Yes. I am warming up. It’s strange how quick you escape if you haven’t continued your personal blogging for a couple of months. Do you know that feeling?
Warming up
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Archiv für den Monat: März 2005
What if patents applied to literature?
The fight against software patents is one of the most important topics for data travelers these days. The whole situation is horrifying as a sprawling culture (programming) will be killed for no reason (except keeping the money at the big companies). One of the big problems in this context is to explain why this is such a big mistake to non-programmers.
Then this article came along: What if patents applied to literature? on the must-read kuro5hin.org story system. The comparison of programming and literature is so valid that most of us may have overlooked how obvious this is:
„Now imagine a literary world restricted by patents. A patent protects not just the work itself, but the idea behind the work.“
Programmers and writers share similar skills. One time, they might face similar problems.
Hack In The Box Security Conference 2004 recordings
Hack In The Box is an annual, community oriented security conference that takes place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Recordings of last year‘ event are currently being spread via BitTorrent.
Fukami has put together the necessary links and a list of featured speakers. Only had a first glimpse but the material is of reasonable quality and the talks are interesting.
Chaos at home
Need some chaos at home? The virtual girl group at Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women provides insight into chaotically designed furniture.
XS4ALL sues The Netherlands
The dutch ISP XS4ALL once evolved out of the dutch hacker scene and has a track record of being an active defender of people’s digital rights. There have been various cases where XS4ALL has been actively supporting the fight against modern plagues like censorship and Scientology.
Now XS4ALL sues the Netherlands for costs that have been imposed on the ISP for installing machinery to allow the government to snoop into people’s communication. Hope they succeed in forcing the government to pay for spying into their citizens privacy.
Language Issues
I am going to start blogging in german soon. I have been doing this occasionally on another blog but I want to shift this in a similar context as my english blurbs. Question is how I do it and I am a bit split on this.
It turned out that I write totally different (in terms of style and topics) in german than I do in english. So this would mean a change in style. Also, it might confuse international readers not capable of speaking german. This would ask for a separate blog. But maybe some people do actually think it would be a good idea to mix and keep the entries separate by assigning a language category? I don’t know.
So if you have an opinion on this and feel like leaving a comment, please leave a comment.
BitTorrent 4.0 released
Bram Cohen has released version 4.0 of BitTorrent. As usual, no details on exactly what is new but some changes to the curses UI tell me some features of BitTornado may have been integrated.
The GUI based client for Mac OS X hasn’t been updated to the latest release but you can already get the command line version via DarwinPorts.
Good feelings anyone?
Need a break? Try OEM radio. Cools you down.
Absolutely del.icio.us
I have been excited by the „social bookmark manager“ del.icio.us since I first found out about it and have quietly using it for a while. Now you find the most recent bookmarks blended in this blog home page as well. I am always surprised people are actually reading the HTML still as fat feeds are doing their job so well. So, for the visually oriented, there is more dog food now to swallow. The hungry might subscribe directly to the feed.
Sheep game
As other important things happen, some people do play the sheep game (Flash). I’ll tell you later, why I mentioned this.