...more recent posts
Someday I'm going to collect all the links to articles of the "what's a weblog?" variety in one place. Someday. Real soon now. Anyway, here's another.
If you're interested in music on the internet you should know about Ogg Vorbis. Here's the faq.
I've been trying to put together a longer piece to say something about all these "free" and "open" software and file formats I like to push. It's come to my attention that maybe I've never explained it too well. This is turning out to be a difficult thing to write, but maybe just the small version will be enough to get started:
The internet might seem like a "place" (albeit virtual) right now, but I think that soon, as things progress, this idea will disappear. We're going to all live on the internet, except by then it won't seem like some other place. It will just seem like the world. It will be the world. What had previously been this new thing the internet will be micro miniaturized, wireless, and completely built in. It will be so pervasive and constant that it won't even seem like anything. So the fights over "free software" and "open source" aren't about making a "new economy" or somehow challenging capitalism. It's way beyond that. It's about securing fundamental rights for human beings in the new world. We're talking, in the end, over who is going to control the wiring of your brain.
What if a for profit corporation owned oxygen? Or multiplication? Or the color blue? This wouldn't make any sense.
Exactly. To return to Ogg, if I can't stream MP3s from my website without paying someone (Fraunhofer in this case) then unless I have enough money I won't be able to have a voice in the world (audio streams aren't only for songs remember, that's just an early popular application.) So fine, we won't use MP3. We'll use Ogg. It's important for there to be free audio codecs, and not just so that we can get all our music for free, thumb our noses at the RIAA, etc.... It's to protect the notion that all people, regardless of economic position, should be able to have a voice that can be heard. In today's world this is protected in some limited way by the inability of a company to patent the biological system that humans use to produce sound. But in the new world we won't always be using biological systems. We'll be using technological systems that companies are having great success in patenting and keeping secret and charging for and locking you into....
But as I think ogg demonstrates, you can't keep this sort of cat inside the bag. Someone will just design around you.
Don't miss: Sarah Macfadden one of a kind jewelry show.
Paul Ford writes some good stuff. From the heart. I don't know him, but I feel like I do. I wish him well. (Make sure you click through to Bridge and River Consecration too.)
I haven't done a long drive in quite some time. Probably yesterday was not the best day to have broken my streak.
I'm off to Boston for the night. Back tomorrow. My phone should work if you need me.
It's the 15th of the month, so that means a new crypto-gram from computer security big boss man Bruce Schneier. The first item is about honeypots, which are network connected computers set up to monitor crackers "in the wild." One such installation is called Honeynet, and is described this way:
The Honeynet Project was initiated to shine a light into this darkness. This team of researchers has built an entire computerWhat did they find out? Well...
network and completely wired it with sensors. Then it put the network up on the Internet, giving it a suitably enticing name and content, and recorded what happened.
A random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The life expectancy of a default installation of Red Hat 6.2 server, or the time before someone successfully hacks it, is less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file sharing enabled, was hacked five times in four days. Systems are subjected to NetBIOS scans an average of 17 times a day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after plugging it into the network.
Morning meditation: Fibonacci grid.
I usually don't link to java applets, but this one's pretty cool: visual thesaurus. Pretty slow on my machine, but Mac java support is poor, so you may have better results.