Wild Webmink

• Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Page on Amazon
  While the creative commons license that covers Wikipedia allows it, this attempt to divert traffic away from Wikipedia without adding any significant value to either the pages or the community looks like it’s in very poor taste.
• Wikileaks is not part of Wikipedia
  This may seem obvious to lots of people, but the way WikiMedia Foundation uses “wiki-” as a prefix for all its products makes it a reasonable assumption that Wikileaks is part of the Wikipedia empire. It’s not, and it’s not even a wiki.
• United States diplomatic cables leak
  If you’ve been wondering what all this Wikileaks stuff is all about, the Wikipedia page provides an excellent and detailed overview. So detailed, in fact, that I’d expect it to come under the same sort of political pressure to remove it as Amazon and Paypal caved to.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Wiki-this-and-that

• Full Body Scanners: What’s Next?
  Definitive explanation from Bruce Schneier why the nude scanners at airports are a waste of money, and why the will always be accmpanied by unreasonably invasive personal searches.
• ZFS imported into GRUB
  Excellent decision here. They could have done this at absolutely any time, but I’m pleased they’ve done it now.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Decisions

• An inside look at Google’s loudest critic

  What Court doesn’t mention in the book is that lenses can also be used to turn a very small amount of light into a raging fire. This appears to be his strategy with Google, taking nearly any tidbit that emerges about Google and turning it into an opportunity to bash the company.

  This is very easy to do and I am constantly checking myself to avoid it.
• Close the Washington Monument
  Stirring and worthwhile “modest proposal” by Bruce Schneier.
• Avoiding another lost decade for open source
  “The Department of Health has yet to recognise the hugely positive management leverage that open source can bring to bear in a change programme as large as its information revolution. Open standards in proprietary systems have not and cannot deliver ‘openness’ on their own and ‘presumption’ is no substitute for strategy.”

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Constructive Criticism

• Who’s driving this thing?
  Well worth reading this explanation, and especially the Oracle VP’s response.
• ForgeRock announces first authorized US training partner
  Great news – probably the best identity software trainer in the USA is now a ForgeRock approved training partner, making our courses widely available.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Links for Dec 12

• Community Bylaws – The Document Foundation
  LibreOffice hosts The Document Foundation have put together a set of bylaws for their new open-by-rule community and are looking for feedback.
• How to grow your open source project 10x and revenues 5x
  Interesting survey my Henrik Ingo puts data behind the conjecture that it’s better to have an open-bt-rule community that grows the addressable market for your project than to have a captive market that doesn’t scale beyond the “glass ceiling” of the maximum size sustainable by a company.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Open and Equal

• Intellectual Property Appears to Figure Prominently In Wikileaks Cablegate
  Michael Geist shrewdly observes that, far from being the exclusive domain of military diplomacy as might be deduced from coverage, the Wikileaks diplomatic cables uncover the fact that huge numbers of “intellectual property” issues are involved. Many of us have known for a long time that the US acts on behalf of its biggest companies in advancing a restrictive global copyright, patent and trademark regime, and we may well be about to see just how often they bully other countries over strictly commercial matters.
• TSA Scanner Proof Underwear Protects Your Privates from Government X-Rays
  Looks like a great way to ensure you receive an “enhanced pat-down” from humourless, over-empowered, unaccountable and underpaid security people who don’t see any kind of joke no matter how cool you think it is.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ Hidden Motives

• Australian Government adds Wikileaks to banned website list
  With WikiLeaks back in the news, this story from 2009 is more relevant than ever. Having rendered WikiLeaks “illegal” last year, it’s now easy to target it without causing a stir. Banning links is simply pointless as it’s easily circumvented and inapplicable outside their jurisdiction. Once someone makes that clear, the next step could be to criminalise clicking on links to banned sites (perhaps as part of the proposed ISP filtering), at which point we’ve got to “thought police” living. This is the web equivalent of “security theatre” and it’s to be despised anywhere it shows up.
• A Waste of Money and Time
  Excellent article by Bruce Schneier sets the benchmark for any future discussion and clearly identifies the problem as politicians and civil servants covering their backsides instead of making people as safe as possible.
• Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cable – UST plugs 8′ (2.44m) pair
  The product is amazingly ridiculous, but the “customer reviews” have become a creative writing contest without peer.
• Moving Java forward through the JCP?
  Very reasonable and balanced commentary from Mark Wielaard calls for the licence terms surrounding JDK7 and 8 to be reconsidered in the light of the need for open source communities to be able to freely work with the specifications.

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on ☞ For Your Safety