessing demonstrations, trialing the product, discussing in forums, updating the wiki ... is massive compared to a traditional software start-up company. The extended infrastructure has to be able to support contributions, bug reports, and fixes from other individuals/companies, take feedback from forums and surveys, and be able to support hundreds of thousands people downloading your software. In amongst this, you have to be able to identify those who want to buy support, patches, and updates for a mission-critical environment and those who want to use the open source as part of the community. Open Source companies have to be masters of the whole Open Source software value chain to support the massive growth potential.

I really think this idea is the key to why open source will ultimately prevail: it represents a thorough-going re-invention of the entire process of creating, distributing and supporting code. Responses by traditional software companies are necessarily partial - unless they convert to open source themselves - and so by definition insufficient.

Google's Deep Search

We tend to think of Google as an engine that finds matches for concepts, since that's how we frame our searches. But in fact, it's simply matching patterns - just try typing a few random characters into the Google box and searching for them: you'll be amazed what can turn up.

As this article indicates, those patterns could just as easily be binary sequences that go to make up executable files - which are simply a pattern with a different kind of "meaning". This seems to indicate that Google is not just indexing the manifest content of the Web, but the entire - and much larger - binary universe that is accessible in some way online.

A Third of a Million eBooks - Free

I have been rather remiss in not pointing out that the World eBook Fair started last Tuesday. In celebration of the 35th anniversary of the founding of Project Gutenberg:

The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.

You can either just bung in a search term on the home page given above, or - probably better - go to the full listing of the constituent collections.

I have to say these are pretty impressive. As well as practically every Western classic you could think (already well-covered by Project Gutenberg) there's some interestingly specialist stuff here: for example, Asian classics (don't miss "Response to a Question on the Five Degenerations of the Eon of Strife" - in Tibetan, of course), seriously deep ancient middle eastern texts (Egyptian, Sumerian etc.), tens of thousands of multilingual editions, 8,000 English poems and sheet music.

It's true that these are not all completely open content: many exist in new "editions" which are copyrighted. They also tend to be PDF files, and some scans from books are not very accurate. But it would be churlish to dwell on these deficiencies (none of which applies to the original Project Gutenberg, which is completely open, in the public domain and highly accurate): get downloading and enjoy.

Open Source in Schools: Could Try Harder

A few months back I wrote about open source's big blunder: its neglect of the education sector. So I was naturally curious when I came across a column that began:

I asked for successes at schools using Open Source Software, and I received a wide variety of them.

Alas, the few examples given show a market is that is still, shall we say, learning its ABC. Overall result: could try harder.

The Other Kind of Open Source Languages

I am constantly delighted by the wit and wisdom of TechDirt. The latest example: a nice little meditation on the virtues of "open source" languages like English, where anyone can make up their own words, and that do not have standards bodies à l'Académie française telling people what is and isn't allowed.

It's true that French isn't exactly closed source (I believe you're allowed to write words down across the Channel), but it's a nice conceit.

Where in the World Are...OSS Companies?

If you've ever wondered where all these new and not-so-new open source companies are based, but can't be bothered looking them all up online, here's a nice mashup that shows the physical location of many of them. All we need now is a similar map for all the coders.... (Via Matthew Aslett.)

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 470

Yesterday I passed on a story about a closed source company unilaterally upping its support prices, and simply locking people out of their files if they refused to pay. Now, here's another good reason not to use proprietary systems.

The UK's shiny new IT system for the National Health Service (NHS) is fast becoming the biggest disaster in the history of computing. The latest area to suffer is that of childhood vaccinations:

Child vaccination rates may be falling to risky levels after a new IT system was installed, a health watchdog says.

Ten out of London's 31 primary care trusts have installed new software to manage the vaccine programme as part of a £6.8bn overhaul of NHS computers

...

Richard Bacon, a Tory MP and member of the Commons' Public Accounts Committee, said: "The national vaccination programme has been one of the NHS's greatest successes."

But he added the IT upgrade appeared to be "destroying it at a touch of a button".

And why is this all happening?

A spokesman for NHS Connecting for Health said the new system was implemented at short notice because the previous supplier "withdrew support for its ageing system from the market".

Had this "ageing system" been open source, the NHS could simply have called in another third-party contractor and given them the code. Since it was closed source, it was doomed when the supplier abandoned it, leaving the health system up to its neck in the proverbial.

Nor is this a matter of simple inconvenience: children are likely to die, if herd immunity is gradually lost as a result of these IT failings.

Why Yell Makes Me See Red

According to Wikinews:

Yell, the world's biggest yellow pages publisher, today threatened to shut down Yellowikis, the wiki-based yellow pages directory.

Yell accused Yellowikis co-founders Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus (his 15 year-old daughter) of "misrepresentation", "passing off" and suggested that using the name Yellowikis could "constitute an 'instrument of fraud'."

Yell is demanding that Paul and Rosa close down the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005, whereas Yellowikis had a loss of $500. The $500 was used to print T-shirts promoting Yellowikis at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt.

Since Yell is apparently a UK company, this makes me ashamed to be British.

Let's look at the situation. You have a multi-billion pound company tied to a dead-tree model - just think of the resources it is wasting - bullying an open, volunteer project that is completely online (and innovative, to boot), through legal threats based on totally outrageous accusations.

Well, guess what?

I am now going to put all my Yell directories in for recycling, in an attempt to undo some of the environmental damage they have caused. And if Yell send me any more (as they are bound to do), I will try to refuse them; if I can't, I will promptly recycle those, too.

Henceforth, I will conduct all of my searches through Yellowikis, with the odd bit of Google thrown in where necessary. When I ring up companies I will make it clear that I never use dead-tree directories, and that they really should go online, maybe with something like Yellowikis, which is completely free. (Via TechDirt.)

Biofuels and the Environmental Commons

Biofuels are much in the news lately. Generally, they are presented as a clever way of getting round oil-dependence, with the added bonus of being environmentally sound: after all, what could be greener than plants?

But step back to look at the bigger picture, and you see that biofuels are no solution; worse, they would actually be disastrous to the environmental commons:

The United States annually consumes more fossil and nuclear energy than all the energy produced in a year by the country's plant life, including forests and that used for food and fiber, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy and David Pimentel, a Cornell University researcher.

...

Corn and soybean production as practiced in the Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. Its effects include massive topsoil erosion, pollution of surface and groundwater with pesticides, and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen and life from a New Jersey-size portion of the Gulf of Mexico.

Sun Gets Stack Love

After Larry "I'd like to have the complete stack" Ellison, it seems that Sun is joining the Club of Stack Love. Not such a daft idea, actually.

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 469

How about this one?

Some doctors who use Dr. Notes' electronic medical records software say they have been denied access to the program and their patients' medical records because they refused to pay increased technical support fees.

(Via LXer and GPL Medicine.)

Open Source Trains

Well, we've got the open source car, so I suppose it's only fair that there should be open source trains. Sounds like a brilliant solution to the near-total breakdown of rail transport infrastructure in Cambodia. And I'm sure there's a great PhD in there somewhere, tracing the evolution of design as ideas are passed around. (Via Boing Boing.)

A Time There Was

I've noted before how mashups depend upon the existence of some kind of mesh; typically this is geographical (which is why so many mashups draw on Google Earth), but time is another obvious option. A good example of how that might be applied can be seen in the new site The Time When.

The idea is beautifully simple: anyone can write short descriptions of why certain dates are important to them. Alongside the entries, there is information about what happened that day, who the monarch was and so on. But as Antony Mayfield astutely observes, you could go much further:

the application could be used in all sorts of ways - I guess some bright spark there is already mashing it up with Google Earth or some such so the memories can start to hang out in space as well as time, as it were

adding extra dimensions to the mesh.

It's worth pointing out that this idea comes from the BBC, which is fast emerging as a real hotbed of creativity when it comes to applying Web 2.0-ish technologies. And if you want to see want kind of stuff people put in their entries, you could always try this.

The Behemoth Bends to ODF

Wow: it looks like Microsoft has finally admitted that ODF is now too big to ignore. According to the C|net story:

Microsoft said it plans to sponsor an open-source project to create software that will convert Office documents to OpenDocument, a rival format gaining ground, particularly among governments.

The software giant on Thursday is expected to launch the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects that use the BSD open-source license.

The software, developed by a France-based Microsoft partner, will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in the OpenDocument, or ODF, format.

Open source, too.

This is big, not least because it indicates that ODF is now strong enough to bend even the mighty behemoth.

From the Commons to...Managed Parks?

One of the areas where the commons is being increasingly invoked is that of radio spectrum, the idea being that there can be frequencies "held in common" for the benefit of all. WiFi is a good example, and more and more jurisdictions are looking to create spectrum commons of one kind or another in order to encourage innovation with the minimum of regulation.

But here's an interesting twist from New Zealand, which is considering creating both "public parks" and "managed parks" for radio spectrum:

A "public park" is analogous to common land, with complete freedom of entry balanced by a requirement that users do not interfere with the activities of other licensees. In New Zealand, limits and conditions of use are defined by a General User Licence (GUL). A common condition of use is operation on a non-interference basis which means that a (General User Radio Licence) GURL licensee shall not cause interference to, nor claim protection from, other licensed services. As a result, issues of interference are normally resolved between users, as a matter of common interest.

"Public parks" can be used for a variety of other purposes including, for example, security detectors, cordless phones, radio-controlled devices, medical monitors and RFID labels. It is possible that, at a local level, this may continue to be a satisfactory environment for some broadband service providers.

...

The Ministry has also been considering combining the advantages of the "public park" with features of the spectrum licence, by establishing "Managed Parks". If "public park" spectrum is analogous to common land, then the Managed Park is akin to a publicly-owned sports ground, in that there is a gate-keeper, consent is required to gain admission and users can engage only in the activities for which the facility is provided.

Aren't metaphors a wonderful thing? (Via Openspectrum.info.)

Jimbo's Wikipolitics

Jimmy Wales, (co)-founder of Wikipedia has launched Campaigns Wikia, part of his new Wikia site, the commercial arm of Wikipedia. As the mission statement explains:

For more than 50 years now, we have been living in the era of television politics. In the 1950s television first began to have a major impact on politics, and the results were overwhelming.

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let's be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

NPOV, anyone?

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians.

With refreshing candour Wales writes:

So, I will frankly admit right up front: I don't know how to make politics healthier. But, I believe that you do. I believe that together we can work, this very election season, to force campaigns to use wikis and blogs to organize, discuss, manage, lead and be led by their volunteers.

Which is fair enough.

Pity that, like The Commons Rising discussed below, his vision has a distinctly parochial feel about it - "this very election season", he writes: not here, mate.

Think big, Jimmy, think global. (Via Boing Boing.)

The Commons Rising

A little while back I wrote about the On The Commons site. It's now launched a new introduction to the area:

The Commons Rising is about the profusion of commons initiatives that are defending and invigorating the commons in all sorts of arenas -- the Internet, natural resources, public spaces, information and culture. We can see the "commons rising" in collaborative websites and ecosystem trusts; in innovative legal tools such as conservation easements and Creative Commons licenses; in new types of social networks such as community gardens and time banks; and in new online communities such as Wikipedia, free and open source software, Craigslist and open science initiatives.

There's nothing startlingly new here, but it's well put, if overly US-centric. If you ever need a short document on the subject to pass on to interested parties, I'd recommend it.

Who Ya Gonna Call? Patentbusters!

This blog has lamented often and loudly about the idiotic patents being granted, principally in the US (but with the EU trying very hard to follow down the same pitiful path). The question is, what can we do about it? Or, to put it another way, who are we going to call? - Patentbusters, of course, in the form of the EFF's Patent Busting project, which seeks to find prior art to invalidate bogus patent claims.

Mind you, with some of the top 10 most wanted, you have to ask why even this is necessary, so blindingly obvious are they. Take ClearChannel, for example, which somehow has a patent for

A system and method for recording live performances (e.g. music concerts), editing them into tracks during the performance, and recording them to media (e.g. CDs) within minutes of the performance ending.

Well, that must have been really hard to invent.

Wikifying Search with Swickis

Swickis are an interesting idea. As their mother-ship, Eurekster, explains:

A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you're interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community.

If you want to see one in action, try archival, which helps you "find texts, images, audio, art, public-domain images and information, electronic books, and archival media." The interesting bit is that once you have done a search, you can suggest re-orderings of the results - just mouse over the entry, and use the options that appear to the right.

The Curse of the Open Source IPO

There's a nice round-up of open source IPOs by Matthew Aslett. I'm not sure Trolltech really counts as a full open source company, but I'm probably being a bit harsh given its dual-licensing approach.

What's interesting about this trip down memory lane is that it makes clear just how painful the IPO experience has been for open source companies. A warning, surely, for those that come after.

ODF in MA: Open and Shut?

The roller-coaster ride of ODF in Massachusetts continues. After the extraordinary blasting the decision had received, which seemed to place its future in the balance, it now looks like things are still steaming ahead. This one will run and run.

Another One Bites the (GNU GPL) Dust

Univention is not a company I'd heard of before; apparently,

Univention GmbH offers a range of Linux-based products and services. Our core competencies are integration of Linux and Windows (on the server and on the client side), directory services, Linux on the desktop, and thin-client technology.

And now it has decided to take its product open source, using the GNU GPL. Heise Online has a better explanation of what is going on:

Both the installation program and, more importantly, the LDAP-based UCS management system are affected; the latter makes it easy to install Linux systems even in far-reaching environments, providing management down to identity and infrastructure. It offers defined interfaces and has, among other things, connectors for an Active Directory, which enables smooth integration in Windows networks.

The Heise report also has this interesting nugget:

The firm stated that this step was only taken after all of its key customers had been consulted. The customers are still willing to pay for the professional maintenance of the code -- for reasons of product liability among other things -- and for support.

My Bardolatry Out in the Open

I'm not really sure what this Open Shakespeare project is trying to achieve that hasn't already been done. No matter: if it's the Bard, put me down for half a dozen.

On second thoughts, scrub that. Since it's meant to be a triumphant demonstration of the virtues of openness as well as whatever else it is, you'd better put me down for a couple of dozen - just to be on the safe side: you just can't have too much of this stuff.

The Dark Side of Eclipse

Eclipse has finished last as far as quality of features are concerned in a survey of developers conducted by Evans Data Corp, and reported by The Register. Looks like there's some work to do here, chaps.

Are Coders Beginning to Get the Message?

The Reg has a good summary of the European Commission's initial findings from its public consultation on Europe's patent system. For me, the most interesting statistic to emerge is that 24% of those who replied came from the open source and software developers community. This says to me that people there are beginning to get the message that they must become involved if they want to change things. Maybe there's hope after all.

Blake Ross On Microsoft's Great Culpability

There's a fine interview with Blake Ross, one of the prime movers behind Firefox, from Seattle PI. Mostly it's just sensible stuff - which augurs well for Ross's start-up, whatever it is - but it contains one insight about the consequences of Microsoft's persistent non-development of Internet Explorer that bears quoting:

The truth is I think Microsoft is very directly responsible for spyware and adware and the pop-up ads in general that proliferated across the Web after they abandoned their product. I mean, this is the world's most-used software application ever ... and I just think it's irresponsible for a company to abandon it simply because they can't find a financial incentive to continue development on it.

(Via Slashdot.)

A Phlock of Photobuckets

The Flock browser is an interesting idea - a re-imagining of the Firefox engine for a Web 2.0 world. Of course, if you don't like that world, you won't like Flock, since it lives and breathes blogs and photo-sharing. It's the latter fact that makes it particularly suitable for customisations, such as this one from Photobucket (but shouldn't they have re-named it Phlock?).

I have never used Photobucket (I believe it's one of those young people's sites), but I'm glad to see Flock getting some deals. Innovation is always welcome, and it would be good to see Flock establish itself as an alternative to the vanilla Firefox. (Via TechCrunch.)

Wine is Not the Only Fruit

Many people have heared about Wine - which describes itself as follows:

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available.

Less well-known, though is FreeDOS, which does something similar for MS-DOS. This project has been going for ages (there's a good history here), and now it seems almost done. Quite whether the world needs an MS-DOS clone is another matter, but it's good to see it reaching fruition.

Fine Microsoft? Fine: But It's Pointless

According to The New York Times, the EU is about to thump Microsoft to the tune of a couple of million a day. I say: quite right, too. As I've written before, Microsoft just keeps playing the same old games of delay, dilatoriness and deceit. It deserves a severe corporate smacking.

But I have to add: fining Microsoft at this level will not make one jot of difference - it can't even feel a million dollars. Make it a billion a day, and maybe then it will notice.

As a result, it will not change its behaviour - which consists of taking the regulation game to the wire - nor will it change the marketplace. The only thing that will do that is if the EU - and other governments - back open source seriously to provide a counter-balance to Microsoft's otherwise unbridled power.

Plugging Away at ODF Plug-ins

According to this article, there are plenty of people beavering away on plug-ins for Microsoft Office to allow users to open and save files in the ODF format. But the interesting bit is this comment from Gary Edwards, one of the top people in the ODF world:

other developers, such as Gary Edwards, head of the OpenDocument Foundation, said he demonstrated his plug-ins to officials last week.

"They've been incredibly systematic, throwing hard stuff at us," he said, noting that his plug-in enables Microsoft Office to open a 16,000-row spreadsheet saved in the ODF format in 31 seconds. Opening the spreadsheet in Excel takes 43 seconds, he said.

Despite Microsoft's concerns that the rise of ODF could prove problematic for Office in the marketplace, Edwards said Microsoft was very helpful with his development efforts. Microsoft has "the best third-party developer model," he said. "They gave us what we needed, and it works beautifully."

Hm: I wonder what Microsoft are up to here? Could it be that they are resigned to ODF compatibility becoming a common requirement, and therefore accept the need to support it?

My Old Dutch

From the fine people that brought us Rembrandt van Rijn and Joost van den Vondel, now some sensible thoughts on the iniquitous EU directive proposing the criminalisation of all violations of intellectual monopolies - copyright, patents, trademarks, the lot. As the article linked to explains, this would entail an expansion of police activities in this area and a major shift of power towards big business.

Of Blogs and Bears

Things are getting seriously dotcom dotty in the world of blogs, with silly money flowing rather too easily into blogs whose long-term potential is not clear. Good, then, to see that arch-cynic Nick "Old Nick" Denton take the opportunity to play the contrarian, cutting staff and putting some blogs up for sale.

Tuning in to the University Channel

Open courseware is an exciting application of openness in the educational context, that is about distributing courseware. The University Channel is an extension of this, in that it provides a selection of video and audio recordings of lectures that are freely available under a CC licence. (Via Creative Commons blog.)

NeoOffice Lets Mac Users Choose the Red Pill

One of the great strengths of open source is its ability to offer cross-platform solutions. As a result, users can switch between Windows and GNU/Linux, or Macintosh and GNU/Linux (as seems to be happening increasingly).

This makes NeoOffice, a port of OpenOffice.org to the Macintosh platform, a key part of the free office suite's strength and appeal. It's good, then, to see NeoOffice 2.0 on its way. (Via LXer and MacDailyNews.)

Carnival of the Bioinformaticians

A little while back I wrote about the blog-form of carnivals. At the time, Pedro Beltrão said he was about to start a new one, devoted to bioinformatics, and here it is, Bio::Blogs, with its very own Web sit. I really must write something for the next one.

The Economics of Security

In his lastest Wired column, Bruce S. is writing about a subject particularly dear to my heart: the economics of security. He was lucky enough to go up to the fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at Cambridge: I had hoped to go, but a sudden influx of work prevented me.

My own interest in this area was sparked by a talk that Ross Anderson, now a professor at Cambridge, gave down in London. I vaguely knew Ross at university, when both of us had rather more hair than we do now. Since this was 30 years ago, it's not suprising that he didn't remember me when I introduced myself at the London talk, pointing out that the last time I had seen him was in Whewell's Court: he stared at me as if I was completely bonkers. Ah well.

Schneier gives a good summary of what this whole area is about, and why it is so important:

We generally think of computer security as a problem of technology, but often systems fail because of misplaced economic incentives: The people who could protect a system are not the ones who suffer the costs of failure.

When you start looking, economic considerations are everywhere in computer security. Hospitals' medical-records systems provide comprehensive billing-management features for the administrators who specify them, but are not so good at protecting patients' privacy. Automated teller machines suffered from fraud in countries like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, where poor regulation left banks without sufficient incentive to secure their systems, and allowed them to pass the cost of fraud along to their customers. And one reason the internet is insecure is that liability for attacks is so diffuse.

Read the whole column, and then, if you are feeling strong, try Ross's seminal essay on the subject: "Why Information Security Is Hard -- An Economic Perspective".

Will RFID Go Phut?

Many people have expressed concerns about the privacy implications of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. But until now, RFID proponents have tended to ignore these issues, claiming that benefits outweigh the risks. However, now that the US Government seems to be worried too, the RFID community may find selling those benefits rather harder. (Via Openspectrum.info.)

Eclipse Advances by Backing Up

Eclipse began life as a Java development platform at IBM that was meant to, er, eclipse Sun's NetBeans tools. Today, it is turning into a kind of total development environment for everything. The latest proof of this is Aperi, an open source project for managing storage devices and the networks on which they reside.

Update: The Reg has some good detailed analysis here.

The Monster Arrives

Bruce - the other Bruce - says: "We've warned you for a decade". More precisely:

Now the monster has finally arrived: attacks against Open Source developers by patent holders, big and small. One is a lawsuit against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping used in Hibernate, a popular component of enterprise Java applications everywhere. The other attack is on an individual Open Source developer for his model railroad software.

Bruce has been known to annoy people both within and without the open source community, but there's no doubting his credentials. Read the rest of his article for the full details of what's happening and what the larger threats are.

Haugland on ODF and Tube Tops

With postings like this, how can Microsoft Office ever hope to prevail?

SCOing, SCOing, SCOne

IANAL, but it seems to me that this judgement, lovingly typed in by Pamela Jones at Groklaw, is a pretty serious blow to SCO's case against IBM. And it wasn't looking very healthy before.

The real killer seems to me to be the following passage, brilliant and witty at the same time:

SCO’s arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM sorry we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know. SCO received substantial code from IBM pursuant to the court’s orders as mentioned supra. Further, SCO brought this action against IBM and under the Federal Rules, and the court’s orders, SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated. Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is in essence still not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that “you know what you stole I’m not telling.” Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus’ entire inventory and say “its in there somewhere, you figure it out.”

Hard to believe that people were seriously talking about the SCO lawsuit as the end of Openness As We Know It.

UK Gets Open Access Brownie Points

Stevan Harnad, the OA Archivangelist himself, has given the UK a Bravo! for the Research Council UK's decision to let individual funding councils decide for themselves whether or not to mandate OA self-archiving. As he says:

Although we had rather hoped for a more concerted consensus from Research Councils UK (RCUK), nevertheless, with three out of the eight councils mandating Open Access Self-Archiving, one strongly encouraging it, and four not yet decided, that is still enough to restore the UK's commanding lead in worldwide OA Policy today.

(Via Open Access News.)

Pootling Away

As I've pointed out before, one of free software's great strengths is that it can serve smaller markets that proprietary systems can't be bothered with. So it's good to find that there is some free software specifically designed to help with the process of translating the wordy bits of programs into new languages.

The overall project is known by the dull moniker of translate.sourceforge.net, but is redeemed by the splendidly-named Pootle portal to facilitate the process. More about Pootle and related projects at Wordforge can be found here.

LiMux Läuft

The City of Munich's decision to migrate to free software was one of the banner victories of the open source world. For this reason, a lot of people - no names, no packdrill, Steve - have a vested interest in seeing it fail, preferably dramatically.

And certainly, things have not gone entirely smoothly for the LiMux project: for example, there was the business about European software patents that slowed things down. But things are still moving: as the deputy Lady Mayor of Munich put it: "LiMux läuft" - LiMux is running (in all senses).

Now, there's more sniping, this time in the Senate administration of Berlin (a little inter-city rivalry, or something more?). Anyway, Munich is resolute in its defence of the project, and Heise Online has a good summary of the current state of play there.

Checking Out Google Checkout

I've not used Google Checkout, launched today, in anger yet, but I've no reason to think that it won't do what it says on the tin. There are, however, a couple of things that strike me.

The first is pretty obvious: by adding this facility to let signed-up Googlers - people who probably already use Gmail and Google a lot - pay by using this system, the company is going to know even more about what you are doing, potentially at least.

Even if the company never joins the dots together, we've already seen that the US Government wants to get its mitts on all that yummy data for its own nefarious purposes. Similarly, lawyers are bound to try to gain access to all kinds of incriminating evidence this cross-linked data will provide.

Secondly, and less obviously, perhaps, is he fact that Google is entering even further into Microsoft territory here. As the press release puts it:

Google Checkout helps merchants streamline the checkout process and also works with Google's advertising program, AdWords, so merchants can attract more customers and increase sales. The Google Checkout icon on AdWords advertisements makes it easier for shoppers to find Google Checkout stores when they search. Once shoppers buy with Google Checkout, AdWords advertisers can also process all or a portion of their sales for free. For every $1 merchants spend on AdWords, they can process $10 in sales through Google Checkout at no charge.

In other words, Google is using the power that it has gained through the success of AdWords to help cross-promote the acceptance of Google Checkout. When Microsoft does this kind of thing, the world squawks: perhaps it's time to do the same with Google.

Update: Om Malik has some interesting thoughts on what this all means.

Use, Re-use and Abuse

A PLoS blog post provides some examples of the Creative Commons' Attribution Licence being used in anger. The idea here, of course, is that you are free to re-use material licensed in this way - if you give proper attribution. The blog lists a few examples of saints who do - and one sinner who doesn't.

Naming and shaming is an important way to police this kind of (ab)use, and should be a routine part of the way the Attribution Licence is used.

Why Open WiFi Security Isn't a Problem

In a study of almost 2,500 access points in Indianapolis, presented at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security at the University of Cambridge on Monday, researchers found that 46 percent were not running any form of encryption.

But the article this comes from goes on to quote several sensible comments on this fact, including one from the ever-dependable Bruce:

security expert Bruce Schneier argued that as long as people's devices were secure, having a secured network was unnecessary.

"I have a completely open Wi-Fi network," Schneier told ZDNet UK. "Firstly, I don't care if my neighbors are using my network. Secondly, I've protected my computers. Thirdly, it's polite. When people come over they can use it."

There are also wise words from Microsoft's chief privacy adviser for Europe, Caspar Bowden:

"If you do want to secure your network, look at end-to-end solutions rather than some of the dodgy crypto around like WEP," Bowden said. "There's only one thing worse than no security, and that's a false sense of security," he added.

Amen to that.

More Kudos to Auntie

Another sign that at least some people at the BBC get it.

There's a good post by Paul Mason about user-generated versions of sporting events (I gather there's something of the kind going on somewhere at the moment). He points out that all sorts of content are starting to turn up on YouTube. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Other spin-off coverage is the rise of the montage-to-music genre of football imagery to make a point. This excellent lament by a S Korea fan of their trouncing by Switzerland is a case in point....though because it is composed of copyright images you will have to click thru to it rather than running it on this site...

This treads a fine line: it doesn't directly take on the copyright thugs, but it certainly doesn't condemn what's going on either. Obviously, a high-profile institution like the BBC has to be careful, but this sensible, moderate approach augurs well for the future. (Via TechDirt.)