The Blog




Astro-mice to get orbiting love-pad Who cares what it's about. What a great headline! Presumably there's a tie in here with yesterday's story about pregnancy testing kits for female astronauts.

Beware That Company Box You Took Oh, good grief! Your company goes out of business. They give you the laptop instead of severance pay. And then... you use it... Gasp! Hook it up to your cable modem and suddenly Win2000 has caught Code Red! "But the sysadmin always used to fix my problems and configure everything for me, gibber, gibber".

The best quote in the article was from Marquis Grove of Security News Portal. "Most of them are totally unaware that computers can't just be turned on and left to their own devices," Well I certainly wouldn't recommend turning on a PC and walking away from it. Who knows what might happen. And then we get the usual helpful advice from the experts. "Run a personal firewall, anti-virus software and re-install everything from scratch". Could be tricky when the accountants have locked up the company assets and have all the original CDs.

On Software "Piracy", Lies, BSA, Microsoft, Rocks, and Hard Penguins An excellent, level headed review of the economics of pirated software. I wonder how much of this is directly applicable to other forms of copyright theft. And what the implications are for the DMCA and copy protection schemes. It would seem that all these could be viewed as ways of shifting the price-volume and demand-volume curves in an attempt to maximise profit for the original creator and distributors. In this light, copy protection can be seen to be largely self defeating.




What is XRepublic ?

Pick a blog, a random blog.

The Times : ASTRONAUTS on the International Space Station (ISS) have been supplied with DIY pregnancy tests in case the enforced intimacy of space travel prompts mixed crews to try for the 200-mile-high club. Shouldn't they supply them with condoms as well?

n/a

The Times : The US Government[1] has backed a global scheme to simplify communication by giving everyone a single contact number, I am nota number. Damn it! (Actually, I'm an IP address, heh-heh!) And they're talking about basing it on reversing the telephone number standard, with different schemes for different countries. Doh!

[1]Yanqui, Back Off. It's bad enough having the US export their laws, like the war on some drugs and the DMCA. Now this.

Today's CD - Car Boot Soul - Nightmares on Wax




On the subject of Single Sign on. ICEPick - Peer to Peer Personalization : ICEPick is an Open Source peer to peer system designed to enable cross web site authentication and personalization services. There's also a discussion on the XML-RPC list on exactly this subject (also available at Yahoo).

On Friday, Dave wrote "My little experiment in Google worked. Scripting News is now the top entry when you search for blognosing. The little things that entertain my little mind. To which I can reply on Sunday, my little experiment in Google worked. Scripting News is no longer the top entry when you search for blognosing. The little things that entertain my little mind.

And the serious point is that Google's rapid indexing of sites that change often is viral. When a blog links to another blog, that one gets given Google's "Index Often" flag as well.

De-centralizing single signon
There are a vast number of web sites that require an ID and password but which have relatively low security requirements. It would make life easier for users of those sites if they didn't have to retype all their preferences and create a new ID and password.

What if the registration form or sign on form had three fields
1) ID
2) password
3) get my preferences from this URL

The site could then use XML-RPC, SOAP or such like to connect to that URL, validate the id and password and return a set of preferences/basic info. This is completely open and allows any and every site to act as the master repository for the preference set.

What's wrong with this picture?

Today's CD - Everywhere and Everywhere - Underworld




Today's CD - Back to Mine, Howie B

Inevitably, Winerlog has something to say about blognosing as well.

What is Syndic8 ?




I'm now getting indexed by Google. What's interesting about this is that I changed robots.txt to let the bots in. I then got linked by Scripting news. Google watch his site closely because of the large number of links both too and from his site. Now Google watches mine as well.

I've been working with newsisfree to build regex scrapers that will turn various websites into rss. Recently added are:-
  • Motorcycle News

  • Motorcycle Online

  • RoadRacing world

  • Spiked Online

  • RedHerring.com | Catch of the Day: Peer-to-peer pressure : Cache-sharing should eventually end up inside operating systems (and P2P companies will get purchased for this). The long-term proposition is to run the huge real-time service that helps machines find data in others' caches. This is a natural OS business extension, so guess which company is likely to get into this business? At last a P2P business plan... get bought by Microsoft!

    Today's CD: Another late night - Fila Brasilia

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