« June 2006 | Main | August 2006 »
Getting all mixed up about open source ideals
Linux founder Linus Torvalds isn't making any friends within the hard core open source community lately. Last week he flamed the second draft of the GPL version 3 that was released earlier in the week.
To summarize, Torvards argued that he's looking for a license that promotes sharing without scaring away any potential users.
The GPL3 draft however has introduced controversial provisions about patents and DRM. And although the second draft has watered down some of the more harsh language, it's still there in spirit.
Torvalds argues that the Free Software Foundation is trying to hijack the GPL to push an agenda of patent and DRM reform. That might all be jolly great, but Torvalds isn't looking to fight that battle.
To take his argument further, everybody agrees that cancer research needs billions of dollars. But that doesn't justify a provision in the GPL to promote fund raising for such studies.
Torvalds' ideals simply don't match with those of Free Software Foundation. He's willing to live with the band aids that have been applied to the patent system and can see DRM as a necessary evil.
That is probably the best way to go for Linux to remain successful, but won't do much to solve the patent problem.
Several people within the open source movement are disappointed with Torvalds' lack of support for the GPL3.
But the dissent merely shows that "open source" means many things to many people. As it goes with revolutions, people agree on the first step to take doesn’t preclude dissent at a later stage.
Torvalds has turned out to be a pragmatist who prefers to focus on making Linux successful. The Free Software Foundation believes that the battle is far from over.
Both are right, and neither has the moral or legal right to force their views upon the other.
Revolutionaries-turned-lecturers
(Disclaimer: image intended to depict revolution and debate - in no way am suggesting that their is any link between open source and communism/socialism/leninsm.)
technorati tags: linux, gpl, gpl3, open+source, linus+torvalds, free+software+foundation, FSF
July 31, 2006 at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Last Wednesday in security hell
Good news if you work for Armstrong World Industries, a manufacturer of floors, ceilings and cabinets. The company in 2005 achieved revenues of $4bn, but didn't feel the need to invest any money in a decent security policy and enforce it.
As the company reported on 25 July, this policy resulted in the loss of confidential information including social security numbers on 12,000 of its employees. The data was stored on a laptop that was stolen from company's auditor Deloitte & Touche.
Let's all say "thank you" to Armstrong World Industries and Deloitte
& Touche for emphasising the need for harsh penalties against
security ignorance.
There is also great news also for a group of up to 23,000 patients of the George Washington Hospital in Washington DC. You probably survived your treatment at the facility, but it isn't that certain that you'll survive the incompetence with InstantDx, a partner that attempted to provide electronic prescriptions.
InstantDx succeeded in exposing data including social security numbers for between 5,600 and 23,000 patients, the hospital disclosed on Wednesday. Amazingly, no medial or prescription data was leaked, only data that can really hurt consumers. George Washington Hospital wisely suspended the trial with InstantDx.
Let's all say "thank you" to InstantDx for demonstrating that security is strategic instead of merely a pesky added cost that gets in the way of your corporate greed.
To round out Wednesday's series of embarrassing security unveilings, a US subsidiary of the UK based financial services firm Old Mutual, realised that "sometime in May" a laptop was stolen. It contained data on 6,500 fund shareholders, including all the details that an identity thief would ever need.
Hopefully the financial services firm is better at investing than it is at securing its data. It's investors after all will need money to monitor their credit scores and fight claims for years to come.
Let's all say: "thank you" to Old Mutual for providing proof that unencrypted confidential data stored on a laptop really is a great way for identity thieves to strike it rich.
And let's finish off by thanking the privacyrights.org website for providing an overview of all these cases of data security incompetence.
technorati tags: securty, identity, theft, fraud, ssn, incompetence,
July 28, 2006 at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Be nice to your sysadmin for one day
Today is SysAdmin Day. Or at least so claims the League of professional systems administrators.
System Administrator Day give me visions of the movie Fight Club, which is about a lot of things, among them the notion that the vast majority of this world works seemingly irrelevant jobs that are only noticed when they messes up.
One quote from the movie to summarize it: "We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not f*%# with us. "
Sysadmins too only become visible when they mess up: your internet connection drops, corporate networks go down, etc. But they don't engineer any great new tools that allow you to work more efficiently.
They are caught between two fires. They get paid to keep the network up and running, but are pressed by end users to enable new applications and tools. Since a stable network is a network that's touched as little as possible, the sysadmin can only make enemies.
But for one day, hate your sysadmin just a little less. Next week you can go back to normal.
technorati tags: sysadmin, fightclub
July 28, 2006 at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Women bloggers unite for commerce
The second Blogher conference kicked off today in San Jose. The event for female bloggers sold out its 800 seats easily.
Why there is a need for a conference for women bloggers. Do they have any needs or challenges that are different from those of their male colleagues?
Judging from the conference's topics, it doensn't look like it. Blogher will feature keynote presentations from luminaries like Arianna Huffington, one of the world's top blogs. The conference is also rich on practical information: which service blogging to use and how can you migrate from one to another?
The conference's real claim to fame seems to be the accompanying website which acts as an aggregator for women blogs. It allows advertisers to identify an online female audience that they can't reach through Google ads.
Just looking at this year's sponsors demonstrated what's going on. Last year's conference was sponsored by MSN and Yahoo!, this year booth on the convention's show floor are advertising goods from consumer brands like GM and Johnson & Johnson.
The site also is preparing to launch an online advertising network for women bloggers, which will be selling ad space on 30 handpicked blogs.
Blogher might serve a greater good of community building and experience sharing, but there's some real business vision underneat.
technorati tags: blogher, blogging, blog, web2.0, advertising, huffington
July 28, 2006 at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Intel Core 2 Duo Launch demo (video)
Intel today officially launched the Intel Core Duo during a company event at its Santa Clara corporate headquarters.
The chipmaker's largest launch since the Pentium was an anti climactic event. Intel has been talking about the chips and their features for months. The official launch was like watching a cyclist cross the finish line on a downward mountain slope: crossing the summit was the real accomplishment.
What remained were some product demonstrations and repetitions of benchmarks that we've all grown tired of hearing. The Core 2 Duo on average is 40 per cent faster and uses 40 per cent less power than its predecessor.
But if you're still interested, below you can watch a video where Sean Maloney, Intel's newly appointed marketing chief and its former head of the mobile unit, demonstrates some of the new processors.
Intel chief executive Paul Otelllini
Tags: intel, core 2 duo, sean maloney
July 28, 2006 at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
It's all in a headline
Cyclist Floyd Landis has been caught using doping, his team revealed three days after the American won the Tour de France.
Certain hormone levels were too high following the 17th stage of the tour. Scientists are currently performing a second test to rule out any mistakes. If the results are the same, Landis will likely be stripped of his victory.
Here's the technology tie-in: Google News nicely shows how the news is being perceived around the world.
US publications in their headlines stop short of convicting the cyclist by merely stating the fact that his testosterone count was too high.
The foreign press however takes the extra step and claims that Landis tested positive for doping.
Technically the foreign headlines aren't correct, but they do draw the obvious conclusion rather than clouding the true impact of the high testosterone levels.
Is this mere nationalism, with the US giving their winner the benefit of the doubt while the rest of the world starts a lynch mob before the second test results are in?
July 27, 2006 at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The dot in web2.0
Sun Microsystems boss Jonathan Schwartz is playing with fire in claming that the company is the dot in Web2.0.
During the internet boom, Sun's marketing slogan claimed that the company was the dot in dotcom. The claim to fame true. The company's servers powered many start-up and dotcom wannabe.
As the bubble burst, Sun also turned out to be the hot air in the internet hype. Its stock tanked almost as fast as the Webvan empire tumbled.
To my disappointment, Schwartz in his blog posting doesn’t explain why Sun should be considered the dot in Web2.0. Instead he turns on the usual marketing spin about the company's growing sales, the success of Java and so on.
If any company could claim to be the dot in Web2.0 today, it would be Google.
Web2.0 is all about information and how you share, index and retrieve it. They tend to run on standards based open source tools such as MySQL and Linux.
Google is famously running white box servers on a tweaked version of Linux.
I haven't heard of YouTube expressing interest in Sun's project Thumper, pardon, the Sun Fire X4500. Digg.com has yet to show up on the list of Sun's reference customers.
Jonathan, we really should talk. We'll do something like a podcast or video, as long as we can slap on a web2.0 label.
Tags: sun microsystems, web2.0, jonathan schwarz
July 27, 2006 at 03:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
For once the sex industry falls behind on the internet
The online porn industry has lost its touch. After having been the driving force in monetizing the internet, online porn completely missed out on user generated content.
Youtube by now is showing over 100 million videos per day, but the site (and all its competitors) have a "no nudity" clause. So where should one post the next Paris Hilton video?
Pornotube claims to have the answer. The site offers a naughty version of all the social video services, including rating and sharing features.
But just like Youtube, it doesn't have any way to make money. That's where the service can take back the lead by showing the porn industry's ability to take mainstream technology and squeeze money out of it.
Photo: PL
Tags: porn, youtube, pornotube
July 27, 2006 at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
A nice Bill Gates memory
Bill Gates _never_ does demonstrations during his keynote presentations. Instead he walks off stage and lets some product manager do the honours.
The main reason for this is a barrage of demo crashes that have been haunting the Microsoft chairman.
At the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Gates broke with the "no demo" rule and tempted faith with disastrous results. The video below shows one of the failed demos.
It doesn’t show the most embarrassing part of the keynote however, when an Xbox demo crashes and shows the ever embarrassing blue screen of death.
In a third demo blunder, the MSN Remote service lost its internet connection.
Tags: CES, bill gates, demo gods, blunder, blue screen
July 26, 2006 at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft opts to force-feed IE7 update to users
Microsoft plans to distribute its forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser as a "high priority" update through its auto update service.
Practically, that means that the vast majority of users will update without giving it much (if any) thought, and that's just plain bad.
Many online application and websites don't work properly in the new browser. Microsoft effectively is telling web developers to update or face the consequences.
Vnunet (the publisher of this blog) for instance uses a (very nice) online content management system. It's a cutting edge Ajax tool based on open source technology that has take years to develop. It currently doesn't work on IE7 and I haven't heard anything about make IE7 compatibility a priority.
Enterprises will be able to block the update, but our enterprise IT guys have never even touched my laptop. And there are tons of small businesses that lack the IT staff to pro-actively think about blocking the update.
The decision is even more wrong on another level. Any product update provides a window of opportunity to switch to a different vendor (Firefox, anyone?). This way of pushing the IE update smells of plain abuse of Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
Don't take this the wrong way: I applaud the work that Microsoft has put into IE7 and especially the security aspects. But since the company can't guarantee compatibility for all online applications, the update should be 100 pct optional.
Tags: microsoft, IE7, windows, windows vista, internet explorer
July 26, 2006 at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Spanish
