Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, January 27, 2003

Astroturf generators -- Comment()
NY Times writes that Editors and Lobbyists Wage High-Tech War Over Letters (membership required): 'Newspapers and political organizations are engaged in technological one-upmanship over "AstroTurf" - letters to the editor that look like authentic grass-roots responses from readers but are not. [...] At [the] Web site, users were encouraged to mix and match paragraphs from about 10 form letters. They could send their newly created letters to any of a number of publications in Wisconsin. [...] The complexity and the creativity of the site surprised Tim Kelley, the paper's editorial page editor. "Maybe you can call them genuine letters because they are encouraged to cut-and-paste," he said."'

Recounting my book reviews: 54 in total -- Comment()
Earlier, I invited Finnish readers to review books. I had posted here 51 book reviews (written in Finnish by me). This morning I noticed that one issue of the reviews had escaped my notice. I posted three more reviews, bringing the total to 54 reviews. All the reviews are licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Blogger communities are being shortchanged -- Comment()
JD's New Media Musings writes: "Paul Boutin correctly notes today that the Internet and blogger communities are being shortchanged when it comes to being credited for revealing the mini-scandal over form-letter letters to the editor sent to newspapers from supporters of President Bush and members of the Republican National Committee."

-- Comment()
Publish globally, script locally: "A picture can be worth a thousand words. But a URL can be worth half a dozen pictures. When application behavior is expressed that way, you empower your community of users to share it directly. And Google, which can zero in on URLs and URL fragments in Web pages posted by those users, becomes your tireless and efficient helpdesk assistant. Software as a service? A powerful idea, I'm all for it. The service doesn't always have to live in the cloud, though. When it's local you get different, and also powerful, effects." (Full story at InfoWorld.com) [Jon's Radio]

-- Comment()
Both Parties Wary of Data Mining: "An amendment to a spending bill that requires the Pentagon to spill the beans to Congress on its Total Information Awareness project gets bipartisan support. Privacy advocates see it as a step in the right direction. By Ryan Singel." [Wired News]

Palladium is now "next-generation secure computing base" -- Comment()
Palladium changes name, but not stripes: 'Palladium -- Microsoft's "trusted computing" program that may be used to protect users from getting hacked but is more likely to be used to undermine competition -- is changing names. [...] Microsoft is adopting a new name to replace the code name Palladium. Effective today, we will use "next-generation secure computing base" to describe the technology and the related development efforts that have until now been done under the Palladium banner. [...] As Dan sez: "You can put makeup on a pig. It's still a pig." Seems to me that the principle "advantage" of calling Palladium "next-generation secure computing base" is that no one will be able to remember the new name.' [Boing Boing Blog]

The Beauty of the Worm -- Comment()
The Beauty of the Worm: "It's a thing of terrorbeauty, this Slammer/Sapphire/W32.SQLExp.Worm. Weighing in at 376 bytes of assembly language code, it is shorter than some email signature blocks. [...] It fits entirely within one UDP packet. The packet goes into a Microsoft SQL Server box, and boom, the machine turns into a zombie, spewing the same packet back out at random IP addresses, over and over and over and over, running in a tight 23-instruction loop, cycling fast enough to fill the network it's connected to..." [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

-- Comment()
Jessica Clark interviews Lawrence Lessig in In These Times: "[G]etting access to content and being able to share content, I think, is going to be increasingly important, and we just have to make sure that people who have a vision of the 20th century don't control the way creativity in the 21st century happens." [FOS News]

-- Comment()
Should computer geeks give up on politics?: "The old saw that the Net routes around damage, including the political kind, has been around just long enough to be unfashionable. That doesn't make it any less true. For all their complaining, the nerds are way ahead of slow-grinding legislators. The only way Washington can catch up is if the geeks stop to play politics." [American Open Technology Consortium]

Metaphor, Morality, and Politics -- Comment()
The essay Metaphor, Morality, and Politics is a great read. I have to study it carefully to find out how the ideas in the essay fit with my thinking. There should be more texts which 'think outside the box' out there on the net.

-- Comment()
I decided to use a creative commons license for this weblog. At the same time, I tested this weblog using the CSS validator. The site passed, with some warnings (which I'm ignoring).