Wild Webmink

• Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality
  Important article from Tim Berners-Lee that needs to be brought to the attention of legislators globally. Key quote:

  Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.”
• Attachmate Corporation to Acquire Novell, Inc.
  Looks like they plan to run SuSE as a business unit. The acquisition is partly facilitated by selling unidentified assets to Microsoft. Hopefully that won’t mean the UNIX copyrights, if SuSE is still a going concern – maybe it means WordPerfect, which would be a logical conclusion to the long-running legal fights between Microsoft and Novell.

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• WebID 1.0
  Interesting proposal for a lightweight mechanism for authenticated personal identity on the internet using existing web mechanisms.
• Does the TSA ever catch terrorists?
  “Does the TSA Ever Catch Terrorists? If they do, for some reason they won’t admit it.”

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• Government suppliers may be ordered to open up data
  I’ll believe it when I see it. The whole point of outsourcing in government contexts (and not just IT – think of military security in Iraq) is to push the dirty business of actually getting things done behind a contractual firewall where they can safely shelter under the cover of “commercially sensitive” and avoid being questioned.
• Re-tweeting the revolution
  “The war on terror is over. We lost.” — the weak-minded direct-causal thinking that’s driven the west’s entire response to the educated, layered and cunning strategy Bin Laden has been executing to destroy non-Islamic society has indeed led to the result Bin Laden wanted, as fear has overwhelmed justice and justice has overwhelmed mercy.

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• Should Companies That Use Open Source Software Pay a Tithe?
  They should certainly budget to obtain service and ensure they pay the companies and people that make the software upon which they depend, whether they need support or not. If they don’t, it might not get updated again. And I like the idea of budgeting a minimum amount for this. But I’m not so sure abstract “giving to the community” is a good idea. Experience shows that a community selectively paying community members to participate demotivates everyone else.
• Legal Attack on Internet Music Storage Threatens ‘Safe Harbor’ Rules for Online Businesses
  Another valuable EFF action, this time protecting “safe harbour” for service providers. Robust legal protection for common-carrier-status is a vital part of enabling innovation and growth.
• Indian Open Standards Policy Finalized
  The most important aspect of this is that India requires royalty-free (and not RAND) licensing for patents in standards.

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