Saturday, June 25, 2005

Winner in Iran Calls for Unity; Reformists Reel. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory leaves Iran's reformist movement virtually powerless and threatens to further complicate relations with the United States. By MICHAEL SLACKMAN. [NYT > International] 5:07:48 PM    comment []

NYT endorses Bugmenot The New York Times, whose odious reg system requires you to personally identify yourself in order to simply read the news, publishes an endorsement of Bugmenot, an excellent service that circumvents registration for websites like nytimes.com. STOP BUGGING ME If newspaper marketers think they are receiving reliable user information via those annoying site registrations, they should run their Web addresses through bugmenot.com, which offers quick user names and passwords to people who click on a link only to be confronted by a mandatory registration page. Some examples of usernames: thisisannoying; iwantnews; thisisjustsilly; whydoyoudothis. DAN MITCHELL Link (Thanks, Bugmenotter!) [bOing bOing] Dunno if that merits the appellation "endorsement," but good to draw attention to it, all the same. 5:07:42 PM    comment []

Remixed penguins?. Penguin Books appears to be trying to capitalize on the interest on the Internet in mashing and is asking people to do a mash - merging unrelated songs and sounds - and then share it. At your disposal at the site are audio snippets from 30 great novels. [Smart Mobs] 5:03:22 PM    comment []

The Armstrong Williams NewsHour. The intent of the right's new assault on public broadcasting is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to quietly annex them into the state propaganda machine. By FRANK RICH. [NYT > Opinion] 5:02:23 PM    comment []

Hard-Line Tehran Mayor Wins Iranian Presidency [Washington Post: Top News] 6:35:16 AM    comment []

Tons of great stuff from presentations on games, gaming, and "real" learning over at The Shifted Librarian Thursday and Friday (and for all I know more coming today). 6:32:47 AM    comment []

Reformists' media problem. I don't dare to say that the majority of Iranians do not demand socio-political freedoms, just because Ahmadinejad has won the elections. To me it means two things: 1. Social inequality is a serious problem in Iran, for which Rafsanjani was heavily responsible. He was beaten by the outcome of his policies. 2. The reform movement can't reach beyond a certain population. They only have newspapers and Internet, with an approximate reach of five to seven millions. While the regime has a monopoly on TV and radio, the reformists can't even reach the majority of the middle-class, especially the youth, who are not into reading anymore, let alone the lower-class in rural areas. On the other hand, satellite TVs which has a much wider reach than print and Internet, are promoting exactly the opposite message of the reform, which has proved it only benefits the regime, especially during the elections, by creating an atmosphere of apathy. Until the reformists change this balance, they are doomed to loose the elections. They have to invest time and money in satellite TV channels etc. and try to decrease the wide-spread apathy, especially among the youth. [Editor: Myself (English)] 6:30:19 AM    comment []

Victory Is Seen for Hard-Liner in Iranian Vote. The conservative mayor of Tehran appeared to be rolling to a landslide victory in the presidential runoff election. By MICHAEL SLACKMAN. [NYT > International] 6:25:25 AM    comment []

Microsoft releases under ShareAlike. You'll find at the Microsoft IEBlog an announcement that will surprise some. I'm happy it doesn't surprise me. Following Dave Winer's decision to release his spec for RSS 2.0 under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, Microsoft has now released its spec for "Simple Feed Extensions" under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This isn't the first Microsoft site licensed under a Creative Commons license. There's a very cool PatternShare site that builds on Microsoft research licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. But this is the first under a ShareAlike license. That's right - the "copyleft" "ShareAlike" license. People are free to modify and redistribute the spec so long as the modifications are licensed under a similar license. Also notable is Microsoft's representations regarding patent: As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification’s extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification. These steps signal important flexibility and sophistication within Microsoft. For anyone who knows people at that place, this is old news. But even if old news, very very good news. [Lessig Blog] 6:24:46 AM    comment []

Indian Call Center Sells Personal Information. There was yet another incident where call center staffer was selling personal data. The data consisted of banking details of British customers, and was sold by people at an outsourced call center in India. I predict a spate of essays warning us of the security risks of offshore outsourcing. That's stupid; this has almost nothing to do with offshoring. It's no different than the Lembo case, and that happened in the safe and secure United States. There are security risks to outsourcing, and there are security risks to offshore outsourcing. But the risk illustrated in this story is the risk of malicious insiders, and that is mostly independent of outsourcing. Lousy wages, lack of ownership, a poor work environment, and so on can all increase the risk of malicious insiders, but that's true regardless of who owns the call center or in what currency the salary is paid in. Yes, it's harder to prosecute across national boundaries, but the deterrence here is more contractual than criminal. The problem here is people, not corporate or national boundaries. [Schneier on Security] 6:24:01 AM    comment []

A Broadband Beat-Down. A Foreign Affairs article says that the U.S. was firmly entrenched as the world's leader in Internet innovation - until the Bush administration. By DAN MITCHELL. [NYT > Business] 6:23:37 AM    comment []

The Chiffons v. George Harrison. I pulled out a Chiffons CD the other day, a collection called The Best of the Chiffons, which I hadn't listened to it since posting about the group's lawsuit (in the 1970s) against George Harrison, alleging copyright infringment. Anyway, this will amuse maybe five of you but the fourth song on the CD is a cover of Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" (mp3). Yes, the song the Chiffons claimed was an infringement of "He's So Fine" is considered one of their "best"! [Stay Free! Daily] 6:23:31 AM    comment []

Bill Gates as Anthropologist. Grouping the founder of Microsoft among great anthropologists is not as strange as it first sounds, according to the current issue of Fortune Small Business. By PAUL B. BROWN. [NYT > Business] 6:21:34 AM    comment []