Thursday, April 24, 2003

Hack the Planet: Using Hydra to collaboratively take notes (or just watch people take notes) is fun (and sometimes just funny). 9:47:45 PM    comment []

WHO defends Ontario travel advisory. Via News Is Free: Popular Items. 9:38:12 PM    comment []

Esther Dyson has started blogging. I saw somewhere that William Gibson had stopped. There's no such announcement on his blog, though it hasn't been updated all week. Maybe that's what "stopped" means. 3:09:01 PM    comment []

Microsoft CD copy protection advances, by John Borland, CNET News.com. We're hopeful that the labels will do some test releases this summer and do some major releases this winter, said Adam Sexton, vice president of marketing for Macrovision's music technology division. Copy protection is working in Europe, and airplanes are not falling out of the sky. The economy is still functioning, despite the doomsday predictions. Interesting embrace-and-extend in all this: Macrovision has been using an encrypted MP3 format rather than Microsoft's Windows Media Audio. Here comes your digital rights management, baby, and it's all up to Redmond. 12:08:00 PM    comment []

Salon Blogs have the best names. With no pretense of or even gesture towards completeness, but just glancing at the recent updates: Underwhelmed and Overrated Who put the Drugs in my Freedom Fries? Triathlon for Dummies! I watch too much t.v. GoogObits Playing with my food, and other things How to Save the World 12:07:55 PM    comment []

Jordan scraps tough new press law clause: Journalists hail scrapping of amendment to Jordan's press law imposing heavy sanctions for range of violations. (Middle East Online) 11:07:47 AM    comment []

We've planted a Wild Plum tree at home, part of a school-surprise, more-or-less-Arbor-Day related project made possible by the local Men's Gardening Club. Without warning, my daughter carried this plastic newspaper bag of wood shavings, roots, and twig out from school about ten days ago. I know that only a fraction of the kids in her class must really have planted them. Notice might have helped with cooperation. But we picked a spot in the yard and dutifully dug a hole that evening. Since, two buds are leafing, so I guess good things are happening. (These photos are not of our tree, by the way!) The info the Garden Club sent home said that it was a Wild Plum, but not much more. I guess it's probably Prunus americana. Though I've also seen reference to Prunus mexicana looking online, I would guess that the Gardening Club was more likely to be passing out the native plant than something from farther out of town -- as mexicana turns up on Texas Web pages, rather than Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri ones. There's also P. angustifolia, but it seems to be limited to parts of Colorado. And Harpephyllum caffrum is also called "wild plum," but it's African, so I didn't think this is that. Technically speaking (see how quickly we put on airs of expertise?), it's a rose. Some sources say it can grow thorns, others just describe tiny, raised dots on the branches. Some call them spiny. According to what I'm reading, not only will it flower prettily in April (or maybe March--sources differ), but it will also bear edible fruit. Here, I'd resigned myself to something ornamental, hoping only for sufficient floral beauty to offset whatever horrid mess the proto-fruit might make, and I learn that it has sweet fruit. Of course, some sources note they're used for jams and jellies, which insinuates they're not really good eating. And nothing I'm finding inidicates how mature it needs to be before it fruits. The birds will get them all, anyway, long before we'll have a good crack at 'em. Still, it's fun so far to have "our tree" to watch, which is part of the point of the whole Arbor Day thing. In time, we should have a four-to-ten-to-twenty-five-foot-tall tree in our back yard, with or without thorns, flowering gloriously in spring and feeding birds in late summer. Pretty cool to look forward to it. http://www.missouriwildflowerguide.com/Flowers/WildPlum.html http://www.paulnoll.com/Oregon/Plants/tree-Wild-Plum.html http://kaweahoaks.com/html/wild_plum.html http://www.lib.ksu.edu/wildflower/wildplum.html http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Pages/tree/plum.html http://www.uwgb.edu/biodiversity/herbarium/trees/pruame01.htm http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/arboretum/photosmainpage/Wild_Plum_Flower_Longenecker_Gardens_May_1_2002.htm http://www.pbase.com/image/13618486 http://www.pgallery.net/rogerama/image-40989.html http://home.earthlink.net/~swier/WildPlum.html http://plant-materials.nrcs.usda.gov/pubs/mopmcpgpram.pdf http://www.nps.gov/wica/Wild%20Plum.htm 10:07:37 AM    comment []

A festival of liberation. At the long-banned pilgrimage to Karbala, joyous Shia faithful yell "Thank you, Bush!" even as their leaders angrily demand that the U.S. get out of their country. [Salon.com] 6:21:58 AM    comment []

Industry Standard: From December 31, 1998; The Spam Wars. Lawrence Lessig. [Tomalak's Realm] 6:19:03 AM    comment []

Security Developer Snared In Legal Tar Pit: An open-source security app may be the first victim of so-called super-DMCA laws. By George V. Hulme, InformationWeek. In the days following the July 2001 Code Red worm outbreak, which infected 359,000 systems in 14 hours, software developer Tom Liston started work on an application that would turn the tables on worms. He created LaBrea, which essentially acts like a digital tar pit, trapping hackers and worms, forcing hackers to break off attacks, and preventing worms from moving on to other computers. The free, open-source application has been heralded in security circles and nominated for awards as a unique weapon. It's also been pulled from Lipton's Hackbusters.net site by its author. He yanked it April 15 when the Illinois resident learned that a 4-month-old state law (Compiled Statutes 720 ILCS 5) makes it illegal to create a device capable of disrupting a communication service without the express authorization of the communication service provider. The law also makes it a crime to conceal the existence, origin, or destination of any communication from a service provider or any lawful party. . . . Some software security experts, academics, and consumer-electronics- industry representatives say such legislation will curb legitimate research and speech. They refer to the state rules as "super-DMCA" laws because they claim the laws tend to be more restrictive than the federal Digital Millennial Copyright Act of 1998. The DMCA itself seeks to prohibit any hardware or software that can circumvent copy-protection schemes for digital media, such as E-books, movies, and music. Intellectual-property-rights advocates, including entertainment conglomerates, say those worries are overstated. So-called super- DMCA laws that are proliferating among the states, they say, are intended only to prevent people from pirating content. These laws are about theft. It's that simple, says Vans Stevenson, senior VP of state legislative affairs at the Motion Picture Association of America. Stevenson says the laws are in no way intended to thwart legitimate security devices. No one is going to go to jail for using a firewall or VPN, he says. Which is, of course, why the laws don't say that? I thought that we already had laws against theft. It's that simple. 6:11:04 AM    comment []

Travelers Urged to Avoid Toronto Because of SARS. The World Health Organization added Toronto, Beijing and a Chinese province to its list of places that travelers should avoid. By Clifford Krauss. [New York Times: Business] 6:06:58 AM    comment []

Echelon: The Secret Power, Review of Echelon: Le Pouvoir Secret, by Lisa Nesselson, in Variety. If you phone, fax or email a friend to say "Let's go see 'Echeleon: The Secret Power,'" be advised, you'll doubtless end up on a list somewhere. Juicy, entertaining and densely informative doc demonstrates the extent to which private communications are illegally and constantly spied on by the title network. . . . . Shot split screen/widescreen in mock "surveillance camera" mode, pic piles on the revelations with matter of fact authority. Doc traces roots of comprehensive electronic surveillance to 1943, when the U.S. and Great Britain pacted to break Germany's Enigma code, shortening WWII by as much as two years. . . . Doc overflows with real names and precise addresses. In a modest building at 8 Palmer St. in London, for example, every fax entering or leaving the U.K. was analyzed in the 1980s, according to information in the docu. . . . Semantic Intelligence is the term for scanning for spoken words. "Voicecast," a form of personalized voice recognition, is credited with making the shooting of Emilio Escobar in 1993 possible. Fred Stock, a Canadian agent from 1987-1993, testifies that he was instructed to listen in on the Red Cross, Greenpeace, Amnesty Intl. and -- get this -- Princess Diana when she began campaigning against landmines. The Queen of England, even the Pope--nobody is impervious. Backed up by leading British and New Zealand investigative journalists and former security agents from the countries concerned, so overwhelming and smartly presented is doc's thesis that by the time a former CIA head weighs in with a straight-faced rebuttal, he appears to have less credibility than a bag lady raving about little green men. 5:06:48 AM    comment []

P2P streaming video from CMU of "Work in Progress by Neal Stephenson" on May 1, 4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Neal Stephenson is the author of several books including Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon. His next work, a series of historical novels entitled The Baroque Cycle, will begin publication in October with the first volume, Quicksilver. The talk is part of the SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES, and (for those in Pittsburgh) will be at the University Center McConomy Auditorium (with Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall from 4:15). Stephenson has been praised for having an almost prophetic vision of the future, and as a respected thinker in this area, is one of six visiting fellows at Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge Massachusetts. Stephenson admits that he runs into people who tell him there are companies in Silicon Valley who are basically throwing his novel Snow Crash on the table and saying "this is our business plan." MIT Media Lab Professor Michael Hawley says, "what Arthur C. Clarke was to a previous generation, Neal Stephenson is to ours. Neal is the kind of genius who puts one jarring idea on every page. Stephenson's talk at CFP2000 in Toronto was one of the more insightful I've ever heard, so I reckon this is worth a look-see. 4:06:38 AM    comment []