01.31.05
Posted in forum archive at 11:23 am by
The Brazilians are in the middle of an interesting transition in their culture. It’s been noted that right now they spend more on licensing fees than they do on aiding the poverty stricken. So they are looking are at moving not only to open source software but a culture based on ‘creative commons’ – open rights management.
Lawrence Lessig, Standford Professor and sensible copyright fighter, documents the proceedings this past week.
Then Gil spoke. Needless to say, the warm up acts were just that. He electrified the audience, delivering a written speech as poetry slam. He promised more support for free software, and free culture. And he again embraced the Creative Commons movement in Brazil, which is exploding everywhere here. Again he took questions. Again he answered critics, directly, and passionately. I was reminded of his comment to me in the car the other night: we’re just citizens here.
After lunch, I visited the Youth Camp at the WSF, where 50,000 tents, and 80,000 kids are participating in WSF events. At the core was a Free Software lab, with about 50 machines, all running GNU/Linux, and constant lessons about how to set the systems up, how do to audio, and video editing, how to participate in free software communities. This was organized totally by the kids who ran it. Machines in shacks, hay on the ground, wires and boxes everywhere.
An interesting experiment and one that I can see picked up elsewhere – any developing nation has to see licensing fees as just another barrier to the big kids table. Will the 3rd world become the leaders of the open movement?
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Posted in forum archive at 11:17 am by
There’s an interesting article on Mercora, a way of streaming radio. Not entirely sure if its as useful as possible but might be good for discovering artists you haven’t heard of.
In short, Mercora is a cross between peer-to-peer file-sharing and Internet radio. It gives you access to thousands of different online broadcasts, but the broadcasters are people like yourself. Their playlists are eclectic and idiosyncratic, not always what you’d expect from a radio station. Plus, in its own way, the ser-vice builds a sense of community. You can freely interact with other broadcasters, meeting people who share your tastes.
Might have to try this service out. 
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Posted in forum archive at 11:12 am by
It’s monday and what does that mean? More amusing hacks! This one, however, is anyone wishing for just a bit more privacy at the office.
The micro-claymore is a small device designed to deliver a short-ranged, dispersed payload from a concealed location. The mine is created from commonly available office materials. It may be either manually fired or fired by a tripline, depending on the orientation of the firing pin. (Follow links for step-by-step instructions.)
Fun, fun.
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01.25.05
Posted in forum archive at 5:44 pm by
That banner image you’re seeing at the top of your aggregator is for you. 
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Posted in forum archive at 11:11 am by
Call me behind the times: I just stumbled across Uplink, a garage game filled with hackers, agents, corporate backstabbing: pretty much any Neuromancer fan’s dream come to (virtual) life.
Try out the free demo and in no time you’ll be referring to yourself as Neo.
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Posted in forum archive at 11:06 am by
The EFF has published its list of endangered and extinct gizmos. An interesting idea.
FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo “God’s machine,” and its devotees have been known to declare, “You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo — or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn’t grow up to threaten the status quo?
That’s the strategy the entertainment industry is using to control the next generation of TiVos and iPods. Its arsenal includes government-backed technology mandates, lawsuits, international treaties, and behind-the-scenes negotiations in seemingly obscure technology standards groups. The result is a world in which, increasingly, only industry-approved devices and technologies are “allowed” to survive in the marketplace.
An entertaining little bit of propoganda.
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01.23.05
Posted in forum archive at 11:26 am by
A member of the EFF has penned an interesting editorial for a San Fran paper. The ideas he mentions for supporting artists (extra $5 a month on one’s bandwidth bill, the money fronted by services like iTunes for licensing fees, etc) are nothing new. However, the realization that we’re going to have an answer to all this by Christmas was something of a shoking revalation:
For better or worse, the biggest legal fight over file sharing will be finished by next Christmas. The Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether makers of P2P software – and by extension other technology makers – are responsible for the sins of their customers. When its opinion comes down next fall, it will tell us what Napster’s demise never did: whether or not it’s legal to make and distribute file-sharing software.
This could very well be the end of the beginning. Whoo-hoo!
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Posted in forum archive at 11:17 am by
Here’s a neat idea: (1) create an awesome game, (2) put it in a consumer friendly PDF file knowing that most people are good and honest with the belief that they will pay you, (3) make it available for electronic purchase online, and (4) keep track of purchase records so that if a customer loses their copy in a hard drive crash they can get another copy.
Steve Jackson has been designing games for longer than I’ve been alive. The recent move into pure electronic form is pretty cool for someone that’s an industry vetran. And because the overhead is lower (don’t have to pay printing on flashy manuals or reproduction and shipping costs) they can take chances with different or more exotic game types. Take about a win-win!
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Posted in forum archive at 11:11 am by
One of the little known rules of the DMCA is that you have to provide a list of protected materials. After all, how is a site manager supposed to filter the infringing materials from their system if they don’t know what those materials are? This obviously presents a problem for the motion picture industry because the list would be very large, very cumbersome, and most likely incomplete no matter how much work was involved. A torrent site owner, realizing this, is now giving the MPAA fits over it:
While as a service we can filter content, and that is exactly how we cooperate by filtering identified copyrighted titles, we do not have the man power to manually verify the tens of thousands of torrent links, nor is it even technically possible without a complete list of copyrighted works to filter against. Since you seem to have trouble producing a complete list, a technical difficulty I can understand, you should also understand the same difficulty we have in making your copyrighted works magically disappear… somehow. So instead of calling it a complete list, which seems unfeasible, it should be referred to as a sufficient list. Without it, we cannot help you in filtering your works in our search results.
Read on for more legal goodness.
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Posted in forum archive at 11:07 am by
I had to do a double take. Japanese companies are notorious for not admitting mistakes. That’s why Sony’s leaders admit they made a mistake with their Walkman digital music players. The players as you may remember, where battery hogs, came way too late (the iPod was well on its way to being the it thing), and was hampered by very restrictive DRM.
It’ll be interesting now that they’re planning to make their players straight ahead MP3 machines. But again, too little, too late? Or is a company as big as Sony never really out of the game?
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