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The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.
On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a controversial National Security Letter .pdf on the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the library’s registered users, asking for the user’s name, address and activity on the site.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive’s lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint .pdf to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.
Red Hat CEO Targets Oracle, Microsoft - Breaking News - Technology - theage.com.au
“Here, we are the attacker. If you listen to all the squealing that Microsoft and Oracle do about us, clearly they’re worried about us.”
“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.
“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”
I’m just glad he stopped short of warning them to lock up their women and children.
So what happens when Matt Asay interviews Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst?
Sparks fly, that’s what.
Q:Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?
A: I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.
Q: You’re serious?!
A: Absolutely.
Q: Are you a geek or something?
Do I have to throw away my iPod now?
Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music has posted both a great presentation and a great promise:
If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.
Go read this great summary of the last eight years of digital music and Rogers’ vision for the music industry’s future.
A lot of us have had the experience of having a parent who tells their friends, “My kid works with computers.” Friends nod and smile at the child’s apparent brilliance, and somebody reminisces about punch cards. Then you start working on open source projects. Mom is not so impressed. The friends are confused. You’re working for free on something you’re going to give away? “Son, I don’t understand!”
Today on his blog, Stephen Walli explains the economics of open source. It certainly doesn’t explain all of the motivations and mechanics of open source projects, but it’s a start. Send it to your mom.
Individual projects behave as markets from one perspective, and code is currency, the medium of exchange. Just like all economic exchanges, the contributor offers something they value less (a fragment of code solving a particular need) for something they value more (the functioning software package in its entirety). Nobody is working for free in an economic sense.
And if turns out that Mom really digs the idea once she understands it, you can send her to Open Source God, a recently posted list of open source projects for all your software needs. There are a million of those lists, but this is one of the best I’ve seen.
The band Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, was already known for using the Internet to market music in creative ways and encouraging fans to download songs rather than buy pirated CDs. Then the RIAA tried to get them to stop being so gosh-darn friendly. Now their fans have released a band-sanctioned free remix album. Reznor put out the multitrack files they needed, and the community responded.
Nine Inch Nails’ Open Source Remix Album Available as Free Torrent
Over the past few months, “multiple judges” at 9inchnails.com listened to over 200 submissions to the Nine Inch Nails open source remix contest and the 21 best remixes are now free to download via torrent or stream via the website.
Download the tracks for free. Trent wants you to.
We’ve spent a lot of time here talking about companies who don’t get it. Here’s a few who do. This week, InfoWorld gave out “people who get it” awards: the Bossies.
Selected by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers, these first annual Bossies celebrate the best open source software available for the enterprise. From CRM and ERP to OSes and middleware to networking, storage, and security software, our 36 winners prove that if your business is willing and your IT staff is ready, there’s an open source solution that’s able.
Now you can help us elaborate on “Bird Song: A cartoon requiem for DRM,” our Lighthearted Cartoon Funeral March for Digital Rights Management.
Below you’ll find links to all of the raw audio, video, and image files you need to proceed with your mashup. Let us know if there are any other formats that might be helpful. All of it is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license, the terms of which you can find here translated into a jillion languages.
Now it’s your turn to add to the story. Here are the raw music and video files:
As for how it was made, we’ll let the designers speak.
Islam Elsedoudi, art direction and design:
We mainly used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator for the animation and GarageBand for the music.
All the illustrations were drawn in Illustrator using the pen tool for the sleek drawings and the pencil tool for the sketchy drawings. We then brought them into After Effects and built “sets” in a 3D environment with a camera. We put a light source on the background to maintain realism and texture. The solid components of the piece (bird, globe, leaves, chandelier) were treated to look as if they were painted on the background.
The background texture remained consistent and unmoving, while everything else moved as it would in real space. Some of the more crude animations, such as the line rolling into the record and the bird cage falling were conventionally animated, frame by frame, using Illustrator and and a lot of screenshots.
Edward R. Murrow: Who owns the patent on this vaccine?
Jonas Salk: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?
See It Now, April 12, 1955
And from a 2005 New York Times thinkpiece about intellectual property:
When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in 1955, he waived the patent process because he wanted to protect the public as quickly as possible and thought it far more important than making money. When the vaccine was first introduced, the United States had an average of 45,000 cases of polio annually. By 1962 there were 910.
Those crazy old timers had some quaint notions back in the 20th century.
Intel Joins One Laptop per Child: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Intel and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) today announced they have agreed to work together to bring the benefits of technology to the developing world through synergy of their respective programs. Under the agreement, Intel and OLPC will explore collaborations involving technology and educational content. Intel will also join the board of OLPC.
More on this soon.
UPDATE
BBC: Intel and $100 laptop join forces
Chip-maker Intel has joined forces with the makers of the $100 laptop project.
The agreement marks a huge turnaround for both the not-for profit One laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation and Intel.
Intel, `$100 laptop’ project make peace
BOSTON - The nonprofit that aims to seed the developing world with inexpensive laptop computers for schoolchildren has made peace with Intel Corp., the project’s biggest and most powerful rival, The Associated Press has learned.
Quicktime | Real
Real Stream | Ogg Theora
The death of software patents?
Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Fight Vandalism
More on GPL-compliant patent settlement
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