Public Relations work is actually fairly cheap. Even the largest PR company, Edelman PR, only had revenues of $206 million in 2002. [1] All they needed to do, in this case, is to create the impression of a "controversy" by ensuring that a few high profile "experts" get funded, so that politicians who wouldn't be inclined to act against global warming anyway would have a moral justification to do so. The Discovery Institute, by far the single most important entity in the similarly huge Intelligent Design "controversy", only received about $3.5 million in reveneues in 2004. [2] Now compare that number to the amount of media stories about "Intelligent Design" (a pure PR rebranding of the earlier "creation science" effort) in 2004. Of course, ExxonMobil's campaign is also part of a larger effort, as detailed, for instance, by PR experts Bob Burton and Sheldon Rampton in this article.
I hope the critics of ExxonMobil will at least acknowledge that the Big Mean Evil Corporation DOES recognize the role its products play in global warming.
That is entirely irrelevant if, at the same time, the company funds professional liars like Steven Milloy and other former tobacco industry lobbyists to systematically discredit scientific findings. A company like ExxonMobil is fully capable of acting in a deliberately inconsistent manner, maintaining a public face that adjusts to the shifting zeitgeist, while continuing to try to undermine it through PR flacks and front groups. The tobacco industry has done the same when it became impossible to publicly deny the health impact of smoking.
Use a PHP-capable host, install Podcast Generator
on
Free Podcasting Hosts?
·
· Score: 1
I suggest this neat little open source tool. It's a web-based frontend for managing podcasts -- just upload the files through a web interface and you're done (you may have to adjust the PHP max. filesize settings). What would be really lovely is a non-profit providing such a service on a reliable basis.
I only had very few interactions with Lilo, but he was always friendly and polite when I did. I am a long time user of FreeNode and a long time Wikipedian. The network has been invaluable to our community, and while of course a project like FreeNode is very much collaborative, I think he personally represented many of the core values that make it a great place for open source and free content projects.
This is a very sad day. May he idle in peace.:-(
Ozzie understands the power of collaboration. The versions of the Groove Networks software I looked at were bloated and overdesigned, but the thinking behind it -- making it easy to set up shared workspaces with all the essential tools you need -- is sound. With Ozzie at the helm, I think there's some hope that Microsoft might actually start innovating, rather than copying what everyone else is doing. This is good in two important ways:
Whether we like it or not, most people are forced to work with Microsoft products in their day to day office work. This is not likely to change in the near future. Any small improvement in Microsoft's products makes a big difference to a lot of people.
Open source programmers have big egos. If someone on a Windows box says "I can do this, why can't you do this?", it creates an itch that they want to scratch. Better Microsoft products will lead to more innovation in the open source sphere as well.
Remember, Microsoft doesn't need to innovate to sustain its market share in the short term. In the long run (think 10-20 years), I think open source is going to win out anyway. But for the time being, Microsoft reorienting itself and becoming a more flexible and agile company is a good thing. I have big hopes that Ozzie is the man who could pull that off.
There is not only the choice between safe and non-safe nukes. There is also the choice of no nukes at all. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually pledged that he would be happy to give up Iran's nuclear ambitions if there was a genuine commitment of all nations with nuclear weapons to disarm. Now, this is a dishonest offer, because he knows that it is not going to happen. But what better way to, literally and figuratively, disarm Iran than taking him up on it? What is the use of nuclear weapons in this world? Who are you going to nuke? "The terrorists"?
If you look at the comments in this thread, you will find that America has no moral leadership anymore whatsoever. It's gone. Note that this is an America-based forum. Don't even try to suggest any kind of moral leadership of the United States in a European context. You will quickly hear: Iraq civil war. Abu Ghraib. Secret CIA prisons. Guantanomo. Police state. Religious fanaticism. Violation of international treaties. And so on, and so forth. What's the last moral defense against an undeniably terrible regime like Iran or the PRC? Democracy? Bullshit. Hardly anybody outside the US takes this so-called democracy seriously anymore. We are talking about an electoral system which tolerates the candidate in an election running the election, legally. Third world countries have more refined democratic systems than the US.
It's time to stop using false dichotomies and poorly constructed slippery slope arguments. "We can have safe nuclear bombs, or unsafe ones!" "We can invade countries, or let terrorists kill us!" "If we let the evil homosexuals marry, goats and chickens will be next!" "We must scare teenagers so they won't have sex and get pregnant!" "We must lock up 2 million people so there won't be criminals in the streets!" What scares me the most is that there are a lot of people who actually believe that.
Not sure if you'll still read this, so I'll just make a couple of brief points:
You're forgetting that it was copyright law that was created first, not record labels. You seem to treat copyright as some kind of "natural right" that basically has always existed, and some companies took advantage of it. The modern institution of copyright was created because politicians believed (not all of them, mind you) that a legally granted monopoly such as copyright may be necessary in order to incentivize creation of intellectual works. It was initially very limited (14 years in the US); it is the corporations that arose that used copyright to their advantage which lobbied to extend it further and further as technology for copying improved. Today, it is effectively infinite for modern works since most of us will not see any work that is created today go into the public domain unless the author puts it there.
It is very much the government's job to level the playing field, not just to "enforce laws" -- hence antitrust, subsidies, etc. The government creates laws in order to improve society, which was exactly the initial motivation to create copyright. The government has not tried any other model yet in spite of rapid technological change.
Certainly anyone can set up a micropatronage website; however, it is broad acceptance and support which make the whole model work, so government support would be one way to try out this model on a large scale.
You've got it the wrong way around. It is not that people think they are "entitled" to copy other's works, it is that they feel the actual entitlement granted to copyright holders through copyright law should be limited because it no longer serves its original purpose. Again, copyright is not a natural law whose existence cannot be questioned.
As for calling a world without copyright, or with alternative compensation systems, "communist", that depends on the implementation. I think the following analogies are accurate:
Traditional copyright = "state capitalism" as defined by libertarians (government supports business through the creation of laws)
Abolishment of copyright, legally enforced copyleft (right to access source code etc.) = communism
Abolishment of copyright = free market capitalism (libertarianism)
Indeed, you will find that many libertarians oppose the institution of copyright on principle for this very reason. I think RMS and some elements of the Free Software / Open Source scene would be inclined to support a more communist model of copyright where everyone is forced to share their changes to other people's work in a modifiable form (source code for programs, 3D models for 3D graphics..), at least when they distribute it. The GPL embodies this principle. Personally, I use the public domain for source code I write, though I believe the distinction between proprietary and free is far more important than the one between copyleft and BSD / public domain.
I'm not a libertarian, mind you, but when it comes to copyright, I think that is where my stance falls.
It's not a free market, dear Slayer, because the government grants you a monopoly of distribution and provides you with law enforcement to protect it. You are using taxpayer money for your method of distribution, in order to punish those who share your work. How about some government funds for a centralized micropatronage system to level the playing field?
Is it understandable that the music industry acts the way it does? Why, yes, certainly it is.
I agree that decriminalizing file sharing would make iTunes obsolete -- any non-profit organization could offer a free, better service. I disagree that this would mean that artists necessarily no longer get paid. Let's establish two facts:
New artists benefit from their work being shared freely. Their primary goal is to get their name out.
Established artists have fan bases that are loyal to them.
In category 1, micropatronage seems like a good strategy. People are happy to make voluntary donations to an up and coming artist they like, esp. the kind of people who listen to new and indepedent music. In category 2, donations may also work, but artists have another option known as the Street Performer Protocol. They can choose to release their next work only when a certain amount of donations has been reached.
Finally, it is important to note that music artists only receive a very small amount per CD sale ($1 or less seems like a frequently circulated figure for typical CDs). This is the amount that needs to be matched in any new model, not more, if you want to support a claim that the new model hurts artists. Of course the labels do significant marketing and production work, but arguably, new media can take over many if not all of these responsibilities.
Of course, this is what labels really have to fear: that artists become completely independent of them. The main reason this evolution hasn't happened more naturally already is the dominance of television as the culture-defining medium of the masses. TV is a centralized medium where large corporations have access and define the content. This, of course, excludes those who do not sign with major labels quite effectively. As we transition to Internet culture, where you have decentralized mass phenomena, this is beginning to change, and I anticipate that either way, the development outlined above is what we're going to see in the long run.
Decriminalization of non-commercial file sharing would therefore merely accelerate a natural development that is the consequence of technological change. Unfortunately, many people have accepted that labels and publishers represent "culture", which has given these companies nearly unrestricted access to politicians to prolong their own existence.
I think that the argument is much stronger in the case of movies. Of course you can make nice movies on a small budget, but a LOTR trilogy you can't. And it's not like the whole world knew who Peter Jackson was when he started the project -- it was a high risk investment, given that he could have f'd it up completely (cf. Gigli). Right now the movie industry is still well-protected by the very experience of watching a film in a cinema, but that may not last forever.
If the movie industry gets into trouble, I can potentially see independent filmmakers slowly rising through the ranks of low budget stuff with the help of micro- and macropatronage, but to see this as a given would be naive indeed. The best protection for high quality immersive content is probably interactivity. If you stream content directly to a client, and you make the content they see dependent on their actions, copying that content will not be useful to anyone else. For instance, how do you copy World of Warcraft or Second Life? These are immersive, interactive communities, with more and more logic on the server side. Making data streams user-specific may work even for passive video using techniques like foveated video in combination with direct retinal projection. Anything which you can burn on a DVD, however, is doomed to be burned onto DVDs.
I would agree that it makes sense for advocacy groups like the "Pirate Party" to limit themselves to the domain of IP law. However, I also think you should do somemorereading about the war on drugs and its consequences. America isn't the global leader in incarcerating people for no reason. It's OK to oppose drugs -- there are different strategies of decriminalization -- but I hope you will agree that locking up thousands and thousands of people is not the way to deal with the drug problem. And let me not even go into the whole tobacco+alcohol vs. marijuana issue.
There is no excuse for ignorance of the facts, however.
DSL with downstream up to 16 MBit is now very common and cheap in Germany. This means that, theoretically, you can download almost a complete song per second. Affordable hard drives store up to 500 GB -- which translates to roughly a full year of uninterrupted listening pleasure. Burn your songs on DVD at 4.7 GB -- almost 5000 minutes -- per disc. My point: Today's technology makes "mass pirating" as easy as exchanging 20 grams of polycarbonate. It's something every kid with a computer can do. Not to mention that even those who just wanted to download something may have become uploaders without realizing this -- virtually all file sharing programs share the stuff you receive.
Those who argue "Serves them right, they knew it was a crime" don't realize just how bizarre this whole situation is. You have police come to your house, take your computer away, and you'll get fined with thousands of Euros for something which is utterly trivial. If this is taken to an extreme, it's even worse than the "war on drugs": You don't even have to leave your house to be labeled a criminal.
The music industry has this funny idea that they can scare consumers into using iTunes and similar networks. This will work -- for a while. But when you have all the technologies mentioned, copyright infringement that is undetectable will become prevalent -- because you just download 1 GB from your friend via IM, or swap DVDs (or soon HDDVDs), or use IRC and FTP. And it's not like you have to be a technology savvy guy to do these things. My mom can use IM, when she gets broadband, she can swap files.
So, what you are left with is completely arbitrary enforcement on some services, scare tactics that work against some, while the underlying "problem" keeps getting "worse" because of technology (hardware, software). Just wait until the next file sharing application with a built in "how anonymous do you want to be?" slider comes along.
The problem will only go away when those who make music embrace sharing as a way to popularize it. Those who like it, will pay. What will work better in the long run -- scaring people into paying? Or letting them choose to? If the industry doesn't realize the answer and tries to criminalize society instead, it's time for people to force them to. I really hope that initiatives like the Swedish "Pirate Party" are successful in working towards the decriminalization of non-commercial copying.
Marijuana is legal in quite a few countries. It can happen.
There's more to CG than character animation, and as Ton explains in the inteview, the artists got better during the course of the project. I think judging by the amount of blog buzz the thing has received, it is being shared and copied quite heavily. I see many potential benefits:
Be taken seriously by studios and animators. Having a tech demo like this out means that people who make decisions about spending money are more likely to take a closer look at Blender as a highly capable free solution for 3D graphics.
As a consequence, a studio might even say: "Sure, Blender is cool, but it's lacking features X, Y, and Z. So we'll pay for developing those, it's still cheaper than what we would pay for licensing." Studios are first and foremost about making films, not software, so open source makes strategic sense for them.
Get young artists interested in using Blender. "That movie had a weird plot, but man, I'd love to do graphics like that." This in turn may lead to increased uptake in academia, as kids want to use their favorite software in university.
Help people learn basic 3D filmmaking skills. Remember that the DVD contains the 3D models, storyboards, making of, etc.
Establish working relations with artists, organizations, and so on that can be built upon in future projects.
Identify key areas where Blender needs work -- this was done during the process, and any new movie project will help to further refine the software.
I don't dare to predict if future movie projects will be successful. I think there's a good chance they will, especially if the basic idea (without spoilers) is published upfront and well-received. I think it would be neat to cooperate with a major webcomics artists on characters and plot. This is a community artform that has already established itself quite well.
The article states, "Install MediaWiki on a server that can be seen by everyone in your organization" and later "anyone on the network will be able to view the wiki". It's basically talking about Intranet access. Of course that's still horrible security thinking unless you're talking about a really small, trusted workgroup. You don't want anyone with some basic PHP knowledge to nuke your wiki without a trace.
It uses the extension mechanism of parser hooks, it just uses it in the wrong place, Setup.php, which is part of the core MediaWiki files. Editing this is bad advice as it'll complicate upgrading.
The idea of using wiki mechanisms for code is lovely in principle, but it'll need a lot more thinking than that to work in practice. As it is, NewsForge would be well served by removing or commenting this piece of information from the article.
The movie is a techdemo showing that it is possible to create high quality, high resolution free content 3D films using a free software toolchain. You should not compare it to Hollywood films made with 100 times the budget, but to other short films that were made with proprietary tools like Maya and similarly small teams. I watched a few 3D short movies last year at the Ars Electronica, and they had roughly the same technical quality (this project used a supercomputer farm for rendering, so some scenes have remarkably high complexity, and they can offer very high resolution for download). Virtually none of them had any dialogue, and the plot was typically similarly surreal. This is what you get when you let geeks make a film to demonstrate what they can do: some nice special effects and bizarre plots. Remember Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?
I agree with you that the animations of Proog and Emo (Emo?!) were a bit jerky. I'm not sure if it was intentional -- if it was not, they seem to have tried to compensate by making the dialogue match the hectical movements. The dialogue was also a bit too quiet, and one could tell that the voice actors aren't native English speakers. But these are relatively minor problems. As a technical demonstration of what free software packages like Blender, CinePaint, DrQueue, Python, etc. are capable of, it was very successful. Given that Hollywood already makes extensive use of Linux, perhaps it will now be easier to make a pitch for even more open technologies. As for Orange, I hope there will be many follow-up projects, perhaps some with better scripts.
This is Peter's more frequently updated blog than the one linked in the article. It has an update on the reexamination request. According to Peter, "The reexamination takes aims at claim 11 and some dependent claims, which in my opinion are the broadest and most restrictive claims in the patent. If Amazon can be made to narrow them, it could allow others to implement innovative and interesting ways of shopping with "one-click" (This isn't legal or professional advice- see the disclaimer below)."
As the article points out, Peter raised the money necessary to pay the reexamination fee through donations. I don't know what his chances are of being successful, but it certainly shows that blogs can be useful in allowing more people to participate in processes that were previously mainly used by businesses. Maybe they'll raise the reexamination fee to keep up with technical progress.;-)
Hm, strange, where in your comment do you condemn the people who put those lives at risk? Wouldn't it, perhaps, be a good idea to fight this virulent brand of fundamentalist Islam using the principles of secular enlightenment, instead of caving in to it?
Diplomacy is fine if it is used strategically, rather than as part of a genuine appeasement effort. You cannot appease those who are afflicted by mental illness -- and the fundamentalist expression of religion is a mental illness. It needs to be eliminated through a competition of ideas. It cannot be accepted. People, especially women, are suffering under truly medieval theocratic regimes. This must not continue. And if more people realize this thanks to the "controversy" we're seeing now, so much the better.
most of the good content on Wikimedia Commons just seems to be duplicates of images from WP articles (albeit organized in a different, and sometimes more convenient, way).
It's the other way around. When an image is uploaded the Commons, you can instantly use it in all Wikimedia projects by specifying its filename. Anyone who is motivated to do so can watch the stream of newly uploaded images and add them to the right Wikipedia articles, Wikibooks pages, Wikinews stories, etc. This happens, which explains the redundancy you see -- the Wikimedia Commons is first of all a media archive for the Wikimedia projects. However, material is originally uploaded there, not the other way around.
With almost 350,000 files, it's shaping up to become the largest archive of free content photos, sounds and other media files (we're not too big on videos yet). I've personally uploaded reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings that were donated by a German publisher, and I operate FlickrLickr, a collaborative project to find useful Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr (we've uploaded over 4,000 photos already). So Wikimedia Commons very much has an identity of its own.
As for Wikibooks, I do not agree about its state. While most books are still incomplete, that doesn't make them useless. Take a look at the recently featured books of the month, such as Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. Sure, they can all still use work, but they're already useful resources for various topics. Importantly, this is the kind of Wikimedia project that is likely to see substantial outside grants in the future, because it ties into the whole "Let's help the developing world" vision that Wikimedia espouses (textbooks in developing countries are often more expensive than they are here!). It might be interesting to start paying people to edit and finalize some textbooks.
Wikinews has produced over 3,500 stories in the English version alone in a year, so while I agree that it's not an alternative to a newspaper (which primarily makes use of licensed newsfeeds), I think we've made some good progress, and I do recommend adding the English RSS feed to your favorite reader - it is often refreshingly different from other news sources in its priorities.
The projects you cite I would actually count as the most successful so far. Wikisource (which is mostly a Project Gutenberg clone) and Wikiquote (which seems very dubious in terms of being "free content") are of less interest; Wikispecies and Wiktionary are of little value without specialized software that adds structure to the data contained in these projects (incidentally, I am working on a project called "Wikidata" to change that).
Providing a neutral and complete synthesis of news from multiple sources is something that can only be done by humans. If you use Google News, you can create this synthesis yourself, but you have to read multiple sources -- if successful, Wikinews really does give you a good overview of all available information at the time. Take an article like this one about the alleged Bush/Blair al-Jazeera memo. It incorporates information from 10 cited sources. Omissions certainly can and do happen, but I think there's a potential for the opposite to take place - namely a much more comprehensive view of the key facts than provided by a typical single news story.
Furthermore, it is all free content, so you can reuse it in any way, and it's available in a free archive indefinitely. This last bit is important -- it's harder than you might think to find an online copy of a non-major AP story after a few months.
The basic model of writing news on a wiki is workable, but it is certainly harder to motivate people to work on Wikinews than it is on Wikipedia. The individual author has to do more work, and in the case of real reporting, invest more resources. I hope that in the feature we can use new tools like SynchroEdit (a browser-based real-time multi-user editor), make the story writing process easier to use, and explore funding models for stories that cannot be done without a budget.
I haven't experienced much instability with Firefox. There are still a few websites where it reliably crashes (I try to report those when I come across them), but generally it's quite solid. Yes, Flash tends to be fucked up - I use Flashblock to selectively enable it, which helps a lot. Most Flash use is advertising or irrelevant (rotating headlines and similar shit), so I'm very glad to have it disabled by default.
I'm not sure to what extent Firefox is to blame for how Flash runs; I wouldn't be surprised if, being proprietary software, the plugin didn't get much priority, or if fixing integration issues was difficult. I don't know if IE handles Flash any better, but given that IE is still very much the dominant browser, it wouldn't surprise me if Macromedia heavily customized Flash for it. I guess the main reason there's no popular open source Flash engine is that people place similar hopes in SVG. What I've seen of SVG in Firefox 1.5 looks promising for sure.
I believe there are a few extensions which seriously affect stability, performance and memory usage. If you use a lot of extensions, check the comments on the addons site. Chances are one of them has a memory leak. Should extensions be able to affect the browser in that way? No, but I'm not sure it can be done differently.
The fundamental problem with the extension approach (as opposed to a monolithic browser) is that when you have lots of modules with different maintainers, module quality can be quite low, which can affect the combined whole. It might be a good idea for Mozilla to "officially" provide a home for some extensions (including a quality review process), similar to the way the KDE project integrates mature applications.
I do believe that Firefox, due to its surrounding hype, is faced with a lot of pressure to innovate from version to version, and that this pressure can take energy and resources away from integration and consolidation. If it becomes too much of a problem, we'll see a very, very small fork of Firefox being hyped up, and Firefox becomes the new Mozilla.
Hint to Sharman: Modify your client to download a list of bad keywords to your client directory. Call this list of bad keywords "badsearchterms.txt" and load it from the disk everytime the user makes a search. At the very least, this should buy you some more time. (The sad part is, the filter would probably still work on 90% of KaZaA users.)
Microsoft's "security" initiatives
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Recently my girlfriend bought a new laptop with Windows XP installed. Before I could use it, I had to reboot about 10 times (no exaggeration) to get required security updates for Windows and the bundled Norton Antivirus package. At the same time, the operating system constantly asked me to set up a Microsoft Passport account and sign up for other MSN services and automatic updates. In fact, in the recommended settings, Windows Update will randomly interrupt you while you're working and force you to reboot.
People who say that "Windows is easy to install" seem to never have gone through this process. And remember, I wans't even installing the computer - I booted a brand new machine and connected it to the Internet. This is not malignant, it's an utter disaster of software engineering, especially for average PC users. (Nothing of the sort, of course, happens with any modern Linux distribution. I can update my entire Debian system without rebooting once or reading a single EULA.)
It also seems that Microsoft is using all its "security initiatives" to intrude evermore into consumers' lives, get more data about them, sign them up for Microsoft services, and lock out competitors. With IE7, apparently there will be yet another layer of intrusion: phishing protection by sending all visited URLs to Microsoft. Do you really think the average user will think about the privacy implications of this?
And let's not kid ourselves: Microsoft is not the only company doing this. Today I installed a Logitech mouse under Windows, and guess what -- it wanted to install a "Logitech messenger" to automatically get updates and deliver "product information". Spyware and adware, it seems, is becoming the norm, rather than the exception, even for "respectable" applications. Microsoft's interest in spyware maker Claria confirms this trend.
Now, IE7 will offer some features which competitors have had for years to average users who would never try Firefox. This is a good thing, and as some have pointed out, the gigantic feature advantage that Firefox will retain (particularly its extensibility, but also upcoming improvements such as SVG support and super-fast back/forward) will hopefully drive more users to it. I can't help but wonder, though, whether we are witnessing the development of a massively polarized information society, where some will work and play in a maximally commercialized environment full of spyware and ads, and others will have free software, built by regular people in their own enlightened self-interest. And it seems that Microsoft, rather than AOL as was predicted in the early days of the Net, is the driving force behind this.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the PC concept -- from what is preinstalled to service and support -- on the basis of free software. An "open PC" that comes with thousands of free applications and games as well as an Internet-based support and update contract could be an excellent deal. Lindows seems to have tried something like this, but they don't seem to be clued up enough to me to pull it off.
Similar proposals have been discussed and implemented before: CoSource, SourceXChange, the Free Software Bazaar, SourceAgency, Experts-something,... here is a historical overview.
Why did past projects fail? I think the main reasons are usability, lack of collaboration and the dot-com-crash. Wiki-like functionality is essential to allow specifications to evolve, and there needs to be a very simple and obvious process of pooling funds and finding projects to donate to.
A brief look suggests that Fundable, while simple and slick, is not yet optimal for the purposes of funding open source projects -- it appears to lack collaboration on specifications, milestones, a process for applying to implement someone else's suggestions, fine grained categorization and sorting, etc. (correct me if I'm wrong on any of this) That it succeeds for some projects regardless shows that there is a vacuum for a portal like this -- not just in open source development. It would give those who cannot contribute code a way to nevertheless help to "scratch their itches" in the open source software world.
Keep in mind that we're talking about multiple accounts matching the same password -- it is highly unlikely that this would happen if the passwords aren't very simple to begin with. If a user uses such an insecure password in an important context, that password is susceptible to dictionary attacks, which are a much more widespread problem than a random troll by chance finding out that some user on Wikipedia has their password and trying it in a large number of contexts. Any security-relevant website should also perform checks on its users' passwords.
All this doesn't mean that Wikimedia shouldn't care for its users' password security, of course, but you shouldn't expect enterprise-grade security from every website you sign up to. Given that Wikimedia employs a single part-time systems administrator, I think it's completely possible that we will see a major password compromise at some point in the future.
You may want to read the Wikipedia article "straw man", by the way.:-).
The gist of the story, which refers to an event from July 2004 (many of the users in question have since left), is correct: there may be legitimate accounts on this list of 109 account names. However, about 90% of them are from identified and well-known trolls and problem users. It's important to know that it's relatively easy for us to block a user, but it's also relatively easy for that user to come back under a new name, especially if they use dynamic IP addresses. Many trolls also like to impersonate others (many of the listed accounts are obvious impersonations of famous Wikipedians).
Unfortunately, Tim at the time didn't run a password checker against the hashes, which could have thrown weak passwords out of the list and thereby prevented legitimate accounts from being included with reasonable effectiveness.
The submitter clearly has an axe to grind (and may well be identical to the comment poster). No similar lookup has taken place since July 2004, so this story is a tempest in a teapot.
I would agree with the criticism in one regard: The decision not to delete the page was mistaken. One problem was that the deletion request came from a troll, which made a lot of people vote to keep the page "by default." The other problem is that the technical arguments to delete the page came in too late to make a difference.
In any case, as noted, this was months ago, has not been repeated since then, and any non-troll among the listed accounts can simply change their password. We're not talking about credit card data here, anyway -- creating a Wikipedia account takes 20 seconds and doesn't even require a valid email address. All that it contains are a bunch of user preferences.
..is the super fast back/forward cache (add a new positive Integer value browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers in about:config to enable it). My impression is that it's even faster than Opera's, though there seem to be some conditions under which a slower reload is used. In any case, this is an absolute killer feature, and I hope they manage to get it ready to be enabled by default for 1.1.
The other killer feature is, of course, SVG support by default -- unlike the crappy Adobe plugin, fast and reliable SVG support. A lot of stuff that is currently done in Flash can be done in SVG without any dependency on non-free software (or unstable, experimental open source players). Personally, I'm most excited about its possible uses in Wikipedia. Unlike a bitmap file, an SVG can be collaboratively edited: translate text, fix mistakes, and so on. Beyond illustrations, SVG is also useful for zoomable timelines, of which Wikipedia has quite a few, and which are already exported as SVG.
I think that Firefox support for SVG could be a major reason to switch from other browsers if we come up with cool SVG-based applications (not that we really need more reasons to switch!). One thing that would be neat is the ability to generally pan and zoom an SVG file even if there are no JavaScript controls for that, I haven't seen that functionality. Perhaps a bookmarklet or GreaseMonkey script could do the trick.
I can't wait for the final version, but I'd be happy to wait 3 months longer if that's how long it takes to get it ready for primetime. One thing is for sure: Firefox 1.1 will kick butt.
Slashdot Mirror
Public Relations work is actually fairly cheap. Even the largest PR company, Edelman PR, only had revenues of $206 million in 2002. [1] All they needed to do, in this case, is to create the impression of a "controversy" by ensuring that a few high profile "experts" get funded, so that politicians who wouldn't be inclined to act against global warming anyway would have a moral justification to do so. The Discovery Institute, by far the single most important entity in the similarly huge Intelligent Design "controversy", only received about $3.5 million in reveneues in 2004. [2] Now compare that number to the amount of media stories about "Intelligent Design" (a pure PR rebranding of the earlier "creation science" effort) in 2004. Of course, ExxonMobil's campaign is also part of a larger effort, as detailed, for instance, by PR experts Bob Burton and Sheldon Rampton in this article.
I hope the critics of ExxonMobil will at least acknowledge that the Big Mean Evil Corporation DOES recognize the role its products play in global warming.
That is entirely irrelevant if, at the same time, the company funds professional liars like Steven Milloy and other former tobacco industry lobbyists to systematically discredit scientific findings. A company like ExxonMobil is fully capable of acting in a deliberately inconsistent manner, maintaining a public face that adjusts to the shifting zeitgeist, while continuing to try to undermine it through PR flacks and front groups. The tobacco industry has done the same when it became impossible to publicly deny the health impact of smoking.
I suggest this neat little open source tool. It's a web-based frontend for managing podcasts -- just upload the files through a web interface and you're done (you may have to adjust the PHP max. filesize settings). What would be really lovely is a non-profit providing such a service on a reliable basis.
I only had very few interactions with Lilo, but he was always friendly and polite when I did. I am a long time user of FreeNode and a long time Wikipedian. The network has been invaluable to our community, and while of course a project like FreeNode is very much collaborative, I think he personally represented many of the core values that make it a great place for open source and free content projects. This is a very sad day. May he idle in peace. :-(
- Whether we like it or not, most people are forced to work with Microsoft products in their day to day office work. This is not likely to change in the near future. Any small improvement in Microsoft's products makes a big difference to a lot of people.
- Open source programmers have big egos. If someone on a Windows box says "I can do this, why can't you do this?", it creates an itch that they want to scratch. Better Microsoft products will lead to more innovation in the open source sphere as well.
Remember, Microsoft doesn't need to innovate to sustain its market share in the short term. In the long run (think 10-20 years), I think open source is going to win out anyway. But for the time being, Microsoft reorienting itself and becoming a more flexible and agile company is a good thing. I have big hopes that Ozzie is the man who could pull that off.There is not only the choice between safe and non-safe nukes. There is also the choice of no nukes at all. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually pledged that he would be happy to give up Iran's nuclear ambitions if there was a genuine commitment of all nations with nuclear weapons to disarm. Now, this is a dishonest offer, because he knows that it is not going to happen. But what better way to, literally and figuratively, disarm Iran than taking him up on it? What is the use of nuclear weapons in this world? Who are you going to nuke? "The terrorists"?
If you look at the comments in this thread, you will find that America has no moral leadership anymore whatsoever. It's gone. Note that this is an America-based forum. Don't even try to suggest any kind of moral leadership of the United States in a European context. You will quickly hear: Iraq civil war. Abu Ghraib. Secret CIA prisons. Guantanomo. Police state. Religious fanaticism. Violation of international treaties. And so on, and so forth. What's the last moral defense against an undeniably terrible regime like Iran or the PRC? Democracy? Bullshit. Hardly anybody outside the US takes this so-called democracy seriously anymore. We are talking about an electoral system which tolerates the candidate in an election running the election, legally. Third world countries have more refined democratic systems than the US.
It's time to stop using false dichotomies and poorly constructed slippery slope arguments. "We can have safe nuclear bombs, or unsafe ones!" "We can invade countries, or let terrorists kill us!" "If we let the evil homosexuals marry, goats and chickens will be next!" "We must scare teenagers so they won't have sex and get pregnant!" "We must lock up 2 million people so there won't be criminals in the streets!" What scares me the most is that there are a lot of people who actually believe that.
- You're forgetting that it was copyright law that was created first, not record labels. You seem to treat copyright as some kind of "natural right" that basically has always existed, and some companies took advantage of it. The modern institution of copyright was created because politicians believed (not all of them, mind you) that a legally granted monopoly such as copyright may be necessary in order to incentivize creation of intellectual works. It was initially very limited (14 years in the US); it is the corporations that arose that used copyright to their advantage which lobbied to extend it further and further as technology for copying improved. Today, it is effectively infinite for modern works since most of us will not see any work that is created today go into the public domain unless the author puts it there.
- It is very much the government's job to level the playing field, not just to "enforce laws" -- hence antitrust, subsidies, etc. The government creates laws in order to improve society, which was exactly the initial motivation to create copyright. The government has not tried any other model yet in spite of rapid technological change.
- Certainly anyone can set up a micropatronage website; however, it is broad acceptance and support which make the whole model work, so government support would be one way to try out this model on a large scale.
- You've got it the wrong way around. It is not that people think they are "entitled" to copy other's works, it is that they feel the actual entitlement granted to copyright holders through copyright law should be limited because it no longer serves its original purpose. Again, copyright is not a natural law whose existence cannot be questioned.
- As for calling a world without copyright, or with alternative compensation systems, "communist", that depends on the implementation. I think the following analogies are accurate:
- Traditional copyright = "state capitalism" as defined by libertarians (government supports business through the creation of laws)
- Abolishment of copyright, legally enforced copyleft (right to access source code etc.) = communism
- Abolishment of copyright = free market capitalism (libertarianism)
Indeed, you will find that many libertarians oppose the institution of copyright on principle for this very reason. I think RMS and some elements of the Free Software / Open Source scene would be inclined to support a more communist model of copyright where everyone is forced to share their changes to other people's work in a modifiable form (source code for programs, 3D models for 3D graphicsI'm not a libertarian, mind you, but when it comes to copyright, I think that is where my stance falls.
Is it understandable that the music industry acts the way it does? Why, yes, certainly it is.
In category 1, micropatronage seems like a good strategy. People are happy to make voluntary donations to an up and coming artist they like, esp. the kind of people who listen to new and indepedent music. In category 2, donations may also work, but artists have another option known as the Street Performer Protocol. They can choose to release their next work only when a certain amount of donations has been reached.
Finally, it is important to note that music artists only receive a very small amount per CD sale ($1 or less seems like a frequently circulated figure for typical CDs). This is the amount that needs to be matched in any new model, not more, if you want to support a claim that the new model hurts artists. Of course the labels do significant marketing and production work, but arguably, new media can take over many if not all of these responsibilities.
Of course, this is what labels really have to fear: that artists become completely independent of them. The main reason this evolution hasn't happened more naturally already is the dominance of television as the culture-defining medium of the masses. TV is a centralized medium where large corporations have access and define the content. This, of course, excludes those who do not sign with major labels quite effectively. As we transition to Internet culture, where you have decentralized mass phenomena, this is beginning to change, and I anticipate that either way, the development outlined above is what we're going to see in the long run.
Decriminalization of non-commercial file sharing would therefore merely accelerate a natural development that is the consequence of technological change. Unfortunately, many people have accepted that labels and publishers represent "culture", which has given these companies nearly unrestricted access to politicians to prolong their own existence.
I think that the argument is much stronger in the case of movies. Of course you can make nice movies on a small budget, but a LOTR trilogy you can't. And it's not like the whole world knew who Peter Jackson was when he started the project -- it was a high risk investment, given that he could have f'd it up completely (cf. Gigli). Right now the movie industry is still well-protected by the very experience of watching a film in a cinema, but that may not last forever.
If the movie industry gets into trouble, I can potentially see independent filmmakers slowly rising through the ranks of low budget stuff with the help of micro- and macropatronage, but to see this as a given would be naive indeed. The best protection for high quality immersive content is probably interactivity. If you stream content directly to a client, and you make the content they see dependent on their actions, copying that content will not be useful to anyone else. For instance, how do you copy World of Warcraft or Second Life? These are immersive, interactive communities, with more and more logic on the server side. Making data streams user-specific may work even for passive video using techniques like foveated video in combination with direct retinal projection. Anything which you can burn on a DVD, however, is doomed to be burned onto DVDs.
I would agree that it makes sense for advocacy groups like the "Pirate Party" to limit themselves to the domain of IP law. However, I also think you should do some more reading about the war on drugs and its consequences. America isn't the global leader in incarcerating people for no reason. It's OK to oppose drugs -- there are different strategies of decriminalization -- but I hope you will agree that locking up thousands and thousands of people is not the way to deal with the drug problem. And let me not even go into the whole tobacco+alcohol vs. marijuana issue. There is no excuse for ignorance of the facts, however.
Those who argue "Serves them right, they knew it was a crime" don't realize just how bizarre this whole situation is. You have police come to your house, take your computer away, and you'll get fined with thousands of Euros for something which is utterly trivial. If this is taken to an extreme, it's even worse than the "war on drugs": You don't even have to leave your house to be labeled a criminal.
The music industry has this funny idea that they can scare consumers into using iTunes and similar networks. This will work -- for a while. But when you have all the technologies mentioned, copyright infringement that is undetectable will become prevalent -- because you just download 1 GB from your friend via IM, or swap DVDs (or soon HDDVDs), or use IRC and FTP. And it's not like you have to be a technology savvy guy to do these things. My mom can use IM, when she gets broadband, she can swap files.
So, what you are left with is completely arbitrary enforcement on some services, scare tactics that work against some, while the underlying "problem" keeps getting "worse" because of technology (hardware, software). Just wait until the next file sharing application with a built in "how anonymous do you want to be?" slider comes along.
The problem will only go away when those who make music embrace sharing as a way to popularize it. Those who like it, will pay. What will work better in the long run -- scaring people into paying? Or letting them choose to? If the industry doesn't realize the answer and tries to criminalize society instead, it's time for people to force them to. I really hope that initiatives like the Swedish "Pirate Party" are successful in working towards the decriminalization of non-commercial copying.
Marijuana is legal in quite a few countries. It can happen.
- Be taken seriously by studios and animators. Having a tech demo like this out means that people who make decisions about spending money are more likely to take a closer look at Blender as a highly capable free solution for 3D graphics.
- As a consequence, a studio might even say: "Sure, Blender is cool, but it's lacking features X, Y, and Z. So we'll pay for developing those, it's still cheaper than what we would pay for licensing." Studios are first and foremost about making films, not software, so open source makes strategic sense for them.
- Get young artists interested in using Blender. "That movie had a weird plot, but man, I'd love to do graphics like that." This in turn may lead to increased uptake in academia, as kids want to use their favorite software in university.
- Help people learn basic 3D filmmaking skills. Remember that the DVD contains the 3D models, storyboards, making of, etc.
- Establish working relations with artists, organizations, and so on that can be built upon in future projects.
- Identify key areas where Blender needs work -- this was done during the process, and any new movie project will help to further refine the software.
I don't dare to predict if future movie projects will be successful. I think there's a good chance they will, especially if the basic idea (without spoilers) is published upfront and well-received. I think it would be neat to cooperate with a major webcomics artists on characters and plot. This is a community artform that has already established itself quite well.It uses the extension mechanism of parser hooks, it just uses it in the wrong place, Setup.php, which is part of the core MediaWiki files. Editing this is bad advice as it'll complicate upgrading.
The idea of using wiki mechanisms for code is lovely in principle, but it'll need a lot more thinking than that to work in practice. As it is, NewsForge would be well served by removing or commenting this piece of information from the article.
I agree with you that the animations of Proog and Emo (Emo?!) were a bit jerky. I'm not sure if it was intentional -- if it was not, they seem to have tried to compensate by making the dialogue match the hectical movements. The dialogue was also a bit too quiet, and one could tell that the voice actors aren't native English speakers. But these are relatively minor problems. As a technical demonstration of what free software packages like Blender, CinePaint, DrQueue, Python, etc. are capable of, it was very successful. Given that Hollywood already makes extensive use of Linux, perhaps it will now be easier to make a pitch for even more open technologies. As for Orange, I hope there will be many follow-up projects, perhaps some with better scripts.
As the article points out, Peter raised the money necessary to pay the reexamination fee through donations. I don't know what his chances are of being successful, but it certainly shows that blogs can be useful in allowing more people to participate in processes that were previously mainly used by businesses. Maybe they'll raise the reexamination fee to keep up with technical progress. ;-)
Diplomacy is fine if it is used strategically, rather than as part of a genuine appeasement effort. You cannot appease those who are afflicted by mental illness -- and the fundamentalist expression of religion is a mental illness. It needs to be eliminated through a competition of ideas. It cannot be accepted. People, especially women, are suffering under truly medieval theocratic regimes. This must not continue. And if more people realize this thanks to the "controversy" we're seeing now, so much the better.
It's the other way around. When an image is uploaded the Commons, you can instantly use it in all Wikimedia projects by specifying its filename. Anyone who is motivated to do so can watch the stream of newly uploaded images and add them to the right Wikipedia articles, Wikibooks pages, Wikinews stories, etc. This happens, which explains the redundancy you see -- the Wikimedia Commons is first of all a media archive for the Wikimedia projects. However, material is originally uploaded there, not the other way around.
With almost 350,000 files, it's shaping up to become the largest archive of free content photos, sounds and other media files (we're not too big on videos yet). I've personally uploaded reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings that were donated by a German publisher, and I operate FlickrLickr, a collaborative project to find useful Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr (we've uploaded over 4,000 photos already). So Wikimedia Commons very much has an identity of its own.
As for Wikibooks, I do not agree about its state. While most books are still incomplete, that doesn't make them useless. Take a look at the recently featured books of the month, such as Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. Sure, they can all still use work, but they're already useful resources for various topics. Importantly, this is the kind of Wikimedia project that is likely to see substantial outside grants in the future, because it ties into the whole "Let's help the developing world" vision that Wikimedia espouses (textbooks in developing countries are often more expensive than they are here!). It might be interesting to start paying people to edit and finalize some textbooks.
Wikinews has produced over 3,500 stories in the English version alone in a year, so while I agree that it's not an alternative to a newspaper (which primarily makes use of licensed newsfeeds), I think we've made some good progress, and I do recommend adding the English RSS feed to your favorite reader - it is often refreshingly different from other news sources in its priorities.
The projects you cite I would actually count as the most successful so far. Wikisource (which is mostly a Project Gutenberg clone) and Wikiquote (which seems very dubious in terms of being "free content") are of less interest; Wikispecies and Wiktionary are of little value without specialized software that adds structure to the data contained in these projects (incidentally, I am working on a project called "Wikidata" to change that).
Furthermore, it is all free content, so you can reuse it in any way, and it's available in a free archive indefinitely. This last bit is important -- it's harder than you might think to find an online copy of a non-major AP story after a few months.
But the area which we really want to expand is Original reporting. Currently there's about 2 stories per week with some OR in it, which I think is not too bad. Some of the stories we've run so far were quite interesting, e.g. Elite Boston Marathon runner Emily Levan discusses life and running and Mothers, teachers air more concerns about leukemia cases at California elementary school (the latter written by a 14-year-old).
The basic model of writing news on a wiki is workable, but it is certainly harder to motivate people to work on Wikinews than it is on Wikipedia. The individual author has to do more work, and in the case of real reporting, invest more resources. I hope that in the feature we can use new tools like SynchroEdit (a browser-based real-time multi-user editor), make the story writing process easier to use, and explore funding models for stories that cannot be done without a budget.
I'm not sure to what extent Firefox is to blame for how Flash runs; I wouldn't be surprised if, being proprietary software, the plugin didn't get much priority, or if fixing integration issues was difficult. I don't know if IE handles Flash any better, but given that IE is still very much the dominant browser, it wouldn't surprise me if Macromedia heavily customized Flash for it. I guess the main reason there's no popular open source Flash engine is that people place similar hopes in SVG. What I've seen of SVG in Firefox 1.5 looks promising for sure.
I believe there are a few extensions which seriously affect stability, performance and memory usage. If you use a lot of extensions, check the comments on the addons site. Chances are one of them has a memory leak. Should extensions be able to affect the browser in that way? No, but I'm not sure it can be done differently.
The fundamental problem with the extension approach (as opposed to a monolithic browser) is that when you have lots of modules with different maintainers, module quality can be quite low, which can affect the combined whole. It might be a good idea for Mozilla to "officially" provide a home for some extensions (including a quality review process), similar to the way the KDE project integrates mature applications.
I do believe that Firefox, due to its surrounding hype, is faced with a lot of pressure to innovate from version to version, and that this pressure can take energy and resources away from integration and consolidation. If it becomes too much of a problem, we'll see a very, very small fork of Firefox being hyped up, and Firefox becomes the new Mozilla.
</RANT>
Hint to Sharman: Modify your client to download a list of bad keywords to your client directory. Call this list of bad keywords "badsearchterms.txt" and load it from the disk everytime the user makes a search. At the very least, this should buy you some more time. (The sad part is, the filter would probably still work on 90% of KaZaA users.)
It also seems that Microsoft is using all its "security initiatives" to intrude evermore into consumers' lives, get more data about them, sign them up for Microsoft services, and lock out competitors. With IE7, apparently there will be yet another layer of intrusion: phishing protection by sending all visited URLs to Microsoft. Do you really think the average user will think about the privacy implications of this?
And let's not kid ourselves: Microsoft is not the only company doing this. Today I installed a Logitech mouse under Windows, and guess what -- it wanted to install a "Logitech messenger" to automatically get updates and deliver "product information". Spyware and adware, it seems, is becoming the norm, rather than the exception, even for "respectable" applications. Microsoft's interest in spyware maker Claria confirms this trend.
Now, IE7 will offer some features which competitors have had for years to average users who would never try Firefox. This is a good thing, and as some have pointed out, the gigantic feature advantage that Firefox will retain (particularly its extensibility, but also upcoming improvements such as SVG support and super-fast back/forward) will hopefully drive more users to it. I can't help but wonder, though, whether we are witnessing the development of a massively polarized information society, where some will work and play in a maximally commercialized environment full of spyware and ads, and others will have free software, built by regular people in their own enlightened self-interest. And it seems that Microsoft, rather than AOL as was predicted in the early days of the Net, is the driving force behind this.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the PC concept -- from what is preinstalled to service and support -- on the basis of free software. An "open PC" that comes with thousands of free applications and games as well as an Internet-based support and update contract could be an excellent deal. Lindows seems to have tried something like this, but they don't seem to be clued up enough to me to pull it off.
Why did past projects fail? I think the main reasons are usability, lack of collaboration and the dot-com-crash. Wiki-like functionality is essential to allow specifications to evolve, and there needs to be a very simple and obvious process of pooling funds and finding projects to donate to.
A brief look suggests that Fundable, while simple and slick, is not yet optimal for the purposes of funding open source projects -- it appears to lack collaboration on specifications, milestones, a process for applying to implement someone else's suggestions, fine grained categorization and sorting, etc. (correct me if I'm wrong on any of this) That it succeeds for some projects regardless shows that there is a vacuum for a portal like this -- not just in open source development. It would give those who cannot contribute code a way to nevertheless help to "scratch their itches" in the open source software world.
All this doesn't mean that Wikimedia shouldn't care for its users' password security, of course, but you shouldn't expect enterprise-grade security from every website you sign up to. Given that Wikimedia employs a single part-time systems administrator, I think it's completely possible that we will see a major password compromise at some point in the future.
You may want to read the Wikipedia article "straw man", by the way. :-).
Unfortunately, Tim at the time didn't run a password checker against the hashes, which could have thrown weak passwords out of the list and thereby prevented legitimate accounts from being included with reasonable effectiveness.
The submitter clearly has an axe to grind (and may well be identical to the comment poster). No similar lookup has taken place since July 2004, so this story is a tempest in a teapot.
I would agree with the criticism in one regard: The decision not to delete the page was mistaken. One problem was that the deletion request came from a troll, which made a lot of people vote to keep the page "by default." The other problem is that the technical arguments to delete the page came in too late to make a difference.
In any case, as noted, this was months ago, has not been repeated since then, and any non-troll among the listed accounts can simply change their password. We're not talking about credit card data here, anyway -- creating a Wikipedia account takes 20 seconds and doesn't even require a valid email address. All that it contains are a bunch of user preferences.
The other killer feature is, of course, SVG support by default -- unlike the crappy Adobe plugin, fast and reliable SVG support. A lot of stuff that is currently done in Flash can be done in SVG without any dependency on non-free software (or unstable, experimental open source players). Personally, I'm most excited about its possible uses in Wikipedia. Unlike a bitmap file, an SVG can be collaboratively edited: translate text, fix mistakes, and so on. Beyond illustrations, SVG is also useful for zoomable timelines, of which Wikipedia has quite a few, and which are already exported as SVG.
I think that Firefox support for SVG could be a major reason to switch from other browsers if we come up with cool SVG-based applications (not that we really need more reasons to switch!). One thing that would be neat is the ability to generally pan and zoom an SVG file even if there are no JavaScript controls for that, I haven't seen that functionality. Perhaps a bookmarklet or GreaseMonkey script could do the trick.
I can't wait for the final version, but I'd be happy to wait 3 months longer if that's how long it takes to get it ready for primetime. One thing is for sure: Firefox 1.1 will kick butt.