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September 16, 2003
Chris “RageBoy” Locke has learned an important lesson from me about sensitivity to the needs of others. You might want to try out his way of making his page more legible for those with various seeing disabilities.
Oh, it’s a proud proud day for the Weinberger family name…
September 14, 2003
Want to hear something extraordinary?
I was at a small conference/seminar sort of thing where Howard Levy was engaged as the in-house musician. He’s a pianist and harmonica player of vast experience. Howard gets a full three octaves — sharps and flats — out of a plain old 20-note harmonica, something no one else does. And it ain’t no stinkin’ parlor trick: he is a remarkably inventive and expressive musician.
So, after he played a three-minute solo version of Amazing Grace on the harmonica, I asked if he’d let us post the recording the conference had made of it, to be distributed free. (It’ll probably end up with a Creative Commons license requiring that attribution to Howard be carried with it.)
So, here it is, an MP3 of Howard Levy playing Amazing Grace (3.7MB), recorded Sept. 12, 2004.
Here is Howard’s home page.
Here’s the recording company where you can buy his remarkable music.
Spread it around!
Dan Gillmor is back from Africa with a column on Open source in the developing world. Here’s the conclusion:
…this may be one arena where Microsoft simply can’t compete, fairly or not. Barring a dramatic change in attitude, product and price from the world’s largest software company, open source is plainly the way developing nations should move.
They literally can’t afford to do otherwise.
Robert Kost has put his notes on Heidegger’s Being and Time into TheBrain.
TheBrain is a way of storing and associating snippets of info. If you like it, you love it. If you don’t, you probably still admire it. You can see a good online use of it at Ray Kurzweil’s AI site. And if you want to see the most mind-boggling demo of it, stop Jerry Michalski in the street and ask him what’s up with his brain.
ClassyDee takes me to task for recommending a “slick Flash” that presents facts about one aspect of how the Florida election was stolen. He writes, in part:
The data in the report may be accurate but the piece is still just propaganda and that is bad news. While a robust fight against the end of democracy is required it shouldn’t be carried using the weapons of totalitarianism… clearly the messages just blur together into a large blitz of value based attack ads, and nobody is the winner after such a thorough destruction of reason and sanity.
No one wants political discourse to consist of nothing but slick Flashes, but that it’s slick doesn’t mean it’s propaganda. Rhetoric matters. Rhetoric is legitimate. Rhetoric is unavoidable. Candidates should do more than issue position statements. Political conversations are not merely rational debates. They can’t be because no debates are merely rational unless — impossibly — the sides don’t care about their points of view. Politics requires that sometimes we be out to convince others, and not every effort to convince can be counted as propaganda if the term’s going to mean more than “What humans say.”
Some of the earmarks of actual propaganda: It makes no reference to any facts. It lies. It does nothing but associate emotive images. It’s got the word “Fox” displayed in the lower right.
Glorious footage of W pretending he landed a jet on an aircraft carrier is propaganda. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech is not.
September 13, 2003
I received the following from eBay’s crack service department this morning:
Dear eBay User,
During our regular update and verification of the accounts, we couldn’t verify your current information. Either your information has changed or it is incomplete. You are to update and verify your information by clicking on the link below.
If your account information is not updated within 5 days, your access to bid or buy on eBay will be restricted.
Please go to the link below and enter the information required:
http://www.ebay.com/accounts/member/avncenter/?[etc]
Now, since I receive about one of these scams a day, I knew there was something wrong with it, but it took me a while to figure it out. After all, the URL they were sending me to is obviously an eBay address. And it’s a plain-text message; Outlook converts lines that begin with “”http://” into clickable links.
But…
First, the header shows that it didn’t come from eBay. (If you’re using Outlook, you have to click on View->Options to see the header info. Oh yeah, real obvious.)
Second, it’s not really a text message. It’s html formatted to look like plain text.
Third, if you look at the source of the html, you see that the link doesn’t really go where it says. It goes to:
which gets translated by the browser into an IP address that is not eBay’s. “billing.ebay.com” is the “user name.” (The Opera browser caught this trick and asked me to confirm that I want to go there. And I’ve made some random changes in the address just in case.)
Finally, if I check my eBay account by going to ebay.com via my browser, I see there’s no problem with my account.
I’m sure this is an old trick (and I’m not sure I’ve figured it out accurately). It was just a new one on me.
Chris Lydon interviews Matthew Gross, the guy who runs Howard Dean‘s blog. Chris calls Matthew “The Transformative Campaign Blogger,” and it’s hard to argue with that. I’m a huge fan of Matthew’s and this interview will show you why.
(“Show you”? What’s the right verb when it’s audible, not visible?)
September 12, 2003
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a petition for those of us appalled by the RIAA’s singleminded attempt to criminalize file sharing rather than working to come up with workable ways to achive the multiple aims of building a flourishing a public domain, providing access to works no longer available thorugh publishers, and compensating artists.
Julian Bond presents hypothetical uses of an MP3 and asks us to decide which ones are legal. Messiness incarnate!
I’ve been listening to people who know stuff talk about PON (Passive Optical Networks), a bit of infrastructure that (perhaps!) threatens to provide a strong incentive to providers not to scale up the amount of bandwidth they grant us. But I’m in way over my head. Here’s what I think I know:
A connectivity provider uses PON to split light (data) over multiple lines. Each subscriber receives all the same data, ignoring the packets not tagged for that particular subscriber. So, you have to build security into the network — Smart! Bad! — to keep A from reading B’s bits.
The insidious problem: PON is difficult/expensive to upgrade. As a result, the PON network suppliers will have an incentive to keep traffic down by filtering and limiting services.
(There’s no unique problem with PON with regard to the fact that it centralizes control, for whoever owns the cable is in a position to control content whether they use PON or not.)
PON is not yet widely deployed. There is a set of towns in Utah entertaining PON bids for providing municipal-licensed cable, and there are maybe some other examples. Primarily, PON is now showing up in responses to RFPs from the ILECs.
Corrections and slap downs gratefully accepted.
(If you’re not sure why smart networks are bad networks, read the original End-to-End argument, Isenberg’s “stupid network” or Doc’s and my World of Ends.)
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