Slashdot interview with Jordan Pollack General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:14:05 AM April 12, 2000: Wow! You must read the last two questions of this Slashdot interview with Jordan Pollack!I am simply saying that permanent use and resale licenses to changeable information (software, art, literature, music, movies) which can be traded securely, without loss or duplication, in a public market, is a form of currency.Interesting thought!

China conducting 'pre-war recon' on line Misc.6/5/2000; 7:14:02 AM April 11, 2000: China conducting 'pre-war recon' on line: "'China has the biggest [information warfare] programme from the standpoint of being able to attack our infrastructure,' Chinese military specialist William Triplett said during an interview on the CBS News programme 60 Minutes this weekend." Good plan for China. Not so good for us.The Pentagon is worried. If an attack were carried out, even just a test attack, it's likely that it would go undetected and might well be attributed to equipment failure or some natural event, US Joint Task Force on Computer Network Defence Director General John Campbell pointed out.

Anti-censorship site censored Censorship6/5/2000; 7:13:59 AM April 11, 2000: "The director of the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain has challenged Dr Laurence Godfrey to sue him following claims by CACIB that it was gagged over the publication of a story on its Web site." "Hutty, who wrote the story, said: 'What I've written is not an actionable libel. If he wants to sue it's up to him,' he said.

Copy Protection Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:13:57 AM Random thoughts: Remember copy-protection on software? Will Gnutella and the like, making "piracy" a matter of opening a program and typing in the name of the desired software, rather then a 30-60 minute hunt on the web for a working FTP site, bring back the days of black print on dark wine red paper? Of course, such a low tech solution now-a-days would be of little use.

Happy Birthday! Personal Notes 6/5/2000; 7:13:55 AM April 11, 2000: Happy 0th Birthday Gerrit John VanDyk!!

Missing the point on Microsoft General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:13:51 AM April 10, 2000: I missed this article on Friday... it has some great stuff in it.The state is involved in creating [intellecutal-property based] monopolies, because there are choices to be made in designing property systems. Lots of them, in fact. One can agree with the idea that there should be intellectual property rights without answering the question "How far should those rights stretch?

Microsoft has been bringin' me down over IE5.5 for Windows Misc.6/5/2000; 7:13:47 AM April 10, 2000: Even as I've been going into spastic twitching fits over Mozilla (If you've ever seen Disney's Alladin, think Jafar's first few seconds of being a genie... "The power! The incredible power! The stars leap at my command!" or something to that effect), Microsoft has been bringin' me down over IE5.5 for Windows. The Web Standards Projects had some stuff to say about it, and I second it.

Digital signatures a threat to privacy? Privacy from Companies6/5/2000; 7:13:45 AM April 10, 2000: Update: Wesley Felter points out the the article incorrectly states what a digital signiture is. *D'oh* should have noticed that myself. Still, I was too busy being in a holy rage about holding the consumers responsible for all screw-ups... yeah, that's it... Digital signatures a threat to privacy?: "The problem for anonymous users is the amount of personal information that is encoded with the signature.

FreeNet Boundary Breakers6/5/2000; 7:13:42 AM April 10, 2000: New Boundary Breaker: FreeNet.Well... it would like to be a boundary breaker...

The liberating power of the Internet at work Personal Commentary6/5/2000; 7:12:34 AM April 5, 2000: The liberating power of the Internet at work: On today's Scripting News, Dave critiques Conxion for their advertising 99.999% uptime. Then,Conxion CEO Antonio Salerno had a problem with the statement above.Userland experiences ~10% outage rates, and sends 50+ e-mails? Conxion ignores them. Userland tells world that Conxion can't boast about their uptime? Suddenly Conxion is annoyed and apparently exerted pressure on Userland to not say that.