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Part of my reluctance is that I don’t have a reason to buy, so to speak. I already give away my content unconditionally. I don’t foresee that ever changing as my goal is not to make a direct living off of the web site or the blog. The only financial goal I’ve thought about is to partly or completely subsidize my ongoing production costs, mostly hosting. To that end, I am already experimenting with advertising, now that I’ve found an ethically sustainable ad network.

It won’t surprise you to learn that between the full time day job, my insane production schedule for the podcast, daily blog posts, and my other projects to which I already don’t devote enough time, I doubt I’ll ever be able to experiment with early access to content as premium model. I am not convinced that such a model makes any sense with podcasts which by definition are so easily time shifted. I don’t have the time to produce extra content for sustaining donors. That cuts against my view on making my content available for free with no strings attached.

I’ve experimented with re-packaging my content but in doing so I want to there to be a free option at a minimum. Having it in formats for purchase is attractive but for the audio at least that is problematic. In some cases third party music I occasionally use would require a commercial clearance.

I hold out hope for my unbook project but it is very slow going. In addition to a free ebook version I’d like to have a POD version for sale when the first volume is transcribed and edited. That is going to be a long way off.

The Idea

Despite all those non-starter options or plans that are still a long way off, I’ve been wanting to offer a premium as a reward for donation. It would make me more comfortable occasionally asking more directly for support. After continually drawing a blank on what I could offer, I remembered a key part of the DIY ethic–do what you are good at and link to the rest.

It may not surprise you to learn I have and love a small but growing collection of Nerd Merit Badges. These are incredibly well made with fun designs and thoughtful details. So it occurred to me last week that these might make for an excellent, very unique premium for donors.

I contacted John and Randy, the gentlemen behind Nerd Merit Badges, and they were very helpful. They do indeed make custom badges and cited several such projects they’d completed. The were also up front about cost, minimum production run and other needful details. A more concrete plan began to form.

I want to offer a custom merit badge to any and all donors who contribute $20 or more to support the podcast and/or the web site. This includes all past donors who have made such a contribution, either as a one time sum or whose monthly contributions total $20 or more for the year.

I need a design and am working with a friend who is a professional in the field of graphic design. He is agreeable and we are hammering out the details including a nominal fee for his time. I am confident he’ll come up with something attractive and distinctive that will work well for the badges.

How You Can Help

The biggest barrier is the cost of producing the badges, $200 for a run of 50. That is where I need some help as that is a bit more than I am used to covering out of pocket for giveaways. If I can get 10 $20 plus donors starting now, I can completely cover the cost of badges. I will include anyone choosing any of the monthly donation options towards that initial count.

The first ten badges will be unique. My wife, who is an accomplished seamstress, is experimenting with how she can perform some additional embroidery to mark the charter badges out from the rest. I will work up a numbered certificate of authenticity that will include a short thank you message and my signature.

Stay Tuned

I will mention this experiment over the next few weeks on the podcast as well for the benefit of listeners who do not also visit the web site. I will also post updates, sharing the badge design as it evolves and any other details leading up to actually producing the first batch.

If this experiment is successful, meaning I can get the help necessary to produce the initial batch of badges, I will definitely explore producing other rewards for donors using a similar model. I’d like to build up a good selection of distinctive, fun premiums to reward donation at all levels. If you have suggestions for other premiums, I’d be happy to hear them, too.

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Previously:

• March 10, 2010 -- OK Go Leaves EMI to Form Their Own Label
• March 8, 2010 -- Is Ad Blocking Choking Sites to Death?
• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• February 25, 2010 -- Advertising Experiment
• February 11, 2010 -- Flat Rate Micro-Payments

According to the New York Times, Netflix has canceled its plans for another research contest and settled the suit. Part of the settlement constrains their future plans for further research involving customer data. Despite that, they are still trying to figure out how to continue improvements in their recommendation system. Good news that they now are convinced to do so only where it is not at the expense of a toxic waste spill online in recovery of personally identifiable info.

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Previously:

• February 11, 2010 -- Government Pushing for Location Tracking without Warrants
• February 8, 2010 -- FBI Pushing ISPs to Retain Data for Two Years
• February 1, 2010 -- Risks, Rights Questions in Social Data Mining
• January 31, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 1/31/2010

Nate Anderson at Ars has more technical details of the filter’s implementation. He also expands on Tech Liberties concerns over the whole plan, beyond the lack of judicial or governmental oversight. The system in question is a bit too coarse grained and likely to inadvertently block harmless sites.

I’ve expressed my concern with filtering systems many times before, namely they are never even anywhere close to perfect. Many researchers and activists have proved that other means of dealing with harms are far more effective than net nannies of any variety.

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Previously:

• March 6, 2010 -- Google and Tor
• February 28, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-02-28 News
• February 17, 2010 -- France Introduces Safety Law that Includes Online Censorship
• February 11, 2010 -- Google Refuses to Block YouTube Videos in Australia
• February 8, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/7/2010

Google has been gobbling up the brightest computer scientists and software engineers at a prodigious pace. RE2, their new regular expressions library, is the latest dividend of their carefully hoarded brain trust. The search giant claims their improved implementation completes in linear time and won’t overflow the stack space of its threads. Put simply, they’ve fixed the potential worst case for this critical Swiss Army knife software tool.

Like Go, this is another stab at speeding up the fundamentals most of us building software take for granted. Beyond the worst case, I would imagine such a startlingly different approach may also speed up the more typical cases.

The release is available under a very permissive BSD license. It won’t take long for the wider community to vet their claims. If RE2 lives up to its promise, I imagine it won’t take long to spread far and wide.

Update: See Philip’s comment below.  The predictable performance of RE2 comes at a considerable price: it doesn’t support back references.  Back references let you re-use part of an expression, the value a group actually matched, later in the expression.  They are intensely useful and based on my own experience, I would hesitate quite a bit more at the trade off Russ Cox suggests is so simple.

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Previously:

• March 14, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for Week Ending 3/14/2010
• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• March 7, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/7/2010
• March 7, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for the Week Ending 3/7/2010
• February 28, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/28/2010

I saw a link to a BBC article on the Net Neutrality Squad mailing list that would be easy to dismiss as part of this trend. This is the BBC, though, not a copyright focused blog. The examples given also lead to a plea that resonates with the one that has been ringing around my skull for some time now.

This has got to stop. We have to say “enough is enough” to those who hold copyrights in songs and images and words and videos. We must refuse to remake the digital world in order to serve only their interests.

Pause for a minute and think about the immense volume of bad copyright stories recently, crowned by the terrifying policy making represented by the Digital Economy Bill and ACTA. Has copyright gone too far? You can guess my answer but this is only the start of a wider conversation that should include access to knowledge as a right and restoring the limitations on new rights under copyright that has traditionally been part of the equation but has been since been set aside.

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Previously:

• March 7, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/7/2010
• March 6, 2010 -- Massive Copyright Crackdown on the Web
• March 3, 2010 -- Jamming with Artificial Musicians
• March 1, 2010 -- The History of Unintended Consequences of IP Terrorism
• February 24, 2010 -- IP Czar Wants Input on Measuring, Reducing Infringement

In the intro, my thanks to Kreg Steppe and Geoff for their generous support through their donations this past week. Also, if you have not taken the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge please do so. Sydney Padua’s madcap web comic has my favorite depiction of Ada, one I’ll bear in mind as I choose my subject to blog on the day.

Listener feedback this week is from Eric and Jon in response to my interview with Nina Paley, specifically our discussion of the non-commercial option with the Creative Commons licenses. Jon shared a blog post on the fuzzy nature of non-commercial.

The hacker word of the week this week is fairings.

The feature this week is a new Hacking 101 on databases.

Grab the detailed show notes with time offsets and additional links either as PDF or OPML. You can also grab the flac encoded audio from the Internet Archive.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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• No Related Post

I think the band is extremely innovative, their latest video is proof enough of that. I am willing to take them at their word when they first felt that working with a label let them do what they love best and they now cite the same reasoning for striking out on their own. They certainly seem like the types to be open to experimentation and the possibility of failing instructively.

The most important thing is that they are able to keep creating in their own, clearly unique and enjoyable fashion.

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Previously:

• March 13, 2010 -- Another Experiment, This Time to Reward Donors
• March 8, 2010 -- Is Ad Blocking Choking Sites to Death?
• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• February 25, 2010 -- Advertising Experiment
• February 11, 2010 -- Flat Rate Micro-Payments

There are two silver linings. The Bilski case currently before the Supreme Court could lead to an invalidation depending on the outcome. The patent expires in 2017 having been filed deep within the bubble in the nineties.

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Previously:

• October 4, 2009 -- Following Up for the Week of 10/4/2009
• February 8, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/7/2010
• February 5, 2010 -- Simulation Suggests Commons May Foster Innovation Better than Patents
• February 5, 2010 -- Beware or You May Be Replaced with a Patent
• January 24, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-01-24 News

Unfortunately, the big day for the little prototype was spoiled a bit, as noted by Daring Fireball. Apparently, the skinning of the early access online IDE was pretty much plagiarized from MetaLab. The two parties have have discussed the snafu, what ultimately turns out to have been videos and screen captures of an internal theme never meant to be seen by the public. MetaLab requested and Mozilla has issued an apology.

If you read the account from MetaLab, though, this may take more time to untangle. MetaLab bid out some work to Mozilla, a proposal that was ultimately rejected. So this may have been an innocent copying by developers of their site’s design and graphics but it was nonetheless incredibly ill advised and arguably in somewhat poor taste, even if only ever meant to be used internally.

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Previously:

• March 4, 2010 -- Firefox Personas May Add Dynamic Update Capability
• February 21, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for the Week Ending 2/21/2010
• January 24, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for Week Ending 1/24/2010
• January 19, 2010 -- Bespin, Mozilla’s Cloud-Based Editor, Gets a Reboot
• January 16, 2010 -- Augment Privacy Policies with Icons like Creative Commons Badges

Watching the demonstration video, it just feels like a natural fit to the way I pull up multiple buffers in vim or eclipse and constantly toggle between them based on a coding task. The set up and tear down cost of those buffers always feels like a waste, especially closing them all out when I switch to a different task. Making groups of bubblers persistable just seems like a logical extension and the task switch in the demo nicely shows how powerful this idiom could be for more efficiently maintaining task related mental state directly in the IDE, state that isn’t reflected anywhere in the code.

My sole concern is whether this IDE is going to be suitable for all users. I have years of experience under my belt and build a very complete mental model of large sections of code as I build and work on a project. I fear this more atomic approach may interfere with the ability of a more junior programmer to keep work in the small correctly nestled in a clear, larger design context. I imagine there may be a way to scale this approach to provide that sort of grand view, as well, in addition to the searching and browsing views of classes it borrows from existing IDEs.

I am definitely interested in getting my hands on this prototype and see how it evolves towards a finished IDE.

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Previously:

• January 21, 2009 -- TCLP 2009-01-21 Hacking 101: Build Tools

This is going to set an amazing tone for the summit. Times like these, I wish I had an unlimited budget so I could plan to be there. I hope the keynote is either streamed live or recorded and made available afterwards.

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Previously:

• March 14, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/14/2010
• March 10, 2010 -- Major Win Against ACTA in the EU
• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• March 7, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/7/2010
• March 2, 2010 -- Both Sides Preparing for Final Round of ACTA Negotiations

On Hacker News, I saw this link to a blog post by Christian Engstrom, the Swedish MEP from the Pirate Party.

The resolution was carried by 633 votes in favour, 13 against, and 16 abstentions.

Epic win!

Epic win indeed. Mike Masnick at Techdirt has another nice quote, that the EU Parliament voted so strongly in favor of the resolution because “[ACTA] flouts agreed EU laws on counterfeiting and piracy online.” As he explains, the rejection of ACTA is very deeply rooted, including consideration of the Lisbon Treaty which is supposed to provide for MEPs to access all stages of international negotiations. The way ACTA has been conducted clearly violates this convention.

As Engstrom reminds us, though, there is still much to be done and the possibility that EU commission working on ACTA might still choose to ignore the resolution. In his coverage, Masnick points out that the Parliament may take the negotiators to court if that comes to pass.

Jamie Love has a very broad roundup of coverage if you want still more detail and analysis.

That an almost unanimous parliament agrees with the strongest criticisms of ACTA is a much needed ray of hope. Hopefully, the legislative bodies of more countries, the US in particular, will take a more active interest in these concerns in wake of the excellent work done by New Zealand and now the EU to exert some much needed oversight.

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Previously:

• March 14, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/14/2010
• March 10, 2010 -- Michael Geist to Keynote NZ Public Summit on ACTA
• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• March 7, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/7/2010
• March 2, 2010 -- Both Sides Preparing for Final Round of ACTA Negotiations

This year’s winner is no less than George Thacker whose work in particular on the Alto at Xerox PARC had a profound impact on the personal computer even as we see and use them today. The New York Times Bits blog has an excellent summary of Thacker’s career and solicits some of his thoughts on the history of the personal computer and its possible future.

Congratulations, Mr. Thacker!

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Previously:

• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• February 28, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-02-28 News
• January 1, 2010 -- WIZZYWIG 3 Is Now Available
• December 15, 2009 -- An Internet Time Capsule
• December 14, 2009 -- First Two Volumes of WIZZYWIG Now Free

I would have really liked to see much more consideration on the values inherent in open source. Mostly he sticks to how this informs opportunities for sharing credit and managing interactions between contributors and users. Maybe I am thinking beyond his simple proposition, considering the hacker ethic more than the common denominator open source methodology. I think adding that ethos could help address some of the other criticisms of transparency, namely the idea that technology can produce beauty and, more importantly, effect change may help fix focus on outcomes as much as process.

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Previously:

• October 6, 2009 -- Federal Register Opens Its Data, Apple Reverses on Politically Charges App, And More
• October 1, 2009 -- Cyberbullying Bill’s Chilly Reception, Open Sourcing Publicly Funded Books, and More
• September 30, 2009 -- Music Inspired by a Computer Game, Portland Backs Open Data, and More
• September 17, 2009 -- Freeing Locked Down Public Data, Protecting Your Anonymous Online Speech, and More
• September 10, 2009 -- Hands on with Retro Computing, Experimenting with eBooks, Facebook Opening Sources Voluntarily and Otherwise, and More

This is actually very consisted with some of the earliest thought on Piracy, as explained by the dark net paper. Published in 2002 by some folks at Microsoft, the hypothesis they put forward was that attempts to stop piracy of digital goods would merely encourage those exchanges to move to less regulated spaces, to dark nets.

If nothing else, Hadopi is proving to be an interesting experiment in advance of other countries looking to adopt three strikes laws. I am still skeptical that this or any other research will have more than a negligible impact on the policy making. That is the nature of panics, they defy reasoned persuasion based on substantiation, common sense and logic.

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Previously:

• November 24, 2009 -- End of Life for the Cell Processor, Debunking the Cat Brain Simulation, and More
• October 8, 2009 -- Three Strikes Hypocrisy, PATRIOT Act Reforms Falter, and More
• March 6, 2010 -- Massive Copyright Crackdown on the Web
• March 2, 2010 -- Web Comic on How DRM is Really Defective
• March 1, 2010 -- The History of Unintended Consequences of IP Terrorism

The example he provides is multiples browser tabs with many embedded Flash and Silverlight objects. When one Flash object crashes, they all crash even though the Silverlight objects and the surrounding content remain unaffected. This actually seems like a decent compromise as using a process for each instance of a plugin could get pretty demanding of the underlying operating system.

Ryan also points out that Mozilla is looking for testers of this build, so if you don’t mind working with a bleeding edge version, check out the link.

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Previously:

• March 4, 2010 -- Firefox Personas May Add Dynamic Update Capability
• March 1, 2010 -- Mozilla Shoring Up Performance for JavaScript beyond TraceMonkey
• February 21, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for the Week Ending 2/21/2010
• February 8, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for Week Ending 2/7/2010
• January 31, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for the Week Ending 1/31/2010

Now Cryptome has had its account suspended by PayPal, according to The Register. The theory I’d heard to explain this repeatedly happening to Wikileaks is a run in with PayPal’s torturous rules on handling donations for some classes of organizations. There aren’t any details, yet, from PayPal on this case but I suspect it is for similar reasons.

I wonder if other not-for-profits have been experiencing similar problems and this is a bias in coverage because of the sensational nature of Wikileaks and Cryptome or this is part of genuine discrimination on the part of the payment processor, disguised as some impenetrable bureaucracy.

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Previously:

• February 25, 2010 -- Microsoft Takes Down Cryptome but It Is Already Back
• January 25, 2010 -- WikiLeaks Able to Receive Donations Again

The Register has some details on why the servers went down. This is apparently an intentional act, a protest of the new DRM. I suspect this will cancel out the attack’s intended effect, that Ubisoft will write it off as atypical rather than a poor design or operational choice. They fact that they appear to be downplaying the effect, too, as the article notes, tends to support that hypothesis.

I remain unconvinced that DRM has any effect on outright thieves. To the extent that no-sales reduce revenue to the point where creators choose not to create, I think there have to be better solutions. And I don’t necessarily think no-sales have such an impact on the bottom line though I am open to empirical evidence otherwise.

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Previously:

• March 4, 2010 -- Ubisoft Hefty DRM Cracked within Hours
• March 2, 2010 -- Web Comic on How DRM is Really Defective
• February 28, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-02-28 News
• February 22, 2010 -- Considering the Likelihood of a DMCA Exemption for Jail Breaking iPad
• February 18, 2010 -- Ubisoft’s DRM as Annoying as Expected

The scan quality is pretty good though I found the lack of a way to browse the issues by date a bit annoying. However, with over a century of content, search is probably going to be a way more useful means of locating articles of interest.

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Previously:

• February 25, 2010 -- Free Audiobook Publisher Raising Funds
• January 20, 2010 -- Project for Making Public Domain Music Friendlier
• January 7, 2010 -- Open Source Media Player Partners with Device Maker
• October 20, 2009 -- Doctorow’s DIY Experiment, Asking Oracle to Let MySQL Go, and More

To me, the whole conversation highlights the importance to engage readers, listeners and viewers not just in the primary discussion around the content itself, but to be candid about what is needed to support producing it. The Ars piece reveals that they do have conversations about ads in their forums. They need to extend that conversation to the advertisers, as well. Masnick sets a good example of holding the advertisers to some kind of standard, one with which fans can live. I am not suggesting that publishers be captive to readers’ interests or so on up the food chain, but there at least be the sort of engagement that will lead to situations that better serve more interests.

Masnick also reminds us that fans serve more of a purpose than generating filthy lucre. Focusing too closely on revenue, in whatever form it is generated, presents the risk of losing sight of that fact. Without engagement in the first place, there is no business model, ad driven or otherwise.

The one other though I had that I have not seen addressed is how much bad ads of the past may have trained the current default of blocking without thought. At the very least, as flawed as it may have been, the experiment by Ars re-visits the question of what is an acceptable or tolerable ad, one that I think is worth re-considering every so often.

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Previously:

• March 13, 2010 -- Another Experiment, This Time to Reward Donors
• March 10, 2010 -- OK Go Leaves EMI to Form Their Own Label
• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• February 25, 2010 -- Advertising Experiment
• February 11, 2010 -- Flat Rate Micro-Payments

In the intro, a huge thank you to Chris Miller for his ongoing donation. Also inspired by my latest appearance on The Secret Lair to discuss free content and supporting artists, some brief thoughts on my own views towards the show and earning something from it.

This week’s security alerts are a several OpenSSL flaw and research on statistical attacks on security questions. I recommend treating security answers where they are required like passwords, storing them in a password vault and securely, randomly generating them.

In this week’s news a fan sequel to King’s Quest is shutting down (the original publisher playing a large role in Steven Levy’s “Hackers” which I reviewed previously), a hearing was schedule last week to discuss internet freedom abroad including circumvention though we might do well to apply the same standards at home, two storied about plugless brain-computer interfaces with a compelling first hand account of one, and Google search index to go real time.

Following up this week the USTR responds to Senator Wyden’s letter about ACTA with some good analysis and the problems with a revised censorship amendment to the DEB that now targets weblockers.

Grab the detailed show notes with time offsets and additional links either as PDF or OPML. You can also grab the flac encoded audio from the Internet Archive.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Previously:

• March 14, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/14/2010
• March 7, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 3/7/2010
• February 28, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/28/2010
• February 21, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/21/2010
• February 15, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/14/2010

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Previously:

• January 24, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 1/24/2010
• March 7, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-03-07 News
• February 28, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/28/2010
• February 21, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/21/2010
• February 15, 2010 -- Following Up for the Week Ending 2/14/2010

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While I cannot quibble with the legal basis of this effort nor find it practically different from similar undertakings by other players in the world of big content, I am concerned about the knock on effects. The web works by linking and to a lesser degree excerpting. I personally don’t think 100% utilization is morally sustainable but this plan has already moved towards just 80% re-use. I may also be more sanguine about that fraction as it still would tend to target folks re-posting the heart of an article rather than adding their own value through additional commentary and analysis while preserving an incentive to click through to the original material. How long, though, before the triggering portion drops to a level that get fuzzier and fuzzier, encroaching on what would commonly be considered a fair use?

The other issue I take with this plan is that it is attempting to solve the wrong problem. I seriously doubt extensive quotation is solely or even largely responsible for the failing revenues that publishers feel are forcing them down this path. In fact, I am convinced that some soul searching on why at least some infringers are so heavily re-quoting may inspire innovative changes by the original publishers. I will concede that this consideration has natural limits, there are a class of pirates who are simply outright thieves resistant to any reason whatsoever to participate in financially supporting content production.

That doesn’t change my conviction that a more constructive response is to look at the piracy first as free market research and at least combine efforts for reducing the outright thievery with a more compelling offering that gives readers and re-linkers more of a reason to shore up advertising revenues and other sources of income for those bearing the burden of producing original content online.

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Previously:

• March 1, 2010 -- The History of Unintended Consequences of IP Terrorism
• January 7, 2010 -- France Considers Media Levy for the Internet
• December 15, 2009 -- One Sided Meeting over Piracy Concerns
• November 24, 2009 -- End of Life for the Cell Processor, Debunking the Cat Brain Simulation, and More
• November 11, 2009 -- A Directory of Public Participation, Microsoft Patents sudo, and More

I am glad that Google is supporting development of Tor but I’d be happier still if they would contribute some servers and bandwidth to the network of relays that is key to its operation. The biggest complaint that I have with Tor, a common gripe from its fans and users, is that it is slow as dirt. There simply are never enough relays in the network to make it usable for any but the most critical needs.

If you’ll indulge me, I’d also like to share another petty criticism of this post. It reads as a little self serving to me. More than once it trots out this rhetorical line that runs to the sentiment of: “Tor is useful for dealing with services that don’t respect your privacy, unlike Google who totally respects your privacy and lets you opt-out and stuff.” Don’t get me wrong, the bulk of the post focuses on some very important issues that Tor is tackling and Google supports, I just don’t see the need for Google to emphasize its own non-evilness. Especially in a post where they are supporting such an excellent tool for evading evil intentions.

This post also made me think back to Ethan Zuckerman’s recent post suggesting circumvention alone is not enough to foil censorship. Worth bearing in mind as we read up on the latest news about such tools.

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Previously:

• September 29, 2009 -- Bletchley Park Receives Lottery Grant, China Finally Starst Blocking Tor, and More
• March 12, 2010 -- NZ Stealthily Launches Net Filter
• February 28, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-02-28 News
• February 17, 2010 -- France Introduces Safety Law that Includes Online Censorship
• February 11, 2010 -- Google Refuses to Block YouTube Videos in Australia

The latest version of StatusNet is already using OStatus and it appears to work quite well. I am optimistic that the shift to build on protocols that are gaining traction will see OStatus picked up by services that are using those protocols. I am still hopeful that I will eventually be able to maintain a single social presence on a site I prefer to use for its features and policies but have my social graph and information flow widely distributed instead of having to maintain multiple presences and duplicate a lot of other as I do now.

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Previously:

• March 7, 2010 -- Quick Security Alerts for the Week Ending 3/7/2010
• March 1, 2010 -- Is There a FLOSS License Suitable for E-Voting?
• February 25, 2010 -- Wikipedia’s Notability Requirement Fails for FLOSS
• February 23, 2010 -- Happy Birthday, Apache
• February 18, 2010 -- Twitter Doesn’t Love Open Source as Much as StatusNet

There is a certain amount of overlap with Sixth Sense, about which I’ve written previously. It has me wondering if the systems could be combined in a complementary fashion. The ability to input data without the projector active seems like a huge plus on top of everything else Sixth Sense can do with output and interaction.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Harrison’s system is as compact, though that may improve as it makes its way to market. The Singularity Hub author, who also noted the similarity between the two systems and a third from Microsoft, also considers the other difference that occurred to me, that Sixth Sense is open source. The author, Aaron Saenz, looks at it as possibly helping Harrison bootstrap his work to market the same way Pranav Mistry is trying to do.

I think just one of them being open might facilitate a fruitful combination of the two. If they were both open, who knows what sort of wild, post-human augmentation they might unleash. Eventually.

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• No Related Post

Silent Hunter 5 was released on Tuesday and just a few hours later a cracked version of the game was published on many file-sharing sites. Ubisoft, worrying that DRM-haters would download the game illegally, quickly responded to the news about the cracked DRM and released a statement in which they downplay ‘the issue’.

Ernesto at TorrentFreak also has a good survey of reactions to the DRM system itself which range from skeptical to downright irked. Not surprisingly, this latest attempt at IP terrorism has only resulted in more users seeking the better experience afford by pirated versions of the game.

We’re seeing a lot of that lately, aren’t we?

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Previously:

• February 18, 2010 -- Ubisoft’s DRM as Annoying as Expected
• March 8, 2010 -- Ubisoft’s Authentication Servers Go Down
• March 2, 2010 -- Web Comic on How DRM is Really Defective
• February 28, 2010 -- TCLP 2010-02-28 News
• February 22, 2010 -- Considering the Likelihood of a DMCA Exemption for Jail Breaking iPad