...more recent posts
If you're looking to freak yourself out with speculation about Al-Qaida's endgame then read on. You've been warned.
Dave Winer's latest davenet piece is worth the read. Very interesting to connect the larger war on terrorism with the smaller battles being fought in the internet arena. So much of modern fighting is about information and intelligence gathering. These things really do fit together.
I haven't said anything about the microsoft settlement because I don't think there's much to say. It's horrible, but not unexpected. I don't have enough information to be sure, but Dave's ideas feel right to me. Micorsoft and the governement made a deal - we just don't know what kind of deal. And given Microsoft's power and reach (especially in light of this settlement) they have quite a bit to give the government. So yes, it does scare me. Read the davenet piece for a good understanding of why.
However, there are some things working in the other direction. Mozilla, for instance, might turn out to be rather important (like it seemed in the beginning, but hasn't seemed to me for a long time now.) Sure that project has been slow to evolve, but that might be because there wasn't much need for it. Internet Explorer is a good browser. Even netscape 4.7 is a good browser (although it gives web designers fits.) But if Microsoft suddenly started censoring web sites through its control of the browser (with a wink and a nudge coming from the government) I think you'd see an explosion of interest in Mozilla. People do care, they just don't always care ahead of time. Outlook might actually be harder to unthrown (outside of the mail client in mozilla, are there any mature open source mail clients?) but I can't see how Microsoft could choke things off as easily with Outlook as they might be able to do by (mis)using Explorer. But again, if they tried that (in a full scale assault on freedom way) people would just make the jump most tech savvy people have been arguing for them to make for years: don't use microsoft products.
So I'm not as scared as I might be by all this. On the other hand, Dave's P.P.S. about loving the checks and balances provided by the judicial branch doesn't bring me much comfort. Remember the last presidential election? The lower courts - maybe - but the supreme court has lost my vote of confidence.
Happy birthday MB!
If you have an account here (and not much of a life?) you can now pop up a small window that will sit on your desktop and watch the site for you while you work. If something gets posted on a page you are tracking the window will let you know. Just go to /monitor (requires javascript.)
Phil Agre (of rock rock eater mailing list fame) has some ideas about colaborative web filters:
The "webfilter", as I'll call it, is a cross between a discussion list, a weblog, and a bookmark file. It is not just a weblog, since it includes numerous functionalities to deal with long lists of URL's. Nor is it just a discussion list, since the goal is to produce a reasonably clean and orderly presentation of the URL's. Nor is it just a bookmark file, because of its community nature.He explains the system he wants, but also adds "I cannot participate in building such a tool, but I would be happy to try out any prototypes that others might construct." Yeah, OK, I'll get right on it. Still, a good article of some interest to bloggers.
Ahhh! Scorpios everywhere!
It's early November and that means birthday time. Seems like I know an inordinate number of scorpios. Someone once told me this makes sense since I am a boring Taurus. Anyway, I was lucky enough to take two to dinner last night at Papillon. Here's the account if you're interested in such restaurant matters.
We're cooking at our place and watching the game tonight if anyone is interested.
Macintouch has some unconfirmed reports of the brand new Apple iTunes2 wiping out whole partitions upon installation. I'm looking forward to using this software (crossfading!), but I think I'll wait a day or two for this to sort out.
About a month ago I made a post with the double misspellings 'antrax' and 'symptons'. If you happen to search on google.yahoo.com for that phrase I come up as one of two results. The weird thing is I'm getting tons of hits from that exact misspelled search. Anyone arriving from such a search should be aware that you wont finde mutch imformation hear.
As we were discussing last night, today is the last phase of the weblogs.com transition. I'm still unclear whether you have to set up an account to be registered by the new system, or whether just sending the XML-RPC update notice is enough. In any case, you can turn on notification for your page here through [editpage] (change 'notify userland' to yes.)