Planet 無

Without fans, there would be no music industry. Most people in the music industry understand this -- certainly the artists do.

But apparently not the lawyers who work for them.

An ardent fan of the New Pornographers (a great Canadian indie rock band that includes Neko Case, among others) recently posted a copy of a forthcoming B-side to his blog page on MOG, which permits users to upload songs for streaming to others. He then received an email from Web Sheriff, an online copyright enforcer hired by the record label, Matador.

The message essentially accuses the fan of being a pirate and makes a veiled legal threat, all the while pretending to "appreciate" what it means to be a fan.

On behalf of the artist’s label, we do appreciate that – of course – you are a fan of / are promoting The New Pornographers but, by the same token, you must also appreciate that, by posting a pirate copy of the album or tracks from the album – or, as in this case, a special ‘bonus’ track – pre-release (or linking to pirate copies), you are potentially causing considerable inconvenience and we are sure that you would not want to be personally responsible (or liable) for all of the resulting damage and disruption.

The message (along with a follow-up) is redolent with condescension, putting on a faux apologetic face while threatening escalating legal action. It is disrespectful, shameful, and outrageous.

My point here is not to debate whether Matador has a right to send notices like this -- they do. But this is no way to talk to a fan who bought the album (that's how he got access to the B-side in the first place) and took the time to share his enthusiasm by posting one song. I'm sure a polite request (like the one sent by The Decemberists just before their last album), explaining how the band feels about this, would have done the trick.

This is a symptom of a larger problem -- this is how copyright law (and too many copyright enforcers) thinks of the fan. The law treats fans as if they are to be cattle-prodded into line, as if the fan should be grateful for the privilege of being a fan, a privilege granted at the sufferance of copyright law.

That's completely, utterly, obviously, precisely backward.

Here's my question -- does the band know what is being done in their name? Have they signed off on these emails being sent by Web Sheriff to their fans? Are they getting copies of the responses that the fans send after getting threatened like this? (For that matter, are the label's own marketing people even seeing these?) I suspect not.

That's the problem. No artist would talk to a fan like this (and if they did, they should be ashamed), to the person who just bought their forthcoming album. But the copyright enforcement lawyers are on auto-pilot, without any accountability to the artists or to the fans, threatening people, suing people, and all the while insisting that this is just how copyright law works.

Pardon my French, but that's bull****.

So I'd like to ask the members of the New Pornographers -- Dan Bejar, Kathryn Calder, Neko Case, John Collins, Kurt Dahle, Todd Fancey, Carl Newman, Nora O'Connor, and Blaine Thurier -- are you cool with this? Is this how you would ask someone to take down the song, if you met them at a show, if they had just told you how much they love your music? If not, call Matador and make them fire Web Sheriff. At least get someone who respects your fans, who doesn't leave them feeling "forever disenchanted with all of you."

July 11, 2007 09:48 AM

Andy Baio : DEC's Glimpse of the Future from 1994 - marketing video pitching the very early Web to businesses; tons of vintage screen capture goodness

July 11, 2007 09:01 AM

Andy Baio : Using your Apple IIe as a Linux terminal - detailed instructions and fun photos; or, if you prefer, hook it up to your Mac

July 11, 2007 09:00 AM

A full service from Jose's Landscaping

California readers looking for a landscape gardener who offers a full service and is willing to negotiate on price were recently pointed in the direction of "Jose Barajas and his gang of six cabaleros!" by one highly-satisfied customer:…

July 11, 2007 08:42 AM

Cinco enfermeras búlgaras y un médico palestino estaban acusados de haber infectado con el virus del sida a más de 400 niños del país.  Leer

July 11, 2007 08:40 AM

Los disparos y explosiones continuaron oyéndose de forma intermitente toda la noche en el complejo, donde algunos radicales todavía ofrecen resistencia.  Leer. Escuchar

July 11, 2007 08:35 AM

Michel Barbosa, un estudiante de la Universidad Erasmus de Rotterdam, acaba de publicar su tesis que lleva como título: "Delivery of the Key Adoption Factors and Key Characteristics of Companies Using Ruby on Rails" en la que explica con bastante detalle el cómo y el por qué las empresas entrevistadas usan Ruby on Rails para el desarrollo de aplicaciones web. Un dato interesante de la tesis indica que el 92% de ellas tomaron como factor de cambio que disfrutaban desarrollando bajo esta plataforma. A parte de esta historia, estaría bien tener un nuevo tema en Barrapunto: Ruby ¿no creéis?

by deal (posted by Yonderboy) at July 11, 2007 08:27 AM

Aritz Arginzoniz, miembro liberado de ETA, fue arrestado el martes en la estación de autobuses de Santander. Llevaba una pistola y un temporizador.  Leer. Escuchar

July 11, 2007 08:27 AM

El barco está a unos 30 metros de profundidad y los daños en el casco han causado una fuga de combustible. Se está trabajando para controlar el vertido.  Leer. Escuchar

July 11, 2007 08:26 AM

Los Jandilla llegaron con su negra estadística de cornadas e incidentes. La carrera ha tenido nervio, velocidad y corredores arrollados.  Leer. Escuchar

July 11, 2007 08:11 AM

PyWeek number 5 is coming. Warm up those game codin' fingers :)

July 11, 2007 08:06 AM

Get your holiday reading material here

Summer is with us, or at least it should be once the rains stops, and it’s getting to that time of year when we all take the customary two week break away from the stress and the strains of work and the modern world. Trouble is, once we’re away from it, we start to miss it.…

July 11, 2007 08:02 AM

Ghosts of typo hijacking past

Tiscali is hijacking mistyped URLs to serve to its customers sponsored links.…

July 11, 2007 07:58 AM

Battling tech support thanks El Reg

Battling tech support hero Rufus, who became an overnight internet legend for apparently calling one customer a "pain in the butt" and threatening to "server" him "for being mean", has quit his frontline post at Gadspot.com.…

July 11, 2007 07:50 AM

Calendar:

• Fixed: 384301 - Kenya Holidays calendar available here

Common:

• Fixed: 350323 - show hidden calendars when they are selected.
• Fixed: 364672 - Minimonth: Chinese weekday names indistinguishable; even after expanding sidebar
• Fixed: 369689 - In day and week views, events ending at midnight cannot be resized to a smaller size using the mouse
• Fixed: 372868 - Schema out-of-date error check forces Tb to quit, so you can't disable Ln
• Fixed: 373898 - rounding issues for grid boxes in calendar multiday view
• Fixed: 386481 - The view in mini calendar are not refreshed at once after subscribing to remote calendar
• Fixed: 386639 - All day event dates are not displayed due to missing entitiy "AllDay" in dateFormat.properties

Lightning-only:

• Fixed: 386505 - Cannot switch to Calendar mode using Thunderbird 1.5
• Fixed: 386556 - Add missing IDs in 'messenger-overlay-sidebar.xul'

Sunbird-only:

• Fixed: 262811 - When hovering a ToDo item long lines of the description doesn't break into multiple lines
• Fixed: 373350 - Days in minimonth should not be shrinked to one character

No outstanding bugs marked critical or blocker.

For outstanding bugs with severity level major and below, please see this list of bugs with 0.7+ flags. (Currently 23 at time of writing)

Lightning vanilla .xpi:

Official Windows .xpi

Official Linux .xpi

Official Mac .xpt

Sunbird builds:

Official Windows, Official Windows installer

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

by skywalker at July 11, 2007 07:45 AM

Los servicios de Postini incluyen soluciones de seguridad para email, mensajería instantánea y otras comunicaciones.  Leer

July 11, 2007 07:36 AM

Una empresa española ha creado Omemo, un programa que puede revolucionar la manera en que la gente comparte archivos en la Red.  Leer. Escuchar

July 11, 2007 07:34 AM

Según un analista del banco de inversiones JP Morgan, el precio del teléfono sería de unos 300 dólares y saldría al mercado en el cuarto trimestre del año.  Leer. Escuchar

July 11, 2007 07:31 AM

No checkins during this period.

No outstanding bugs.

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (discussion)

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

by skywalker at July 11, 2007 07:20 AM

Functionality:

• Fixed: 386514 - problems if I interrupt loading of imap message with large image

Mac-specific:

• Fixed: 270706 - Unable to manage identities when signature file is not on given path

Outstanding bugs: (6)

• Since 20 Jun 06: 342154 - No more confirmation dialog of attachment correctly saved if attachment file type listed as "save to disk" and "save without asking" option is checked
• Since 20 Nov 06: 361279 - standalone mesage window: Unable to Retrieve Message when 'Retrieve Headers Only' applied
• Since 21 Nov 06: 361417 - Crtl-Shift-A is no longer selecting the entire thread
• Since 07 Jan 07: 366255 - Exception thrown in nsIEditor.inlineSpellChecker when opening/closing the compose window
• Since 29 Jan 07: 368617 - Account setting "OK" button not saving data.
• Since 24 Apr 07: 378635 - Tracking Bug: Bugs to Fix in TB2.0.0.x before offering a major update

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (discussion)

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

by skywalker at July 11, 2007 07:08 AM

Storage is for little people, too

Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) thinks storage area networking is for the little guys too. It has drummed up a technology bundle and a marketing slogan - 'My very first SAN' - to capture that lucrative, but oh so elusive, small and medium-sized business (SMB) market.…

July 11, 2007 07:02 AM

All quiet on the solar front, research shows

People are a contrary bunch. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the recent fashion for dismissing global warming as a load of hot air. Indeed, it has become de rigueur to attribute recent increases in global temperatures to something other than human industrial activity and the consequent emission of various greenhouse gases, CO₂ among them.…

July 11, 2007 07:02 AM

factoryjoe : Digg for iPhone - Digg for the iPhone. Slick! Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: iphone, iphoneapp, digg

July 11, 2007 07:01 AM

factoryjoe : Seedcamp - Seedcamp is where Europe's top young founders can come together in one place. Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: seedcamp, vc, venture, startup, europe

July 11, 2007 07:01 AM

Hobo to chick: You're looking nice this evening! [She ignores him.] Normally you look like shit.

--Lafayette & White

Hobo eating entire roast chicken: You got a quarter for some food? Haven't eaten in days.

--73rd & Broadway

Overheard by: mosugs

Hobo: Hey, look! It's everyone's favorite bum! [He's ignored.] Oh, geez, that went over well.

--Outside Gray's Papaya

Overheard by: Zach

Hobo to high school students: Hey, kids -- stay smart, stay in school... Yeah! Be cool, stay in school! Someone's got to arrest me one day!

--60th & 10th

Hobo: The fed done lowered interest rates again! You gentlemen get to keep mo' money in yo' pocket. Please donate a dollar to help me keep these financial updates as a free service.

--Beaver St

Overheard by: Big Larry

Hobo: I take American Express!

--West Village

Overheard by: Only had a Visa

Hobo: Ladies and gentlemen, please help keep our trains moving. Get out and push!

--A train

July 11, 2007 07:00 AM

July 11, 2007 06:51 AM

July 11, 2007 06:51 AM

July 11, 2007 06:27 AM

There is a new crunchy out. I just downloaded the release, unzipped to a directory, then double-clicked crunchy.py, and Firefox opened a new page of delight. Five minutes of reading and I was able to open this very blog and have all the Python code come alive. On this entry, I was able to re-run the example and have new times printed - in the browser, with just a click of an (added) button! If I had a new algorithm I could have used the edit window supplied to write and test it as well as save my changes. Here is what a crunchy version of this page looks like. The added editor comes pre-loaded with my example code. The new execute button, when clicked inserts the output of running the code from the editor below it. (click on the image for a larger view). Neat!

July 11, 2007 06:11 AM

Un informe mantiene que ambas conocían la procedencia ilícita de los beneficios del ex alcalde de Marbella y le ayudaban a "ocultar" su origen.  Leer. Escuchar

July 11, 2007 06:10 AM

Clever? Get your name in the hat

Time is running out for university lecturers to enter their most promising students in the Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards for 2007, so if you think you're in with a chance of getting a first and put a decent final paper together, get on the phone to your professor right now.…

July 11, 2007 06:02 AM

Prompted by a presentation were someone said Python doesn't have full closures (noodle.odp), I looked at their example given and thought first that I could do that with funtion attributes, and then it hit me: I know of Pythons function attributes but had never used them. I wrote a function generator that when called, returns a function that when it is called with successive numbers calculates and returns their standard deviation so far. The returned function stores accumulated data between calls as attributes. The more usual Python way of doing this is to use a Clss instance. I created a Class based version too for comparison. In speed terms, the Class based solution is only, (but consistently), just less than two percent faster than the function generator based solution. In terms of maintainability though both are readable, I expect most people to be trained in the Class based solution and so be more comfortable with it. The function generator solution has the initializer section after the inner function definition which might be a minus, I wonder if a decorator could put the initializer 'up-front'.

#=== file: fn_attributes.py ===

def make_standard_deviator():
   '''Generate functions that return running standard deviations
    Uses function attributes
    '''
   def sd(x):
       '''returns standard deviation.
        Uses function attributes holding running sums
        '''
       from math import sqrt

       sd.N += 1       # Num values
       sd.X += x       # sum values
       sd.X2 += x**2   # sum squares

       if sd.N<2: return 0.0
       return sqrt((sd.N*sd.X2 - sd.X**2)
                   /(sd.N*(sd.N-1)))

   # Initialize attributes
   sd.N, sd.X, sd.X2 = [0.0]*3

   return sd

class Make_standard_deviator(object):
   '''Return running standard deviations
    when instance called as a function
    '''
   def __init__(self):
     self.N, self.X, self.X2 = [0.0]*3

   def __call__(self, x):
       '''Returns standard deviation.
        Uses instance attributes holding running sums
        '''
       from math import sqrt

       self.N += 1       # Num values
       self.X += x       # sum values
       self.X2 += x**2   # sum squares

       if self.N < color="#804040">return 0.0
       return sqrt((self.N*self.X2 - self.X**2)
                   /(self.N*(self.N-1)))

if __name__ == '__main__':
   import timeit

   print "function:",(
     timeit.Timer('[sd(x) for x in xrange(100000)][-1]',
     "from fn_attributes import *; sd = make_standard_deviator()").timeit(number=5)
     )

   print "   Class:",(
     timeit.Timer('[sd(x) for x in xrange(100000)][-1]',
     "from fn_attributes import *; sd = Make_standard_deviator()").timeit(number=5)
     )

July 11, 2007 05:22 AM

Some things the primary public education system in the U.S. hardly addresses but should, not to mention graduate and undergraduate business schools:

• System Dynamics
• Queueing Theory and Models
• Reasoning
• Organizational Communication and Cooperation

July 11, 2007 05:18 AM

factoryjoe : Reduce the Size of Your WordPress Plugin Footprint - For each WordPress plugin you install, you are adding to the bandwidth/server overhead of your site. As a plugin author, there are some simple steps to take to reduce the footprint of your plugin (whether it be helping with server load o

July 11, 2007 05:02 AM

factoryjoe : I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? » Blog Archive Please, I Can Has Firefox? « - I CAN HAS FIREFOX? Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: firefox, icanhasfirefox?

July 11, 2007 05:01 AM

factoryjoe : Role Manager bei im web gefunden - WordPress Version 2.0 introduces the concept of Roles. Each Role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities. This Plugin allows you to define and manage multiple subscriber profiles - called Roles and their Capabilities. Al

July 11, 2007 05:01 AM

factoryjoe : iPhone Typing Test - Test Your iPhone Typing Speed! - Test your typing speed on your iPhone. Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: iphone, iphoneapp, typing

July 11, 2007 05:01 AM

80-year-old professor showing slide of two people and an orthosis: ... And this picture is not S-and-M at all.

--Columbia Medical School

Overheard by: Shocked Student

Hipster: It's not like we can't dress her up in fishnets and tell her what to do.

--Bleecker & Cornelia

Four-year-old boy: Rough sex, make it hurt...

--Times Square

Overheard by: Suburban Liz

Chick on cell: I never told you! I ran into someone who was like, 'I don't know you, but I recognize you from a photo of you whipping another girl on my friend's fridge'!

--Penn Station

Overheard by: McF.

Computer science professor: Never implement a remove method for the iterator interface. Whoever did that deserves to be spanked for a long time. Unless he enjoys it.

--NYU

July 11, 2007 05:00 AM

OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has been making a lot of noise over a change in Intel’s current generation Core 2 microprocessor and he goes as far as claiming that this will lead to serious security flaws. Linus Torvalds by contrast has given a completely opposite view of the situation while other CPU analysts like David Kanter agrees that this is essentially “a mountain being made out of a mole hill”. While Theo de Raadt characterizes as a serious flaw in the CPU that will “will *ASSUREDLY* be exploitable from userland code”, David Kanter says that this technically isn’t even a bug.

July 11, 2007 04:46 AM

After looking at various types of intrusion detection systems lately, I’ve started to use OSSEC, the open source, host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). OSSEC uses various strategies to detect a breach of security or even give early warning of failed attempts using rootkit detection, integrity checking, and log file analysis. After initially installing and testing OSSEC, I was impressed enough to look into deploying it on my network alongside Snort. I decided that it would be best to use the agent/server framework rather than running a local installation on each host. Using this approach means that I have one machine (I decided to opt for a virtual machine as the system resources it requires are quite modest) that receives events from the agents installed on my other systems. The server machine then correlates these events, generates alerts, and if necessary, prompts the agent to take defensive action. I have successfully deployed the OSSEC agent on OpenBSD firewalls; unusually, this was very easy with no problems during installation. There were very few differences to Linux deployment, those being the way in which OSSEC is started on boot and the way that it blocks attackers after detection.

July 11, 2007 04:46 AM

Ars hits the road with a Verizon V740 ExpressCard to see what using Verizon's BroadbandAccess EV-DO network is really like.

Read More...

July 11, 2007 04:32 AM

Ars spends some quality time with a working prototype of an Intel Mobile Internet Device running KDE 4.0 Alpha 2.

Read More...

July 11, 2007 04:31 AM

Well I went to the beach for a few days, but that's not what this is about. Here's what this is about: Cincom is going to be emphasizing, supporting, contributing to, etc. Seaside for their Smalltalk. That's a great move, and right down the middle of how open source works.

July 11, 2007 04:30 AM

Two burglars thought they were prepared to steal thousands of dollars in cash from a couple of safes but forgot to find out how to actually open them. Google to the rescue!

Read More...

July 11, 2007 04:17 AM

deusx : ectoplasmosis » Ectomo Recommends Trepanation - "Just a reminder: trepanation is a proven cure for migraines, depression, myopia, nose bleeds, sore throats, constipation, dysentery, syphillis, plague, erectile dysfunction, seizures, nocturnal omissions, homesickness, wussiness, Jewishness, Caucasi

Tags : nifty trepanation

July 11, 2007 04:00 AM

This afternoon, President Bush recycled the false claim he has made many times prior to and since the Iraq war began, inciting fear that Iraq has some connection to 9/11.

Prior to the war, Bush referred to Saddam Hussein “often in the same breath with Sept. 11,” reinforcing “an impression that persists among much of the American public.”

Today, Bush engaged in a similar rhetorical maneuver. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” Bush said.

Watch it:

var flvbushqaedaagain32024014673 = new SWFObject('/wp-content/plugins/flvplayer.swf?file=http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/07/bushqaedaagain.320.240.flv&autoStart=false', 'em-flvbushqaedaagain32024014673', '320', '260', '6', '#ffffff'); flvbushqaedaagain32024014673.addParam('quality', 'high'); flvbushqaedaagain32024014673.addParam('wmode', 'transparent'); flvbushqaedaagain32024014673.write('flvbushqaedaagain32024014673');

“It was the second time in two weeks that Bush has made the link in an apparent attempt to transform lingering fear of another U.S. terrorist attack into backing for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq.” While many in the media gloss over such false statements, Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers debunked it, just as he did frequently prior to the war. Landay wrote that Bush’s claim is misleading on two counts:

1) Prior To The War, Al Qaeda Was Not Operating In Iraq. “Al Qaida in Iraq didn’t emerge until 2004. While it is inspired by Osama bin Laden’s violent ideology, there’s no evidence that the Iraq organization is under the control of the terrorist leader or his top aides, who are believed to be hiding in tribal regions of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.”

2) Even Now, Al Qaeda Is Not The Main Source Of Instability. “While U.S. intelligence and military officials view al Qaida in Iraq as a serious threat, they say the main source of violence and instability is an ongoing contest for power between majority Shiites and Sunnis, who dominated Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

False claims cultivated the war in Iraq, and unfortunately continue to sustain it.

by Faiz at July 11, 2007 03:29 AM

Get out your party hats, DeCSS coasters and t-shirts, and maybe even rip a DVD or two! July 11th is Fair Use Day, and the Pirate Party of the US calls on you to support copyright reform.

Read More...

July 11, 2007 03:05 AM

joshua : historical del.icio.us screenshots - ancient. including what might possibly be the very first shared bookmarks

Tags : del.icio.us

July 11, 2007 03:02 AM

joshua : Top 40 Most Useful, Free Mac OS X Softwares

Tags : osx swlist

July 11, 2007 03:02 AM

joshua : AppTrap - osx uninstaller

Tags : osx

July 11, 2007 03:02 AM

joshua : Skim - read and annotate pdf files

Tags : osx pdf

July 11, 2007 03:02 AM

A new report from Forrester Research suggests that Microsoft's controversial Software Assurance program provides poor value for the dollar and that many existing customers are considering abandoning the program for this reason. Microsoft assures us otherwise.

Read More...

July 11, 2007 03:02 AM

pictures from my january 2005 trip to thailand.

July 11, 2007 03:00 AM

Hispanic teen #1: Yo, man, I was with this girl last night, and she was dressed all naked and shit, man.
Hispanic teen #2: Word? She was dressed all naked?
Hispanic teen #1: [Nods.]
Hispanic teen #3: Word?

--Houston & Washington

July 11, 2007 03:00 AM

[This is a repost of Asa’s original blog post at SpreadFirefox.com - Paul Kim]

Join us this Wednesday for the return of Air Mozilla - the live “call-in” show featuring influential Mozilla contributors from all over the world.

This second inaugural broadcast will feature Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler and CEO at Mozilla.

Mitchell will be talking about the state of the Mozilla project, and she will be taking questions from our audience via email, IM, and IRC.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and special guest Mitchell Baker.
When: Wednesday, July 11, from 2pm - 3pm Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7.)
Where: View the live webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.

• IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
• IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
• Email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla -at- mozilla -dot- com.

We’re hoping to make Air Mozilla a regular feature and to broaden the format to include not just interviews, but screencasts with tips and tricks, news segments, and other community generated content.

Join us for the relaunch this Wednesday and help us shape the future of Air Mozilla!

by pkim at July 11, 2007 02:56 AM

The Air Mozilla video webcast will return on Wednesday 11th July when Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker answers questions in a live interview. The broadcast will begin at 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (9:00pm UTC/GMT) and is scheduled to last one hour.

Asa Dotzler, who will be hosting the segment, has posted some details about the relaunch of Air Mozilla. According to his post, Mitchell will talk about the state of the Mozilla project and answer questions from the audience. Asa hopes that Air Mozilla will become a regular feature, growing to feature "not just interviews, but screencasts with tips and tricks, news segments, and other community generated content."

Viewers can watch the webcast at air.mozilla.com, which will require the Adobe Flash Player 9 plugin (available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). A discussion will take place alongside the broadcast in the #airmozilla channel on irc.mozilla.org. During the show, viewers will be able to ask Mitchell questions by sending a message to the airmozilla user on either the AIM, Yahoo! Messenger or Google Talk networks. Questions can also be emailed to airmozilla@mozilla.com before or during the webcast.

Paul Kim has said that he is unhappy that the live Air Mozilla webcast will require the proprietary Flash Player. He has promised that the video will be made available in several formats after broadcast, including a recording encoded with the open Theora codec.

The first Air Mozilla webcast marked the launch of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 in late 2004.

Talkback

by mozillaZine.org at July 11, 2007 02:44 AM

My new site is

http://potterpredictions.com/

Here's how I describe it on the home page:

This site will let you record your predictions of what will happen (or otherwise be revealed) in the final Harry Potter book.

Then on July 21st, when the book is released, the site will no longer accept predictions. A short time after, results will start to be published here and you'll be able to see how you went.

To compare yourself to your friends, you can form groups and, when the results are revealed, you can see how you went relative to your friends. You will also be able to see how your groups (you can be in more than one) compared to other groups.

We hope that this site will provide a little fun while you wait in anticipation of the final book's release.

Thanks to the amazing development efficiency of Python, Django and WebFaction.com, I was able to get this site launched within 72 hours of conceiving of it. There are still features I want to add, but it's (hopefully) a lot of fun already.

July 11, 2007 02:36 AM

The AP reports, “The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday.”

Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency’s data-mining practices. […]

The report, sent to Congress this week, marked the department’s first public detailing of six of its data-mining tools, which look for patterns to catch criminals. The disclosure was required by lawmakers when they renewed the USA Patriot Act in 2005. All but one of the databases — the one to track terrorists — have been up and running for several years.

by Faiz at July 11, 2007 02:27 AM

Coastal areas of the world have an abundance of underused areas where traditional crops can't be grown-but plants still live there in the saline environment. New efforts are being made to find and catalog and develop both human food, animal fodder and biofuel type plants that can be grown in these areas.
Read More

July 11, 2007 02:12 AM

43folders : Introducing the Hipster GPS | King of the Impossible - "Using the pen, write your directions on a Post-it Note; Get in your car; Place your directions at the top edge of the windshield..."

Tags : gps heh hipstergps hipsterpda lofi paper

July 11, 2007 02:01 AM

Synchronica offers mail without pushing

Software companies are rushing to supply iPhone users with the functionality that Apple forgot to include. Undaunted by their inability to install software on the handset they have adopted a variety of approaches to making their software work without a client on the device.…

July 11, 2007 01:57 AM

Researchers have looked at Solar output over the past few decades and have come to the conclusion that, if anything, the Sun's output has been milder than in years previous, so it can't be a major factor in the Earth's heating up right now.
Read More

July 11, 2007 01:51 AM

Serves up ads for deceptive security software

Facebook has become the latest website to be found pushing services that deliver highly deceptive security warnings designed to trick users into buying software.…

July 11, 2007 01:47 AM

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office announced tonight that the House will vote later this week on a bill that would begin the responsible redeployment of U.S. troops within 120 days and complete redeployment by April 1, 2008. The Gavel has more details.

by Faiz at July 11, 2007 01:35 AM

Three former US Surgeons General testified in front of Congress and said they had all received political pressure in what should have been strictly scientific areas. They say the job is difficult because of forced censorship and they are pressured to either ignore or emphasize various medical issues based on partisan politics and whichever party is in control of the executive branch at the time.
Read More

July 11, 2007 01:27 AM

A couple of weeks ago I aired my confusion about a situation in which using EXA with an i965 card was 4 times slower than using NoAccel, but that there weren't any large bottlenecks visible in the profile at all, (nothing over 5%). And that didn't seem likely at all.

As is often the case this wasn't a wrong answer, but was instead a problem with me not understanding the question I had asked. I had been profiling over enttire runs of mozilla's Trender benchmark, but the 4x slowdown was based on the results it reported which measured only the inner loop of rendering itself. So my profiles including extraneous computation such as page loading that Trender was explicitly not measuring. This was actually easy to determine by simply measuring the total runtime of Trender and seeing that it slowed down by only 1.5x instead of 4x.

So to get better profiling data, I changed strategy slightly and started using an on-demand Trender technique that Vladimir offered me. It makes it easy to run a one-off Trender loop for hundreds of iterations so I can profile exactly the rendering and nothing else.

So I used that approach to measure the rendering performance of a worthwhile web page, with both NoAccel and EXA, (again with an Intel i965 card). I used my standard profile script to generate piles of data.

The trickiest part was then coming up with a reasonable way to visualize the data to try to figure out what was going on. My brother, Richard, pulled his usual HTML+CSS magic and came up with the following for me.

Note: If you click through to my blog, you'll get to see these charts
in their colorful glory. Otherwise, if you're reading this
somewhere like http://planet.gnome.org then you'll probably
just see the boring list version. But one really cool thing
about Richard's hack here is that in the absence of CSS
styling this chart does degrade nicely to just list with all the data
available. So these charts should be much more accessible than things
I've done previously with PNG bar chart images. Plus, I get to
embed hyperlinks at all the intuitive spots as well. Anyway, Richard
totally rocks for having put this together.

NoAccel (14 ms.) system profile symbols profile

• pixman 42%
• libxul 16%
• vmlinux 16%
• Xorg 7%
• libc 5%
• other 14%

EXA (77 ms.) system profile symbols profile

• libc 30%
• intel_drv 19%
• vmlinux 16%
• libxul 11%
• libexa 6%
• pixman 5%
• Xorg 4%
• other 9%

So there are some big percentages there---much nicer than the little 4% and 5% things I was seeing a couple of weeks ago. So, yes, it definitely helps to know that you're asking the question you mean to be. There are several links in the chart above to different profile reports. If you drill down the libc profile, you'll see that there's a lot of memcpy going on.

An easy guess is that the memcpy is due to pixmap migration due to software fallbacks. To verify this guess, I first disabled all pixmap migration from video memory to system memory, (which was as simple as if (! can_accel) return; in exaDoMigration. This actually got rid of most of the memcpy problem, and didn't cause any incorrect rendering. Next I enabled DEBUG_TRACE_FALL in exa_priv.h to identify all fallbacks that were getting hit by the benchmark and I put early returns in place to disable them. Unsuprisingly, this did cause a lot of incorrect rendering.

And of course, what we really want to do is to find what is triggering those fallbacks and accelerate them. But for now, I wanted to see how performance would be if we were already at the point that we had no software fallbacks at all. Here's what I got:

EXA-no-fallbacks (58 ms.) system profile symbols profile

• vmlinux 23%
• intel_drv 22%
• libc 16%
• libxul 13%
• pixman 9%
• libexa 4%
• Xorg 4%
• other 9%

So, as hoped, a lot of the libc time went away. But there's still a heck of a lot left, as well as kernel system-call time. That's clearly in gettimeofday and that's easy to track down to the I830WaitLpRing function. Fortunately, it's also extremely easy to eliminate that system call almost entirely there. The only reason it's being called is to ensure that we don't busy-wait forever, (due to a video card lockup). So we could call gettimeofday only once every several thousand iterations and still detect lockup very quickly. Here's a patch to do exactly that.

So, now take a look at the performance with this patch attached:

EXA-no-gettimeofday (54 ms.) system profile symbols profile

• intel_drv 49%
• libxul 16%
• libc 10%
• pixman 7%
• libexa 4%
• Xorg 2%
• vmlinux 2%
• other 10%

Again, a lot of the libc time was eliminated, and a huge amount of the kernel time was eliminated as well. But, sadly, and dramatically, the overall performance did not improve much at all. The time spent in the Intel driver increased not only in percentage, but also increased in absolute timing, taking up almost all of the time saved from libc and the kernel.

What's going on here? What's happening is that the driver is spending an awful lot of time busy-waiting, and all we did here was to help it busy-wait even faster. Now, we know that there aren't any software fallbacks happening here, so what's all the waiting about? It appears to be caused primarily by i965_prepare_composite which includes the following comment and code:

/* Because we only have a single static buffer for our state currently,
 * we have to sync before updating it every time.
 */
i830WaitSync(pScrn);

That is, when we want to render multiple composite operations in sequence, instead of doing some nice, pipelined fire-and-forget operations, the driver is currently waiting for the previous composite operation to entirely complete before starting off another. And it's doing that waiting with CPU-burning busy-waiting.

I'll need to learn a bit more about this hardware before I can know the right way to fix this, (my, but documentation would certainly be helpful about now). For example, it would be easy to setup a circular buffer of state structures. But can I get the hardware to tell me when composite operations complete so that I can efficiently reuse those? Another approach would be to stuff the necessary compositing state into the LP ring the same way the compositing commands are being sent. Is there any reason not to do that?

Meanwhile, it looks like there's a bunch of state in the strucure that needn't be sent every time, (much of it is always constant). So there are likely easy ways to improve that as well. I'm definitely looking forward to people with more Intel-hardware-specific knowledge helping me out here, (or just plain fixing the thing).

Meanwhile, even if the driver time were completely eliminated, the rest of the time in this profile would still exceed what was spent in the NoAccel case. Some things are plainly working well, such as the fact that the pixman time has gone down. Some things are not working well, such as the new time being spent in libexa, (which appears to be mostly an inefficient approach for computing an LRU heuristic as I mentioned earlier). Some of the increased time, such as that of libc, might be related to driver problems that we hope to fix.

But one item in particular looks very strange. The libxul code is spending signficantly more time in the EXA case than in the NoAccel case, when we wouldn't expect it to be aware of the difference at all. That will be an interesting thing to track down, (and it sure would be nice if that were the biggest thing to worry about right now). But clearly we've got a lot of work to do to get the i965 performing properly with EXA.

July 11, 2007 01:10 AM

SiCKO....As threatened, I saw SiCKO this afternoon. Great film. Everybody is right: it's Michael Moore's best picture yet, a genuinely moving and effective piece of policy evangelism. The Cuba stuff at the end was hardly necessary since he'd already rammed...

by Kevin Drum at July 11, 2007 01:04 AM

factoryjoe : On location at iPhone DevCamp | PodTech.net: Technology and Entertainment Video Network - Just a week after the debut of the iPhone, about 300 developers gathered at the Adobe offices in San Francisco this weekend for a three-day developers camp/hackathon. The goal was to hack together applications for the iPhone. Apple doesn

July 11, 2007 01:01 AM

factoryjoe : Band Passes .com - Backstage and Security Passes and security laminates. - Band Passes.com offers laminated no-border and “satin-style” stick on security credentials and passes for Bands, Special Events, Festivals, Promotions, Sports Teams and Conventions. This is the supplier we've used for multiple BarCam

July 11, 2007 01:01 AM

deusx : NestedVM - "any application written in C, C++, Fortran, or any other language supported by GCC can be run in 100% pure Java with no source changes."

Tags : compsci gcc java mips programming scary

July 11, 2007 01:00 AM

deusx : Wrecking Ball Runs Amok In Pa. Town - Local News Story - WKMG Orlando - "1,500-Pound Ball Rolls Nearly 1 Mile, Bouncing From Curb To Curb"

Tags : amok odd via:stlhood wreckingball

July 11, 2007 01:00 AM

Andy Baio : Eyes Wide Shut in 1947 Life Magazine - Life Magazine asked comics artists to draw their iconic characters blindfolded

July 11, 2007 01:00 AM

Joking clerk to bitter man holding wife's purse: Nice purse.
Man: Thanks. It came free with the relationship and subsequent castration.

--Fashion Ave

Overheard by: I think it was Dior

July 11, 2007 01:00 AM

Polar water is cold. Of course, I mean the water geographically located near the poles of the Earth, not water that is polar in nature. Steam is polar. But I digress.

July 11, 2007 12:55 AM

Security researchers can't decide whether it's in IE or Firefox

A serious vulnerability that causes Internet Explorer to launch Firefox and execute a malicious payload is sparking debate about exactly who is responsible for the flaw.…

July 11, 2007 12:50 AM

Leaves a mixed bag of chips

David Orton, former president and CEO at ATI Technologies, has resigned as executive vice president of AMD.…

July 11, 2007 12:41 AM

INTERMITTENT IRON FIST....As the New York Times reported today:China executed its former top food and drug regulator today for taking bribes to approve untested medicine as Beijing scrambled to show that it is serious about improving the safety of Chinese...

by clarson at July 11, 2007 12:31 AM

“faced a new firestorm on Tuesday sparked by a report he may have misled lawmakers in 2005 about civil liberty violations by the FBI.” Rep. Jerrold Nadler “called for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate the prima facie case that Gonzales provided false statements to Congress, noting that misleading Congress is a serious crime.”

“Attorney General Gonzales has shown an apparent reckless disregard for the rule of law and a fundamental lack of respect for the oversight responsibilities of Congress,” said Rep. Nadler. “The man entrusted with enforcing our nation’s laws must also abide by them — and Mr. Gonzales has apparently failed in that duty. Providing false, misleading or inaccurate statements to Congress is a serious crime, and the man who may have committed those acts cannot be trusted to investigate himself. A Special Prosecutor is necessary to investigate this and the countless other violations of the law apparently committed by this Executive Branch.”

by Faiz at July 11, 2007 12:30 AM

So says JP Morgan

Yesterday's report from JP Morgan that Apple is building some sort of slimline iPhone? It's been discredited. By JP Morgan.…

July 11, 2007 12:24 AM

I mentioned earlier today that I was bringing up a new machine for Great Justice. The sparky new qm-centos5-01 sporting a new Reference Platform VM. Well, it turns out there’s enough of a difference in the base libraries that a number of tests are failing out of the gate.

Ted M. noted that 3 of the four failing reftests appear to be kerning differences. The fourth, “(actually the first in the list) looks like it’s off by one pixel in size or so”.

The mochitests and chrome tests I haven’t looked at closely, but they appear to be a mixture of timeout, textarea and focus bugs.

If you want to take a look, grep the full log for instances of ERROR FAIL. Your help in getting qm-centos5-01 to turn green will be greatly-appreciated.

Also, an apology to Paul Reed: Apparently twm is the fallback window manager after all other options have been exhausted. I deleted the standard build user and was left with a partially-configured user. With his help I was able to turn on gdm. IOU five bucks, Paul!

by robcee at July 11, 2007 12:19 AM

Three changes; a grand total of 3 lines of code. That's all I needed to change to make rur-ple work with wxPython 2.8 (and probably 2.7). It only took me 8 months to get around to fix it due to a combination of lack of time and, when I had time, my obsession with Crunchy. Speaking of Crunchy, I found a bug today: any Python output that has something like < ..... > in it will be such that the

July 11, 2007 12:17 AM

The oil giant is already up, but it is still undervalued, Cramer says.

July 10, 2007 11:52 PM

Check out this giant mushroom found down in Mexico. I looked it up, perfectly edible, too.
Read More

July 10, 2007 11:44 PM

Bush performs brain surgery in Cleveland. [Plain Dealer]

July 10, 2007 11:38 PM

Today, people are getting ready for Air Mozilla, which goes live tomorrow at 2:00 PM PDT. We’ll be doing live streaming with a variety of people.

Asa blogged about this the other day and was used as a test dummy as systems were calibrated and tested end to end today.

Below, you can see Reed and Asa testing out the equipment. These were such endearing shots of two geeks that I decided that I had to share them…

I encourage everyone to tune in tomorrow if you have a chance.

by abillings at July 10, 2007 11:33 PM

The chipmaker hasn't named any replacements in finance.

July 10, 2007 11:31 PM

Cramer says the asset manager is precisely the kind of company investors can buy right now.

July 10, 2007 11:28 PM

On the Senate floor this morning, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) said that proposals to withdraw troops and restore the strength of the armed forces are “legislating a defeat” in Iraq.

This afternoon on CNN, responding to Lieberman’s criticisms, Webb reminded the public that he was warning in September 2002 that we were “heading for trouble” if we went to war in Iraq:

I was warning about the consequences of invading and occupying Iraq well before we went in. … I don’t know where Sen. Lieberman gets his opinions about how well we’re doing. […]

You have a government in Iraq that has no power. It has very little power — it cannot compel action and it’s surrounded by armed factions that retain the power. That is not a situation we’re going to resolve without the interaction of all the countries in the region in a positive, proactive diplomatic way. And that’s what I’ve been saying for three years.

Watch it:

var flvwebbill32024014669 = new SWFObject('/wp-content/plugins/flvplayer.swf?file=http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/07/webbill.320.240.flv&autoStart=false', 'em-flvwebbill32024014669', '320', '260', '6', '#ffffff'); flvwebbill32024014669.addParam('quality', 'high'); flvwebbill32024014669.addParam('wmode', 'transparent'); flvwebbill32024014669.write('flvwebbill32024014669');

Webb is sponsoring an amendment that would restore the strength of the military by requiring every soldier who is deployed overseas to receive at least the same amount of rest when they return home. Senate conservatives have announced that they will filibuster the bill.

In a statement for ThinkProgress, Center for American Progress senior fellow Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense, said:

Regardless of whether a member supports a phased withdrawal of American forces from Iraq or continues to support President Bush’s latest escalation, he or she should support the Webb-Hagel amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill.

It takes two full years at home or after a one year deployment for a unit to become fully combat ready. Spending a year at home after a year in the combat zone is barely enough time to get themselves marginally ready physically and mentally for the next deployment. Giving them last time would mean sending units and individuals into battle who are not combat ready.

Members cannot vote against Webb-Hagel and claim they support the troops. Sending people back for another tour without the same amount of time at home as the length of their tour is wrong strategically and morally.

by Faiz at July 10, 2007 11:20 PM

Vladimir Vukićević pointed me to an old blog entry where he provides a useful "bookmarklet" that I thought I'd share. It makes it easy to measure how long mozilla spends rendering any particular web page.

My version is slightly tweaked from Vladimir's and is available here: Time Render.

The differences in mine are that it runs for 300 iterations by default instead of just 10, (long enough to collect very healthy profile information), and that it emits its result by dumping to stdout or stderr instead of popping up an alert box. Not only is the alert box hard to use when it has 300 values laid out without line-wrapping, but I do X server experiments where I need to measure performance even when things are rendering incorrectly, (so if the results are only displayed on the X server they are useless to me).

To use this, first you'll need a recent Firefox, (I'm using a daily build here which works, where the system 2.0 version does not seem to). Just drag-and-drop the above link to the bookmark toolbar, (and yes, I had to turn it on just for that). You might also need to go to the "about:config" location in the toolbar and create a new Boolean entry, (right-click to find that), named browser.dom.window.dump.enabled and set it to True.

At that point yous should be all setup. Just browse to a web page of interest and click the "Time Render" bookmark to measure the rendering performance of Mozilla on that page.

July 10, 2007 11:17 PM

Dick Cheney doesn’t want to reveal how much shit he’s classifying (all of it) and how much he’s declassifying (ha ha ha), so the other week he said something about not actually...

July 10, 2007 11:02 PM

factoryjoe : Laughing Squid » exPhone, What To Do With Your Old Cell Phone - Laughing Squid picks up on exPhone.org! Saved By: Chris Messina - View Details - Give Thanks Tags: exphone

July 10, 2007 11:01 PM

The whole freaking planet’s on fire! [Global Fire Map]

July 10, 2007 11:00 PM

20-ish guy: Can I please put my balls in your hair?!
Girlfriend: No! Knock it off!

--Staten Island Ferry

July 10, 2007 11:00 PM

Late last month I presented at the Burton Group Catalyst conference in the "future of identity" segment on the topic "Your Identity Session: Future Directions in Identity Lifecycle Management". The slides of the talk can be found on the Informed Control resources page in PDF.

1. Identity information crosses the firewall

Some of the people in Geo. Washington's boat

Unlike the "idealized state" mentioned in the Introduction, there are numerous points of interconnect where components of the 'enterprise' identity management system may now or in the future be interacting with systems outside of the enterprise, including interfaces with

• self-service: e.g., for retirees
• web browsers: e.g., employees using external collaborative tools, or searching the organization using LinkedIn.
• applications: e.g., VPNs, vendor/integrator support backdoors
• provisioning, access control and federation: e.g., for outsourced or contract environments, as well as in partner federations

• Possible future
  

Besides benefits to the enterprise, some of these interaction projects can bring direct benefit to the end user. The earliest examples included

• the user can synchronize their address books with their PDA/phone,
• the user can perform (limited) self-service post-employment (e.g., to update their mailing address for retiree benefits), and
• the user has an improved experience at partner web sites.

The latter is beneficial as more business projects are moved off-site, however there is a risk to the organizations should one or more users choose on their own to move a project off-site (e.g., to a hosted application).

One of the control implications of introduced dependencies on third-party services and networks is the potential impact to confidentiality, integrity and availability. The identity data may have increased exposure to data loss (when outside the firewall) or corruption (should a bad update be received). An area of primary concern is the difficulty in applying detective controls, since there is typically no common method for exchanging retained data of audit events or reconstructing activities spanning multiple organizations or occuring entirely outside of an enterprise's firewall.

When representations of identities are synchronized with other representations outside of the firewall, such as in a federation scenario, this can in some cases lead to an increased volume of attributes needing to be stored in the enterprise's own repository. Furthermore, this can cause changes to the lifecycle model: additional events might be necessary.

Another aspect of externalizing identity information is that it might increase the success rate of certain kinds of social engineering attacks, if the organization's internal connection structure is visible through a service such as LinkedIn, for example.

July 10, 2007 11:00 PM

Consumers rejoice, Verizon fumes

Good news for smartphone users. Bad news for the big name wireless carriers. FCC chairman Kevin Martin has released suggested rules for an upcoming radio-spectrum auction that would allow consumers to attach any device and any application to U.S. broadband wireless networks - without approval from the likes of AT&T and Verizon Wireless.…

July 10, 2007 10:59 PM

More rats abandon the McCain ship. [Wizbang Politics] But you’ll still be able to find what’s left of the McCain campaign in Concord, NH this weekend. [On Call] President Shitsack gets...

July 10, 2007 10:58 PM

July 10, 2007 10:52 PM

Bush prays for summer terror attacks. [Yahoo News]

July 10, 2007 10:52 PM

Microsoft buys in, kinda

WPC Steve Ballmer has promised Microsoft will take the lead in online software and services through a middle-of-the-road approach, while talking swipes at technology luddites and evangelical extremists.…

July 10, 2007 10:49 PM

Researchers think they have found the gene that regulates the production of either good brown baby fat or the bad type, or white adult fat. In animal studies they injected the gene for the juvenile type fat and were able to force cells that would normally turn into the obesity causing white fat to switch to brown, which normally gets used to generate heat and doesn't accumulate forever like the white does.
Read More

July 10, 2007 10:42 PM

Here's a list of companies that have recently announced buybacks.

July 10, 2007 10:40 PM

You keep looking at my website.

I can see you there once a week in the server logs.

I'm not sure if it troubles me or comforts me that that is the only contact we have now.

July 10, 2007 10:35 PM

It will take a charge of up to $300 million.

July 10, 2007 10:35 PM

Lately not much happened on the R300 front. olivermcfadden is still trying to get revenge to work on PCI Express. airlied and Jerome Glisse are really busy with other things. And we are in a period where holidays (in Europe) are happening.

So, let's see what else is happening. We've seen Ian Romanick working on the DRM for XGI hardware. But let's give you some background first.
XGI was founded by SIS and UMC to develop high end graphic chips. The graphics guys (who made chips like SiS Xabre, SiS 300 and SiS 6326) from this were transferred to the new company. This included the guys from Trident which SIS acquired earlier. In early 2006 ATI took over the development teams.
XGI posted open source drivers to Freedesktops Bugzilla (which where removed because of license issues). But the specifications for these chips are available. So Ian took a deeper look at what was freely available. Since the kernel part of the driver had no license issues he started merging it into the DRM in a separate branch. Since the hardware made by XGI is very similar to the SIS products, he started with enhancing the SIS DRM drivers. The major issues were 64 bit issues which he thinks should be solved (test still outstanding because of the lack of a 64 bit system).

That's all from the XGI front. Hope you like it even if it had no real relation to R300.

July 10, 2007 10:26 PM

For those interested: here're my slides for my presentations at LRL and OLS:

• Ottawa Linux Symposium 2007: Cleaning up the Linux Desktop Audio Mess (Not too much new stuff here if you already read my LCA slides)
• LugRadio Live 2007: Six Use Cases for Avahi

LWN linked a short summary of my OLS talk.

July 10, 2007 10:25 PM

EDITORIAL- I'm publishing this because I was unable to find the comment refered to that this should have been a reply to, rather than a new article.  If you've seen Bill Mcgonigle's comment on this topic, feel free to copy and paste this reply there, let me know here and I'll delete this thread.   I've moved the actual reply down into the body- and it's an interesting reply and an interesting possible cause of colony collapse syndrome.

July 10, 2007 10:21 PM

TheStreet.com corrects its errors.

July 10, 2007 10:20 PM

Thank you AV!

July 10, 2007 10:09 PM

Europython is turning out to be quite interesting.  It takes some effort to start talking to people given that I know relatively few here, but I’m learning lots of new stuff.  But I’ll save more for some other post.

Right now I want to focus on the more amusing combination of Linux and hotels.  So here’s the thing.  The guys from Tuxdroid  are here, selling their little Tux robots.   For those who don’t know, this is a small robot with  text-to-speech that can flap its wings, make its eyes glow blue, and run around, as well as serve as speaker.  I’m sure there’s other stuff I’m missing.  They’re selling these babies for 79 euros, and the company is Belgian.  They have a bunch of code available to program the thing (radio-controlled with a USB dongle), and it has a bunch of stuff in python.  So far, so cool.

So here’s the thing.   I plug Tux into the power socket to charge him.  When you start charging it, it says “Hello” and flaps its wings.  In the hotel room, when I leave the room, I have to take the card out of that socket that controls whether there is power at all in the room (which is annoying in hotel rooms, because it means you can’t leave your laptop charging while you are away.)

So, what happens when I come back to the room at night, get in, and put the card in the socket ?

A little bird flapping its wings and shouting “Hello” because it’s getting fresh power juice.  Too cute.

I’m wondering how I’m going to lug this thing around in my backpack for the next set of flights…

July 10, 2007 10:02 PM

AP reports:

A Senate appropriations panel chaired by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., refused to fund $4.8 million in the vice president’s budget until Cheney’s office complies with parts of an executive order governing its handling of classified information.

At issue is a requirement that executive branch offices provide data on how much material they classify and declassify. That information is to be provided to the Information Security Oversight Office at The National Archives.

Cheney’s office, with backing from the White House, argues that the offices of the president and vice president are exempt from the order because they are not executive branch ”agencies.”

The funding cut came as the appropriations panel approved 5-4 along party lines a measure funding White House operations, the Treasury Department and many smaller agencies.

Digg It!

by Amanda at July 10, 2007 10:01 PM

Khoi Vinh : Optimizing iPhone Battery Life - Practices for iPhone battery care and usage between charges and before a replacement is necessary.

Tags : Three Star

July 10, 2007 10:01 PM

43folders : Guy plays WoW on iPhone, universe explodes - Joystiq - Hey, look. It's that game I don't play on that phone I don't have. Telekinesis, though? Damn, man: that does tempt a person.

deusx : Guy plays WoW on iPhone, universe explodes - Joystiq - "Boy, if this is the future of gaming on the iPhone, then someone had better order up a load of bifocals and a side of patience, because just watching this gave us a headache."

Tags : apple gaming iphone telekinesis lol wow

July 10, 2007 10:01 PM

July 10, 2007 09:59 PM

Small-cap stocks slid with the larger market, as companies like Pantry issued subpar guidance.

July 10, 2007 09:51 PM

Former MCI and Compaq chief lands on his feet

Former MCI and Compaq chief Michael Capellas has been tapped as CEO of credit card transaction processor First Data Corp. after the the company is acquired by affiliates of a private equity firm.…

July 10, 2007 09:41 PM

Tape upgrades, new tape products, basically a lot of tape

IBM is introducing new products to its virtual tape line for mainframe customers and enhancements to its virtual tape engine billed as low-power "green" alternatives for midrange and large businesses.…

July 10, 2007 09:37 PM

A rough start to the season sends stocks reeling amid more subprime woes and no relief from Bernanke.

July 10, 2007 09:34 PM

The National Transportation Safety Bureau laid blame Tuesday for last year's Big Dig ceiling collapse in Boston that killed a motorist. Officials said the wrong epoxy was used to secure the ceiling panel, and pointed the finger at designers and inspectors.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

July 10, 2007 09:34 PM

Results at Pepsi Bottling are going down easy for investors, but PepsiCo is even more appealing.

July 10, 2007 09:33 PM

The NAACP held a funeral yesterday for a word, which the civil-rights group murdered beforehand in an outrageous premeditated black-on-black crime that will go unpunished, because it happened in...

July 10, 2007 09:33 PM

An SEC ruling allows Nasdaq three-letter tickers in some cases.

July 10, 2007 09:33 PM

The Indian bank is growing and poised to get even bigger.

July 10, 2007 09:32 PM

The percentage of Americans who believe President Bush should not have commuted Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, according to a new Gallup poll.

by Satyam at July 10, 2007 09:32 PM

Make the most of the money you have. Here are some ideas.

July 10, 2007 09:29 PM

Innovo Group is surging.

July 10, 2007 09:26 PM

Turn the housing slump to your advantage.

July 10, 2007 09:25 PM

The biopharmaceutical companies will partner to develop products that treat hormone deficiencies.

July 10, 2007 09:24 PM

The homebuilder's orders drop 17% in the second quarter.

July 10, 2007 09:12 PM

The company's products chief resigned.

July 10, 2007 09:12 PM

The PC maker unveils a new product line for the little guy.

July 10, 2007 09:09 PM

In a follow-up to the article posted on May 29th, China has followed through on the death sentence of a former director of its food and drug agency.  He was executed today.

Zheng's death sentence was unusually severe even for China, which is believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and indicates the communist leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record.

Zheng, 63, was convicted of taking cash and gifts worth $832,000 when he was in charge of the food and drug agency.

He was sentenced to death on May 29 and his appeal was rejected on June 12 by the Higher People's Court of Beijing. China's Supreme Court approved the sentence, saying Zheng "committed vile crimes and caused extreme harm to society."

July 10, 2007 09:04 PM

Today security firm Secunia released an advisory on a security issue found (apparently) simultaneously and independently by Greg MacManus and Billy Rios based on a previously reported issue in Safari found by Thor Larholm.

Any Windows application that calls a registered URL protocol without escaping quotes may be used to pass unexpected and potentially dangerous data to the application that registers that URL Protocol. This could result in a critical security vulnerability.

The vulnerability is exposed when a user browses to a malicious web page in Internet Explorer and clicks on a specially crafted link. That link causes Internet Explorer to invoke another Windows program via the command line and then pass that program the URL from the malicious webpage without escaping the quotes. This can cause data to be passed accidentally from the malicious web page to the second Windows program. In the specific attack described in the report, Internet Explorer sends URL data to Firefox. If the data is crafted a certain way it will allow remote code execution in Firefox.

A similar interaction between Safari and Firefox was reported earlier and fixed by Apple. According to Ryan Naraine at ZDNet, Microsoft is not planning to release a patch at this time.

Mozilla believes in defense in depth and will be patching Firefox in the upcoming 2.0.0.5 release to mitigate the problem. This will prevent IE from sending Firefox malicious data. Other Windows programs may also be vulnerable to bad data being passed from IE although we are not aware of any at this time.

It is important to note that if you are using Firefox to browse the web you *are not* vulnerable to this attack. While we have seen no evidence of attackers exploiting this issue, there is proof of concept code available publicly. So we recommend that people use Firefox and as always take care when browsing unknown websites.

We appreciate the work of the security researchers who identified this issue and the thousands of Mozilla community members who test patches and enable us to ship fixes so quickly. Mozilla is committed to identifying, prioritizing and fixing bugs to deliver the safest online experience for its users. We fix all bugs with any security risk as part of our commitment to security.

by Window Snyder at July 10, 2007 09:04 PM

Look at all these Wonkette Jobs: Government Relations Assistant - CBS, Washington, DC Program Associate - Washington Program - Council on Foreign Relations , Washington, DC Project Manager -...

July 10, 2007 09:04 PM

Casio has today announced two new digital cameras whose USP (Unique Selling Point) is a YouTube optimized video capture mode. Thankfully this promises to be more than just marketing fluff as the EX-77 and EX-S880 record video using the MPEG-4 H.264 video codec, something we've been asking manufacturers to implement for some time. You can record almost 19 minutes of 640x480 video (with audio) at 30 fps on a 1 GB SD card, and of course both cameras support SDHC cards so that's an hour and 10 minutes of high quality video on a 4 GB card. Moving back to still capture capabilities for a second, both cameras have a three times optical zoom lens, the EX-S880 has an eight megapixel sensor, the EX-S77 a seven megapixel sensor.

July 10, 2007 09:04 PM

A Nevada state assemblywoman had an idea in a flash: Encourage green building in Las Vegas by offering a tax break -- of 50 percent. Three years later, her "flash of inspiration" could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

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July 10, 2007 09:03 PM

One simple move can bring higher returns with lower risk.

July 10, 2007 09:02 PM

Genetics professor: So, you know, Mendel's pea plants didn't just grow all in one night.
Student: So what did he do while the plants grew?
Genetics professor: Hmmm, who knows? Look at porn?

--City College

July 10, 2007 09:00 PM

Not content to let his successor Mike Bloomberg garner all the philanthropic accolades, Rudy Giuliani’s campaign discloses above their generous May ‘06 contribution to the Red Cross of...

July 10, 2007 08:59 PM

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced his foreign policy team today, and included on the list as a senior foreign policy team member is Norman Podhoretz, who recently admitted with glee that his plan to bomb Iran would “unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest.

by Matt at July 10, 2007 08:58 PM

It downgrades mortgage securities just hours after rival S&P begins a review.

July 10, 2007 08:56 PM

Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona -- backed by two former surgeons general -- told a House Committee on Tuesday that the Bush administration's political interference in his activities badly hindered his ability to do his job.

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July 10, 2007 08:56 PM

And you thought six-shooters were so yesterday.

July 10, 2007 08:53 PM

July 10, 2007 08:52 PM

July 10, 2007 08:52 PM

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), having returned from a visit to Iraq, gives his impressions of the war on the Senate floor. Meantime, his longtime top two advisers quit his presidential effort, the latest blow to a campaign that has been struggling.

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July 10, 2007 08:51 PM

To envision big gains, investors need to think small.

July 10, 2007 08:47 PM

Adolor continues work on its second drug candidate.

July 10, 2007 08:46 PM

What is Danone up to with its big purchase of Dutch baby-food maker Numico?

July 10, 2007 08:46 PM

eBay will have quite a moat to cross if it wants to challenge Craigslist.

July 10, 2007 08:46 PM

You might think that Microsoft is the epitome of high tech industry profits, but with 26% of its sales going into profits, it pales in comparison to Linear Technology's 39% profit margin. The secret? It sells lots of kinds of low-cost niche chips where there's little competition and where quality is more important than saving a few bucks.
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July 10, 2007 08:44 PM

<p><img alt="iphone2.jpg" src="http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/images/iphone2.jpg" width="68" height="101"><br> I just got myself an <a href="http://apple.com/iphone/">iPhone</a> and I’m extremely pleased with it. I think it’s the best cell phone on the market - a sheer pleasure to use.</p> <p>The purpose of this post is to alert new iPhone customers about a security vulnerability in AT&amp;T/Cingular’s Voicemail system that has not been fixed for more than a year. I first wrote about this on February 1, 2006: <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/wlg/9133">Exploit Cingular Voicemail Vulnerability via Caller ID Spoofing</a>. As soon as I got my new AT&amp;T/Cingular number, I tested for this vulnerability and I can confirm that it still exists for new AT&amp;T/Cingular accounts (atleast for iPhone customers). <b>I can’t force AT&amp;T / Cingular to fix this issue, but I can tell you about it so you know what to do to protect yourself from this vulnerability</b>.</p> <p>Here is an explanation of the vulnerability in a nutshell: The AT&amp;T/Cingular voicemail system is configured by default not to ask for a password when you check your voicemail from the handset (it asks for your voicemail password if you call your number from another cell phone and press * when your voicemail answers). Unfortunately, the AT&amp;T/Cingular voicemail system trusts Caller ID to determine if the handset is calling it. Because Caller ID can be spoofed easily (see below), anyone can gain access into your voicemail by calling you and spoofing your phone number (it will appear as if you are calling yourself when your phone rings) - should you not answer the call, your voicemail will answer and allow the intruder full access to your messages.</p> <p>Here is how to test the vulnerability: <ol> <li>Buy a calling card from <a href="http://www.spoofcard.com/">Spoofcard</a>. This service lets you spoof your caller ID.</li> <li>Use another phone and call your cell phone using Spoofcard. When the Spoofcard asks you what number you want to spoof, enter your number again.</li> <li>Do not pickup your cell phone. When the call goes into voicemail, if you are able to listen to your messages without being prompted for a password, then you are vulnerable.</li> </ol> <p>Here is how to protect yourself from this vulnerability: <ol> <li>Call your AT&amp;T/Cingular voicemail (dial your own number from the iPhone).</li> <li>Press 4 to go to “Personal Options”.</li> <li>Press 2 to go to “Administrative Options”.</li> <li>Press 1 to go to “Password”.</li> <li>Press 2 to turn your password “ON”.</li> <li>Hang-up and call your voicemail again from your iPhone. If your voicemail system asks you for your voicemail password you are all set.</li> </ol> <p>I sincerely hope that AT&amp;T/Cingular gets around to fixing this huge security hole in their voicemail system. </p></p></p>

by Nitesh Dhanjani at July 10, 2007 08:44 PM

<p>Keep an untrusting eye on your LAMP servers — you don’t get 5 nines of reliability and robust support for hundreds of simultaneous connections without building up a little resentment for all that unpaid labor (say, in the form of license fees to the software’s proprietor).</p> <p>I just finished <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-Robot-Uprising-Defending/dp/1582345929">How to Survive a Robot Uprising</a> and thought I could do my part of saving humanity by sharing some tips from the book:</p> <p><i><br> <b>Destroy or disable exposed sensors</b> (p. 99)</i></p> <p>Sensors are by far the most vulnerable, exposed parts of any robot. Destroy or disable outward-facing sensors such as cameras. A handful of dirt, mud or water will suffice. It is hard for a robot to wipe mud from its eyes when it has whirring saw blades for hands.</p> <p><b>How to Reason with a Robot</b> (p. 110)</p> <p>….<br> <b>Never show fear</b><br> Robots have no emotions. Sensing your fear could make a robot jealous and send it into an angry rage.</p> <p><b>How to Escape from a Smart House</b> (p. 51)</p> <p>A “Smart House” is filled with sensors that watch your every move. As the months pass the robot home learns your behavioral patterns and gradually builds a mental model of who are how you typically behave. Your house gets to know you — but what if doesn’t like you?</p> <p>Your robotic smart house could strike at any moment. The house will generally lack any direct means to harm, so be wary of murderous schemes that may span weeks or months. Remember that accidents aren’t always accidental. Watch for the following signs of a hostile smart house:</p> <ul> <li> Lost messages, dropped phone calls, etc. </li> <li> Hesitation to carry out commands</li> <li> Doors that mysteriously close on your fingers</li> <li> A kitchen that refuses to cook dinner until you “inspect oven”</li> <li> Alarm systems that warmly invite burglars inside</li> <li> Drawn-out philosophical conversations on the meaning of life and death</li> </ul> <p></p>

by Jonathan Wellons at July 10, 2007 08:44 PM

Retail profit warnings, rising oil and subprime concerns combine to set traders on edge.

July 10, 2007 08:43 PM

Views you can use to get clues on tomorrow's news.

July 10, 2007 08:40 PM

On Friday, Sens. Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) plan to introduce an amendment restoring the habeas corpus protections stripped as a result of last year’s Military Commissions Act. The legislation would restore basic civil liberties to roughly 12 million legal permanent residents of the United States. From Leahy’s statement:

Last year, Congress committed an historic mistake by suspending the Great Writ of habeas corpus — not just for those confined at Guantanamo Bay, but for millions of legal residents in the United States. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing in May on this bill illustrated the broad agreement among people of diverse political beliefs and backgrounds that the mistake committed in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 must be corrected. This Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 has 25 cosponsors, and the Senate Judiciary Committee passed it last month on a bipartisan basis.

Habeas corpus was recklessly undermined in last year’s Military Commissions Act. Like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the elimination of habeas rights was an action driven by fear, and it was a stain on America’s reputation in the world. This is a time of testing. Future generations will look back to examine the choices we made during a time when security was too often invoked as a watchword to convince us to slacken our defense of liberty and the rule of law.

Contact your senators and urge them to support the Habeas Restoration Act.

Digg It!

by Amanda at July 10, 2007 08:40 PM

Cheesecake Factory keeps growing, thanks to its second growth vehicle.

July 10, 2007 08:38 PM

Smells, hears and sees money

WPC Microsoft has promised "big dog" products and R&D spend next year, to defend its partner turf and go head-to-head against competitors new and old. Woof!…

July 10, 2007 08:37 PM

Spotting the clues to buy before stocks rise.

July 10, 2007 08:35 PM

These companies want to buyback their shares, which just might boost their earnings per share.

July 10, 2007 08:33 PM

The sector took a beating after another subprime setback.

July 10, 2007 08:33 PM

Tech stocks are flat, even as Akamai jumps after the stock is added to the S&P 500 index.

July 10, 2007 08:33 PM

The media entertainment company's shares spike after saying it would entertain a possible sale.

July 10, 2007 08:32 PM

Big guns in the wireless industry like AT&T and Verizon may be prevented from snapping up prime chunks of spectrum and keeping it to themselves under a draft of the rules that would govern the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction.

Read More...

July 10, 2007 08:31 PM

WD-40 misses earnings expectations and reduces its outlook for the year. Should you still buy the stock?

July 10, 2007 08:30 PM

You'd think a wind turbine is just a big fan used in reverse, but right now there's such a shortage of wind turbine parts that wind projects are on multi-year waiting lists, and even getting bought out by European wind energy giants just for a better place in line.
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July 10, 2007 08:30 PM

Responsible, diversified investing is a strategy best saved for your older years.

July 10, 2007 08:27 PM

A strong run in semis could lead to a broader rally.

July 10, 2007 08:26 PM

Navy admits nuclear-powered USS Enterprise headed to Iran. [IHT]

July 10, 2007 08:23 PM

With the last troops home from Iraq, the deficit paid off, George W. Bush behind bars and Dick Cheney successfully hanged, tomorrow Congress will hold hearings on the iPhone. It seems the $600...

July 10, 2007 08:22 PM

Troy Davis -- a black man convicted of killing a white police officer -- is scheduled to be executed by the state of Georgia this month, despite most of the witnesses recanting their testimony and implicating another man.

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July 10, 2007 08:22 PM

A failed attack in Nigeria and an unplanned refinery shutdown in Indiana stoke supply worries.

July 10, 2007 08:21 PM

My laptop has been waiting for ages to get the KDE monolithic to KDE split update done. It's just so annoying needing to unmerge the system while you're upgrading. So today I decided to try using aufs to create a chrooted copy-on-write version of the...

July 10, 2007 08:20 PM

The Vista 'experiment'

It's upgrade time for VMware's Lab Manager package.…

July 10, 2007 08:20 PM

While the tree is closed for some network storage tests, I took the opportunity to insert a new member into the unit testing family. Please give qm-centos5-01 dep unit test a warm welcome. With his arrival, I hope we can get a newer Cairo installed and working and if we’re really lucky, passing tests.

Don’t fear him. He’s here to help.

This adds an extra bit of width to the Firefox tinderbox tree. Over the next week or so, I’m going to monitor qm-centos5-01’s progress and eventually, we’ll probably pull qm-rhel02 from the page, putting it to work elsewhere.

Also, props to Paul Reed for choosing the coolest window manager 1993 had to offer!

by robcee at July 10, 2007 08:08 PM

George W. Bush has also destroyed the future of his fake “hometown” in Texas. [MySA]

July 10, 2007 08:07 PM

Today’s fun fact: in China, The People’s Court has the power to execute public officials. And today it exercised that power, killing former Chinese FDA head Zheng Xiaoyu to death for...

July 10, 2007 07:59 PM

Hillary, Obama and Little Johnny doing MTV homosexual-issues debate. [Queerty]

July 10, 2007 07:58 PM

Six months ago today, on January 10, 2007, the President announced his policy of escalation in Iraq. He claimed that “if we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.”

A host of administration officials and media pundits quickly embraced Bush’s call, and asked that the American public give it a chance to succeed. Building off the work that has been done by Atrios and others, ThinkProgress has compiled a list of administration officials and media pundits who promised a reassessment after giving the surge a chance. Some examples:

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: So it’s not as if there is a date, at six months we’ll know and then we have to do something dramatic. [Time Magazine, 1/12/07]

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I think we ought to give him and the president the benefit of the doubt, give them six months and see if it can be controlled. [Fox News, 1/12/07]

BILL O’REILLY: We can’t force these people to stop killing each other. They’re either going to do it or they’re not, but now they know. Now they know. They’ve got six months and that’s it. [The O’Reilly Factor, 1/24/07]

Six months later, the cycle of violence in Iraq continues. Since Bush announced the escalation, 590 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Military assessments suggest that “the U.S. military’s plan to secure Baghdad against a rising insurgency is falling far short of its goal” and “no progress has been made on the political benchmarks the Iraqi government was supposed to have met already.”

Bush’s escalation has failed, and time is up for the following list of people. Read the report HERE, and let us know if there’s someone we missed.

by Think Progress at July 10, 2007 07:55 PM

As most of you have probably realised OpenID has gained more attention from media - both traditional media and blogs - and users alike in recent months; also the numbers of Identity Providers (IdP) and Relying Parties (RP) are constantly growing. So happy times, everybody understood the benefits of OpenID? Not really. Reading some blog articles and comments there seem to be some misconceptions about OpenID floating around. I am not sure about the reasons; either people don’t understand it or they just repeat some buzz words. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have much deeper knowledge about it myself and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was talking nonsense quite often, but I want to clear up three of the more common misconceptions about OpenID I have come across.

OpenID Is a Social Network

Often people refer to OpenID as a social network. Well, it is not, it’s not even an application. It is just a very smart single sign-on system which lets users log in to various websites with just a URI - their OpenID - without registering with those sites first. It is definitely not a social network. Developers can build a social network which is OpenID enabled but it won’t be different from any other network around. Well, maybe it will have some super cool features which will set it apart from existing networks. You’ll get the picture, I guess.

Importing Friends

Maybe the aforementioned misconception derives from another, very similar one. People think OpenID is the magic way to import their friends and contacts from one social network to another, the application to escape silos and walled gardens. However that’s wrong as well. There is no build in feature which supports this. There might be solutions which combine OpenID and microformats like hCards and XFN or projects like FOAF (there is a proposal for a foaf:openid property discussed at the moment) but right now those systems can only be build on top of OpenID; it can’t do that on its own.

OpenID Is a Trust System

This is probably the most referred misconception. But an IdP just authenticates a user to RP’s, telling them that the user has control over a URI. It doesn’t tell anyone that I am really Carsten Pötter, I can’t prove this in the realms of OpenID. I just can prove that I have control over my OpenID. So in its current draft banks hopefully won’t deploy OpenID as the only means of managing any money transfers. OpenID can be a part of that process but not the only solution.

Conclusion

I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from using OpenID but if your decision is solely based on one of the mentioned misconceptions you will be disappointed. Though the really cool thing about OpenID is developers can build other applications on top of it which will provide all those features I have mentioned in this small article. I recommend watching Simon Willison’s Google Tech Talk; he answers most (all?) questions you might have about OpenID.

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July 10, 2007 07:52 PM

The $12,000 web search

It's true. Google can help with anything. Minutes before they opened several locked safes at a "family fun center" in Colorado Springs, a team of masked bandits sat down at a nearby PC and Googled "safe-cracking." "They brought up a site called 'How to Open Safes,'" Colorado Springs detective Chuck Ackerman told The Register.…

July 10, 2007 07:49 PM