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Tuesday, April 13, 2004 |
P2P for text sharing. Tracey Logan, File-sharing to bypass censorship,
BBC News, April 9, 2004. Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, one of
the first to advocate P2P file-sharing, now wants to extend the
practice to the distribution of news. Not only would P2P networks
bypass censors, they would break the monopoly of major news
syndicators. Quoting Anderson: "The effect of peer-to-peer networks
will be to make censorship difficult, if not impossible. If there's
material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then
it's possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's
material that only one government says is wicked then, I'm sorry, but
that's their tough luck". (PS: Of course the same networks could be
used for research data and articles, preprints and postprints. This
would aid in preservation and freedom from censorship, but would hinder
efforts to measure traffic and usage.) [Open Access News]
9:14:51 AM  Google It!.
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Scribbling in the margins. 
The fuzzy intersection of official and unofficial data has never been a comfort zone for information technologists. In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard's Software Design and Usability,
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says
that "one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was
the idea of the margin." There was always space for unofficial data,
which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the
relationship between the two. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
This column muses on the use of DNS TXT records to implement the latest
round of SMTP sender authorization schemes. Everybody feels guilty
about not using some new formally-defined DNS resource record type, but
everybody also knows that would be a non-starter. So instead we're
scribbling in the margins of the DNS, and luckily, DNS has margins available for scribbling.
... [Jon's Radio]
9:14:17 AM .
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Federal preemption, open source, and open access. Michael Warnecke, NASA Will Become First Agency to Get OSI Certification of Open Source Agreement,
BNA Electronic Commerce & Law Report , March 31, 2004. In the U.S.,
software and research produced by government employees is not
copyrightable. That's good news for the free exchange of software and
research. But open-source licenses typically require copyright-holder
consent, not the public domain. So how can goverment-produced software
use those licenses? After some legal analysis, NASA has decided that
while its software cannot be copyrighted, it can be licensed, and it
will take advantage of this fact to release its software under
open-source licenses. This strategy depends on some court rulings that
state contract law, which governs licenses, is not preempted by federal
statutes, which govern copyright. My take: it's good news that NASA
software will be released as open-source, but bad news that other
agencies might use less generous licenses to control downstream use of
their uncopyrightable content. And despite its effects on open-source
software, I still believe that federal preemption would be better than
the lack of federal preemption for open-access research. [Open Access News]
9:12:10 AM Google It!.
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OSCON 2004 - Python 12. O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2004
The OSCON 2004 site is live, so you can register; be sure to take advantage of the many discounts available. Also, don't forget to check the schedule for the Python 12 presentations and tutorials. OSCON is being held July 26 - 30 at the Portland Marriott Downtown in Portland, Oregon.
There is a plan to have sprints after the main conference is over,
starting Friday afternoon and lasting through Monday morning, but the
details haven't been worked out yet. If you are planning to attend
OSCON and think you might be interested in doing some coding over the
weekend, then you might want to hold off on finalizing your flights. [Kevin Altis' Weblog]
9:09:43 AM .
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Skeptical eye on Google repository searching. Henk Ellermann, Google Searches Repositories: So What Does Google Search For?,
-=(In Between)=-:, April 12, 2004. Ellermann puts the brakes on
enthusiasm for Google's proposed federated repository searching,
reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday, April 9 (see earlier OAN posting.)
His questions relate to the actual number of documents concerned; press
accounts have said the 17 repositories hold an average of 1000
documents, but Ellermann's calculations show a number considerably
smaller. He maintains that the repository movement has a long way to go
to attract and index content and provide reliable access, that there be
something for Google users to search and find. [Open Access News]
9:08:51 AM Google It!.
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Fundamental issues with open source software development. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_4/levesque/
The latest issue of First Monday contains this paper by Michelle
Levesque which offers a non-'fear uncertainty and doubt'-based
accounting of some of the common problems with open source projects.
Many of these are now commonplace complaints. Based on my own
investigations of existing open source learning object repositories and course management systems,
I have to concur that many of the problems she outlines, especially the
varied quality of documentation and the limited user interfaces, are
endemic and do limit the uptake of these systems when they are compared
against their commerical alternatives. And as Levesque says, it's not
that any of these failings couldn't be corrected, and you can point to
some open source projects that get it right. - SWL [EdTechPost]
9:08:04 AM Google It!.
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Jakob Nielsen:
"It's apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete
conversation, in which two people take turns speaking, than it is to
ignore a person speaking and falling silent in turns." [Scripting News]
9:06:37 AM Google It!.
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A Black Box for Human Health.
NASA engineers are working on a device that records and transmits vital
signs like heartbeats, body temperature and blood pressure. The device
is designed for astronauts, but it could be handy on Earth, too. By
Amit Asaravala. [Wired News]
8:51:29 AM Google It!.
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Robots May Fight for the Army.
A Massachusetts company is working on a new generation of robots that
would help American soldiers in battle. The machines won't look
anything like the Terminator, though. By Mark Baard. [Wired News]
8:50:17 AM Google It!.
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Got me a bug tracker. Finally installed Roundup
on my home computer to give me a place to keep my to-do list. Have been
using it at work for the last few months and it's been working really
well -- so now let's see if I can use it effectively at home too!
Comment [Second p0st]
8:48:48 AM .
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Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft's patents. "The company is filing for protection for, on average, ten patents per week." [Scripting News] the breaking of the patent system under load? --BL
8:33:52 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
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