Posts from — April 2004

i have recently come to the decision that i do not like the taste of lamb or mutton. it tastes wrong to me and i don't like it. this is odd because i generally don't dislike things, but i've had lamb 4 times now, and i just don't like it.

A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer. A number of people, including New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, have spoken out in favor of national ID cards. In a recent op-ed piece of his own, Bruce Schneier responds to one of Kristof's recent editorials, pointing out that “[adopting a national ID card system] won't work. It won't make us more secure. In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.” Schneier justifies these statements in his article. [ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center]

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this is pretty much the case, it cannot, contrary to some opinion add anything positive to security, but it does add alot of new problems, and it expands other types of problems that occur with id cards.

the gopher:// manifesto. 14 Apr 2004: “Gopher is an infoserver which can deliver text, graphics, audio, and
multimedia to clients. Keeping documents “link clean”, making linking a
function of the server info-tree and not in the doc, layout is kept to
its most frugal minimum, and is standard across all docs. No graphic
design means its the ideal navigable interface, a hypertext Eden.” Story [RootPrompt -- Nothing but Unix]

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it isn't really hypertext as much as archived text, but gopher is good.

esp. if you use your atm….

On opportunities for innovation. Clément Laberge: “Les innovateurs ne sont pas rares… ce sont les conditions propices à
l'innovation qui le sont. C'est cette rareté qu'il faut combattre.”

(”Innovators are not in short supply… the proper conditions for innovation are. It is that scarcity that must be fought.”)
[Seb's Open Research]

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but by maintaining artificial scarcity, and limiting the opportunity for innovation, you then have the ability to profit immensely off of minor innovations.

Fear less.

Jeff finds Julie Hilden's pull-quote of the year at Findlaw:

Only speech without fear is truly free.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

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i would say only speech made in fear is free too, if you still make the speech.

IETF to lead anti-spam crusade.

The Internet's premier standards-setting body is making its first attempt to develop messaging technology aimed at reducing the amount of spam flooding corporate e-mail servers.

Having researched spam for more than a year, the IETF this month formed a working group that will develop a standard mechanism to eliminate spam that uses a spoofed sender address.

The IETF's new working group plans to develop a DNS-based mechanism for storing and distributing information that authorizes an e-mail server to send messages from a particular domain or network. The group is dubbed MARID because it will create message transfer agent (MTA) authorization records in DNS.

By targeting spam, MARID has set its sights on one of the biggest headaches facing corporate network managers. In March, 68% of all Internet e-mail was spam, according to anti-spam vendor Brightmail. Brightmail says it filtered 2.93 billion fraudulent e-mails in March, up 25% from the previous month. [via NetworkWorldFusion]

[ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog]

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interesting issue, we'll see if they actually come up with a solution.

Citizens Rights Management. Spent a delightful few hours this afternoon in Toronto at the International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance: Cameraphones, Cyborglogs, and Computational… [Blog de Halavais]

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i think this terminology actually transforms the debate in interesting ways. It is a very useful idea. but it is likely not citizen rights management as much as consumer rights management, because there are more consumers than citizens.

one of the reasons why i think tv sux is because fox mangled firefly, which was a great sci-fi show. (that was only one of the many reasons) this is a nifty poster with some things people learned in firefly.

Published, recognized and stretching. Remember that “Fundamental Issues with Open Source Software Development” rant I wrote back … [Catspaw's Guide to the Inevitably Insane]

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nifty.