Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Viruses Get Smaller

Ebola isn't the only dangerous virusIn the decade to come, it’s clear that the Internet will face two related challenges:

  • Increasing volume of spam, and
  • Increasing sophistication of viruses.

These two are related because spam is being increasingly used to spread viruses, and viruses are increasingly used to subvert security measures on computers and to turn them into spam relays.

The Register reports that a hacker has produced the first PocketPC virus. Oh joy. Along with the recent discovery of cell phone viruses, we can expect an entire new generation of annoyances and irritations, if not thefts and vandalism.

I don’t mean to sound like a Luddite, but I do have some fear for the future. Our increasing reliance on the relatively weak infrastructure we’ve developed is dangerous. Depending on who you talk to, somewhere between thirty and eighty percent of the bandwidth on the web is tied up in processing spam. Many of these messages carry virus payloads. And it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

Exterminate Excessive Copyright Terms!

Daleks!The BBC is reporting that there will be no Daleks in the latest incarnation of the Dr. Who franchise. It appears that talks between the BBC and the estate of Terry Nation have broken down.

At least here in the United States, copyrights and patents were intended as incentives for individuals to create and extend the useful arts and sciences. Unfortunately, excessive terms (approaching infinite in the case of copyrights) have eroded this idea. As far as I know, Terry Nation will never write another Dalek script. He can’t. He’s dead. No incentives are likely to change this fact in a significant way.

For the past 40 years, Terry Nation and his estate have exercised editorial control over exactly how the Daleks are portrayed in film. That’s my entire lifetime. Is it too much to ask for them to think up some new pony, and cede control of these characters to the public that originally made them popular in the first place?

I know, I know, I’m not talking about what’s legal. I’m trying to talk about restoring the ideal behind the power granted to the government by our Constitution. It was never intended to establish a ceaseless monopoly for authors, artists or inventors. Excessive copyrights have a chilling effect on artistic expression. We all borrow from our collective experiences and cultural icons, and when we are denied access to a large part of our collective experience, ultimately we miss out on experiencing it. Instead, we get to experience only the narrow slivers that IP owners decide to give us. No work which was written in my lifetime or even my mother’s lifetime will enter the public domain for decades, if ever, given the Supreme Court decision to give carte blanche to Congress to indefinitely extend copyright terms.

Senate Has Too Much Time – Passes Useless Bill

Reuters is reporting that the Senate has just passed a bill that makes using a camcorder to record a movie a federal crime. punishable by up to three years in prison, or up to five years in prison if such recordings were made for commercial purposes.

On the one hand, I work for the movie industry. I also try to respect intellectual property laws, and think there is no legitimate excuse for video taping a movie inside a theater.

But get real! Three to five years? Continue reading →

Public Domain Images

butterflyI was looking for some clip art that I could use on my website, so last time I was at the bookstore I acquired a copy of Dover’s Old Fashioned Animal Cuts, a book of copyright-free images ready to be scanned. It’s a fairly nice collection of hundreds of black and white images which are copyright free.

They could have just said “public domain”. After all, if a work is not protected by copyright or trademark, it is in the public domain. Curiously, Dover includes the following “license” in the front of this book.

This book belongs to the Dover Clip Art Series. You may use the designs and illustrations for graphics and crafts applications, free and without special permission, provided that you include no more than ten in the same publication or project. (For permission for additional use, please write to Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Streen, Mineola, N.Y. 11501.)

However, republication or reproductin of any illustration by any other graphic service whether it be in a book or in any other design resource is strictly prohibited.

FishWhat’s wrong with this? The fact that it is a complete fabrication. If the images themselves do not carry copyrights, they cannot place any restrictions on their use. That’s what public domain means. They can copyright the collection as a whole, keeping you from basically Xeroxing their collection (which is a creative work, requiring the acquisition of images and their arrangement in a catalog format), but they can’t keep you from, say, scanning them all and producing your own derivative work in the form of a catalog of your own.

I’m not trying to bust their chops. They produce a nice $6.95 book which is convenient and good to have, and frankly worth the pittance they charge. But for them to place restrictions on the use of their public domain collections is well beyond any rights they hold to the collection.

Caveat emptor: I’m not a lawyer, and cannot advise you on these, but you can go ahead and read up on the subject. I suggest Steven Fishman’s The Public Domain: How to Find Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art and More.

CPU Evolution…

Over on linuxdevices.com, there’s interview with Glenn Henry, founder of Centaur Technology, the bright guys behind the C3 CPUs which are marketed by VIA. I’ve got a 1ghz Nehemiah running the webserver that you’re looking at this very moment. I saw this mentioned on Slashdot and on Dan Lyke’s flutterby!, and I thought that I’d comment.

Glenn Henry had an amazingly simple idea: that he could compete in the PC chip market not by making faster chips, but by making cheaper, cooler chips. It’s a good notion. After all, my webserver ran for years on an old 133Mhz P5. Given the relatively low volume, it was more than adequate. I’m typing this message from an 800mhz Celeron, which runs Fedora Core 2 very nicely. It’s far from clear that having a 3.2ghz P4 would significantly enhance my weblog-authoring experience, or the experience of my readers.

What does enhance my weblog-authoring experience is quiet. My webserver runs with fairly aggressive power management. If people don’t access my site for some small number of minutes, disks spin down and the machine goes into an idle mode. Right now, the server is loafing along at a load of 0.02. It’s quiet and cool and energy efficient. I can leave it on all day, something I really wouldn’t want to do with todays power hungry CPUs and GPUs.

The other cool thing is that VIA is making a wide variety of small boards (Mini-ITX and soon Nano-ITX) that are full PC computers, but which run much cooler. Their 1ghz machines loaf along at under 5 watts. They can be passively cooled, which eliminates fans. That makes them desireable for home theater applications, for thin clients and just for machines that run quieter than your average PC. I’m almost more interested in this region of the CPU world than I am in additional speed enhancements (although some hardware enhancements for MPEG-4 encoding/decoding might be useful).

Centaur Technology also recognized an interesting economy of scale: that making a chip which runs 80% as fast as Intel or AMD didn’t cost 80% of what Intel and AMD spent to make their chips. The last tweaks of performance come at a great deal of design cost and die space. By accepting lower performance, they are able to design chips more quickly and with vastly smaller dies and correspondingly smaller costs. This is the kind of “work smarter, not harder” mentality that I wish were more prevalent in business.

The race doesn’t always go to the fastest. Intel and AMD can continue to try to put out muscle cars, but the market is going toward cheaper, more energy efficient technologies. VIA has placed themselves admirably to put x86 chips in all sorts of places that Intel and AMD have overlooked. I think they will do just fine.

Ken Brown is a Big Fat Idiot…

Holy crap. It isn’t often that I get a chance to read something as high in drivel as Ken Brown’s rebuttal to Andy Tanenbaum’s critique of Brown’s Samizdat, an as yet unreleased critique of the Linux operating system, Linus himself, and open source software in general. If you haven’t read Andy’s comments on Brown, by all means go and do so, otherwise the rest of this rant might not mean as much to you. I’ll wait till you are done.

Pretty amazing, huh? But Brown’s rebuttal is even more amazing. I thought I’d take a few minutes and pick apart a few points for the gratification of myself and what two or three readers this weblog might have. Continue reading →

On Watching Weight and Weight Watchers…

I have been attending Weight Watchers since early January, and have had good results (over 36 lbs lost as of my weigh in on June 6). If you are having difficulty getting started on your weight loss goals, I recommend them as a sane, safe and reasonably effective way to get jump started. It’s definitely easier to get started when you have somebody independent who is going to be monitoring your progress.

But in a way I think it is kind of childish for me to need this kind of independent auditing. Continue reading →

How To Build Your Own Blog

orange coneThe title is a bit of a fraud. This is not so much an article on how to build your own weblog as a short bit about what I think is important in building a weblogging system, what is not important and how to drive most directly toward a system that is simple, flexible and works. It also describes some experiments that I’ve been performing, and will soon deploy on my orangecone website. Continue reading →

Andy Tanenbaum on ‘Who Wrote Linux’

It’s fascinating the degree to which Microsoft/SCO backed front companies are trying to create FUD around the use and authorship of the Linux operating system. In a Slashdot article today, they link to an article by Andy Tanenabaum about Ken Brown’s claims that Linux Torvards is not the author of Linux. Brown’s argument seems to center around the notion that it’s impossible for an individual to write an entire operating system by themselves.

This would seem to be a curious idea to come away with after talking to Andy Tanenbaum, since that’s precisely what Andy himself did. Continue reading →