The Blog Formerly Known As SunMink
All the posts that used to be at blogs.sun.com/webmink

Watch the video and see this entirely straightforward attack being carried out. There is clearly a huge issue here, and the fact the banks will claim that "PIN Authorised" means they have no liability means we should all shout loudly about it.

Jonathan Schwartz has a new blog.

Note how unconcerned the bank spokesman appears. Then note that all transactions verified with a PIN (according to the bank) are the liability of the customer. Then draw the obvious conclusion.

While Matthew's discussion is good (and the links are very useful), he misses the key point: that communities where one member has significantly more rights than all the rest tend to fail. If you must aggregate copyright, share rather than transfer, and aggregate in the hands of a community-controlled entity.

What's not to love? As long as you are in the US, anyway, Amazon UK doesn't go for this sort of grand gesture.

So let's get this straight – it's OK to upset the balance of power in copyright law when it benefits big-business copyright holders, but not when it protects individual citizens and new-market innovators. Riiiight. More blatant clear-cutting and commons-enclosure in preparation for ACTA ratification, more like.

I'm not sure if I am more interested in the statistics or horrified that they can be discovered just by looking at the data visitors' web browsers supply to the server…

I can understand it being outside warranty terms, even voiding warranty, but making it technically impossible is going too far. Plus, what's the betting that if there is a way to use them it's against the DMCA. The pendulum has swung too far away from the interests of the customer.

See/hear Eben Moglen's useful discussion of this important emerging topic for software freedom

If you're a US citizen, write to negotiator working on your behalf on ACTA and express your concerns about how ACTA will enshrine in law protections for outdated business models at the expense of new innovations, internet and software freedoms and the education of the next generation who will be criminalised because of it.

Excellent analysis of the situation from DJWM. The theory goes (from the BSD side of the aisle) that the cost of maintaining an ever-expanding fork forces everyone back to the community eventually. This is a real test both for that theory, and for the GPL side of the aisle who believe publication of source under GPL achieves this goal. In the face of Google's macho "all the smart people work for us" attitude, will either view be upheld?

Looks like another damning finding against high sugar diets. Too late for me, but maybe you can cut back and live longer.

"Flash IS open" say Adobe. Well, apart from the source being closed and unavailable, the patents on the codecs, the lack of standardisation of the format and the defensive attitude when anyone challenges it. Come on guys, get real. There are so many degrees of freedom more before anyone will respect that lame argument. Release full source and let the community plug in Theora and Vorbis, for example…

Impressive demonstration of the power of HTML 5.

"OpenJDK will remain the single open source Java and JVM implementation that Oracle contributes to." Given the social media policy at Oracle one assumes this must be an official statement (the first I have seen).

Good to see SourceForge being responsive here and deciding to take this risk. The draconian US export laws do leave US corporations in an invidious position, even outside their own borders, and it's easy for managers to decide to play it safe at the expense of freedom and transparency.

I hope there is more to this than there appears. I'll try to investigate.

"Google shows no sign of working to get their code upstream anymore." — Serious break-down of trust here, as seemingly the fusion of pragmatism and secrecy at Google is leading them to treat their community responsibilities as a low priority. We'll see much more of this from corporate FOSS users in the future, which is why I'm convinced we need to grade projects on more than just their license choice (or the warmness towards the FOSS communities of their out-of-band programmes).

Good to see the Washington Post tackling ACTA and attempting to explain its provisions to the general reader. Still far to complex for everyman, but the seeds are there (like explaining that all the three-strikes legislation is advance preparation by national governments so that ACTA ratification is easier when it happens).

While you can't take anything dangerous on to a plane in the US, you can certainly buy very worrying stuff in the on-board catalogue. This, for example, is a USB stick containing a rootkit and activity monitor. I note it doesn't work on a Mac.

Mark Pilgrim with a eulogy for the freedom to tinker. This is one of the key reasons I'm an advocate of and activist for software freedom.

It is, of course, the more educated choice.

Spun out to its own site, this project (a virtual machine kernel written in Javascript) is absolutely fascinating and deserves wider investigation.

It's FOSDEM weekend, so maybe it's time this shirt made a comeback.

Some good news on internet rights from Australia for a change. This case establishes that common-carrier status does indeed apply to Australian ISPs. Hopefully this starts setting a precedent that will push back on thre-strikes regulations.

Useful voice-of-experience post by Nat.

Disturbing but great post explaining how the license terms MPEG-LA force their H.264 (and MPEG-2/4) licensees to pass on in their sublicenses basically give you no useful rights to the 900 patents. This ridiculous situation has to end. No amount of "pragmatism" can excuse giving a patent pool cartel such power to shake down the whole connected population.

Joy of Tech with a much more convincing hype cycle explanation than that tired analyst curve diagram.

It's not necessarily cause-and-effect, though. Unless you're reading about H.264 patents and licensing.

A long, must-read article that draws lessons from previous experiences (with GIF and MP3) to explain why anyone with concerns for liberty should discourage use of H.264 and promote alternatives. The link below is to a letter where the licensing company for H.264 even explains that they are using the drug-dealer model to minimise consumer fears via no-cost licensing while threatening implementors with aggressive legal action. I'm still 100% in agreement with Mozilla on this one.

Pretty good synopsis of the interview I gave, which ironically appears to be locked up behind a paywall.

If you are in any doubt that H.264 cannot be implemented legally as open source, take a look at this letter from MPEG-LA.

To summarise: MySQL was always Free software, always had these problems (some would say never open source in spirit) yet still thrived at the heart of the FOSS movement, so why should this transition prove any different.

This is the way the world ends /
Not with a bang but a whimper.