After months of work, and several sleepless nights, I have finally moved. All the articles and your comments have been flawlessly imported to the new site. The Blogger.com site will soon redirect to the new site.

Don't think for a minute that my work is done on the new site, though. I have a lot of plans for expanding it. I'll update all ya' all as my plans for world conquest grow nearer.

Peace out.

Today's systems have hundreds of file formats they must support. Wouldn't it be great if we could reduce all the file formats in existence down to a single file format that could be supported across all systems?

My latest three-part article addresses this concept: The Intelligent File Format

If such a concept could be made into a standard, pressure could be put onto Microsoft and other large companies to support the format or lose massive government business. (See the recent pushes for the Open Document Format for a very real example of how this can work.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

Please read the alert here. The Broadcast Flag is back, this time as a WIPO treaty, and if you don't speak up, it'll be decided by bureaucrats without any democratic input at all.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&cid=14558550 I don't see a reason for the negative moderation. I'd appreciate if anyone with mod points would help fix this.

Bruce

Slashdot user rodgster sent me 1000 slashdot subscription pages because he likes my comments. Thanks, rodgster!

Things are going nuts in Second Life. This is a game where people can own land, do adult things and create objects for sale. The game currency is freely convertible into real money, so people develop land, charge admission fees for clubs and so on -- this is a real economy.

A group of technically sophisticated trolls, the W-Hats, from Something Awful unleased a doomsday device (a few times) on the virtual world, ruining the experience for everyone. It was essentially a fork-bomb, which overwhelmed the servers of the game, Now the proprietors of the game are talking "FBI". This is covered here.

A previous hack, by the same folks, involved hacking a client so that they could violate the protection scheme of the game, stealing the source code of valuable in-game objects/businesses.

The interesting thing about the responsible trolls is that they've combined technical skills with anti-social behavior multiple times -- the doomsday device is just their latest. Previous "offenses" have included: Building offensive structures[NSFW!!], extorting money from neighbors, or mocking the 9/11 attack on the WTC.

So this is a virtual world where trolling and hacking have financial consequences -- not just for the proprietor of the world, but the players, whose "virtual property" can lose or gain value based on the actions of trolls.

No less than once a week I hear about random corporation violating the license on some piece of open source software. The Free Software Foundation says that this happens all the time, but once the infringers are informed about their violation they typically correct the problem very quickly. Such failures typically include: not including a copy of the GPL or whatever license the software has been released under; not providing source code or an offer to supply source code; blatantly using GPL code and then licensing the complete work under a restrictive license.

Instead of notifying these companies and asking them kindly to comply, and then letting them off scot free, why don't the developers freakin' sue already? Sure, it costs money, but the great thing about lawyers is that they tend to overlook your lack of funds if they can see dollar signs on the horizon. They do it for insurance, liability and accident claims, I'm sure there's some ambulance chasers looking to make big bucks in copyright law too. The whole "sue for revenue" model isn't likely to go away. Large companies are just too pitiful at due diligence to actually follow a license as complicated as the GPL.

So what do you need to pull off this get-rich-quick-scheme? Well, number one is you need some copyrights. Thankfully, that's really easy to get, just hire some student programmers to work on open source and put your company name on the contribution. Once you've got a stake, no matter how small, it's my understanding that you can sue any infringers just as well as the major contributors. Of course, this tendancy by open source projects that are run by corporations to get copyright assignment on all contributions will trip you up.. guess you'll have to avoid those projects. Next, you'll need lawyers. Scum sucking, bottom feeding ones. You'll need them to review violations that you pay people to find in some "work from home" scheme. You'll also need them to send nasty letters and pull dirty tricks so the company can't weasle out of paying by complying with the license after the fact.

Speaking of paying, how much can you expect to get out of these fat corporate giants? Well, if you were to go to court you could expect to get at least "statutory damages" which is a minimum of $200/copy. But that's chump change. Typically any profits the company made that can be attributed to the violation will be awarded to the copyright holder, and that almost always exceeds the statutory damages by an order of magnitude. Then there's the punitive damages, which apparently don't exist in copyright law but always seem to be claimed, which tend to be around $70,000/copy.

So really, suing people who didn't bother to read the license on your open source software and have made a mint by unlawfully distributing your code is so easy even the most Lionel Hutz of lawyers should be able to get you a big fat payout. Then you can hire more developers, more people to look for copyright violations, and more lawyers in an endless regression.

If you're actually interested in reading what I have to say, go look at:

www.livejournal.com/users/randomdreams

The RIAA has finally decided to bust folks selling mixtapes -- starting with Kim's of New York. As with the BSAA enforcement, RIAA thugs accompanied the cops and generally acted like asses. They had a pizza party in the store to celebrate their triumph. Mixtapes are illegal; Copyright holders don't get paid. Still, they've been tolerated by record labels as the best viral marketing method -- musicians routinely release them to test new music. They are not bootlegs in the traditional sense. E.g. 50 cent had five hit mixtapes before he got signed for big bucks; he released them to promote himself after his label dropped him. They are even sold online, openly and increasingly in stores like the one that got raided -- one that any New Yorker has heard of. Here's a decent roundup. Village Voice on the subject, and more from The Voice. Here's a more tinfoil hat crowd article.

A common theme that I've noticed in Slashdot stories about China is that no one seems to know China's actual laws about free speech, criticizing the government, or religion. Nearly everyone is surprised when I drag out the Chinese Constitution and show them the rights that the government supposedly guarantees.

While getting +5's for knowing this is a nice racket, I feel that it's far more important to catalog the information in one place so that others can learn and spread understanding of China's abuses.

Thus this weeks article is China: Getting the Facts.

If you find yourself in a discussion about China again, I hope you'll find it a useful resource to direct people to. If some of you feel that it's worthy of a front page Slashdot story, feel free to submit it. :-)

As the price of gas surged past $3.00 a gallon, many consumers began to wake up to more efficient road vehicles such as hybrid cars. These cars reduce your overall costs by requiring less gas at the pump for the same range. Unfortunately, such savings are bound to be only a temporary fix. Oil prices have dropped back down for the moment, but they're still sitting at some of the highest prices in the history of the modern world. To avoid a transportation collapse (which would result in an economic collapse), we need to reduce our dependency on oil. And fast.

This week's article is part of a new series of articles I'm introducing called, "Come Dream With Me." This series is intended to showcase existing technologies that can be used to make our everyday lives better and our futures brighter. All we need to do is develop them.

The current episode is a two parter focused on Stirling Engines in both planes and cars. Let me know what you think. My hope is that everyone will learn a little something that will help them in the future. :-)

Alrighty, then! Now that I've finally got home internet again (which means that I'll soon be replying to many of the emails that I have piled up in my box!) I've put out a new article! This time, you can actually *have* the future I described, today!

Read More!

Don't you love the title, BTW? Buzzwords are fun, whee! (Or maybe I've done just a little too much cold medication. You decide.)

My friend Steve Dekorte suggested that I have a go at the old shareware game. He makes a comfortable living off a collection of Mac mini-apps that, he tells me, pull in about the same per year as he got working at a dot com. When I worked at dot coms I got paid above average so it sounds like a pumb to me.

Apparently Windows shareware developers make a lot more than Mac shareware developers, so I've cranked out a (hopefully) useful app called TcpSafe on Windows. It allows you to monitor where your computer is connecting and who is trying to connect to your computer. Good for catching spyware and trojans that "phone home" in the act, debuging sockets applications, troubleshooting network problems, monitoring the network for worms and hackers, etc.

I'm using Paypal for a payment system and I've integrated it into both my web site and the application. The licensing system is per machine. So if you want to use the registered version on multiple machines you've got to pay multiple times. As such, I've set the price really low ($9.99) and hopefully we'll make up for it with volume.

Steve had this great "I've Paid!" button idea which I've duplicated. So if you need to reinstall the software for some reason and it comes up in evaluation mode you can just hit the button and it downloads your license key automagically. Support costs are apparently the killer in shareware, so here's hoping everything runs smoothly!

 

A new article is finally up, asking the question is AJAX actually new?

I got to thinking about how most organizations implement information technology, and to comparing it with the way they implement other technology, such as plumbing.

Normally, when you need plumbing done, you hire a plumber and let him do his job. At the end, you have piping and other bits installed appropriately to perform the desired function. This is a stark contrast to the way IT is done, at least in most of the Western world. Here is how plumbing would work if it we did it like IT:

Company X decides it needs plumbing. X has been growing for some time, and the styrofoam waste troughs and bamboo aqueduct system delivering water from the roof drainage system (designed and implemented by the owner's nephew 2 years ago) don't seem to be working like they used to. There have been several catastrophic containment failures, spewing human waste into the hallways, and several customer complaints have resulted.

In order to tackle this problem, X does what any American company does when action is called for - they call a manager's meeting. The meeting is 6 hours long. The group universally fails to understand the depth of the problem and each member believes he has an unquestionable grasp of the problem and is uniquely qualified to provide a solution. The comptroller argues that the existing system has worked fine for 2 years and that there is no need for change just because of a few minor bugs, even if the bugs are literal.

The directory of marketing points out that 90 percent of other companies are using a technology from a company called PlumbSoft. PlumbSoft manufactures a piping and waste delivery system that includes several interesting features. All the pipes consist of loose bundles of poorly bent copper pipe with holes drilled in random locations. None of the joints ever fit together quite right, but this is touted as a feature by PlumbSoft because it allows for greater modularity and scalability. The end result is that the pipes must be disconnected and refitted regularly, sometimes several times a day to ensure stable operation.

Stable operation is itself open to some interpretation. Because of the inherent instability of the system, and because it does not securely convey the waste, there have been numerous disastrous pandemics of cholera and other diseases that came about as a direct result of using PlumbSoft products. Rather than impacting upon PlumbSoft's acceptance, this has created a thriving industry of emergency waste cleanup and dead body removal, collectively known of as the "antivirus industry". Contracting yearly subscriptions with such services is accepted as a normal part of daily life and business.

Just as the group begins to agree to go with PlumbSoft, a new operations intern mentions something about this plumbing technology which seems to be popular among professional plumbers. These professionals are collectively known of as geeks and while useful in a disaster, their opinions as to design are rarely considered useful. The technology involves 1/4 inch thick pipe made from something called "PVC" and water lines held together by actually using metals to literally weld the pipe together with lead and other soft metals.

This suggestion derives a condescending chuckle from the rest of the group. The PlumbSoft marketing fan holds up his styrofoam cup and points out: "I can fill this cup up 1000 times and it will never leak. It is ridiculous to suggest we need something as elaborate as PVC for our plumbing needs. And soldered connections? We can't use technology that requires such specialized skill as that. PlumbSoft's fittings are good enough for everyone else. They are good enough for us, too."

The end result is that by the time a plumber is called in to do the job, X has already decided to use PlumbSoft and have established a $100 budget for the job. X's stock later goes down by 3 points after clients are killed by exploding sewage. Their operations are outsourced to India. Customers flee the company in droves and it lives on only as a corporate parasite making its living off IP litigation.