antikoan

 |::| Saturday, July 06, 2002

 |::|   9:37:17 PM 

From DayPop, a tutorial on accessibility techniques for Radio/MT: "Day 19: Using real table headers" [Daypop Top 40]

 |::| Battleship [Flash 5]  5:46:29 PM 

Just what it sounds like -- a Flash Battleship game. Froze up on me part way through in Linux, but I imagine it works fine on more mainstream Flash implementations:

"Battleships" [Daypop Top 40]

 |::| ABCNEWS.com : Eight Cities in Patriot Act Revolt  5:32:08 PM 

From ABC News:

"This law is based on the faulty assumption that safety must come at the expense of civil liberties," Laura W. Murphy, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington National Office, said in that group's analysis of the law. "The USA Patriot Act gives law enforcement agencies nationwide extraordinary new powers unchecked by meaningful judicial review."

[Forwarded link | unforwarded link | Daypop Top 40]

 |::|   5:24:24 PM 

From Freshmeat, a utility to do something I've been sketching out for a while myself: Namely, grab Yahoo mail via HTTP, without using POP.

Yahoo Mail Sucker Prototype 21 [freshmeat.net]

Let's see how long this works. It would be an interesting challenge to spec out how Yahoo could block this. Maybe I'll do that and send it to the authors.

 |::| What Dave Said  5:11:31 PM 

As often as I think Dave Winer over-reacts, and though I sometimes think he lacks perspective, the following summarizes important and hitherto ignored aspects of the technical issues with "deep linking" more succinctly than I could have easily done myself:

In Denmark today, a judge rules against a search engine that respects the robots.txt convention, and stops it from "deep linking" into sites run by the Danish newspaper association. All these court cases are as stupid as dirt. Several good technical preventatives exist. First, if the search engine supports robots.txt, you can simply edit the file on your site, and save the lawyer's fees. If it doesn't support robots.txt, first raise the issue in public, and the tech weblogs will get right on it. If that doesn't work, add a simple script to your server to look at the referer attribute on the HTTP request and if it isn't from your site, redirect to your deep linking policy page. We know for sure that when a company goes to court for "deep linking" that they aren't talking to, or listening to, their technical people. BTW, deep linking is an oxymoron. There's only one kind of linking on the Web. Why would you ever point to the home page of a news oriented site. [Scripting News]

Bra-vo. "Deep linking" only exists where search-engine vendors or site-owners have ignored a painfully clear and precise existing standard. When I was a webmaster, I ached for search spiders to honor robots.txt. Now, some uneducated jurist has made a bizarre judgement that renders this standard for signage null and void.

And the final point is quite poetic, in a zen-like way: "Why would you ever link to the root page of a news site? [Here's why.]"

 |::|   5:02:18 PM 

Trying to keep up with the current eroding environment re. digital "rights" management, as in the link below to the Janis Ian essay. From Daypop/NYT (reg req'd):

"New Chips Can Keep a Tight Rein on Consumers" [Daypop Top 40]

Key quotes:

But Palladium can also be used for digital-rights management on your PC. This means that only certified programs could be run, and only certified content could be displayed. At the level of bits, censorship and digital-rights management are technologically identical.
....

[Ross Anderson, Cambridge U.:] What are the economic implications of technologies that can control after-purchase use? The answer depends on how competitive the markets are. Take the inkjet printer market. If cartridges have a high profit margin but the market for printers is competitive, competition will push down the price of printers to compensate for the high-priced cartridges. Restricting after-purchase use makes the monopoly in cartridges stronger (since it inhibits refills), but that just makes sellers compete more intensely to sell printers, leading to lower prices in that market. This is just the old story of "give away the razor and sell the blades."
....

All well and good for non-creative commodities like ink cartridges. But what about creative effort? The Times hits slightly closer to the mark:

But there is another set of problems associated with controlling after-purchase use: these technologies can reduce innovation

To put it mildly. More accurately, they make a mockery of the concept of Fair Use.

Really, American jurists and "intellectual property" lawyers ought to be forced to read and then be tested on the intellectual property writings of the "founding fathers", and in particular the inventors Jefferson and Franklin. [Need to find a link to some of those writings -- Jefferson, though, was quite explicit in his belief that patents were a burden to freedom and ought to be tolerated only for the minimal amount of time necessary to encourage individual innovation.]

 |::| "For I, too, am Welsh!"  4:41:22 PM 

Cleaning house and putting up links to a bunch of things. From MeFi:

posted by stbalbach » July 5 1:16 PM | 13 comments. It appears England is made up of an ethnic cleansing event from people coming across from the continent after the Romans left. Our findings completely overturn the modern view of the origins of the English. [MetaFilter]

This one reminds me of the findings a few years back that much of Japanese culture sources to immigrants from Korea. Somehow, I think the English will take this revalation much more gracefully than Japanese took theirs.

Really, as I understand it -- and as I recall from my conversation with an archaeologist-acquaintence some years back -- this should be no surprise. As I recall the story, Welsh, Basque, and Celtic are so distantly related to one another as to seem unrelated at all (except for apparent borrowing from Celtic into Welsh), and none seem to bear any relation to Indo-European. Basque and Finno-Ugric are commonly cited as linguistic freaks of nature: Languages with no apparent relation to any other language on earth. So should it be a surprise that the speakers of those languages should have history in common? Especially in light of recent scholarship suggesting that Celtic Scots are all descended of Irish and Scandinavians sometime after the 8th century?

And it's not as though the English haven't always felt this in their heart -- or, at least, since Malory. They seem to me to have always been a little afraid of the Welsh, as though they preserved some ancestral source of power and vitality that the nation would someday need in its hour of crisis. Never forget, after all, either that "Arthur" was a Welshman, or how Charles (the Prince of Wales) chose to name his eldest son...

 |::|   11:35:35 AM 

Janis Ian presents an artist's view on file sharing, complete with 35+ years of experience and without Courtney Love's blustering ("The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View" [Daypop Top 40]).

 |::| Quote of the Moment  9:46:35 AM 

"That's my trouble, you know," Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. "Between me and every ideal I always find Scheisskopfs, Peckems, Korns and Cathcarts. And that sort of changes the ideal."

"You must not try to think of them," Major Danby advised affirmatively. "And you must never let them change your values. Ideals are good, but people are sometimes not so good. You must try to look up at the big picture."

Yossarian rejected the advice with a skeptical shake of his head. "When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy."

"But you must try not to think of that," Major Danby insisted. "And you must try not to let it upset you."

"Oh, it doesn't really upset me. What does upset me, though, is that they think I'm a sucker. They think that they're smart, and tat the rest of us are dumb. And, you know, Danby, the thought occurs to me right now, for the first time, that maybe they're right."

-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22