Alert To Activists: Customs Enforcement of IPR “This is a very worrying development. Borders are places with arbitrary rules, over-empowered and unaccountable officers and no recourse for victims. It is simply wrong to give open-ended powers regarding arguable and intangible “infringements” to these people.” Amarino – “Android meets Arduino” Fascinating toolkit to allow open hardware [...]
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Should You Donate To Open Source Projects? Donating money to your favourite open source project may not be the first thing you should do. Support the sources of income for the co-developers first. Read more on ComputerWorldUK…
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Oracle has finally done what the business management at MySQL had been asymptotically approaching for years. It’s taking MySQL open core. It’s interesting to read both Monty’s view and the comments for this one. It’s all on ComputerWorldUK…
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The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats I’d heard of Benford’s Law before, but it was a timely reminder. There are quite a few banks of data that it would be good to test, not least open source community download/member/commit stats… How Peaceful Activists Get Swept Up onto “Terrorist” Watch Lists I have to [...]
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Sony asks gamers to sign new terms or face PSN ban Sony demonstrates it still has no respect for its customers. This is the same company that installed an exploitable rootkit on its customers computers. Surely the ability to force your customers to surrender their recourse against you has to be a signal that you [...]
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Facebook and Cisco back IT skills drive for kids RIM has started up BlackBerry Hands-On Workshops, in which students will take apart BlackBerry smartphones to see how they work.” Free hoodie with every class? Seriously, we would do far better teaching kids to program and to solder using open source software and hardware than letting [...]
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UK business and government dangerously out of tune with cyber threats Interesting how the government is keen to protect Cliff Richard’s pension (by criminalising his fans) and to protect celebrities against hacking yet has no policy to pursue scammers or protect against criminal hacking. Instead they prefer to allow the public domain to be eroded [...]
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The Great Copyright Conspiracy Laid Bare It will come as no surprise to anyone reading here regularly, but there may be some that still don’t realise their political “representatives” have so little grasp of the dynamics of copyright and patent laws that they are willing to trade your cultural inheritance for short-term political advantage. Microsoft [...]
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If you were blissed-out by the amazingly beautiful choral music I linked to on Bank Holiday Monday, and if you happen to live within reach of London, you will definitely want to check out the concert that composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is organising in mid-October. If the review of last year’s equivalent performance is [...]
Over the weekend I realised how much pleasure I get from listening to Garrison Keillor each day with his small but perfectly formed “Writer’s Almanac” podcast.I’m also a fan of the Lake Wobegone podcast, but the Writer’s Almanac is a different, more thoughtful creation. Catching up with a few days, I heard (among many other [...]
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