Saturday, July 28, 2007

The Day Free Speech obsoleted Preventative Copyright Enforcement

I said before that I thought Net Neutrality was a red herring in the fight for digital freedom—on further reflection I can see this was a gross understatement. If codified into law, the goal of net neutrality spells the end of censorship, and along with it any chance of so-called preventative copyright enforcement.

If ISP's are not free to prioritize one kind of traffic over another, then they are effectively prevented from policing their own networks. It's no longer an issue of who watches the watchers; if the actions of those with the keys to the kingdom are stunted through legal means, then there can be no watchers.

Fair use laws provide exceptions for educational use as well as parody and derivative works. If you designed an alternate ending for Beetlejuice and published the whole movie online with the alternate ending attached, there is an argument for a derivative work or parody. The ending is pretty fruity in the first place, but bear with me.

Pretend

What does this mean for the Motion Picture industry? Though the timeline is continuous, recent government codes have expressed that we are in the midst of a digital millennium, a time of discrete events, some with causes and some with effects, and that the culprits will be held responsible. We are no boondock saints here.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

E-mail Cake and Obsolete Software

Woe is me! It was nice knowing you modauthkerb, but I grow weary of rigid frameworks and have failed to find value in the well-designed but unmanaged and varied implementations of Kerberos; hopefully pam-http and Subversion with htpasswd will serve my needs from now on. I unsubscribed myself from that mailing list as well as the xorg developer community, I was never truly at home with you people.

On the bright side, my e-mail inbox has been freed up for off-site network storage! Now if I can get my disk requirements under 2.8GB, and so long as Google never kicks the bucket or pulls the rug out from under this free e-mail service of theirs, I can have an attempt at compliance with sane and reasonable procedures for off-site data backup without carrying disks full of important data from place to place, and without incurring a separate rent roll for a server or server farm.

Neat! However that's not happening any time soon. One large 700GB filesystem sits on my RAID5 array on the server called Sheng, and a pair of filesystems is spread across two 500GB disks on Blackruby using LVM. With both servers running at capacity, there is no way to produce a backup, so we will have to settle for dueling banjos. Still, I'm not sure that this business of data retention will ever provide a paycheck; perhaps it's time to clean out my Inbox!

Sharing Bandwidth and Disk

Bandwidth and Disk are interrelated just as money and time, but this doesn't mean it behooves anyone to meter it and charge extra for heavy use. Extra value is sometimes a product of sharing, and as you will recall sharing is caring!

I once discovered software for digital media transcription (read: backup), and the peasents rejoiced as they were enlightened. A copy house is like a data warehouse; duplicates of written or copy material are produced, that's copy that's sometimes written on CD and Disk media. Optical media can be reverse-mastered into an image which can be loaded from disk and accessed directly or copied to produce a duplicate of the original media. Files and disks can be shared as well as copied, and so can compressed files.

Network disk can be used to share files within a group; issues sometimes arise when clients and servers part ways, and revision control like Subversion helps determine original authorship. A server maintains a catalog of changes made by users who collaboratively administer a file space. Commits that derive from outside sources should provide citations. New and unique information is sometimes produced, and new ideas are dated in case of patent litigation.

This is all of the software you need to be a producer of media content on a desert island; that and an internet connection. Ideally we have a more elegant system for generating income from distribution than sending out messages stuffed into plastic bottles and hoping that they return filled with gold doubloons... still we might be surprised just how often this works!

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Laughing from Afghanistan to Iraq

If you speak English (and you probably do if you found this page), then you might have noticed as I have (and I'm probably not the first Irishman to think in this way, it's a funny coincidence) that Afghanistan was the first target in the so-called war on terror, and that Afghanistan is also the first country out of all countries in an alphabetical list. Now I'm not suggesting that President Bush decides his political strategy by opening a phone book and starting at the beginning, but I was watching Comedy Central one day and I took note of the fact that the writers for Lil' Bush put that same kind of thinking into their Fathers' Day episode.

It's funny! I'm not trying to say that death and fighting are laughable, or that we should take terrorism as a source of amusement, but why don't you go ahead and ask George Carlin for his opinion. Death can be funny. In fact, death is damn near all he's been talking about, the last few times I've seen him doing stand-up comedy sketches, and I've always thought him to be a fantastic comedian. I thought it was funny then, and I'll probably continue to think that way until it's too late anymore, for thinking any other way. So while you keep on trucking, please do keep on laughing. It's good for you, and it's good for us!

Cheers,
Kingdon

Generating Traffic

While I might not be the best source for information of this sort (my blog has 4 subscribers at present, and I know that my own computers account for at least two), I have accumulated quite a decent amount of information on cheap and free internet publishing methods and strategies for generating traffic. This is really everything you need to become a source of news—well, this much and also some news.

As long as you are comfortable with Google hosting your content, it doesn't cost you any money! Increased availability of this information will certainly not help me to sell space on my servers, but if you have something good to share and you only want to get the word out, you really shouldn't have to pay for the privilege. I thought I should share my knowledge, so I'm writing this article. Of course if I've missed anything really helpful, I hope you'll leave a comment and let me know so that I can integrate it into my strategy and update the HOWTO document.

Monday, July 9, 2007

Crash-Proof Arabic Language Base

For my next trick, I will attempt to learn 3 API's and produce a data model and controller for my Arabic Language Base application, Qaal. There are several goals in mind with this project: aside from utility as a learning tool for Arabic language, it should also be written to take advantage of public databases for authentication and data storage as much as possible.

A personal account on Yahoo's Delicious server will be required of all users, to maintain a list of the documents which have contributed to their personal corpus of understanding. Further, the app will likely maintain more information locally using Google Gears, and store this information on a private Subversion server when the application is terminated. Local configuration files and databases are a no-no, for data-greedy applications like this one.

We want to store: vocabulary lists, with translations, and also links to documents. Go.