Saturday, October 11, 2003

A Matrix of Weblog Uses in Education. Scott Leslie, an educational technology researcher and emerging technology analyst, is working with Dr. Bruce Landon and the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) on the Edutools.info project. The  project participants are researching course management systems. Scott has developed an interesting matrix of  possible uses of weblogs in education. He describes the project in his October 9, 2003 weblog post. [via James Farmer's incorporated subversion] [Ohio Edublogging] 9:14:43 AM    comment []

Peace Prize Is Awarded To Iranian: Rights Activist Is First Muslim Woman to Win. By Keith B. Richburg Washington Post. Reporting from Tehran, the Reuters news agency quoted the editor of the conservative newspaper Resalat as saying, This prize carries the message that Europe intends to put further pressure on human rights issues in Iran as a political move to achieve its particular objectives. But Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist, said he was very happy that an Iranian, and above all a woman, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a sign of the very active presence of Iranian women on the social and political scene. And in a remark apparently aimed at recent court rulings against reformists, Abtahi added, The fact that a lawyer has won this prize gives us hope that the judicial system will change its methods. In 2000, she was sentenced to 15 months in prison and was prohibited from practicing law after being convicted of defaming the Iranian authorities. The sentence was reduced to a fine on appeal. . . . n a statement, the Nobel committee said she is a sound professional, a courageous person, and has never heeded the threats to her own safety. The committee said it hoped the prize would be an inspiration for all those who struggle for human rights and democracy in Iran, in the Muslim world, and in all countries where the fight for human rights needs inspiration and support. The committee also praised Ebadi's support for religious freedom, including her advocacy of Iran's minority Bahai community. . . . [Azadeh] Kian-Thiebaut [an associate political science professor in Paris], who left Iran at age 20 in 1980, said she cried when she heard her friend had won. For Iranians, this is very, very historic, she said. It's terrific for all of us." She called Ebadi really very courageous and said her nickname for her friend is the Tehran Lion. This can reinforce the position of the reformers who are for the respect of human rights, who are for the respect of women's rights, Kian-Thiebaut said. But this is very, very bad news for the conservatives, who imprisoned Madame Ebadi. [Washington Post: Front Page] 9:11:02 AM    comment []

A Champion of Iranian Freedom. Honoring Shirin Ebadi with the Nobel Peace Prize will encourage millions in the Islamic world who share her belief in free expression, the rule of law and the rights of women. [New York Times: Opinion] An activist for thirty-some years, a champion of human rights, Islam, as well as of the Iranian people, a woman removed from a judgeship after the Islamic Revolution, now on the world stage as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. It's great. 9:00:56 AM    comment []

SunnComm v Halderman - recanted!. Yet another entry celebrating the non-lawsuit. Though I do have a rare primary source link to the SunnComm recant press release [Infothought] 8:54:41 AM    comment []

More on a story reported on in this space yesterday, namely the threatened-then-backpedalled DMCA-related suit of a Princeton grad student for revealing the shift-key method of defeating Sunncomm's lame-o copy protection: Sunncomm's earlier agreement in settling the Charlie Pride cloquing CD-protection mess. 8:52:01 AM    comment []

'Subversive' code could kill off software piracy, by Barry Fox, New Scientist. Software pirates who make illegal copies of a particular computer game are finding the games companies are coming up with a radical new anti-copying strategy. Illegally copied games protected by the system work properly at first, but start to fall apart after the player has had just enough time to get hooked. As a result, the pirated discs actually encourage people to buy the genuine software, the developers say. The new protection system, called Fade, is being introduced by Macrovision, a company in Santa Clara, California, that specialises in digital rights management, and the British games developer Codemasters, based in Leamington Spa. It makes unauthorised copies of games slowly degrade, so that cars no long steer, guns cannot be aimed and footballs fly away into space. But by that time the player has become addicted to the game. Fade exploits the systems for error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have become scratched. Software protected by Fade contains fragments of "subversive" code designed to seem like scratches. The bogus scratches are arranged on the disc in a subtle pattern that the game's master program looks for. If it finds them, the game plays as usual. When someone tries to copy the disc on a PC, however, the error-correcting routines built into the computer attempt to fix the bogus scratches. When the copied disc is played, the master program then cannot find the pattern it is looking for, so it knows the disc is a copy. . . . The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version, claims Bruce Everiss of Codemasters [which produced the scheme]. Not unbeatable, of course, but an interesting development. 8:12:45 AM    comment []

Spam suits filed in MO: Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon has filed the first two suits under that state's new anti-spam law. The suits, filed against a Florida man and Fundetective.com which is also based in Florida, claims that spam messages were sent to Missouri email accounts without the required ADV label. (thanks, BNA News!) 2:44:01 AM    comment []