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Independence day quote, internet style:
"We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." (Dave Clark, IETF 1992)
Good discussion at advogato about online communities and the various ways they interact (usenet, web bulletin boards, mailing lists.) Lots of "I remember back in the good old days..." but that can be instructive if coming from the people who really were around "back in the day." The much ridiculued Jon Katz has a 4th of July type article about Jose Bove, the man on trial for trashing the McDonalds in France. And slashdot also recommends space.com for some streaming rocket fireworks action, featuring clips from both categories ("when rockets go right" and the ever popular "when rockets go wrong".) But really, you should probably get out of the house. Turn that computer off. Happy 4th.
HavenCo is the company doing that "secure" co-location facility on the abondon military sea platform turned wacky independent nation off the coast of England. (The one on the last cover of Wired.) Slashdot did the first half of their HavenCo interview a few weeks ago (in the first half they solicit the questions that will be asked from the readers.) The long awaited article has been posted. Pretty interesting. The questioners don't pull any punches, basically suggesting that this is just a P.R. stunt. They do better with their responses then I would have thought.
Here's more about the next generation "two-way" web. Sick of these stories yet? This one's a good intro to all the various players (not just Mozilla) who hope to enable the client side.
On line privacy: the good and the bad.
And oh yeah, just in case you thought that Clinton "signing" the new e-signature bill was a good thing: it wasn't. The bill has nothing to do with the very feasible technology of digital signatures (using public key encryption) which could be used to verify the author or signer of various electronic documents (the Clinton admin. is still very against public key encryption.) All this bill does is increase the power of those "click here to agree to this license" licenses. This is purely for the benefit of big business, and definitely not in any way for your benefit (unless you are a big business of course.) Thanks again Bill.
This is one of the things I'm waiting for: the Mozilla editor. This will be a key piece in building the two-way web (start reading at The Web as groupware section for the shorter version.) In other words, Mozilla, and the Mozilla editor specifically, could be the thing that takes web authors (those writing directly to the web, like we do on this site, through little textarea input boxes) to the next step. Imagine that our little posting page was actually a full text/html/image editor. Nice. I've been playing around with M16 (latest milestone release in the Mozilla march to commercial release) and I can safely say that the editor is not ready. But it is really cool. And it's gotten a lot of people thinking. Enabling collaboration (reading and writing; consuming and authoring; the two-way web) is the mantra of web developers. And I would think everyone has their fingers crossed for Mozilla.
Today is the first day I feel sort of normal since I drank way too much with S. on her last night in town. Still haven't really gotten anything done since then, but it's been a good week in other ways. Lots of interior changes. Sort of like I redecorated my mind. Not exactly sure how that night ended. Hope S. is still talking to me when she gets back.
(My dillema of late: If you know what this means, then you probably heard the news already; if you don't know what I'm talking about then you definitely wouldn't care. Oh well. I'm so pleased about this I'm going to blog it anyway.) MySQL has been GPL'd