Posted on May 6, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Use this handy and simple web page to get a full list of the stuff Facebook is making public about you.
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Good (if slightly hyperbolic) slogan.
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The first credible explanation for the war on water bottles at our airports.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Sublime, Ridiculous: You Choose
Posted on May 1, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Given the warnings from Steve Jobs about the gathering attack on open source, this has the feeling of the first surge against Helms Deep, but it's still gratifying to see red hat beat Acacia in this way. May there be much, much more of this. And let's hope the US Supreme Court decides against software patents in the Bilski decision…
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They are using the EUPL by preference and allowing GPL et al by implication. Huge news, and a sign of a trend that will sweep europe as each country sees the value of ending the stranglehold of the big softwrae companies and the SIs.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Big Wins
Posted on April 30, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Hear Brown, Cameron & Clegg in their own words on the Digital Economy Act. Brown says it needs scrutiny, although he still let Mandelson ram it through. Cameron tries to defend the Tories colluding to let it through, and leaves one wondering whose side he's on. Only Clegg seems to understand how important the issue is. A clear LibDem win on this one, as the viewer voting reflects.
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While all industry consortium figures need to be treated with scepticism, it's good to see the technology industry fighting back against the well-funded astroturfing of statistics by the media lobby. This report from CCIA is of course funded by vested interests too but it puts on the table the idea that it's not "music & movie professionals versus pirate thief scum kids" as the media lobby has been framing it, but rather "niche media market vs much larger and more diverse 'fair use economy'".
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Very simple model from Oracle to provide support Solaris and the hardware that runs it. The devil, of course, is in the details.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ New Economy
Posted on April 29, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Congratulations to Georg Greve on being awarded a German knighthood for his contributions to software freedom.
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“What’s remarkable about this entire episode is how decade-old web writings have been used against me in a blog-based smear campaign, which then, after another two years, successfully escalated into a mainstream news publication. This is an eye-opening example of how defamatory information can be spread – all going back to an anonymous smear letter distributed in 2008 – and how helpless and incompetent mainstream media can be when dealing with such challenges.”
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Boosters and Detractors 2.0
Posted on April 28, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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Network.Com was the (great) domain name that Sun used for its cloud computing initiatives. Seems it’s finally been decommissioned – not even a redirect today, there’s no ping response even.
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Hard to believe chocolate is the cause – I prefer to believe it is just the case that you eat more chocolate when you are depressed. Pass me that box from Hotel Chocolat…
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Daily Links
Posted on April 24, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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The European Commission’s specialist open source unit, OSOR, has finally produced an official version of the procurement guidelines that Rishab Ghosh and colleagues worked on about three years ago.
This is an important document that needs bringing to the attention of local, regional and national government across Europe (and beyond). It provides a possible answer to the key problem preventing implementation of the many policies that at best mandate and at least permit open source software in government applications. The problem has rarely been the political will; it has usually been that the procurement guidelines in place prevent use of open source.
That’s a situation no government employee has wanted to fix because of the toxic power of suppliers who don’t want it fixed (just see what Microsoft did in Massachusetts). So we’ve had pro-open-source policies neutralised by the tired bureaucracy. But now procurement teams everywhere can now pick up this publication and use it. Problem solved!
More links: Continue reading →
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Fixing Government Procurement
Posted on April 21, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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It’s good to see press coverage starting to appear about ACTA – hopefully the release of the current draft today will get more comment flowing. The article notably only includes comment from trade lobbying bodies and not from individual companies. To effectively challenge ACTA, we need to help businesses understand how they will be disadvantaged by it – by the removal of common-carrier status from ISPs for example, or by the probability that an employee error could be the third strike that cuts off the company internet connection – and get their weight behind opposition.
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Article documenting the frustration felt by the OpenSolaris community because of the complete drying-up of the flow of information on the future of the project. There is a strong sense in which this is an episode of coming to terms with the new cultural norms of a new owner, although I’m beginning to also detect a change of strategy that will also feed concern from the highly invested community members who are already engaged. Turbulent times with more change to come.
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Really excellent use of HTML5 to explain HTML5. Well worth the time just to get an idea of the power of HTML5.
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The results from a research project exploring how YouTube detects copyright violations. As you’d expect, it makes no attempt whatever to flag potential fair use of works it detects. The result is a system that goes beyond US law, removing the freedom to use works in ways that creatively or critically reuse existing works and giving copyright holders rights that the law won’t.
Filed under: Links | 1 Comment »
Posted on April 20, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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If you are in any doubt about the size of the cultural gulf that separates societies on this planet, read and weep. By the metric of this cleric, the road outside my study (where hundreds of students walk past every day) would have been shaken into a rubble-heap by now.
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I wonder if the people who put up the sign understood the irony of it all.
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“as many as 88 percent of people do not read the terms and conditions of a Web site before they make a purchase” – the same goes for EULAs and for the rest of the legal paraphernalia used so deceptively by businesses today.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ The Improbable
Posted on April 19, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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I can think of a Lego fan who would love these. I wonder how long the trademark and patent threats that take these off the market will take to come?
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Lovely graphic demonstrates that Eyjafjallajoekull volcano has probably done more to save the planet from global warming in a week than our politicians have achieved in their lifetimes…
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ There’s a link
Posted on April 18, 2010 by Simon Phipps
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“participants have reached unanimous agreement that the time is right for making available to the public the consolidated text coming out of these discussions” — About time too. They couldn’t keep it secret any longer because too many people – including those inside the process – thought it was a disgrace. I wonder if they had to surrender any principles to the US in order to gain that unanimous agreement? We’ll know on Wednesday, after which the “you’re wrong and I’ll not tell you why” defence for ACTA’s apologists is also off the table.
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“any reasonable analysis shows that a monthly password change has little or no end impact on improving security! It is a ‘best practice’ based on experience 30 years ago with non-networked mainframes in a DoD environment” — Given how old this article is, surely corporate security experts should have got a clue by now?
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Excellent article differentiates open source and crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the phenomenon previously known as sharecropping. Sadly it characterises the attitude many corporations have towards the communities they have created and call “open source communities”. But truly open source communities align the fractional self-interest of many around the evolution of a free software commons, and that is almost the polar opposite of crowdsourcing.
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Good to see a politician taking the need for a leap into the connected era seriously. I fear Tom may have alienated himself from his party leadership, so this initiative is unlikely to spread fast. But he’s a crucial voice of reason in this particular debate and needs our support.
Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Going Open
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