Category: Tech

Everything about technology but product reviews

Joining the Free Software Foundation

I recently joined as an associate member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and was shocked to discover that the total number of associate members is well under 2000. The FSF is the protector of the GNU Public License (GPL) and the steward of the GNU Project that organizes and helps to deliver GNU software. I suspect one would have to look long and hard to find anyone in the computer industry, hardware or software, who is not producing software with or using software developed using GNU or GPL'd projects. Even Microsoft ships GNU software. So show your gratitude and help protect your own future by joining the FSF. And while you are at it get your company to join too.

RSS Feed

I tend to update the site sporadically so to make it easier for those who care to keep track of my latest ramblings I have set up an RSS feed for my page. Much thanks to Mark Nottingham and his most excellent page on RSS. Using RSS you can subscribe to my page and your RSS reader will notify you whenever I create an update. Read Mark's page for more information about RSS.
For what it's worth I use Amphetadesk as my RSS reader. Picking a reader was a pain because there aren't that many out there for Linux and most of them have sucky UI. I'm also paranoid and cheap so I didn't want to use a web based RSS reader service. My favorite reader from a UI perspective was NewsMonster. But it sucked up huge memory (usually around 80 megs) and made Mozilla 1.3.1 crash at random times. So I then tried Amphetadesk which is missing some really important features (like the ability to mark a feed as read) but it is cool enough in other ways that it is usable. I will check out NewsMonster again when I upgrade to Mozilla 1.4 to see if it has become more stable and less of a memory hog.

Palladium and What You Use Security

A good article explaining Microsoft's Palladium initiative. What interesting about Palladium is that it provides a mechanism to not just authenticate who you are but also what software you are using. For the purposes of this article I will refer to this as What You Use (WYU) security. In reading this article please keep in mind that I know nothing about Palladium so the following comments only apply to WYU style security systems in general and in no way reflects Palladium's past, present or future plans.

Continue reading Palladium and What You Use Security

Patents, Open Source and GPL

Lots of commercial companies are getting very worried about Open Source. They view Open Source as a direct threat to their success. After all, how do you compete with free? I think these companies are missing the point, Open Source is just another commoditizer and anyone who has succeeded in the technology business long ago learned how to deal with being commoditized. In fact, as commoditizers go Open Source is not a bad way to go. In the old days when a technology became commoditized it would disappear into some dominant platform that no one could access. With Open Source when a technology is commoditized it instantly becomes available to everyone which is to everyone's benefit, except of course to the dominant platform owners.

Continue reading Patents, Open Source and GPL

A Buyer's Guide to Standards

This article talks about the two criteria a technology buyer can apply to determine if the 'open standard' they are intended to rely on is really open at all. Those criteria are – licensing and change control.

Licensing controls who gets to implement the standard and what price they have to pay to do it. Open standards are licensed under 'royalty free' terms which means that anyone can implement the standard any time they want without having to pay any money or ask anyone's permission. Closed standards are almost universally RAND or RAND-Z based.

Change control identifies who has the right to say what the standard is and change it as time goes on. Open standards are owned by open standards organizations which have reasonably open membership and voting procedures to approve standards that can not be hijacked by a small group of people/companies. Closed standards either haven't been submitted to any open standards organization, have been submitted under dubious circumstances or have been submitted to pseudo-open standards organizations created to provide the veneer of openness.

Of these two criteria licensing is the most critical. If you check nothing else, check the license because if it isn't royalty free it isn't open.

Continue reading A Buyer's Guide to Standards

SPAM

I want to thank the folks at http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/system/services/e-mail/spam.shtml for reminding me of a very old trick. In most mail systems if you send yourself mail of the form joe+hotmail.com@foo.bar it will be delivered to joe@foo.bar. This is great for signing up to e-mail lists (that you honestly want to get mail from) because you can trivially filter on the + and you can keep track of which e-mail list is sharing your name with whom. This is just a rehash of the old 'fake middle name' trick that was used to track snail mail mailing lists. It's the really obvious ideas that are the most useful. In my case I own my own domain so I can actually just use alternate e-mail address (e.g. spam@goland.org).

I also decided to get a mail filter to check for spam. I literally receive over 50 pieces of spam a day. That's what I get for having a 10 year old e-mail address. The winner was Mail Washer ($20 donation). It has a nice interface, automatically hooks into the major spam black lists, the heuristics seem to work well, the mail preview works great and it's free. The only downside is that it only supports POP. This is probably a show stopper for most folks but in my case it's fine. BTW honorable mentions go to Spam Detective,SpamEater Pro and PocoMail.


OpenNic

This web page is available via http://www.goland.geek. IANA's incompetence and bad faith has reached legendary status in the Internet community and we desperately need an alternative. I don't claim that OpenNic has the solution but we have to do something. I now point my PC's DNS resolution to http://www.opennic.unrated.net/personal.html. Yes, this has obvious privacy ramifications but I'm willing to live with it. Thanks to Simkin for hosting my .geek DNS record.