Interview with Jeff Waugh.Jeff Waugh:
http://bethesignal.org/
http://www.olpc.org.au/
**
News:
OzPoliCon 2008: Australia's politico bloggers and online activists
conference
http://www.australianpoliticstv.com/ozpolicon08
Blog Action Day 2008
http://www.blogactionday.org/
The Learn About Poverty Blog Action Day Competition
http://learnaboutpoverty.org/2008/10/09/blog-action-day-competition/
Lawrence Lessig: In defense of piracy
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB122367645363324303.html
Google Operating System: How to start a linked YouTube video at a specific
point
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/embed-part-of-youtube-video.html<http://www.lifehacker.com.au/tips/2008/10/13/start_a_linked_youtube_video_at_a_specific_point.html>
Russian researchers achieve 100-fold increase in WPA2 cracking speed - Security and the Net
Russian security company Elcomsoft just posted a press release (original PDF) detailing a new method to crack WPA and WPA2 keys:
With the latest version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, it is now possible to crack WPA and WPA2 protection on Wi-Fi networks up to 100 times quicker with the use of massively parallel computational power of the newest NVIDIA chips. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery only needs a few packets intercepted in order to perform the attack.
The 100-fold increase in speed is achieved with two GeForct GTX280’s per workstation; for €599 you can build a network of 20 workstations dedicated to “recovering” your “lost” WPA keys. This means that a WPA or WPA2 key could be cracked in days or weeks instead of years.
Slashdot | Bugs Delay Release of Debian Lenny
over 200 release-critical bugs continue to push back Debian Lenny's release date. Originally slated for a September release, there is still a long road to be traveled before Lenny sees the light of day. Project leader Steve McIntyre says they may consider dropping some packages for the release if they continue to cause problems, and while an end of October release is the goal, only time will tell.
Screenshots of Firefox Mobile for Windows Mobile Finally Surface - ReadWriteWeb
Firefox Mobile looks to be coming to a Windows Mobile device near you very soon. With a reported Acid3 Test score of 88/100, the mobile web browser looks nearly complete in the screenshots that have surfaced. The address bar is reminiscent of Safari on the iPhone. However, it takes a visual cue from Firefox 3 with the addition of website favicons. Screenshots also show a really unique way for web surfers to visualize what tabs are open in Firefox Mobile. Mozilla may be foregoing traditional 'forward', 'stop', and 'back' buttons located in the address bar. Instead, the screenshots show on-page text boxes that indicate these actions.
Digg - Why OpenOffice 3.0 Just Became An Even Better Alternative
OpenOffice.org is a free, open-source office suite that's a serious alternative to pricey products such as Microsoft Office. It strikes me as a no-brainer to at least try it when you're in the market for an updated productivity suite, because it costs you nothing but your time. OpenOffice 3.0 is a significant upgrade and, again, is completely free.
What's Next After Web 2.0 - ReadWriteWeb
e're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one Web era is usurped by another.
Of course this last happened when Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly Media in about 2004. Luckily not long before that ReadWriteWeb was born (early 2003). So ReadWriteWeb has been documenting Web 2.0 ever since. Over the past couple of years, we've been focusing on other, perhaps more meaningful, trends - Semantic Web, recommendation technologies, web sites becoming web services, Mobile Web and more. We've documented these meta trends in a number of big posts, some of which are in our Best of ReadWriteWeb page and copied here:
* Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond
* What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008
* 2008 Web Predictions
* 10 Future Web Trends
* 10 More Future Web Trends
Slashdot | Microsoft's New Programming Language, "M"
"Microsoft announced Friday their new 'M' language, designed especially for building textual domain-specific languages and software models with XAML. Microsoft will also announce Quadrant, for building and viewing models visually, and a repository for storing and combining models using a SQL Server database. While some say the language is simply their 'D' language renamed to a further letter down the alphabet, the language is criticized for lack of a promised cross-platform function because of its ties to MS SQL server, which only runs on Windows."
Digg - 52 Things To Do With Google
You can do a lot more than search the web with Google nowadays, from reading newspapers in languages you don't speak to seeing the natural habitat of Komodo dragons.
Artists See a Future With BitTorrent | TorrentFreak
Giving away music for free might not sound like a very solid business model to most people, but it is. Most artists make most money from concerts and merchandise, not so much album sales. Even more so, the key to success are the fans, and what better way to introduce people to your music by giving it away for free?
A whole new generation of artists, most of who grew up with Napster, Limewire and BitTorrent, are starting to utilize the power of filesharing networks. This year alone, thousands of albums were released online for free, and this number is growing at an increasing rate. The possibilities are endless. Some artists use sites like Jamendo, others go for mainstream BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova, and yet another group prefers niche BitTorrent communities such as What.cd.
On What.cd, one of the larger music communities with over 60,000 members, artists have found a particularly successful outlet. In fact, the free albums are particularly popular, and often among the most downloaded. The music minded members, of which quite a few are artists themselves, are very appreciative of every new album. This August a compilation CD was released with tracks from 19 artists who uploaded their music to the site. This CD, titled “The What CD” is the most active torrent of all time on the tracker.
Linux Summit will preview new advanced file system
The problem with contemporary file systems, Ts'o said, is that -- following Moore's Law -- file sizes have grown bigger, and disk drives have doubled in capacity every couple of years. While the file system error rate per megabyte has remained constant, the increase in volume has created performance and quality control problems for large data centers, which find data more difficult to manage, he said.
In addition, data centers today want to be able to do things they didn't dream of in the 1970s, like merge data from multiple hard drives, Ts'o said. Another challenge is the switch from conventional hard drives to solid-state disks, which use less power and retrieve data at a uniform rate irrespective of location but have lower overall performance than hard drives, he said. So file systems today need to be adaptable to the hardware people want to use and how they actually use it, he said.
But changing the file system to fix the scalability and functional limitations of ext3, the default file system in many popular Linux distributions, requires a significant education outreach. Because the consequences of data loss are so severe, data center managers are reluctant to trust their data to new file systems, Ts'o said. New-system information needs to be shared well ahead of time, including a roadmap of coming features so IT professionals know what to expect, he said. That's where the Linux Foundation's event hopes to make inroads.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday for October 2008: 11 bulletins
Microsoft will issue four Security Bulletins on Tuesday, and it will host a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins the following day (October 15 at 11:00 AM PDT, if you're interested). Four of the vulnerabilities are marked as "Critical," six are rated "Important," and one is considered to be "Moderate." The first four earned the rating through a remote code execution impact, meaning a hacker could potentially gain control of an infected machine. Eight of the 11 updates will require a restart.
New Zealand's copyright minister starts screaming when asked whether it's fair to cut people off from the Internet on the basis of three unsubstantiated accusations of copyright infringement - Boing Boing
When we suggested that natural justice would imply that it was unreasonable to withdraw Internet access based on an accusation, she reiterated her position that something had to be done and that ISPs had to do it. ISPs, she said, need to negotiate with the licence holders to put in a regime to prevent copyright infringements. The licence holders’ associations had assured her that they would not be unreasonable.
In response to being told that it is technically impossible for ISPs to tell what people are doing, Judith said that it had been done for child pornography and that ISPs need to apply the same standards. It was pointed out that the state defines objectionable material, possession of which is a crime, but there’s no equivalent definition for copyright, infringement of which is a civil matter to be determined by courts.
Of all the unreasonable and awful proposals to come out of the entertainment industry, none is so bad as the three-strikes rule, a rule that would leave everyday people vulnerable to having the connection that brings them freedom of speech, of assembly and the press, the link that connects them to family, school, work and government, terminated because someone, somewhere made three accusations of copyright infringement, without having to offer a shred of evidence.
WalMart now says they'll keep the DRM servers on forever - Boing Boing
After announcing that they'd be shutting off their DRM servers and nuking their customers' music collections, Wal*Mart has changed their mind. Now they've told their customers that they'll be keeping these servers online indefinitely -- which means that they'll be paying forever for their mistaken kowtowing to the entertainment industry's DRM mania.
All those companies (cough Amazon cough Apple cough) that say they're only doing DRM for now, until they can convince the stupid entertainment execs to ditch it, heed this lesson: you will spend the rest of your corporate life paying for this mistake, maintaining infrastructure whose sole purpose is to lock your customers into a technology restriction that no one really believes in. Welcome to the infinite cost of doing business with Hollywood.
Entertainment industry made up $250 billion/750,000 jobs losses due to piracy - Boing Boing
With Customs a dead end, we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986. Yes, back in the days when "Papa Don't Preach" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" topped the charts, The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000."
Where did that preposterously broad range come from? As with the number of licks needed to denude a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. Ars submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce this summer, hoping to uncover the basis of Baldridge's claim—or any other Commerce Department estimates of job losses to piracy—but came up empty. So whatever marvelous proof the late secretary discovered was not to be found in the margins of any document in the government's vaults. But no matter: By 1987, that Brobdignagian statistical span had been reduced, as far as the press were concerned, to "as many as 750,000" jobs. Subsequent reportage dropped the qualifier. The 750,000 figure was still being bandied about this summer in support of the aforementioned PRO-IP bill...
XKCD strip explains how DRM creates piracy - Boing Boing
XKCD strip explains how DRM creates piracy
BBC NEWS | Technology | Firefox users gain location tool
Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, has released technology that helps websites detect the physical location of computers.
The system will allow users, for instance, to find local restaurants when they travel to a new town.
The Geode project is an experimental add-on ahead of a full blown launch of geolocation technology in version 3.1 of Firefox.
Users will have control over how much location information they give.
It uses technology from a firm called Skyhook which works out a computer's location from nearby wireless networks.
Its so-called Loki system can determine location within seconds with an accuracy of about 10 to 20 metres.
YouTube fumbles remote with full-length TV shows
As part of YouTube's ongoing effort to make some money, the site has begun testing full-length TV episodes. For YouTube, a video portal built almost entirely on user-generated content (UGC), this is another important step into a realm where Big Content giants stomp about and offer their magic beans only to the worthy. But the move also betrays just how much more work YouTube needs to do; offering a bit of Sulu won't be enough to best Hulu.
Related Stories
* Rumors fly about Google acquisition of YouTube
* Google buys YouTube
* YouTube's future (or lack thereof)
During this test run, YouTube features a handful of complete episodes from four TV shows: Beverly Hills 90210, MacGyver, Star Trek: The Original Series, and The Young and The Restless. Shows can be displayed in the typical YouTube video player or broken out in a new "Theater View" that widens the player horizontally, knocks most other elements down the page, and "dims the lights" on the rest of the page (save for a banner ad just above the video). Various pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads are placed in an episode's typical TV commercial spots, and the timeline controls dim during ads so that they cannot be paused, skipped, or muted.
OpenOffice 3.0 released amid fears of development stagnation
As the OOo project increases in relevance, some friction has emerged between the growing number of stakeholders with different agendas. Allegations continually emerge that Sun's management of the project is impeding acceptance of some third-party code contributions and is deterring additional corporate involvement. Novell's Michael Meeks, a very active OpenOffice.org developer and a frequent critic of Sun, expressed some new concerns last week in anticipation of the release.
Novell maintains an OOo patchset which includes a number of changes that developers haven't been able to push upstream to Sun's version for a variety of reasons. Many of these patches maintained by Novell provide important features that are valuable to Linux users, including support for embedded multimedia via GStreamer, faster startup time, improved Excel interoperability, support for 3D slide transitions in Impress, and support for Mono-based automation and scripting. Many mainstream desktop Linux distributions now package Novell's version instead of the one from Sun, because of these improvements.
Sun's process for vetting new features is often viewed as excessively bureaucratic by third-party contributors and some are also concerned about Sun's copyright assignment requirements. Novell's patchset ensures that the improvements made by users who are unwilling to accommodate Sun's procedural requirements will eventually reach users and don't just languish indefinitely in the bug report system. Sun has responded to concerns from the third-party developer community by improving the contributor agreement and making an effort to act on community feedback. Critics, however, argue that Sun needs to turn over control to an independent foundation so that contributors will not have to assign copyright directly to Sun.
EU reminds us to lose the distraction, turn the volume down
The European Commission, concerned about the fate of all those Parisian teens drowning out the noise of le Metro with bad techno, asked the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks to look at the issue of personal music players and hearing loss. That report, released today, concludes that headphones "produce minimal risk of hearing impairment for the majority of PMP [personal music player] users."
But the players aren't without risk, The combination of duration and high volume is a toxic one, and it has long been recognized in industrial settings that noise can damage people's hearings. The EU therefore says that factories cannot expose workers to noise above 80dB(A) for more than 40 hours a week. And each additional 3dB(A) of volume increase means that the duration has to be cut in half; at 83dB(A), workers can only be exposed for 20 hours a week.
With earbuds capable of pumping out maximum volume levels of 80-115dB(A), it's clear that people need to be careful with their music. At 115dB(A), the limit is a mere half a minute.
Few people listen this loudly, but the EU does find that 5-10 percent of PMP users "are at high risk of developing permanent hearing loss after five or more years of exposure. Those are the individuals listening to music over one hour a day at high volume control setting [sic]."
The results of taking Spinal Tap's advice, turning it up to 11
(Table based on WHO data)
These aren't epidemic-type numbers, but the report does go on to point out that hearing loss isn't the only side effect of noise exposure. Reading acquisition, for instance, is affected in children. Almost 20 studies have found that chronic noise exposure leads to delayed reading skills in kids, and "there are no contradictory findings." Noise (airplanes overhead, loud motorways) may also lead to decreased performance in school, less motivation to achieve, and even higher blood pressure.
But, for my purposes as a writer, the most interesting result is buried in a brief paragraph on page 56. "The more boring, repetitive, and simple a task is, the more will it benefit, both in quality and quantity, from being performed in noise (Kryter 1994). On the other hand, the more complex and difficult a task is, the more it is prone to be hampered by excessive sounds."
BBC blames Apple DRM for holding up iPlayer downloads
The BBC gas updated its iPlayer offerins once again, adding the ability to download TV shows for viewing on portable media players. Unfortunately, the BBC is using Windows Media DRM for the content, meaning that iPod and iPhone owners are still out of luck. The BBC's Online Media Group head, Anthony Rose, even made a comment about the situation, chiding Apple for keeping its DRM under lock and key rather than licensing it.
The BBC has had to work around the iPhone's lack of DRM support before, although the result was somewhat less than ideal. In this case, it seems that there's a restriction preventing the BBC from offering DRM-free downloads, so we're not going to see a similar concession this time. Rose claims that the issue has the BBC's "full attention," since the inability of iPod owners to download the iPlayer content is a pretty big omission. The BBC is a large organization, so it might be able to work out some sort of deal with Apple that would let the content work on iPods. Or it might not.
Additionally, the TV downloads only work through Windows for the time being. iPlayer uses a method called "sideloading" (downloading and then copying) to get content on to media players, therefore it still requires a computer that works with the Windows Media Protected content. Because of this, neither OS X nor Linux can be used to download the TV shows at the moment, although the BBC has a release coming "very soon" that will improve iPlayer options for users of those two operating systems. Whether that means TV downloads on the Mac is anyone's guess, but I'm betting that the answer is "no."
Asustek to introduce Eee motherboards - TechSpot News
Asustek's success with the Eee has led them to expand the line in numerous fashions, from creating desktop PC versions to making higher-power ultra slim versions available.
Now, Asustek is planning to expand the Eee line even further, with the introduction of Asustek Eee motherboards. No system specifications are available yet, but it's easy to imagine that the boards would be similar in spec to existing Eee hardware. It'll be interesting to see where they intend to compete with this board. They will most likely go up against the Atom and Pico-ITX platform.
Future Eee projects include potential touch screen units and more. What was just a short while ago nothing more than a cheap laptop has turned into an entire portfolio of hardware.
Windows 7 to be officially named... Windows 7 - TechSpot News
As the Professional Developers Conference approaches, Microsoft plans not only to discuss their currently code-named Windows 7 product but also to distribute a pre-beta version among attendees. Many have been wondering what the official name will be once the next release of Windows hits the streets.
In a quick announcement today on the company’s Windows Vista Team Blog, Mike Nash, the corporate vice president of Windows product management revealed what some already suspected: Windows 7 will be officially called… Windows 7. He went on to explain that the company opted to keep the '7' name for simplicity – as this is the seventh release of Windows – and because Microsoft doesn't want to come up with a new “aspirational” name that simply wouldn’t do justice to their goal of staying firmly rooted in the ideas of Vista while evolving and refining the operating system.
MacBook Pro updated: now sports integrated and discrete GPU
While the MacBook Pros have been made out of aluminum since their inception, the manufacturing process has changed in this carnation of Apple's high-end laptop. The machines are now being made using the company's new unibody manufacturing technique, which involves using a solid piece of aluminum and then removing chunks, rather than joining what would have been multiple parts together and then welding. Also new to the exterior is the iMac-inspired black bezel surrounding the screen. Speaking of the screen, the resolution nor the size have changed; however, you now have no choice in screen finish: you will be buying a LED-backlit glossy model if you want to sport a new MacBook Pro. Also immediately apparent is the buttonless, glass, multi-touch trackpad.Unlike the MacBooks, the MacBook Pro line did not see a brand change in GPU as the Pro was already using NVIDIA chipsets. What it did see is kind of an unusual turn that I'm not sure anyone saw coming: the new line has both integrated and discrete graphics processors. Under normal use, the portables will use NVIDIA's GeForce 9400M integrated (read: shared) processor with 256MB of RAM, but when needed, it can be ramped up to the discrete GeForce 9600M GT with either 256MB of memory on the low end and 512MB on the highend. The reason for this departure from the norm seems to be battery life. Apple claims that while using the 9400M, users can see up to a full hour more of battery-powered use.
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