21 February 2008
UK Copyright Extension Alert
Even though the Gowers Review comprehensively trashed the idea of extending copyright for sound recordings, zombie-like it's back as a Private Member's Bill. The indispensable Open Rights Group has more and tells you what do about it. Hint: it involves writing to your MP:What can you say to persuade your MP to show up to the Commons on a Friday? Perhaps you might point out that all the economic evidence points against term extension. Or that every other UK citizen is expected to contribute to their pension out of income earned in their working life. Or that retrospectively extending copyright term won’t encourage Elvis Presley to record any more new tracks. Or that if governments continue to draft intellectual property legislation on behalf of special interest groups, it will only further erode the respect that ordinary citizens have for the letter of the law.
Why Intellectual Property Does Not Exist, Part 3502
A nice point from Mike Masnick:Those who insist that copyright is the same as real property break their own rule by also insisting that they retain perpetual rights to the good, even after it's been sold. If copyright were like real property, after the creator sold it, the buyer could do whatever they want with it, including giving it out for free.
A hit, a very palpable hit.
The Inq Has the Dirt on the One
More details on the Elonex £100 ultraportable:Elonex claims the whole caboodle is optimised for the Linux software it runs. The Linux is Debian flavoured and the little office suite that is bundled with it is all branded ONE. ONEInternet, ONEMail, ONEWord, etc.
As we surmised, storage comes in a 1Gb flash flavour. There's 128Mb of DDR-II memory, a seven-inch 800 by 480 LCD screen with stereo two-channel audio, built-in speakers, a microphone and audio Jack. Wibbling comes courtesy of a Lan/WLAN 10/100M Ethernet with WLAN 802.11g Antenna.
Update: And someone else has spotted that it seems to be this machine, rebadged.
Hip-hip-Hadoop!
Just one more reason why the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, if it happens, will be hell:
Yahoo is following in Google’s footsteps again in search. Today, it is shifting a crucial part of its search engine to Hadoop, software that handles large-scale distributed computing tasks particularly well. Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce software and file system.
...
Yahoo is replacing its own software with Hadoop and running it on a Linux server cluster with 10,000 core processors.
Go that? 10,000 core processors running GNU/Linux at the heart of Yahoo. Microsoft is damned if they do (rip and replace) and damned if they don't. Go on, make our day, Steve....
Document Freedom Day a Month Too Late?
It all sounds jolly japes:
On 26 March 2008, the Document Freedom Day will provide a global rallying point for Document Liberation and Open Standards. It will literally give teams around the world the chance to "hoist the flag": A 'DFD Starter Pack' containing a flag, t-shirt, leaflets and stickers is in preparation and is planned to be sent out in the first weeks of March to the first 100 teams that sign up. Sixteen teams already signed up during the preparation phase of the DFD prior to this release. Sign your team up now!
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
But I can't help feeling that they have missed a trick here. Surely the obvious time to try to raise awareness of open documents and open standards was just before the meeting beginning on February 25 in Geneva to decide the fate of Microsoft's soi-disant Open Office XML format?
Welcome to ... The Spittoon
Last night I had the pleasure - and privilege - of attempting to hack the minds of a roomful of young scientists. It was my usual Digital Code of Life riff, and in the course of preparing my thoughts I wandered over to the 23AndMe site. This, you will recall, is:a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.
It is also the company set up by the wife of one of the Google founders - you can join the dots yourself.
But one thing I'd not come across before was the company's blog - called, rather charmingly, The Spittoon....
Adobe Flash - Now with Added Evil
Another reason to hate Flash:Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
(Via Techdirt.)
19 February 2008
Bank Julius Baer, Meet Barbra Streisand
One of the claims to fame of Techdirt's Mike Masnick is for coining the phrase "the Streisand effect":The phenomenon takes its name from Barbra Streisand, who made her own ill-fated attempt at reining in the Web in 2003. That's when environmental activist Kenneth Adelman posted aerial photos of Streisand's Malibu beach house on his Web site as part of an environmental survey, and she responded by suing him for $50 million. Until the lawsuit, few people had spotted Streisand's house, Adelman says--but the lawsuit brought more than a million visitors to Adelman's Web site, he estimates. Streisand's case was dismissed, and Adelman's photo was picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in newspapers around the world.
So attempts by the Bank Julius Baer to shut down the Wikileaks site are not only doomed, but doomed to make things much, much worse than if the bank had just put up with it. Fighting openness is just not a good idea.
Monopoly in the DNA
It seems that Bill Gates' foundation is affected with the same love of monopolies and keeping things closed as its creator:The chief of the malaria program at the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the health agency's policy-making function.
In a memorandum, the chief of the malaria program, Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, that the foundation's money, while crucial, could have "far-reaching, largely unintended consequences."
Many of the world's leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."
Amazing: exactly the same dynamics seem to be operating here for research as for software. Must be something in the DNA. (Via Slashdot.)
18 February 2008
Is Elonex the ONE?
One emerging trend is that of ultra-cheap ultraportables powered - of course - by GNU/Linux. As I've noted before, Microsoft simply cannot follow down this particular rabbit-hole: Windows is too big and too expensive for such cheap hardware.
And to prove the point that the only way is down, here are tantalising hints about a new sub £100 - yes, you read that correctly - machine called the ONE from the UK manufacturer Elonex:The ONE has been specially designed to aid and encourage learning. The user-friendly unit comes with a full software suite including a word processor, spreadsheet, scientific calculator, and an imaging and graphics package. Linux is at the core of the ONE. This has not only massively reduced the cost and has been a major factor in making the ONE available sub £100, but also corresponds with the governments startegy on software interoperability. “I want to see young people access all sorts of software, to feel confident with the use of open-source and proprietary software." Jim Knight MP.
Nice one: let's see what the UK government's reaction to *that* is....
Hacking Ashley Highfield
Some might say I've been overly critical of the BBC's digital boss, Ashley Highfield (no, no). Be that as it may, it's certainly true that I've not offered any concrete solutions for changing his mind about the urgency of divorcing iPlayer from Microsoft (and no, Macintosh implementations do *not* count). Maybe this is the way:
The BBC's George Wright and Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon offered to install the OS on a laptop for Ashley to take home and experiment with. We're hoping that both George and Ashley will be posting about the experience.
Nice move, Jono.
Photoshop on GNU/Linux
As I've noted elsewhere, free software is absolutely central to Google's success and future. Here's some further proof - it's helping to get Photoshop running on GNU/Linux using Wine:"Photoshop is one of those applications that Desktop linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we're happy to say they work pretty well now," Google engineer and Wine release manager Dan Kegel wrote. "About 200 patches were committed to winehq, and as of wine-0.9.54, Photoshop CS2 is quite usable," Kegel noted in a separate post.
(Via tuxmachines.org.)
Motivation of Open Projects Volunteers
More info is always good, especially when it's about open source. So here's what sounds a worthy endeavour:My name is Zbigniew Braniecki and I'm a sociology student at Leon Koźmiński Academy in Warsaw.
The goal of this survey is to extend our knowledge about nature of volunteer participation in the Internet open communities. To learn why people participate and what keeps them going.
It will allow us to better understand how open communities (should) work and who the people building them are.
The survey is made of two parts, socio and psychological. It will be most helpful if you make it to the end.
The whole survey will take you no more than 12 minutes to complete.
Thank you for your help. The results will be publicly available on the Interent.
16 February 2008
Is Europeana Too Flash?
I've written before about the nascent European Digital Library:Consistent with the i2010 digital library initiative, this thematic network will build consensus to create the European Digital Library. It will find solutions to the interoperability of the cultural content held by European museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries in the context of The European Digital Library.
Now we have a chance to try it out - at least as a demo. It's cross-linking is impressively rich, but I do worry that we're going to end up with something too flashy - or, rather, too Flashy, with lots of invisible code that makes deep linking impossible. We shall see - or maybe not....
15 February 2008
Charlie's Not My Darling (Again)
Charlie McCreevy is a one-man disaster area: first he tries to bring in software patents for the European Union, now he wants to extend copyright for performers. I could rant about this but Mike Masnick has already said everything that needs to be said:It's important to be entirely clear here: this is a total and complete bastardization of copyright law. Copyright law was intended to grant the creator of content a deal: you create new content and we will give you a limited time monopoly on the rights to that content before passing it on to the public domain, from which everyone can benefit. It was designed as an incentive system, providing a gov't backed monopoly in exchange for the creation of content. By creating content and accepting that deal, musicians clearly said that it was a reasonable deal. To later go back and change the terms for content already created and extend copyright makes no sense and is violating the contract made with the public. You can't newly incent someone to create content that they already created 50 years ago. Thus, the only reason to extend copyright is if you believe that it's really a welfare system for musicians. If that's the case, then we should be explicit about it, and present it that way, rather than calling it copyright.
That's not all that McCreevy has up his sleeve either. He's also apparently a huge fan of copyright levies that add taxes to any blank media for the sake of reimbursing musicians just in case you happen to use that blank media to record unauthorized material. It's effectively a you must be a criminal tax. So, basically, McCreevy's plan is to treat all consumers as criminals, forcing them to cough up extra money for musicians, while also setting up a welfare system for musicians hidden in the copyright system. Musicians must love him, but it's a bit ridiculous for him to claim these proposals make sense because "copyright protection for Europe's performers represents a moral right to control the use of their work and earn a living from their performances". Does Mr. McCreevy earn a living from something he did 50 years ago? Does Mr. McCreevy get a cut every time a consumer buys something just in case they commit a crime?
Superb stuff, Mike.
14 February 2008
Code is Law is Code
Code and law have been inextricably mixed ever since Richard Stallman drew up the first GNU GPL. Indeed, in many ways, the logical processes for crafting both are similar - which is probably handy. Nonetheless, law does present special problems that hackers need to be aware of.
To provide some help, the Software Freedom Law Center has just put together a useful legal issues primer for open source and free software projects:This Primer provides a baseline of knowledge about those areas of the law, intending to support productive conversations between clients and lawyers about specific legal needs. We aim to improve the conversation between lawyer and client, but not to make it unnecessary, because law, like most things in life, very rarely has clear cut answers. Solutions for legal problems must be crafted in light of the particulars of each client’s situation. What is best for one client in one situation, may very well not be best for another client in the same situation, or even the same client in the same situation at a later date or in a different place. Law cannot yield attainable certainty because it is dynamic, inconsistent, and incapable of mastery by pure rote memorization. This is why we do not provide forms or other tools for “do it yourself” lawyering, which are almost always insufficient and, in fact, can be very harmful to a project’s interests.
The specific topics addressed herein are:
1. copyrights and licensing,
2. organizational structure,
3. patents, and
4. trademarks.
They are presented in this order because that most closely aligns with the life-cycle of the legal needs of a typical FOSS project. When code is written, copyrights immediately come into being. The terms under which the owner of those copyrights allows others to copy, modify and distribute the code determine whether it is considered “free” and/or “open source.” Once a project gains speed, many benefits can be achieved by the creation of an organizational entity for the project that is separate from the project’s individual developers. After successful public release of a project, patent and trademark issues may arise that need attention.
Happy Birthday, Budapest Open Access Initiative
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is the nearest thing to an official definition of open access that we have. Today is apparently its sixth birthday. If you want to find out more about BOAI and what's happened in those six years, where better to go than the man who helped draw up that definition, Peter Suber?
And what better birthday present could open access have have than this announcement that Harvard, or at least The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will be adopting it as standard policy?The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.
What Davos Can Teach Us
The World Economic Forum is a fairly disgusting dance of power and money, but even in this context intelligent observers can learn something useful. For example, here are Brian Behlendorf's thoughts on the problems of getting people to understand and engage with true openness:On the downside: twice, I mentioned ODF vs. OOXML in conversations with people, and each time, there was a lack of awareness of the issue. I really don't want to embarrass them so I won't name names, but they were people who really should have known; one was a leader of a business that has been around for years and has serious document management and longevity issues, the other a government official who was charged with preserving his country's culture but sadly non-technical. In both cases, the initial response was along the lines of "this is a mess that you techies have created, I expect you to clean it up", as if it was simply a matter of defects in code that a company like Microsoft would be cleaning up quickly. If it turned out that valuable company data from 1993 were in a Word file format that couldn't be properly read by Office 2008, then they'd simply hire someone or a firm to dive in and repair it by hand. I believe I brought both of them around to understanding how it's not just a matter of bugfixing or outsourcing the problem, that it is a knowlege and institutional threat, and the role they need to play as informed customers in pressuring vendors to do the right thing. But, Microsoft's judo-move with OOXML of appearing to do the "right" thing that isn't actually right in practice has more power than I think you or I would wish were true.
13 February 2008
Striking Back Against the Three-Strikes Rule
As I noted yesterday, the idea of banning people from the Internet after "three strikes" is both outrageous and unworkable. One reason advanced for the latter is that people may be piggybacking on your wireless router, so they get the files and you get the blame.
That may well be true, but I find this rather weak as a potential defence, since it means that you would need to leave your router open, which many would be chary about. But I've just realised that there's a way to do this that goes beyond simply leaving it open and hoping: you join the Fon community, which is all about opening up your router in a controlled way. What's even better, is that it's backed by none other than BT in the UK:BT and FON have joined forces to create a Wi-Fi community that allows its members to connect for free to thousands of places around the UK and the world, by simply sharing some of their Internet connection at home.
This tie-up with BT always struck me as masterly, because it meant that Fon was suddenly "official", and not some wild hacker thing that ought to be shut down. And yet shutting it down is the only way you could stop strangers from downloading copyright material through your shared connection.
So the three-strikes idea comes down, in part, to this: whether the UK government really wants to scupper BT's attempts to provide "Wifi for everyone", as it puts it, to keep a few lazy media companies quiet for a while - until they realise that plan 'C' has failed too.
Embarrassed by DRM
Here's a telling comment:The point behind all this is, of course, to conceal the very existence of DRM from the user – Microsoft is so keen on this that it won't use the term itself at all. The vast majority of iTunes users have no idea their content is being "protected" through Apple's FairPlay DRM, and while a vocal minority seem to be driving the music world away from DRM'd music, it's hard to imagine Hollywood (or Bollywood) being so keen on sharing their labours.
Ergo, we need to shout about the presence of DRM from the rooftops: the more people know about it, the more they will dislike it, as Microsoft well understands....
12 February 2008
Opening the Mirror
Der Spiegel is the greatest news magazine in the world, bar none. It makes The Economist look superficial, and yet constantly surprises with the range of its coverage.
A little while back, writing about Focus, its main rival - although that's really too strong a word, good though Focus is - and the fact that the latter was providing free access to its archive, I made the wish that Der Spiegel would follow suit.
Apparently, it has. It's called Spiegel Wissen, and I may be some time....
Three Strikes and the Media Industry is Out
So the music and film industries want to follow Sarko's daft plan:People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week.
Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt.
Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law.
Broadband companies who fail to enforce the “three-strikes” regime would be prosecuted and suspected customers’ details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.
Well, if they want three strikes and out, try these for size:
Strike One
The music and then film industries failed to recognise that digital downloads were the future. Instead of embracing this incredibly efficient way of distributing content, the industries have fought it tooth and nail. Since there was no legal way to download materials, users were forced to turn to alternative sources.
Strike Two
When it became blindingly obvious that users wanted digital files, the media industry eventually provided them - in the hideously hobbled form of DRM'd formats. Which meant, once more, that people who wanted content that they could use on all their computers and players were forced to turn to other sources.
Strike Three
The present move. Leaving aside the civil liberties angle - the fact that ISPs become the media industries' spies - and that the UK government proposes propping up a dying business model for no other reason than the said industries demand it, even when there is evidence that sharing music *increases* sales of media - it won't work. The instant this becomes law, the number of sites offering encrypted downloads, which are impossible to check in transit, will mushroom, just as decentralised P2P systems sprang up once Napster was nobbled.
The upside is that average user will probably start using encrypting routinely, thus putting the kibosh on Echelon's easy access to everyone's Internet traffic.
Update: Moreover:UK government proposals to make ISPs take action against the estimated six million users who access pirated online material every year could prompt an explosion in Wi-Fi hijacking, experts warned today.
Microsoft Cunctator
Here's a classic example of how Microsoft plays the delaying game:Microsoft’s rival Sun Microsystems had complained to the Commission that the US software giant would not grant it data needed to ensure that Windows was interoperable.
“Microsoft’s defence was that the information was covered by intellectual property rights,” Hellstrom said. “This argument was never used when Sun asked for the information. It was only used in the eleventh hour. Microsoft showed one patent a day before we adopted our decision [in 2004].”
One day before: obviously hoping to throw yet another spanner in the regulatory works.
Flickrvision
I wrote recently about the wonderful WikipediaVision: be warned, if you thought that was good, you'll love Flickrvision too - and have even less time left to do useful things in your life.... (Via Commonsblog.)
Free Thinking
I have been accused of being "sniffy" about Kevin Kelly's meditation on eight new scarcities created by free; well, be that as it may. However, I was much more impressed by an earlier essay, pointed out by Chris Anderson, called "Technology Wants to be Free", which seems much meatier to me. It contains lots of concrete examples of how the cost of commodities inevitably tend to zero, and concludes with this important thought:The odd thing about free technology is that the “free as in beer” part is actually a distraction. As I have argued elsewhere (see my 2002 New York Times Magazine article on the future of music for example) the great attraction of “free” music is only partially that it does not cost anything. The chief importance of free music (and other free things) is held in the second English meaning of the word: free as in “freedom.” Free music is more than piracy because the freedom in the free digital downloads suddenly allowed music lovers to do all kinds of things with this music that they had longed to do but were unable to do before things were “free.” The “free” in digital music meant the audience could unbundled it from albums, sample it, create their own playlists, embed it, share it with love, bend it, graph it in colors, twist it, mash it, carry it, squeeze it, and enliven it with new ideas. The free-ization made it liquid and ‘free” to interact with other media. In the context of this freedom, the questionable legality of its free-ness was secondary. It didn’t really matter because music had been liberated by the free, almost made into a new media.
11 February 2008
Catalonian Androids
Google's Android makes its debut in Barcelona:The first mobile phones fitted with Google's Android software platform made their debut at an industry trade show on Monday, a key advance in the struggle to bring the power of desktop computing to handsets.
But the most interesting part of this report was the following:
Although the technology on display Monday is in prototype form, experts and journalists were so eager to witness its demonstration that all places for private displays were booked out on Monday within the first hour of the show.
Well, there's clearly some pent-up demand *there*.
DAB Dying?
It might seem strange that an avowed lover of high-tech and music should not have a DAB radio: but so it is with me. In part, it's because DAB in the UK seems to be worse than FM (at least that's what Jack Schofield says, and his argument looks pretty reasonable).
But it's also been from a gut feeling that this is the wrong way to go. It looks like I'm not alone:In a sign of crisis for digital radio, UK commercial radio leader GCap will, as expected, sell its 67 percent stake in the DigitalOne DAB multiplex
...
”We believe that broadband is the ideal complementary platform to analogue radio given the interactivity that they both provide, creating social networks and communities on-air and online.”
I suppose what I'm looking towards is a radio with built-in Wifi to pick up radio-over-IP signals sent out by one of my computers. One reason for that is the extremely high quality of music online these days: BBC Radio 3, for example, is broadcast at 64 kps, which is pretty much CD quality in a domestic setting. Who needs DAB?
XML People: Tim B on TimBL
Here's a rather wonderful document by Tim Bray, one of the key people in the XML world, and someone who evidently knows everyone else there:
XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It’s really long.
It's also really good for its witty pen portraits of XML notables. Here's a sample: Tim B on TimBL:
TimBL is thin, pale, and twitchy, a well-bred British baby-boomer who circumlocutes and temporizes and gets to the point slowly. Englishly, he deplores confrontation and can find a way to paint any blood-feud in the colours of unfortunate misunderstanding. His publications suggest strong idealism, an overriding vision of the future of information space. His detractors say he’s a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky. The McArthur foundation says he’s a genius. I can’t figure out what he’s getting at half the time, or why he does things, but I’ve known a couple of real geniuses and that’s not necessarily a symptom.
However, I take exception to that idea of TimBL being "a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky." Not so much because it's insulting Sir Tim, but because I think it misses the point entirely. Like RMS's, TimBL's greatest contribution is not actually technical: it is ethical.
Had he not put his code into the public domain - after briefly flirting with the idea of licensing it under the GNU GPL - the Web would not have become the greatest invention of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is for his inspired altruism that we salute Sir Tim - not for anything so trivial as a markup language.
OOoCon in China?
The OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) is anannual gathering is where representatives of all the community projects meet to celebrate and learn from the achievements of the past twelve months, and discuss how to meet the challenges of the next twelve.
Hardly stuff to get excited about, you might think, but apparently not:I was only 50% out yesterday when I expected four bids to host the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference this year (OOoCon 2008). It’s felt like every time I looked in my inbox today, there was another entry waiting. With an hour to go before the final deadline of midnight UTC, I’m heading off to bed with a total of six bids received:
* Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* Beijing, China
* Bratislava, Slovakia
* Budapest, Hungary
* Dundalk, Ireland
* Orvieto, Italy
Spot the odd one out. The appearance of Beijing is particularly interesting, because it's still not really clear how well open source is doing in China. Maybe this is a hint that there's more interest than you might think.
10 February 2008
Asus Eeek PC?
I'm a big fan of the Asus Eee PC, but it seems that someone was a smidge careless with the software that runs by default:Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to root.
08 February 2008
EU to Clobber MS Over OOXML Vote - Allegedly
There's a story zooming around the blogosphere that the EU smells something rotten in the state of Denmark - or rather in a few countries - where the committees voting on OOXML ballooned suddenly with pro-Microsoft people.
What's annoying is that there's been no official confirmation of the story, and the original source, the Wall Street Journal, has a paywall, so you can't find out the details.
Not exactly very open.
Saving Limbu from Linguistic Limbo
There's a fair amount of acrimony flying around the OLPC XO machine at the moment, which is a pity. Because the real story is stuff like this old but still important post that I came across recently:
The development team at OLPC Nepal have been working hard on developing various learning activities for children using the XO. A significant area in which they have been making progress has been in creating activities to help children learn their local dialect.
The first dialect to be setup for use on the XO is Limbu. This is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by more than 300,000 people in eastern Nepal as well as parts of Myanmar, Bhutan and India.
This is a really exciting development and is a positive counter to concerns that the OLPC project will only serve to homogenise indigenous cultures. In fact, the project may aid the long term preservation and viability of minority dialects and culture which are no longer part of the curriculum in the traditional school teaching models.
I always was a sucker for those Tibeto-Burman languages....
Top 50 Open Source Alternatives
Top n lists are two-a-penny in the world of computing, and collections of open source alternatives to proprietary are pretty common. This one has the virtue of offering a paragraph on each, so you have a better chance of deciding if something's worth following up.
The same site has some other lists that may be of interest: Top 25 GNU/Linux Games, and an intriguing list of "brave" hosting companies that won't (it is claimed) dump you when the going gets a smidge tough.
DRM For Libraries?
This is a very bad precedent:the BPL [Boston Public Library] has launched a new service powered by a company called OverDrive. The system gives BPL patrons access to books, music, and movies online -- but only if they use a Microsoft DRM system.
There are lots of problems with the introduction of this system: it bars access to users of GNU/Linux and MacOS and creates a dependence on a single technology vendor for access. These are important issues, certainly. The worst problem, however, is much more fundamental.
By adopting a DRM system for library content, the BPL is giving OverDrive, copyright holders, and Microsoft the ability to decide what, when, and how its patrons can and cannot read, listen, and watch these parts of the BPL collection. They are giving these companies veto power over the BPL's own ability to access this data -- both now and in the future. Cryptographically, BPL is quite literally handing over the keys to their collection. In the process, they are not only providing a disservice to their patrons. They are providing a disservice to themselves.
Libraries should be about opening people's minds, not closing off their collections.
07 February 2008
Time to Get Incensed about the 2011 Census?
US authorities will not be able to see data covering all UK households even if a US defence giant wins the contract to run the 2011 census, a minister says.
The US Patriot Act allows personal data held by companies in the US to be made available to intelligence agencies.
But Treasury Minister Angela Eagle told MPs the government had received legal assurances this would not happen if Lockheed Martin wins the census bid.
Oh, that's alright then - if they really gave "legal assurances".
The fact the US telecom companies have been spying on US citizens illegally because they were told to do so by the US government doesn't have any bearing here, does it? I mean, if Lockheed Martin were *ordered* by the US government to hand over all the census data, they'd just refuse, wouldn't they? They'd have to: after all, they have given those legal assurances.
And if by any chance you were still a teensy-weensy bit nervous about the security of all that intimate information about yourself and your family - because, well, you know, the UK government has had one or two little mishaps with data recently - Angela Eagle has some reassuring words:she was "pretty confident" there would be robust safeguards on the security of data.
Update: ORG's Becky Hogge points out a useful site called Census Alert that tells you what you can do to thwart this gross insult to the national intelligence.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
