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Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications is likely to help you find a lot of problems with your web software, and some of those problems would be security holes.

It is Free Documentation, under the GNU FDL.

It's at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks.

Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications is likely to help you find a lot of problems with your web software, and some of those problems would be security holes.

It is Free Documentation, under the GNU FDL.

It's at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks.

None of the following things guarantee your security, or even your success:

• Shipping a successful product
• Raising venture capital
• A successful IPO

Learn why in The Valley is a Harsh Mistress at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks.

-- Mike

None of the following things guarantee your security, or even your success:

• Shipping a successful product
• Raising venture capital
• A successful IPO

Learn why in The Valley is a Harsh Mistress at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks.

-- Mike

• How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein
• Buy at Amazon
• Buy at Powells

Yeah, those are affiliate links. I get a small commission if you buy the book after clicking them. It's part of my effort to stop working for The Man. I'm not proud.

The first thing Lakein says to do is to write down your goals. First your goals for your entire life, then your goals for the next five years, and then what your goals would be if you knew you only had six months to live.

Then he explains how to prioritize the activities and tasks you spend time on each day based on how they advance you towards these goals. Any activities that don't advance you to your own goals for your own life are to be considered low priority, and unless you have a lot of spare time, not performed at all.

Now for the reason your boss doesn't want you to read this time management book: Lakein seems pretty businesslike throughout most of the book, but in discussing how activities should advance one's goals, he comes right out and explicitly says that if your job isn't helping you to achieve your goals, then you should quit it and get a better one.

Works for me. I'm still working as a software consultant, but that's just a means to an end. A goal I'm working towards, presently by spending two hours a day practicing on my piano, is to quit working altogether and to go back to school to major in musical composition. I want to be a composer someday.

Well, I am already am, I guess. Here are some MP3s of my playing my own piano compositions:

• Geometric Visions

I write more about my career change in this rough draft of my upcoming Kuro5hin article, I Have So Many Questions About Music.

I also have more to say about Lakein's book in my k5 diary: Time Management.

You may be interested to read my article:

• Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications

It's at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks, and is published under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I was inspired to write it after I got a call in the middle of the night from the CTO of a now-failed dot-com, desperate for help because his eCommerce application fell over under a load of less than fifty users when they deployed it live, just in time for Christmas. This despite the fact that their servers were high-end Sun hardware.

Despite the best efforts of our valiant hardware engineers to obey Moore's law, careless mistakes by software engineers can and often do reverse hardware performance gains.

You may be interested to read my article:

• Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications

It's at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks, and is published under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I was inspired to write it after I got a call in the middle of the night from the CTO of a now-failed dot-com, desperate for help because his eCommerce application fell over under a load of less than fifty users when they deployed it live, just in time for Christmas. This despite the fact that their servers were high-end Sun hardware.

Despite the best efforts of our valiant hardware engineers to obey Moore's law, careless mistakes by software engineers can and often do reverse hardware performance gains.

I've been running Google Adsense ads on GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks since september. Overall, it's paying really well, I have found hope that I could make a living someday writing full-time, earning my pay through ads on my articles. I'm so sick of programming, but I like to write...

However...

Nearly all of my pay comes from clicks on my article about legal music downloading. The ads are almost always for p2p apps, and I'm dismayed they often claim what they do is legal. But there is a clickthrough rate of over 20%, which is quite unheard of in web advertising.

Most of the site has more technical articles. My article on C++ style is my second most popular (after the music downloading article), and gets ads for obviously useful and legitimate things like software development tools and training courses, but it has a clickthrough rate of just 0.1%. Rates for other technical articles are similar. In the three months I've published adsense ads, I've made only $10 from the ads in the C++ style article.

My experience running ads on other sites is that a typical response rate is 0.5% - 1%, so it seems technically-inclined readers click ads far below the average.

In between are some articles on marketing, web design and such, that get about a 1% response rate.

Although the ads on my music article pay well, I don't like what they're advertising, and feel they call my credibility into question. I've started approaching the manufacturers of mp3 players directly, to offer them ad space on the page, but have had no takers yet.

I don't think I could come up with another high-response article very easily, so my plan is actually to write more technical articles, with the hope that by posting new content regularly, I can encourage repeat visitors. It is very hard to get someone totally new to visit a website, but I don't think it's so hard to get a visitor to come back for a second time.

Also I'm going to completely change the page design to use a very nice CSS/XHTML design my wife Bonita made for me. Right now my pages look very homemade, and I expect some visitors hit the back button because my pages look so poor. Here's a peek at the new design, I think once I have it up all over my site I will get more repeat visitors.

I've been running Google Adsense ads on GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks since september. Overall, it's paying really well, I have found hope that I could make a living someday writing full-time, earning my pay through ads on my articles. I'm so sick of programming, but I like to write...

However...

Nearly all of my pay comes from clicks on my article about legal music downloading. The ads are almost always for p2p apps, and I'm dismayed they often claim what they do is legal. But there is a clickthrough rate of over 20%, which is quite unheard of in web advertising.

Most of the site has more technical articles. My article on C++ style is my second most popular (after the music downloading article), and gets ads for obviously useful and legitimate things like software development tools and training courses, but it has a clickthrough rate of just 0.1%. Rates for other technical articles are similar. In the three months I've published adsense ads, I've made only $10 from the ads in the C++ style article.

My experience running ads on other sites is that a typical response rate is 0.5% - 1%, so it seems technically-inclined readers click ads far below the average.

In between are some articles on marketing, web design and such, that get about a 1% response rate.

Although the ads on my music article pay well, I don't like what they're advertising, and feel they call my credibility into question. I've started approaching the manufacturers of mp3 players directly, to offer them ad space on the page, but have had no takers yet.

I don't think I could come up with another high-response article very easily, so my plan is actually to write more technical articles, with the hope that by posting new content regularly, I can encourage repeat visitors. It is very hard to get someone totally new to visit a website, but I don't think it's so hard to get a visitor to come back for a second time.

Also I'm going to completely change the page design to use a very nice CSS/XHTML design my wife Bonita made for me. Right now my pages look very homemade, and I expect some visitors hit the back button because my pages look so poor. Here's a peek at the new design, I think once I have it up all over my site I will get more repeat visitors.

I've been running Google Adsense ads on GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks since september. Overall, it's paying really well, I have found hope that I could make a living someday writing full-time, earning my pay through ads on my articles. I'm so sick of programming, but I like to write...

However...

Nearly all of my pay comes from clicks on my article about legal music downloading. The ads are almost always for p2p apps, and I'm dismayed they often claim what they do is legal. But there is a clickthrough rate of over 20%, which is quite unheard of in web advertising.

Most of the site has more technical articles. My article on C++ style is my second most popular (after the music downloading article), and gets ads for obviously useful and legitimate things like software development tools and training courses, but it has a clickthrough rate of just 0.1%. Rates for other technical articles are similar. In the three months I've published adsense ads, I've made only $10 from the ads in the C++ style article.

My experience running ads on other sites is that a typical response rate is 0.5% - 1%, so it seems technically-inclined readers click ads far below the average.

In between are some articles on marketing, web design and such, that get about a 1% response rate.

Although the ads on my music article pay well, I don't like what they're advertising, and feel they call my credibility into question. I've started approaching the manufacturers of mp3 players directly, to offer them ad space on the page, but have had no takers yet.

I don't think I could come up with another high-response article very easily, so my plan is actually to write more technical articles, with the hope that by posting new content regularly, I can encourage repeat visitors. It is very hard to get someone totally new to visit a website, but I don't think it's so hard to get a visitor to come back for a second time.

Also I'm going to completely change the page design to use a very nice CSS/XHTML design my wife Bonita made for me. Right now my pages look very homemade, and I expect some visitors hit the back button because my pages look so poor. Here's a peek at the new design, I think once I have it up all over my site I will get more repeat visitors.

I've been running Google Adsense ads on GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks since september. Overall, it's paying really well, I have found hope that I could make a living someday writing full-time, earning my pay through ads on my articles. I'm so sick of programming, but I like to write...

However...

Nearly all of my pay comes from clicks on my article about legal music downloading. The ads are almost always for p2p apps, and I'm dismayed they often claim what they do is legal. But there is a clickthrough rate of over 20%, which is quite unheard of in web advertising.

Most of the site has more technical articles. My article on C++ style is my second most popular (after the music downloading article), and gets ads for obviously useful and legitimate things like software development tools and training courses, but it has a clickthrough rate of just 0.1%. Rates for other technical articles are similar. In the three months I've published adsense ads, I've made only $10 from the ads in the C++ style article.

My experience running ads on other sites is that a typical response rate is 0.5% - 1%, so it seems technically-inclined readers click ads far below the average.

In between are some articles on marketing, web design and such, that get about a 1% response rate.

Although the ads on my music article pay well, I don't like what they're advertising, and feel they call my credibility into question. I've started approaching the manufacturers of mp3 players directly, to offer them ad space on the page, but have had no takers yet.

I don't think I could come up with another high-response article very easily, so my plan is actually to write more technical articles, with the hope that by posting new content regularly, I can encourage repeat visitors. It is very hard to get someone totally new to visit a website, but I don't think it's so hard to get a visitor to come back for a second time.

Also I'm going to completely change the page design to use a very nice CSS/XHTML design my wife Bonita made for me. Right now my pages look very homemade, and I expect some visitors hit the back button because my pages look so poor. Here's a peek at the new design, I think once I have it up all over my site I will get more repeat visitors.

Harvest this, infidels:

• crawford@goingware.com

A long time ago I decided I wanted to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to email me, so I have never spam-protected my email. It's all over a lot of different websites. It's all over Usenet too.

On the other hand, I get a lot of spam. It's only just beginning to bother me. I have a friend, she gets maybe ten spams a day, and she gets so outraged that she reports them all to the abuse@ addresses and so on. Me, I get a few thousand spams a day. I read my email with elm because it's the only email client that can handle the huge mailboxes I get.

What's getting me down though are the viruses. At one point I was getting 400 MB a day of viruses. Now I've decided I'm going to set up a virus filter on my home linux box, and use fetchmail and spamassassin and clamav and what have you to filter it, and serve it with imap to my other computers.

My hosting service tried to filter all the viruses with clamav, but they got so many viruses that it was too much of a CPU load, so now they do only very simple virus filtering, to catch the most obvious viruses without much CPU consumption.

I've been publishing GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks on my website for several years. I don't get as much time to write as Joel does, but there should be some articles there that would be interesting and useful to you.

It is Google's #1 hit for programming tricks.

I have quite a wide range of interests, so the articles aren't really just about programming anymore.

It is within your power to make the sharing of files - any file - completely legal. While the Constitution permits Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright is not a constitutional right like free speech is.

In Change the Law I discuss the constitutional basis of copyright law in the US, and suggests a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. The steps range from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.

There are over sixty million people using p2p networks in the US. That's more than voted for George Bush in 2000. That's enough people to bring about change, if you can work together effectively.

My article has been read by over six hundred thousand people so far but I'd like to see all sixty million American p2p users read it by the time of the 2006 midterm elections. I'd like to see copyright reform become a hotbutton issue in the next election.

If you're sad that Kerry lost November 2nd, consider that Kerry voted for the DMCA. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are on the side of the RIAA and MPAA. They're on the side of the big-money donors after all. That needs to change.

There are very few elected officials who feel that the DMCA is any sort of problem. They think it's the solution. Our elected officials view people who share files as the problem.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog or from message boards.

It is within your power to make the sharing of files - any file - completely legal. While the Constitution permits Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright is not a constitutional right like free speech is.

In Change the Law I discuss the constitutional basis of copyright law in the US, and suggests a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. The steps range from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.

There are over sixty million people using p2p networks in the US. That's more than voted for George Bush in 2000. That's enough people to bring about change, if you can work together effectively.

My article has been read by over six hundred thousand people so far but I'd like to see all sixty million American p2p users read it by the time of the 2006 midterm elections. I'd like to see copyright reform become a hotbutton issue in the next election.

If you're sad that Kerry lost November 2nd, consider that Kerry voted for the DMCA. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are on the side of the RIAA and MPAA. They're on the side of the big-money donors after all. That needs to change.

There are very few elected officials who feel that the DMCA is any sort of problem. They think it's the solution. Our elected officials view people who share files as the problem.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog or from message boards.

• Is This the America I Love?

From the essay:

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I want all of you to get the word out on this atrocity by linking to indymedia.it's press release from your website, weblog, or other message boards. Here's the URL:

• http://www.indymedia.it/press_release_en.html (English)

I just put a prominent link up at the top of this page of mine which is getting 5000 hits a day lately. Here's how my link looks:

READ THIS! The Feds are Violating the First Amendment!
FBI Seizes Indymedia Servers in the UK
If You Don't Vote November 2nd, it Will Only Get Worse!

Except that I used CSS colors to make it stand out more.

Every US voter should know about this, and understand why they should be outraged about it, before the election happens.

It is within our power to put a stop to this nonsense. But to do that, we have to tell the world, and then we have to vote that war criminal out of office November 2nd.

You can enjoy free music without getting in trouble by downloading the legal music many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves.

The easiest way to do it is with iRATE radio. It downloads tracks from music hosting services like the Internet Underground Music Archive, using a collaborative filtering system to select the tracks you're most likely to enjoy.

The client fetches the URLs of a few tracks from iRATE's central database server, then downloads them directly from the servers where the musicians have them hosted. When you listen to the new tracks, you rate them according to how much you like and dislike them. The next time iRATE contacts the server, it submits your ratings, which are then correllated with the ratings of other users to find the best tracks for you.

Basically, if you and I enjoy the same kind of music, iRATE will fetch for you all the same music I like. If we disagree on our taste in music, iRATE will avoid downloading for you the music I enjoy.

iRATE radio is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL. A new version, 0.4, is expected to be released within a couple weeks. You can help with testing if you try out the unstable builds and report bugs using SourceForge's bug tracking system.

I discuss iRATE and many other ways to download music free and legally in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.

I want every p2p network user to read my article. If you also feel that more people should read it, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from message boards.

Thank you for your attention.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

It is within your power to put a stop to this nonsense. But you have to act now.

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

Thus spake feloneous cat:

Which lists about 1037th on the average voters list of "what is important to me".

Yes, most voters don't generally feel much desire to have either patent or copyright law reformed. Nor trade secret law - the DMCA is the first law to forbid reverse engineering.

The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.

If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.

The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.

That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from speaking out to civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to vote.

Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.

My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.

So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.

Thanks for your help.

Thus spake feloneous cat:

Which lists about 1037th on the average voters list of "what is important to me".

Yes, most voters don't generally feel much desire to have either patent or copyright law reformed. Nor trade secret law - the DMCA is the first law to forbid reverse engineering.

The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.

If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.

The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.

That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from speaking out to civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to vote.

Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.

My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.

So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.

Thanks for your help.

Thus spake feloneous cat:

Which lists about 1037th on the average voters list of "what is important to me".

Yes, most voters don't generally feel much desire to have either patent or copyright law reformed. Nor trade secret law - the DMCA is the first law to forbid reverse engineering.

The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.

If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.

The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.

That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from speaking out to civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to vote.

Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.

My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.

So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.

Thanks for your help.

Thus spake feloneous cat:

Which lists about 1037th on the average voters list of "what is important to me".

Yes, most voters don't generally feel much desire to have either patent or copyright law reformed. Nor trade secret law - the DMCA is the first law to forbid reverse engineering.

The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.

If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.

The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.

That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from speaking out to civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to vote.

Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.

My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.

So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.

Thanks for your help.

Thus spake feloneous cat:

Which lists about 1037th on the average voters list of "what is important to me".

Yes, most voters don't generally feel much desire to have either patent or copyright law reformed. Nor trade secret law - the DMCA is the first law to forbid reverse engineering.

The slashdot crowd cares, but they're not enough of us to make a difference during elections, and we tend not to be very organized.

If it looks weird that I would have a long section called "Change the Law" in an article entitled Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, it is precisely because my article is a carefully calculated piece of shameless propaganda. I worked very hard over a period of several weeks to do the very best job I could on it. I aimed to attract lots of readers by offerring them free music, but to give them a political education while I had their attention.

The reason being that I knew there are far more people using peer-to-peer networks to download music than there are us slashdotters. In the US there are more p2p users than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is that most of them are pretty clueless about the laws and the issues, and, like the slashdot crowd, they are not just not organized, they are resistant to organization, like trying to herd cats.

That's why my article goes on to suggest several specific steps any p2p user can take to effect change, ranging from speaking out to civil disobedience. Of course I encourage readers to vote.

Of course many p2p users aren't of legal voting age, but they can take the other steps, and eventually they will be older and able to vote.

My server logs tell me that my article has been read by about 400,000 people so far. That's a lot, but not yet enough to impact the upcoming election, especially since the readers are from all over the world, not just the US. But I'm contuing to work towards getting every p2p user to read it eventually, and am now hoping I can get it to impact the midterm elections in 2006, whoever should win the one this year.

So let me repeat: if you agree with the goals I've expressed here, if you want to encourage p2p users to become active politically, if you want to bring about reform in the patent and copyright laws, you can help - significantly - if you link to my article from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.

Thanks for your help.

Before a couple hundred years ago, the concept of intellectual property did not exist. There was no such thing as copyright, and patents weren't granted to inventors, instead they were granted by the King to companies who got his favor somehow, so they would have a monopoly on some business. Such patents had nothing to do with invention.

For example there is a famous incident in which Gandhi, in trying to promote local cottage industry, went to the sea to make salt, thereby violating the patent that the British crown had given to some company, which had a monopoly for all salt production in India. This was portrayed in the excellent movie "Gandhi".

The only kind of "ip" which has existed from ancient times are trade secrets. Those aren't really property at all, because simply telling someone else makes it not a secret anymore.

It's only recently that trade secrets had any kind of legal protection: US state trade secret law only disallowed getting the secrets through nefarious means, but explicitly permitted reverse engineering. Trade secret protection wasn't meant to provide any kind of monopoly. There were patents for that, and the government preferred patents because they require the inventor to fully describe the process of making the product that's patented.

The DMCA was the first law in the US that outlawed any form of reverse engineering.

The US Constitution allowed for Congress to:

promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

But even this didn't create the concept of intellectual propery, it was more intended to be a limited grant of monopoly to help stimulate the economy of the young United States. I don't think that the concept that inventions and copyrighted creations were property existed yet. Did Congress intend that such monopolies could be bought and sold like land could? I don't think so, but I'm not really sure.

I discuss this in more detail in my piece Change the Law, and also have some extensive discussion of what you can do to change things.

If you feel as I do that more people ought to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, weblog, or from message boards.

Thank you for your attention.

- Mike

You might think this is a good thing at first, because it screws the record industry, but I don't think it is. For one thing, the patents could just as well be used against open source, so you couldn't use md5sum to check the integrity of distro packages or source tarballs. Also it has been pointed out that Altnet could get bought out by a record company, and the patents turned against everyone.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the arguments against software patents. But maybe you're not aware that while the US Constitution allows Congress to issue patents, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Patents could be eliminated tomorrow if we could get the votes in Congress to repeal the laws that authorize patents.

Patents are authorized in the same clause of the Constitution that authorizes copyrights. I discuss this, and what you can do to fix things, in Change the Law. The discussion there is about copyright, but everything I say applies equally to patents.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your website, weblog, or from other message boards.

Thank you for your attention.

-- Mike

I just did the Analog BROWSERSUM browser summary report for last month's GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks traffic. My findings showed some suprises:

• Requests - Browser
• 402 - MSIE 4
• 42 - MSIE 3
• 2 - Mozilla M18
• 15 - Netscape 3
• 2 - Netscape 2
• 12 - Opera 5

My wife has done up a real nice redesign of what's presently a real haphazard site. Her new design is all validated XHTML 1.0 with CSS, including positioning.

It looks appalling in Netscape 4. One reason we haven't posted her new design yet is that, until her 1996-era Mac died a month or so ago, Netscape 4 was what my mom used. I convinced her to buy an iMac. She likes the stylish design.

Something people need to realize is that there are still many people who cannot upgrade. Some people aren't permitted to by their IT departments, but more likely many are people like my Mom using ancient hardware where Mozilla won't run.

iRATE radio is a GPL'ed MP3 downloader and player. From the page:

iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.

According to iRATE's sourceforge statistics, it has had 15,344 downloads.

I've been using iRATE for a little over a year now, and have downloaded about a thousand tracks with it. If I were a typical user, then that would suggest that iRATE users all together have downloaded about fifteen million songs, thus far surpassing iTunes' puny one million download total.

Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of iRATE's downloads were existing users fetching updates, and not everyone who uses it keeps using it. But it clearly shows that free, legal downloads are potentially dwarfing the paid downloads being tracked by the BBC.

Note that the RIAA doesn't get a penny from iRATE's downloads. They can't complain either, because the copyright holders - the musicians themselved - give permission to us to download their tracks when they post them on MP3 hosting services like the Internet Underground Music Archive.

I discuss not only iRATE but a lot of other places to get free music downloads in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads. Share the link with all your buddies who use p2p.

Thank you for your attention.

If your friend the musician offers any music downloads from his website, I can give his band a listing here. All I ask is for him to link to my article from anywhere on his site, it doesn't have to be on his homepage.

The article has been getting 2000 hits a day steadily since march and has been Google's #1 hit for legal music downloads for a whole year, as well as in the top ten for the much more popular search query free music downloads for several months.

I report the article's statistics in more detail here. I haven't updated it for a while but will do so shortly.

If your friend the musician offers any music downloads from his website, I can give his band a listing here. All I ask is for him to link to my article from anywhere on his site, it doesn't have to be on his homepage.

The article has been getting 2000 hits a day steadily since march and has been Google's #1 hit for legal music downloads for a whole year, as well as in the top ten for the much more popular search query free music downloads for several months.

I report the article's statistics in more detail here. I haven't updated it for a while but will do so shortly.

Note that the court in the Grokster vs. RIAA only found that publishers of P2P software did not infringe copyright. Sharing or downloading music without the permission of the copyright holder is still copyright infringement, for which the RIAA can still sue you.

But there's a way you can enjoy free music downloads without getting into trouble. Listen to the legal music that many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves. Find out how in my article:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

If you downloaded such music instead of infringing copyright on the p2p networks, we'd make short work of the RIAA. You'd start listening to bands that aren't signed with RIAA labels, and the RIAA would have no cause to complain because no one's copyright is being infringed. The RIAA labels would wither away because no one is buying their music anymore, and a lot of deserving artists would get the exposure they deserve.

Here's a page that I found out about just a couple days ago and haven't added to the article yet. etree offers a page of Bit Torrent Downloads, all of them TradeFriendly.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, your web log, or from message boards. Be sure to email the link to all your friends who use P2P!

While the US Constitution allows Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Not just the DMCA, but copyright itself could be repealed tomorrow if we could get the votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think that could happen, consider that there are sixty million peer-to-peer network users in the US, more people than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is then how to get all the p2p users to become politically active.

Find out how in Change the Law, which explores the history of copyright law in the US and suggests several specific steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. The steps range from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read what I wrote in my article, you can help by linking to it from your own web site, web log, or from message boards.

Thank you for your attention.

And I worked for several years as a programmer without a degree before I went back to school and graduated (mainly because I got tired of job interviews where they'd ask why I never graduated).

I had a few programing language courses at a community college, and one real computer science course at Caltech, an intro to data structures and algorithms.

Early on I could see how I was at quite a disadvantage compared to those with CS degrees, so I put a lot of effort into studying programming - reading books like Knuth's Art of Computer Programming on the bus to work, learning to program macs by writing a graphics editor on my Mac Plus, reading other people's source code and fixing it.

It's been quite some time since the lack of a CS degree has been a problem. I have seventeen years paid experience as a programmer, and have run my own consulting business for six years. Here's my resume.

I have a catch all email address at my domain. It's catching so much email that I've had to tell all my clients to email me at this Yahoo address that (ironically) I registered so I could sign up for websites that I suspected would be spammers.

I have more details in my Kuro5hin diary:

• Two Thousand Spams a Day - mostly racist messages intended to affect the recent German elections
• Four Hundred Megabytes of Spam a Day - mostly the zafi.b virus

You`ve got 1 VoiceMessage!

My hosting service had the ClamAV antivirus software installed for a little bit, but had to disable it because it was using too much CPU time, I think because the host was getting so much mail.

I'm self-employed doing software consulting, and so far all my clients are in the U.S. (which is great for me, getting paid in US dollars, but with living expenses in Canadian dollars).

However, the exchange rate is not as good for me as what it was when I was in Newfoundland for our wedding in 2000. Back then, it was 1.6 Canadian dollars to a U.S. dollar, now it is 1.3.

The Canadian economy in general has been doing better than the US economy for a while, which is why the Canadian dollar is stronger now.

But I don't know about the tech sector. I suspect it's not as good at the Canadian economy in general, because the market for Canadian tech is likely the same as the market for US tech.

Corel is a Canadian company, as is QNX, which makes a nice embedded OS.

My wife, who is from Newfoundland, is sponsoring my immigration to Canada.

I feel very fortunate not to be living in the US anymore. I didn't feel safe. For example, I've received some threatening email from people who didn't like what I wrote on this page.

You can immigrate to Canada too. The most permanent way is to marry a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.

You can live and work here for a year if you get a TN-1 visa, which you can qualify for if you have a bachelor's degree and a written job offer, for a job that's on a certain list specified by the NAFTA agreement. Any qualifying citizen of the U.S., Mexico or Canada can work in either of the other NAFTA countries with a TN-1. The procedure for getting a TN-1 is very simple and inexpensive, and can be renewed each year if you continue to qualify.

During the dot-com boom, Canada established a special visa just for computer programmers. There was a shortage here, because all the Canadian programmers were going to the US to work. You'll need to find a Canadian company to hire you as a programmer and sponsor you for the visa.

Programmers don't make as much in Canada as they do in the US, but then the cost of living is much lower here (in Nova Scotia anyway) than anywhere I've lived in the US.

I have a couple of articles that have Creative Commons licenses, and I tried at first to include RDF in them.

But when I tried to publish one article at Kuro5hin, the RDF code, which took the form of HTML comments, was displayed literally in the visible body of my article. That is, all the tags had been turned into entities so the tags appeared literally in the rendered text.

I think Kuro5hin's Scoop content management system doesn't permit HTML comments. Maybe it's not trying to suppress comments, but it didn't occur to scoop's developers to allow them.

RDF on the web would likely be much more popular if one could count on publication sites allowing it in the submitted markup.

Another problem I had is that Creative Commons' recommended way to apply a license to a web page is not permitted by any of the community sites I frequent. CC-licensed web pages usually have a small banner that links to the license text. But for obvious reasons, sites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin don't permit images in article or comment submissions.

The result is that, even for the copies of my articles on my own website, I use neither RDF nor the CC banner, because I want to make it easy for others to copy my CC-licensed articles to site that don't permit RDF or graphics.

The way I apply the license is the much-less-cool method recommended for plain text files. I have the following text appear in the body of my articles:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

A couple of years ago I wrote an essay called Is This the America I Love? Maybe it's pertinent here, seeing how our next election is well on its way to getting even more fixed than the last one was.

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.

In the section Should Copyright Even Exist?, part of Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, I compare digital music to software, and introduce the reader to Richard Stallman, the GNU Manifesto, and the Free Software Movement.

Because my article is written for, and widely read by music downloaders, I think this section may be the first introduction most p2p users get to the notion that there is a legitimate reason to consider the elimination of copyright: the reason being that the ability to faithfully and cheaply copy digital information yields more benefit to society than the benefit that results from allowing the authors of digital information a monopoly to their work.

While copyright law is a cornerstone to Open Source licensing - without copyrights, licenses would be unenforceable - I think it's pretty clear especially from Richard Stallman's earlier writing that his objective is the elimination of copyright.

Consider that there are far more people who listen to music than who program, or even use computers. If they were all made to understand the benefit to society of cheap, faithful digital copying, maybe we could eliminate, or at least substantially reform copyright.

In the section Should Copyright Even Exist?, part of Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, I compare digital music to software, and introduce the reader to Richard Stallman, the GNU Manifesto, and the Free Software Movement.

Because my article is written for, and widely read by music downloaders, I think this section may be the first introduction most p2p users get to the notion that there is a legitimate reason to consider the elimination of copyright: the reason being that the ability to faithfully and cheaply copy digital information yields more benefit to society than the benefit that results from allowing the authors of digital information a monopoly to their work.

While copyright law is a cornerstone to Open Source licensing - without copyrights, licenses would be unenforceable - I think it's pretty clear especially from Richard Stallman's earlier writing that his objective is the elimination of copyright.

Consider that there are far more people who listen to music than who program, or even use computers. If they were all made to understand the benefit to society of cheap, faithful digital copying, maybe we could eliminate, or at least substantially reform copyright.

See also the MacSlash discussion on FairPlay.

So let's be rational about this. The tool removes DRM from AAC files purchased from iTunes Music Store. Is this about fair use or piracy? Probably both, but it could be used solely for fair use. Scenario: you have an mp3 player (iPod was a bit too pricey), but you bought a song on iTMS so that you could play it on your computer in iTunes. Now you decide that you'd like to play that song on your mp3 player (which has AAC support, by the way). Is this fair use? I think so (but who's a lawyer around here anyway?). There is one hangup to this scenario, though. Do you have to agree to some terms of service before you buy from iTMS? And if so, do these terms of service say that you can't attempt to beat the DRM? In that case you would have a different problem related to breach of license, but you still have not violated copyright law.

Others will argue that breaking this DRM is civil disobedience, and is a necessary and responsible part of the protest against the music industry's scheming evils. That is a foolish plan of action, especially because all of the copyleft licenses rely on copyright law to guarantee freedom. Disregarding copyright law erodes the freedoms granted by copyleft, which is a very bad idea.

I know that in the US at least, there are more people sharing files on peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000. I suspect the numbers are proportional in other countries.

If you work to reform the copyright laws, you can make the sharing of any file legal.

Here are some steps you can take to do this:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

In the US anyway, copyright is not a Constitutional right. I suspect that it's not a fundamental right in most countries.

The reason I ask you to googlebomb my article in my signature here is that I'm trying to educate the peer-to-peer network users. I attract the readers by offerring links to lots of free, legal downloads, but give them a political education while I've got their attention.

I know that in the US at least, there are more people sharing files on peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000. I suspect the numbers are proportional in other countries.

If you work to reform the copyright laws, you can make the sharing of any file legal.

Here are some steps you can take to do this:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

In the US anyway, copyright is not a Constitutional right. I suspect that it's not a fundamental right in most countries.

The reason I ask you to googlebomb my article in my signature here is that I'm trying to educate the peer-to-peer network users. I attract the readers by offerring links to lots of free, legal downloads, but give them a political education while I've got their attention.