SoftwareFreedomDay.org

August 28, 2004

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to ask you to join us in celebrating Software Freedom
Day in 2004 and beyond.

In an effort to step up the marketing effort for Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS), a small group of volunteers [1] have formed
softwarefreedomday.org with the aim of organizing a global
celebration of FOSS on August 28th this year [2]. We hope to involve
a large number of teams, comprised of LUG members and other
enthusiasts, all around the world. Our role will be to help
coordinate the event and provide the required infrastructure,
including a web portal, posters and fliers, and most importantly,
high quality (pressed) CDs with FOSS that the teams can give out to
the general public on Software Freedom Day.

Before we launch this concept to the community at large, we would
like to reach out to a few key groups and individuals in the FOSS
world, like yourself, to ask you to join us in this endevour. Though
we do hope to form a working relationship with you over time, for now
we can simply recognize our mutual goals. Thus we respectfully ask
for your endorsement of our effort; this project will enjoy even
greater success if the FOSS community unites around it.

For further information and to observe our project's progress, please
visit our newly assembled web portal, which will serve as the hub for
our collaboration in the months to come. We hope that creative souls
around the world will find varied and interesting ways of celebrating
FOSS, and that ultimately the public will join us in that celebration
too.

Sincerely yours,

Henrik Omma and Matt Oquist

Post: Interruptive Technology and the Death of Deep Thought.

For those of you who know me, you know that I think Gauss is cool :: Gauss was so tremendously smart that he accomplished 10 times more than the average genius and I think I've started to understand how. Just imagine Gauss's day: every morning he would wake up, and have nothing to do but work on his latest theories … 8-10 hours of uninterrupted time to think. Imagine that. Nowadays its just the opposite: its hard to get 8-10 *minutes* of uninterrupted time, and this is mainly due to the interruptive communication technologies that saturate every minute of our…

[OK/Cancel]

[A blog doesn't need a clever name]

——

yep, time time time, it is not on your side or mine, no it isn't.

The Household InternetIt's official, I am now a Ph …. The Household Internet
It's official, I am now a PhD Candidate. I have passed through the hoops of writing two comprehensive exams – one in Gender (January) and the other on the Domesticated Internet (June). Today I successfully defended my research proposal – my committee was great. Now, the last hurdle is researching and writing. Surveys are going out in the next couple weeks, with follow up interviews in August and September. I will update my research page soon with more details.

Phew! No turning back now – Onward! [Netwoman]

—-

she's off and running.

CERT now says it, too:

Beware of IE (Ryan Naraine story in Internet News).

The U.S. government's Computer Emergency Readiness Team
(US-CERT) is
warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE)
browser.

On the heels of last week's sophisticated malware attack that targeted
a known IE flaw, US-CERT updated an earlier advisory to recommend the
use of alternative browsers because of “significant vulnerabilities”
in technologies embedded in IE.

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies
relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model,
MIME-type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce
exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser,
especially when browsing untrusted sites, US-CERT noted in a
vulnerability note.

[A blog doesn't need a clever name]

—–

yep, use a real browser.