The Substantially Similar Weblog

Last week, I wrote about a poorly written slightly satirical article criticizing open source. Today, I received a response from a Princeton administrator, linking to an official Princeton position statement on open source·.

While the position paper does distance itself from Howard Strauss’ article, it unfortunately presents a false trichotomy of “open source” vs. “vendor” vs. “local development.” In fact, there are at least two entirely separate decisions to be made in software procurement:

• Open source vs. Proprietary (and, in fact, various shades in between)
• Vendor supported vs. community supported vs. “in house” or local development

Any entity is free to mix and match between these options. For example, it’s quite common to have vendor supported open source software (e.g., Red Hat Linux·), or to have some in house expertise and development on open source software. Or even to rely on some vendor support, some community support, and some in house support.

Of course, if you choose the proprietary solution, you’re likely locked into the “vendor support” model indefinitely, and have no choice about your vendor.

It’s also disappointing that the Princeton Position Paper didn’t touch on the historic role of the University in advancing the pursuit of knowledge, and how open source code comports with these principles, which have been observed in the scientific community since the beginning of time. (i.e., share freely your discoveries so that others may improve on them).

Instapundit· writes about· a “support the troops” rally Near Seattle·. According to Instapundit, the rally was organized “in response to plans by antiwar types to protest the deployment.”

The article suggests only 20 antiwar protesters showed up, which makes a lot of sense. None of the peace movement people that I know and respect would be protesting against American troops. The troops aren’t any more responsible for what’s going on than are General Motor’s assembly line workers for air pollution.

What surprises me is the false dichotomy of “support our troops” vs. “oppose the war” works at all. It strikes me as such a transparent and puerile discourse, yet thousands of people appear to buy into it.

People who oppose military involvement in Iraq, in my experience, do not oppose soldiers at all, and would be the last ones to protest their deployment or return. As many others have noted, the idea of “supporting our troops” is quite consistent with bringing them back home.

Check out Tapestry: Your Favourite Comics by RSS· if you (1) read comics and (2) use an RSS aggregator, such as my personal favorite, Straw·. The site provides a list of comics available by RSS, as well as an RSS feed that provides updates on new feeds available.

I recently noticed an email is going around with the subject line Submission re: (your email address):

Someone who knows you just submitted a Word-of-Mouth Connection about you at our website, WordofMouthConnection.com. When your acquaintance submitted this Word-of-Mouth Connection at our website, they provided us with your email address.

I did a quick google search for “word of mouth” and “word of mouth connection” and all the top results pointed to the site itself.

It appears, though, that the “service” is a total scam. Snopes· does a good job at documenting the problems with the Word of Mouth Connection·. So pass on the word:

There’s no “report” or any other useful information to be found here just a notification that some anonymous contributor recently submitted an “I HAVE INFORMATION” entry on you. If you want to find out what this anonymous contributor actually said about you, you have to communicate with him through Word-of-Mouth’s ANONYMOUS EMAIL SYSTEM which this is where the “sucker” part kicks in is only available to Word-of-Mouth “Power Users”: One-Year Subscription $19.97, Two-Year Subscription (BEST VALUE) $29.97. However, all the “Power Users” who have written to us about their experiences with Word-of-Mouth have reported that after they paid the fees to learn what was being said about them, all they learned was that the anonymous contributors had “misplaced” whatever information they supposedly had to share.

I’ve been working on a few new features for this weblog. Aside from the search box in the sidebar, I’ve written a program that creates a local compressed cache of all outgoing links. This allows you to see a snapshot of whatever page I link to at the time it was linked, and also to see the content if the other server is down or the content is gone.

There is now a little dot following each link when there is a corresponding local cache file. For example, check out The Dick and Jane Reader for Advanced Students· from this month’s McSweeney’s· (parental discretion advised.) The dots to the right of those links should lead you to a local cache.

My weblog also automatically adds “titles” to outbound links—that means you should be able to hover your mouse pointer over a link and see the title of the linked document.

I’d appreciate any feedback on these new features. Particularly let me know if you notice any bugs, odd behavior, or ugliness with particular browsers. I haven’t had an opportunity to test with any Windows-based browsers.

There’s a great segment (quicktime movie) on the Daily Show with John Stewart· about Nat Heatwole’s “box cutter” experiment·, mentioned here last week. (via Boing Boing· via On Lisa Rein’s Radar·).

Stewart strategically clips statements from Department of Justice· and Transportation Security Administration· speakers to show how ridiculous this whole thing really is. Particularly of note—Heatwole sent a signed email about his plan to the FBI, yet it took several weeks to track him down. Is there any reasonable explanation for this?

Presidential Candidate John Edwards· has been a guest blogger this week on Larry Lessig’s weblog·. I hadn’t given him much consideration before, but I was actually impressed by his understanding of some important intellectual property issues (particularly the problems with the pharmaceutical patent regime·. In his final entry·, he squarely addressed the importance of open source licensing:

When a government official stepped forward and opposed an international forum on open source, that was a mistake—just as it would be a mistake to oppose a discussion of proprietary licensing. As I said, the role of government is to establish a level playing field, not pick a winner.

It probably helps that he represents the home state of Red Hat·, but so far he’s the only candidate who seems to know anything about the Free Software movement.

Howard Dean was also a guest blogger back in July·, and Dennis Kucinich in August·. Both Dean· and Kucinich have “personal” blogs as well. Although it’s all a little gimmicky, much of the blog writing has a slightly more sophisticated flavour than what you see in the debates, campaign speeches, and TV ads. This can only be a good thing.

In the tradition of people who like to say “I’m currently blogging from [x]” where x is some location other than [home]—

I’m currently blogging from Maxfield’s House of Caffeine·, on the corner of Dolores and 17th in the Mission. I highly recommend it. Features include:

• Spacious interior, well spaced tables and comfy couches. Counter seating if you don’t want to look at anyone (or look out the window); also several outdoor tables on a relatively quiet street.
• Well lit, tastefully decorated, lots of plants.
• ATM in the shop, if you care about that.
• Excellent wireless signal, no hassles joining the free LAN. Getting approximately 140kB/s at the moment.
• Decent ecletic music targetted at people like me (note Miles Davis and the Flaming Lips in the same set).
• Very respectable coffee prices in this Starbucks age. Regular coffee for $1.25, and an espresso is only $0.25 more. Single Cappuccino for $1.75; double for $2.00. How can you not get a double under these circumstances?
• Pleasant, unharried staff. The whole place oozes chill.
• They appear to, at least informally, allow pets.
• Live music performances in the evenings, looks like primarily jazz and bluegrass variety.
• With a name like Maxfield’s House of Caffeine, it’s got to be good. Lots of newspaper articles on the walls about the healthful effects of caffeine (possibly prevents tumors from sun exposure, delays menopause, improves complexion, etc.).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation· and the Center for Internet and Society· are seeking an injunction against Diebold to halt its campaign against sites linking to its internal documents·.

I wrote about this total misuse of copyright law last week.

Nathaniel Heatwole, a 20-year-old college student who told authorities he placed box cutters and other banned items aboard two airliners to test security was charged Monday with taking a dangerous weapon aboard an aircraft. He faces up to 10 years in prison on federal charges. (interesting trivia: apparently Heatwole has received an amateur radio scholarship).

What’s interesting is that the article notes:

The discoveries prompted the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security to order security inspections of all U.S. commercial airliners.

The discovery being Heatwole’s email to the TSA about his accomplishments.

There is a long history in the hacker world of testing security measures to see if they work, and if they don’t either notifying the people responsible or leaving some sort of indication that you’ve been there. This sort of activity has never been well received by the powers that be, and is now subject to increasingly harsh criminal sanctions.

It seems to me that the arguments for permitting this sort of “white hat” hacking (vs. cracking) are just as good when applied to real world physical security as to computer and Internet security. After all, Heatwole’s actions did provoke an investigation. If someone had just called the TSA and said, “hey, are you sure nobody can bring box cutters on board?” there would likely have been no response. Demonstrating a “proof of concept” as here may ultimately result in improved security for all of us.

Interestingly, federal prosecutors recently they made a mistake when they obtained the conviction of a computer administrator who exposed flaws in his employer’s computer system to customers. The prosecutors are actually seeking an appeal to reverse the conviction that they themselves got. Although you would hope they would have thought this through before prosecuting the guy, it’s something of a testament to their honesty that now they’re trying to get him out.