PlasticBoy

I think this is an encouraging sign. For a while now the rhetoric around copy-protection has been that no DRM scheme will prevent piracy because they will all be cracked in short order. But most DRM formats have gone for a long time without any high-profile tool for converting them to unprotected formats. Now it seems that the DRM arms race has begun, with the iTunes 4.5 format being cracked within 24 hours of its release. How long will this have to go on before the media industries give up on DRM?

The Evolution maintainers are overwhelmed with bugs and need help getting them fixed in time for the 2.0 release.

I may have linked to this before but I just rediscovered it: easy Ad blocking with Mike Skallas’ hosts file.

ABCNews.com has rolled out RSS headline feeds. They even have article descriptions.

Netcraft: Interview with Miguel de Icaza, co-founder of Gnome, Ximian and Mono.

We have a lot of existing customers which are also considering Linux desktop migrations and rolling out some of these programs, so we’re learning from them. For example, in Extramadura and Andalucia they’ve been going out for two years now with these deployments. They have 200,000 deployed seats and they’re going towards 400,000 deployed seats by the end of the summer on pure Linux, Gnome, Mozilla, OpenOffice desktops. They’re two very, very large deployments, probably the largest deployments of Linux desktops today. These are being used by kids, by grandmothers.

Free Reads

The Tech has a hilarious interview with Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA and chief advocate of restricting how you can use your computer.

TT: No, you said four years ago that people under Linux should use one of these licensed players that would be available soon. They’re still not available — it’s been four years.

JV: Well why aren’t they available? I don’t know, because I don’t make Linux machines.

Let me put it in my simple terms. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, that’s wrong. Number two, if you design your own machine, you can’t fuss at people, because you’re one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?

TT: About two million.

JV: Well, I can’t believe there’s not any — there must be a reason for… Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question — I don’t know the answer to that… Well, you’re telling me a lot of things I don’t know.

The House has a ridiculous bill that could make sharing songs over your WiFi network a crime and require ISPs to maintain a database of your online activities. Fax your representative now.

Globe Magazine: “When scientists at the Tufts veterinary school fractured the legs of six dogs to see how they healed, and then euthanized the dogs, all in the name of research, the ensuing outcry reopened the argument over how far is too far when it comes to using animals to advance medicine.”

Randompixel:

For those of you who haven’t heard about the project before, Randompixel is a collection of disposable cameras, each swaddled in stickers instructing the weilder to take some pictures, then hand the camera off to someone else, a stranger, a friend, anyone. They take pictures, hand it off, and so on. When the camera’s full, they drop it in a mailbox and it makes its way back to me, where I get it developed and scanned, then post it for all the web to see.

Neat, I got a Gmail beta account through Blogger. Log into Blogger and see if you got one.

The new Thunderbird logo is sweet.

News.com: Quest for ‘Utopia’ hits a roadblock. The mayor of Salt Lake City says one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard:

“I just don’t see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files,” he said. “We should spend money on getting people fit, rather than deteriorating their quality of life with higher bandwidth to surf the Net.”

Gosh, he’s really on to something here. Now that I think of it, people are spending too much time reading, let’s get rid of libraries so they can get outside and get some exercise! And really, all public sewers do is keep people from walking to the outhouse, what are we wasting taxpayer dollars on that for? Sheesh. [via boing boing]

IETF’s MARID working-group will make a decision between the competing email caller-ID systems.

The IETF already has received several proposals outlining ways to reduce spam by authenticating e-mail servers. Microsoft says it will submit to the IETF its Caller ID for E-mail Specification, which outlines a scheme for thwarting e-mail address spoofing. Yahoo is expected to submit an alternative proposal called DomainKeys, which use digital signatures to authenticate e-mail servers. Despite market pressure, IETF officials say they are unlikely to adopt a proposal from Microsoft or Yahoo without making significant changes to it.

Salon: Making the world safe for free software.

Insurance is crucial for Linux, Egger says. Unlike proprietary software, the free operating system is vulnerable to third-party infringement claims. When large corporations buy applications from proprietary software firms such as Microsoft, they are usually sold rock-solid “indemnification” packages — clauses that let the customer off the hook in the case of any legal question surrounding the software. But it’s not the same for Linux, which was written by many developers all over the world and can’t be guaranteed by a single firm. It wouldn’t be fair to ask Red Hat, say, to indemnify you of any claims against Linux, Egger points out. “You would be asking them to guarantee something which they have no more knowledge of than you do,” he says. “You’re asking them to do something where they might be in the position of having to guarantee what their competitors wrote.”