Guilty Even When Proven Innocent

The Great UK DNA Database Lie continues to grow. Despite Government efforts to paint this as a deeply necessary tool to catch all those wicked evil people out there - "if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear" etc. etc. - it is increasingly becoming clear that, in the interests of total control, it is trying to create a DNA database of everyone.

As The Reg explains:

Less than two thirds of people whose profile is stored on the National DNA Database are there for having been cautioned or convicted of a criminal offence, Home Office figures have revealed.

In response to a parliamentary question, John Reid last week responded that 3,457,000 individuals are on the database, but 1,139,445 have no criminal record. The figure is eight times the total of 139,463 reported by the Home Office Earlier in March.

That's over 2% of the UK population that shouldn't be on there: only another 95% to go.

The Game God Goes Virtual

There aren't many details yet, but Raph Koster, generally regarded as one of the most original minds in the online gaming world, has lifted a corner of the curtain on his new company, with the delightfully erudite - and tricky - name of Areae:

Areae means "many places" in Latin. Depending on who you ask, you pronounce it "Airy-eh" or "Airy-eye" or "Area-ee"… well. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what it means: many places, many worlds.

Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new. Something anyone can jump into. Something where anyone can find something fun to do or a game to play. Something where anyone can build their own place on the virtual frontier.

For me, the real giveway is the logo, which consists of smaller and larger interconnected blobs: sounds like a system of interconnected, perhaps standalone virtual worlds to me. Watch out Second Life....

Bad Vista, Naughty Vista

The FSF is undergoing a remarkable change at the moment. From being a deeply worthy, but rather dull organisation, it has started to turn into the Rottweiler of the free software world. First there was Defective by Desig, targeting DRM, and now we have the splendidly-named BadVista going for the jugular of Microsoft's new operating system:

"Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care", said FSF program administrator John Sullivan.

Oh, come on John, tell us what you really think.

Hold the Front Page

This is rather impressive in its way:

The TAB is owned by GateHouse Media, a newspaper conglomerate that owns 75 daily and 231 weekly newspapers. And the TAB isn’t the only paper that got a silver CC badge this week. Without fanfare, the company is rolling out Creative Commons licenses covering nearly all of the 121 dailies and weeklies they own in Massachusetts. The CC license now covers 96 of the company’s TownOnline sites, which are grouped within a portal for their many Eastern Massachusetts newspapers.

CC for 96 newspapers? Go, Larry, go. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Patently Odd

I came across this story on LWN.net:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Second Million is the Hardest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real and Virtual Pirates

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

Avatar Liberation Movement

Interesting:

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

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

MyPassword

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Does Patents...

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

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

Speaking up for the Commons of Silence

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

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

TechCrunch UK Gets Crunched

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Ryzom.org Going to Be Massive?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Ubuntu Discovers Second Life

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

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

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

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

Open Source Laser Business???

Maybe you can push a meme too far:

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

(Via Slashdot.)

Vive L'Open Source

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

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

Yikes.

The Real Crowdsourcing

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

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

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

Not-So-Sadville

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

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

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

OpenServing

How can I resist a pitch like this?

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

You can set up your own collaborative blogging site.

All articles are sorted democratically.

Sound good?

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

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

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

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

God Bless Bickering

Poor Charlie:

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

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

Welcome to Iconistan

I'm such a sucker for clever neologisms:

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

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

Digital Mozart and Our Open Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Google is your friend

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

2. Yahoo and MSN are a waste of time

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

3. People like tags

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

4. People like weird stuff

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

5. It gets easier

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

Larry's New Code

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

Towards the Bio-Fabber

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solveiging a Publishing Problem

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

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

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

Now is Our Summer of Code Made Glorious Winter

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

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

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

Telling the Truth About a Telling Fact

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

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

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

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

Code is Law, Code is Power

Yup:

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

...

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

The Virtual World of China

Talking of the blurring of distinction between life and games, here's a great rumination on certain aspects of modern China (a subject that interests me greatly). I was particularly struck by these two passages:

In China’s case, I’d say morality is probably 5% instinctual, 20% customs and traditions, and 75% fear of law and loss, with an overall lower bar for morality. It is interesting to observe how this is very similar to how morality evolves in an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer On Line Role Playing Game). Religion has nothing to say about how your Avatar’s life should be conducted (hah! What Would Arthas Do?), and there is little rule of law on the servers. Thus, if one was to take a walk through SecondLife, one would commonly find copious quantities of sex-related items for sale, and presumably there are many people who will also sell you virtual sex for Linden dollars. Maybe this is a stretch, but I think the underlying moral lessons are not too different from the scene I saw in the Hard Rock Cafe Beijing.

And:

Beijing is in the process of building an enormous Olympic park. They tear down whole neighborhoods and pave roads over them in a matter of weeks. They are building an 11 or 12-route subway system that promises to rival the subway system in Manhattan for connectivity and completeness. Watching this happen reminds me of how I play Sim City. If you’ve ever played the game, you’ve probably remorselessly bulldozed huge sections of Sim Cities that you messed up the planning on, and improved your city’s long-term productivity through doing that. The Beijing government seems to restructure the city with about the same attitude and efficiency...

Fascinating. (Via GridBlog.)

It's Only a Game

One of things I have come to appreciate, albeit rather belatedly, is how gamer culture is going mainstream. By that, I don't just mean that it's more acceptable to be a gamer, or that more and more sectors of society are playing games, but that the gaming world-view is starting to seep into other areas of life.

Take Amazon's new Askville, for example:

Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic. It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know. You can learn something new everyday or help and meet others using your knowledge. Askville even helps you learn by giving you cool tools to help you find information online while you are answering questions. It’s all about sharing—what you know and what you want to know—so go ahead and meet someone new today and Askville!

But most interestingly:

Every time you answer a question on Askville you will earn or potentially lose experience points in the topics that were associated with that question. Askville uses experience points to determine how knowledgeable a user is in a given topic. Experience points are broken up into various levels. To reach a certain level you need to have earned a certain number of experience points in that topic. Go to Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins in the FAQs to learn more about experience points and levels.

Which, of course, is precisely how a game works. In other words, Askville is a game. Life is a game. (Via TechCrunch.)

Wordie for Wordies

How could I not love this totally pointless site? Actually, come to think of it, I'm sure it'll feed into some interesting mashups. (Via TechCrunch.)

Energy Worries: Not Just Virtual

Following the recent excitement about Second Life's energy consumption, it seems that people are beginning to realise that it's not the only one with problems:

The nation's biggest technology companies sat down with federal regulators Wednesday to assess the industry's thirst for power amid fears that volatile and expensive energy could hinder the growing sector.

The fierce competitors at the table -- including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard -- rarely gather to talk strategy. But they were lured by the chance to influence the development of national energy standards.

"I think we may be at the beginning of a potential energy crisis for the IT sector," Victor Varney, a vice president for Silicon Graphics, told the regulators. "It's clearly coming."

(Via Slashdot.)

Google Joins Eclipse

In another sign of the ascendancy of Eclipse, Google has joined the club:

Ending months of speculation, Google has officially joined the Eclipse Foundation as an add-in provider, according to officials at both organizations.

Sharing: As Natural as Childhood

Children are increasingly swapping music via mobile phones, often without realising they can be breaking the law.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

...

Almost a half (45%) of children who said they did not swap music via their phones said they would like to.

Inevitably this story is provoking howls from the music industry. But it teaches us two things.

First, that - just as RMS has always said - sharing is natural, part of our genetic make-up that allows us to function as social beings. And secondly, that this is an opportunity, not a threat: these children are doing free marketing for the music companies, spreading the word about cool music. Copyright owners should rejoice, not fret about it - and move on to coming up with a way to make some money selling more music off the back of all this fantastic viral distribution.

China's Virtual Money Woes

It's spreading:

As if Chinese leaders did not have enough of a headache trying to manage the country's rising but still undervalued currency in the testy world of international trade, now the growing popularity of virtual money enters the already complex equation.

The so-called "QQ" coin - issued by Tencent, China's largest instant-messaging service provider - has become so popular that the country's central bank is worried that it could affect the value of the yuan. Li Chao, spokesman and director of the General Office of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), has expressed his concern in the Chinese media and announced that the central bank will draft regulations next year governing virtual transactions.

So tell me again the difference between real and virtual currencies....

Is Germany Really Losing It?

I have a great deal of respect for the German nation. More than anyone else, I think, they have come to terms with their recent history - specifically with the Nazi period - and emerged stronger, wiser and more admirable (compare, for example, Turkey's rather sad denial that a genocide of over a million Armenians lies festering in its past). But recently, I've noticed some signs that German society - or at least its politicans, which I concede is not quite the same thing - are really out of touch with reality.

I wrote yesterday about its daft plans to monitor PCs while connected to the Internet - blithely ignoring the near-impossibility of this idea. Now we have something else equally stupid: the criminalisation of violent video games. According to Der Spiegel - probably the best news magazine in the world - the Bavarian minister for internal affairs wants to make the "production, sale and purchase of such games punishable by up to one year's imprisonment."

This is so obviously a knee-jerk reaction by frightened old politicians, unable to deal with the technological changes that are happening around them. What makes it particularly sickening is that it concerns itself with virtual violence, and blithely ignores the rather more pressing issue of all the violence present in this world - as practised, for example, by the US Government in its various torture camps around the world. Get real, people.

BrainGumbo

This has to be the coolest name for a project in recent years: BrainGumbo. No wonder, perhaps, since it's pressing some of the hottest hot buttons in computing today:

The BrainGumbo Project aims to build a virtual movie (machinima) production studio in Second Life, from the work of amateur enthusiasts and free components.

IBM and Microsoft's OpenXML: Update

I'm impressed: IBM has just stuck a dirty great clog in the engine of Microsoft's machinations to get its Office XML format adopted as a formal standard:

IBM voted NO today in ECMA on approval for Microsoft’s Open XML spec.

Heavy stuff: I think we expect some horse heads to start turning up soon.... (Via C|net.)

Correction: further to Bob's comment, I've gone to the ECMA site and found the press release announcing the approval of the standard. Naively, I thought that somebody voting against it would block it: not so. Apologies for my over-enthusiastic analysis. I suppose IBM's move was therefore more symbolic than anything. Ah well.

Second Life Goes Really Brazilian

In a significant sign that Second Life is beginning to expand beyond its early-user, largely anglophone base, the Internet arm of Brasil Telecom has announced that it is coming out with a localised version of Second Life this month.

The company estimates that there are currently 30 to 40 thousand Brazilians already active in Second Life, a number it hopes to double in the first year of operation. It also aims to help those currently using the English-language version to migrate to the new Brazilian client.

A separate arm of Brasil Telecom is being created purely for this venture; worryingly, the company behind it talks about "selling advertising inside the game". I don't think that's going to go down to well with the (virtual) locals....

The Open Source Brain

At first sight, there's something appropriate about Paul Allen paying for the Allen Brain Atlas:

an interactive, genome-wide image database of gene expression in the mouse brain. A combination of RNA in situ hybridization data, detailed Reference Atlases and informatics analysis tools are integrated to provide a searchable digital atlas of gene expression. Together, these resources present a comprehensive online platform for exploration of the brain at the cellular and molecular level.

After all, he did work on an "electronic brain" as they were mockingly called back in those dim, dark days of early computing. And it comes as no surprise that the freely-available and rather impressive 3D Brain Explorer - think Google Earth for the mouse brain - is only available for Windows XP and the Macintosh.

But dig a little deeper, and you find something rather telling about the real "brain" behind this brain:

Processing the amount of data produced during the Atlas project (approximately 1 terabyte/day) requires a fully automated data processing and analysis pipeline. A goal of informatics is to provide the infrastructure that will allow scaling of an increase in image data and complexity of image processing. The IDP was designed to be modularized and scalable to support a library of informatics algorithms and to function so that additional incorporation of informatics modules does not interrupt production systems. The system must also have the flexibility to accommodate defining multiple workflows using some or all algorithms and is iterative in its processing of gene image series. Parts of the process are computationally intensive, such as image quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) and preprocessing, registration, and signal quantification. These tasks are scheduled and run in parallel on the server cluster.

Right. And just as a matter of interest, what might that cluster be running?

The cluster consists of a total of 148 CPUs, 32 HP BL35p blades with dual AMD 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM and 21 IBM HS20 blades with dual Intel 2.8Ghz Hyperthreaded, 4GB RAM, all running Fedora Linux.

Obviously someone used their brain.

Carousel Fraud: Virtually Virtual

I'm always amazed when people raise their eyebrows over the money involved in virtual worlds, because it's obviously not "real", and so doesn't count (ever stopped to consider how valuable that piece of paper you call a banknote really is?). But when I read things like this, I have to shake my head:

Missing trader or carousel fraud cost Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs £3bn in the last financial year.

...

Carousel fraud involves importing, or claiming to import, goods from another EU country without paying VAT, then selling them on and pocketing the tax. The same goods will often go from country to country earning fraudulent tax at every stage.

Increasingly, the goods don't even physically move.

So, this is fraud to the tune of billions of pounds per year, "increasingly" involving goods that don't move - and that presumably only exist as disembodied numbers passing through the UK government's IT system: and they're telling me that virtual money doesn't count?

Arrested for Sharing a Kurdish Ubuntu?

Here's a rum to-do:

Controversy followed the release of a Kurdish translation of Ubuntu in Turkey last week. The release was originally reported in Millyet, a Turkish national newspaper, on November 21. This first release of a Kurdish language operating system and software has caused a stir in Turkey, where, up until 1991, it was illegal even to speak Kurdish in public.

...

Subsequent reports in the Turkish press suggest that Mayor Abdullah Demirbas of Sur, a town in Diyarbakir, Eastern Turkey, is currently under investigation by the Diyarbakir chief public prosecutor's office following the launch. It is not clear what Demirbas is being investigated for, but it is probably related to Turkey's less than tolerant stance on the public use of Kurdish.

Who - aside from RMS - would have thought that making a distro could be a political act?

Solaris Lives - Live

I've been slightly unkind to OpenSolaris in these parts. This was particularly reprehensible since I've never tried it (but why let the facts get in the way of some good bigotry?). Truth to tell, I've not really relished the prospect of grappling with its installation. Now I don't have to.

The greatest thing since the proverbial sliced bread - the live CD - has come to OpenSolaris. Significantly, this Solaris live CD, which is called BeleniX, hails from Bangalore - surely a sign of things to come. I'm off to download it to give it a whirl.

The Politicians' Big Disconnect

According to heise online:

the [German] Federal Ministry of the Interior declares the ability to search PCs without physical access to them to be a key component in the fight against terror.

Well, it can declare away until its booties fall off, but as the article points out:

How a screening of PCs protected by a firewall or tucked away behind a router with Network Address Translation is to be carried out the proposals of the politicians concerned with internal security remain conspicuously silent, however.

Quite. Throw in a modicum of serious data encryption, and you have a PC that is seriously hard to hack - however much the politicians might declare this approach to be a "key component in the fight against a terror."

All of which provides a further demonstration, if one were needed, of how this idiotic "fight against terror" is merely a pretext for governments around the world (step forward, Mr Blair) to impose pointless and unworkable schemes that serve no other purpose than to trample on the freedom of all of us, while the ne'er-do-wells laugh up their terrorist sleeves.

ODF Support from Apple?

Here's an interesting pair of screenshots, that seem to show that Apple has added ODF support to TextEdit tool. It may be a small stone, but it all adds to the cairn. (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

Samba Dances Towards the GNU GPLv3

According to this story, the Samba project will move to GNU GPLv3 once it's finished. That's a big win for the the FSF, since Samba is undoubtedly one of the most widely-used and highest-profile open source projects.

What a Waste of Energy

The official Curmudgeon of Computing, Nick Carr, stirred up a little excitement recently by pointing out that Second Life, for all its virtuality, really does use quite a lot of electricity. But before we start grabbing the digital pitchforks and descending upon Linden Lab for being such an ecological extravagant bunch, it's probably best to put things in context.

That's exactly what this post from KnowProSE.com does. It points out that the problem is not really Second Life's, it's the Internet's - ours, in other words. And it's certainly a big problem.

But it seems to me that the solution is less finding all the energy, than reducing the amount used by computers. It's a bit like cars: it's not really hard making them more fuel efficient, but until there are incentives to do so, you carry on using the old, inefficient technologies. We need to re-engineer our thinking, not just out technologies.

Wayback: 85,898,456,616 and Counting

The Wayback Machine is one of the Internet's best-kept secrets:

A snapshot of the World Wide Web is taken every 2 months and donated to the Internet Archive by Alexa Internet. Further, librarians all over the world have helped curate deep and frequent crawls of sites that could be especially important to future researchers historians and scholars.

As web pages are changed or deleted every 100 days, on average, having a resource like this is important for the preservation of our emerging cultural heritage.

And even for someone like me, who uses it all the time, numbers like this still take the breath away:

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine now has 85,898,456,616 archived web objects in it

plus

The database contains over 1.5 petabytes of data that came from the web (that is 1.5 million gigabytes) which makes it one of the largest databases of any kind.

And a cyber-pearl beyond price. (Via Open Access News.)

Set My Libri Free

Everybody knows about Project Gutenberg, which aims to provide texts of as many public domain books as possible. One freedom that is available for such texts is to create spoken versions of them. Librivox is aiming to do just that:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and we operate almost exclusively through Internet communications.

...

We get most of our texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive and ibiblio.org host our audio files.

Not only that, but it offers its files in both the well-known - but proprietary - MP3 format, as well as the less well-known but free and deliciously-named ogg format. Another unexpected plus of the project, is that it can offer several versions of the same text, allowing all kinds of interesting comparisons to be made - to say nothing of cool reworkings.

There is also a small but select group of texts in languages other than English. (Via Creative Commons.)