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Tuesday, May 25, 2004 |
The Nepal Wireless Networking project.
The Nepal Wireless Networking project is the result of a campaign led by a local teacher Mr Mahabir Pun and it has hooked up the villages of Nangi, Paudwar, Ghara, Tikot, and Sikha using wireless technology.Mr Mahabir Pun says "Villagers are using it to send messages between the villages and to the outside world,and they are putting online things they have to sell.Yak farmers are using the network to buy and sell livestock, and exchange vetinerary tips,"the BBC reports.
Wi-fi lifeline for Nepal's farmers
[Smart Mobs]
8:42:43 PM 
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News from Hong Kong:
E-mail scam swindler charged.
A 30-year-old Nigerian man in connection with an e-mail scam
valued at US$26 million was today (May 15) charged.
. . .
Arrangements were made to hold a meeting in a hotel room in Wan Chai on May
14 between the swindler and two CCB officers with one of them posing as an
recipient who had been maintaining contact with the swindler.
After the swindler expressed that the fund would be ready for transfer
early next week provided that the officers let him use their bank account
and urged the officers to pay an administration fee of US$24,000, the
swindler was arrested at the meeting.
7:35:37 PM
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Dershowitz protests, and a new, milder book review runs.
By David Mehegan, Boston Globe.
After reading the review, he fired off an e-mail to Nora
Rawlinson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, complaining about the
"self-aggrandizement" comment, and added: Several recent reviews of my
books in Publishers Weekly have smacked of personal antagonism by the
reviewer. They seem more reviews of me as a controversial person than of my
writings. He did not ask for a new review.
A few days later, Rawlinson replied by e-mail: We have looked at the
review . . . in light of your comments and agree that it does not meet our
reviewing standards. We are sending out the book for a second review.
Meanwhile, we have contacted Amazon.com and the other online booksellers
who license our reviews to ask them to remove the current one. In last
week's Publishers Weekly, dated May 17, the new, considerably milder review
appeared.
Rawlinson said yesterday that the first review was ad hominem -- a personal
attack -- and should not have slipped through the usually rigorous editing
process. That is something you should never do, she said, coming
closer to attacking the writer than the book. The "self-aggrandizement"
crack, she says, was particularly unacceptable.
Reassigning a book after a negative review, as a result of a complaint from
an author, is almost unheard of in the book review world, mainly because it
may lead other offended authors to ask for a second chance. Yet most book
editors would agree that while a book review can be extremely negative it
should focus on the work and not sneer at the author.
3:35:06 PM
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Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head
off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad
in certain versions of Opera's Web browser,
CNET
News.com has learned. (Story by By Evan Hansen and Paul Festa.)
Opera disclosed the payment last week in a terse press release that omitted
other details, including the name of the settling party and the nature of
the dispute.
But a source indicated that the payment came from Microsoft in order to
close the books on a clash over obscure interoperability problems. On at
least three separate occasions, Opera has accused Microsoft of deliberately
breaking interoperability between its MSN Web portal and various versions
of the Opera browser--charges that the software giant has repeatedly denied.
A Microsoft representative said the company does not comment on rumors.
Reached by phone, Opera executives refused to name the company involved in
the settlement or describe the nature of the legal claims, citing a
confidentiality agreement.
We forwarded a few facts to a big international corporation and settled
before we took legal action, Opera Chief Technology Officer Hakon Lie
said Tuesday. This resolves an issue very close to my
heart.
(
Backstory here at A blog doesn't need a clever name)
1:34:41 PM
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using the shift key to rip certain copy-protected CDs.
Today I had my first experience of a seriously copy-protected CD, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, released by EMI. I didn't have much luck ripping it onto my Mac - I ended up having to force quit out of iTunes. Apparently there are a number of different copy-protection methods. One method can be circumvented with a magic marker. I didn't think that this method would work on this particular CD, so I looked for other methods. Then I saw this reference to hold down the shift key on a Windows computer for 5 seconds after inserting the CD. This stopped the CD from automatically launching the program which would interfere with the copy protection. I then copied the CD with iTunes, and soon I'll have it in my iPod.
As I've written before, I believe that creators should be fairly compensated for their work, but that copy-protection technology goes way too far, and I have no moral qualms about circumventing it. I've never been interested in downloading music from file-sharing sites. The only thing which would tempt me would be if I wasn't able to rip a CD which I had lawfully purchased. Then I would feel entitled to download an illicit copy.
When will the record companies realize that people like to listen to music on their computers and mp3 players, and it is manifestly unfair to prevent this from happening? It is simply such a stupid thing to do - piss off your paying customers and drive them into supporting your real target, the file-traders.
I'm about to really start ranting, so instead I'll link this detailed explanation of how the shift method works.
[explodedlibrary.info]
7:27:04 AM
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Tales of Cyber-Crime Running Rampant, by Dennis Fisher, eWeek.
Most Americans would be surprised to know that thousands of credit
card numbers are sold online every day, and very little is done to
stop it, said Jim Melnick, director of threat intelligence at
iDefense Inc., in Reston, Va., and a former Defense Intelligence
Agency officer.
The dirty little secret is that there's all this other stuff going on
that nobody is stopping. I'm not sure there's an understanding inside
Washington of how pervasive cyber-crime is.
7:23:12 AM
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