It’s always puzzling when the good guys take on the good guys. John Gilmore runs an open relay on his home network for the benefit of himself and others. Well, as you might expect, sometimes spam gets routed through his open relay. That prompted a complaint by SpamCop to his ISP, Verio. Now Verio is blocking outgoing mail from his network. So, what’s more important, Gilmore’s right to provide an open relay or the prevention of spamming by closing all open relays? ...
Tim O’Reilly has abandoned his search for prior art that would cause Amazon’s one-click patent to be overturned, and has issued something of a public apology to Jeff Bezos. Unfortunately, in his article, he doesn’t say exactly what the real innovations in Amazon’s one-click patent are, and right now I’m feeling too lazy to read it myself. Alas, Aimster’s Pig Encoder is no more. That didn’t take long. Hopefully, no rc3.org readers will be using this tax form to file their 2000 taxes. ...
According to The Register, Nautilus 1.0 has hit the streets. Now I just need to figure out somewhere to install it. Today Salon’s cover story is about the grim job market. Apparently, in the Bay Area, even programmers and sys admins are having a tough time finding work. I don’t like the sound of that. Japanese Engrish … now that’s funny. It seems to me that “Engrish” is probably an offensive term, but the shots of some of these Japanese packages are hilarious. ...
Scott Rosenberg steps up to defend Yahoo in his latest column. He makes an important point – Yahoo is only doing poorly based on its own standards, it’s still way better off than just about any other Internet company. I’m inclined to believe that Yahoo is still fundamentally sound, although the fact that much of the revenue that they “generated” this quarter was deferred revenue from previous quarters is troubling. I’m not enough of a financial analyst to know what that means, but I believe it’s a pretty common form of book cooking. ...
Declan McCullagh has been subpoenaed to testify in the criminal trial of David Bell, the cypherpunk who came up with the “assassination politics” scheme whereby people would anonymously post bounties to have politicians (or others) assasinated. Microsoft’s Hailstorm is something that would be very interesting to me if it were offered by someone other than Microsoft. Declan has also written up the story of his subpoena for Wired News. The New Republic has an interesting article in favor of national missile defense by Lawrence F. Kaplan. He criticizes the preprogrammed Democratic and Republican positions on NMD and makes a pretty compelling argument in favor of a shipboard system designed to address states with few ballistic missiles. I think that his position is more strategically sound than most, but I don’t agree with his strategy on many points, and don’t share his optimism on the technical feasability of the system. For his strategy to be implemented optimally, not only must the system work very reliably, but all of the states with missile capability must be sure that it works very reliably. ...
Remember the predictions made by some people that enemies are needed to justify spending outrageous amounts of money on missile defense? Well, the shoe is dropping. Dubya broke the news to South Korea’s president that we’ll be abandoning arms reduction talks with North Korea. Pathetic. Dan Hartung encouraged me to look a bit more deeply into the “encryption” Aimster plans on using to thwart the RIAA, and even sent along a helpful link. As it turns out, it’s not encryption at all, it’s encoding. And the encoding is even simpler than pig Latin. I figured they wouldn’t be doing anything complicated, but this system is obviously designed to exploit the comedic stupidity of the DMCA. ...
Do people really only believe 9% of what they read online and 16% of what they read in newspapers? I find it hard to believe, given the number of people who get burnt by stock fraud when they act on tips read on investor message boards. Here’s the reassuring email I received from Bibliofind this morning concerning the compromise of their credit card database. The guys at Aimster are using judo against the record companies by protecting themselves using the DMCA. Basically, they’re encrypting their communications so that if the record companies attempt to circumvent that encryption, they’ll be in violation of the DMCA – a law that recording industry wanted very badly. I wish we could come up with more ways to bludgeon industry with the consumer-unfriendly laws that they’re always spending big bucks to get pushed through Congress. ...
Man, the credit card numbers of 98,000 Bibliofind customers were compromised when the site was cracked recently. Ugly. I shopped there awhile back, and I’m hoping that they removed my data from the system before the attack. There was an interesting story on NPR this morning about a guy who turned the human DNA sequence into music by assigning notes to the proteins that make up DNA. The music was actually quite interesting to listen to. ...
Declan McCullagh reviews The Lone Gunmen for Wired News. I skipped it because the season premiere of The Sopranos was on, and I didn’t feel like taping it. You know, it was OK when black people said Clinton was the first black President, but it seems stupid for Clinton to say it himself. The New York Times today has an article about the Carlyle Group, a 12 billion dollar private equity firm that has built its business by hiring lots of former government big shots and then investing in businesses that are associated with government (like the defense industry and telecommunications). The chairman of the company was Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and George Bush, James Baker, and John Major are also on the payroll. Back when Dubya was a business failure (before his sweetheart Rangers deal), the company put him on the board of one of their companies to help him out. I’m not sure what to say about this, other than repeating the old saw: “them that has, gets.” ...
I find the destruction of the enormous statue of Buddha at Bamyan by the Taliban to be one of the most stupid, outrageous, offensive things I’ve heard about in a long time. I first heard this story on NPR the other day, and I have literally been seething ever since. Destroying ancient statues for the purposes of adhering to some warped interpretation of religious dogma is just such a monument to zealotry and capriciousness. Hopefully, 2000 years from now people will look at the big gap in the side of that cliff and say to themselves, “My, what idiots the Taliban were.” ...