Tuesday February 09, 2010 ☞ Leaving a bad taste
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Looks like another damning finding against high sugar diets. Too late for me, but maybe you can cut back and live longer.
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"Flash IS open" say Adobe. Well, apart from the source being closed and unavailable, the patents on the codecs, the lack of standardisation of the format and the defensive attitude when anyone challenges it. Come on guys, get real. There are so many degrees of freedom more before anyone will respect that lame argument. Release full source and let the community plug in Theora and Vorbis, for example...
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Impressive demonstration of the power of HTML 5.
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"OpenJDK will remain the single open source Java and JVM implementation that Oracle contributes to." Given the social media policy at Oracle one assumes this must be an official statement (the first I have seen).
Posted by webmink
( Feb 09 2010, 04:08:07 AM PST )
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Monday February 08, 2010 ☞ Community Matters
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Good to see SourceForge being responsive here and deciding to take this risk. The draconian US export laws do leave US corporations in an invidious position, even outside their own borders, and it's easy for managers to decide to play it safe at the expense of freedom and transparency.
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I hope there is more to this than there appears. I'll try to investigate.
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"Google shows no sign of working to get their code upstream anymore." -- Serious break-down of trust here, as seemingly the fusion of pragmatism and secrecy at Google is leading them to treat their community responsibilities as a low priority. We'll see much more of this from corporate FOSS users in the future, which is why I'm convinced we need to grade projects on more than just their license choice (or the warmness towards the FOSS communities of their out-of-band programmes).
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Good to see the Washington Post tackling ACTA and attempting to explain its provisions to the general reader. Still far to complex for everyman, but the seeds are there (like explaining that all the three-strikes legislation is advance preparation by national governments so that ACTA ratification is easier when it happens).
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While you can't take anything dangerous on to a plane in the US, you can certainly buy very worrying stuff in the on-board catalogue. This, for example, is a USB stick containing a rootkit and activity monitor. I note it doesn't work on a Mac.
Posted by webmink
( Feb 08 2010, 04:06:56 AM PST )
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Sunday February 07, 2010 ☞ Worrying Trend
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Mark Pilgrim with a eulogy for the freedom to tinker. This is one of the key reasons I'm an advocate of and activist for software freedom.
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It is, of course, the more educated choice.
Posted by webmink
( Feb 07 2010, 04:07:01 AM PST )
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Friday February 05, 2010 ☞ The Advance of Open
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Spun out to its own site, this project (a virtual machine kernel written in Javascript) is absolutely fascinating and deserves wider investigation.
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It's FOSDEM weekend, so maybe it's time this shirt made a comeback.
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Some good news on internet rights from Australia for a change. This case establishes that common-carrier status does indeed apply to Australian ISPs. Hopefully this starts setting a precedent that will push back on thre-strikes regulations.
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Useful voice-of-experience post by Nat.
Posted by webmink
( Feb 05 2010, 04:06:18 AM PST )
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Thursday February 04, 2010 ☞ More on H.264
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Disturbing but great post explaining how the license terms MPEG-LA force their H.264 (and MPEG-2/4) licensees to pass on in their sublicenses basically give you no useful rights to the 900 patents. This ridiculous situation has to end. No amount of "pragmatism" can excuse giving a patent pool cartel such power to shake down the whole connected population.
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Joy of Tech with a much more convincing hype cycle explanation than that tired analyst curve diagram.
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It's not necessarily cause-and-effect, though. Unless you're reading about H.264 patents and licensing.
Posted by webmink
( Feb 04 2010, 04:06:06 AM PST )
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Saturday January 30, 2010 ☞ Why H.264 Must Be Avoided
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A long, must-read article that draws lessons from previous experiences (with GIF and MP3) to explain why anyone with concerns for liberty should discourage use of H.264 and promote alternatives. The link below is to a letter where the licensing company for H.264 even explains that they are using the drug-dealer model to minimise consumer fears via no-cost licensing while threatening implementors with aggressive legal action. I'm still 100% in agreement with Mozilla on this one.
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Pretty good synopsis of the interview I gave, which ironically appears to be locked up behind a paywall.
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If you are in any doubt that H.264 cannot be implemented legally as open source, take a look at this letter from MPEG-LA.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 30 2010, 04:07:43 AM PST )
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Wednesday January 27, 2010 ☞ Endings
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To summarise: MySQL was always Free software, always had these problems (some would say never open source in spirit) yet still thrived at the heart of the FOSS movement, so why should this transition prove any different.
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This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 27 2010, 04:13:52 AM PST )
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Tuesday January 26, 2010 ☞ Access To The Party
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Excellent start to an explanation of Mozilla's position on H.264 and patent-encumbered CODECs. Still plenty of remaining questions, which will hopefully be addressed in part two of this explanation. Personally I think Mozilla is picking the right path and I hope we'll see Google (owner of YouTube) backing them in their promotion of technologies anyone in any country can use freely (rather than H.264 which is deviously chained to corporate profit).
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Tim Bray joins the growing number of writers dangerously circling in politically-correct shark-infested waters looking for the core truth explaining the low numbers of women in the technology industry. Personally I think we make a mistake to look just at gender for an explanation. I think there are plenty of men put off the technology industry too, for the same reasons as many women.
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Great feature on Neil Gaiman in the New Yorker.
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Details (in Portuguese) of the event I'm attending in Brazil this week.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 26 2010, 04:07:29 AM PST )
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Monday January 25, 2010 ☞ Making A Stand
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The issue at stake here is what some call "common-carrier status" for networks. Regardless of the excuse - be it China's hatred of protest, Italy's hatred of pædophiles or the USA's hatred of music lovers - governments should be protecting it. Once the principle has been breached, it is a slippery slope to a corporate-controlled society, whether the corporation is question is the state, the RIAA or, indeed, Google or Microsoft.
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Tone-deaf editorial by the Chinese government coruscates Clinton & Google while actually casting light on the paranoia that makes China censor its citizens and force them to live by rumour.
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If you were still in any doubt about it, this interview should prove that RMS does not live in your world. To go beyond the interview, a comment elsewhere points out he does not use web browsers; rather, he e-mails web URLs to a server that sends back the text for him to read in EMACS. Amazingly and inspiringly consistent philosophy and values over time, yes, but increasingly disjoint from the reality the rest of us have to navigate.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 25 2010, 04:07:26 AM PST )
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Sunday January 24, 2010 ☞ Protecting Freedom
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Schneier points out that the feature China hacked in GMail was only there because the US government demanded it "for security", and that building trapdoors for use by spooks is an invitation for bad guys to hack them. They are another example of why security through obscurity is an anti-pattern.
Another question this raises is whether Google's position is truly defensible. They say they will only obey Chinese law if the Chinese government does too. Does the same apply to other governments? What about US government use of the same trapdoor?
To criticise here is not to defend China's execrable record on human rights. Rather, it is to note that China defends itself internationally by saying it is just doing publicly what other governments do secretly (while overlooking the fact its own use is usually tyrannous). Once again that defense is theirs. -
Excellent explanation of why Firefox has no H.264 support and why it won't be getting any. This is exactly the right position to be taking and I think it's a crying shame that major traffic drivers like YouTube aren't taking the same approach. [Is there also some rule that demands that the better the article, the more stupid the comments?]
Posted by webmink
( Jan 24 2010, 04:04:46 AM PST )
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Thursday January 21, 2010 RIP
The news is in that the EU has finally approved Oracle's purchase of Sun, and while there are some more hurdles to cross I think James' response is very fitting so I'll reproduce it here too.
I doubt there will be an official wake given what happened when James tried to arrange one before, so we'll need to have drinks ourselves.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 21 2010, 07:52:29 AM PST )
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Wednesday January 13, 2010 ☞ Clear Thinking
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Google doubtless understands that the Chinese government don't respond well to public statements like this. I expect them to get far less diplomatic, directly-rude responses in fact. But after attempting to do things China's way, it's hard to see what response they could take to the betrayal of the trust they had placed in the Chinese government by toeing their line for three years. Google's business will increasingly depend on being globally trusted and this sort of political behaviour is a business necessity for them. It also challenges their competitors to make a stand that looks equally principled. Sadly, I expect most of them to be in Chinese government offices right now offering to fill the gap Google will leave. To understand why, Google "webmink reptiles".
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More intensely sensible comment from Schneier. We need to refuse to be terrorised, which means refusing to tolerate security theatre that responds to it by propogating it. To the readers who only read my comments and not the articles; go on, read this one before you accuse me of stuff for a change!
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Sensible comment on travel security from The Independent's travel guy: "We need a "Groucho" approach to airline security. To paraphrase Groucho Marx's attitude to clubs, I'd prefer not to join a flight that unquestioningly accepts dodgy characters like me on board."
Posted by webmink
( Jan 13 2010, 04:11:58 AM PST )
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Monday January 11, 2010 ☞ Attention-Grabbing
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Lovely interview that captures Pollan's humanity. The idea of having a booklet of common sense eating rules to counter all the crazy diet junk that's floating around is wonderful, I've ordered my copy to pick up when I get to the US.
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Really scarey image here, showing the Gulf Stream diverted northwards, removing the additional moderation from the British Isles and adding warming to the Arctic.
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Must post more typos.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 11 2010, 04:07:49 AM PST )
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Friday January 08, 2010 ☞ Dealing With The Real Issue
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Show this to every politician: "What we need is security that's effective even if we can't guess the next plot: intelligence, investigation and emergency response. ... The real security failure on Christmas Day was in our reaction. We're reacting out of fear, wasting money on the story rather than securing ourselves against the threat. Abdulmutallab succeeded in causing terror even though his attack failed. If we refuse to be terrorized, if we refuse to implement security theater and remember that we can never completely eliminate the risk of terrorism, then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed."
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While it's great to see Microsoft finally joining the SVG WG after all these years, let's not forget (as this article does) that they were involved at the beginning and it was their unforgivable NIH attitude in rejecting the decision of the WG not to use Microsoft's contribution that has kept vector graphics from being a web technology for a decade. Imagine what could have evolved by now had they not listened to their greed and control-lust and instead worked with everyone to perfect web vector graphics. Even still I can't help myself wondering if they have joined the WG to snuff it out by over-activity.
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Given the news that Google is avoiding paying almost all the taxes it should on UK advertising revenue through an offshoring loophole, a specific tax on portals-that-advertise may well be the only way to get the tax that's due in today's global economy.
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It may be satirical humour but it makes a crucially important point. The reason so many of us stopped trusting Microsoft back in the 90s was we knew that partnering with them only had two exit points: acquisition or the "theft" of our ideas and customers (for me it was the latter). FSJ points out it's deja vue all over again.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 08 2010, 04:10:29 AM PST )
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