hi i’ve just finished up the basic outline of the login system for the project.  it’s currently running on a pc in my apartment so expect it to be down occasionally while i’m tinkering.  if you are interested in checking it out see test_server_1.  friendly hackers welcome to join in.

For the last hundred years, rightsholders have fretted about everything from the player piano to the VCR to digital TV to Napster. Here are those objections, in Big Content’s own words.
By Nate Anderson.

It’s almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

The anxious rhetoric around new technology is really quite shocking in its vehemence, from claims that the player piano will destroy musical taste and the “national throat” to concerns that the VCR is like the “Boston strangler” to claims that only Hollywood’s premier content could make the DTV transition a success. Most of it turned out to be absurd hyperbole, but it’s interesting to see just how consistent the words and the fears remain across more than a century of innovation and a host of very different devices.

So here they are, in their own words—the copyright holders who demanded restrictions on player pianos, photocopiers, VCRs, home taping, DAT, MP3 players, Napster, the DVR, digital radio, and digital TV.

It’s an amusing read.  See the rest at Ars Technica.

An interesting bit from the blog of RMS:

Many in our community are suspicious of the CodePlex Foundation. With its board of directors dominated by Microsoft employees and ex-employees, plus apologist Miguel de Icaza, there is plenty of reason to be wary of the organization. But that doesn’t prove its actions will be bad.

Someday we will be able to judge the organization by its actions (including its public relations). Today we can only try to anticipate what it will do, based on its statements and Microsoft’s statements.

The first thing we see is that the organization ducks the issue of users’ freedom; it uses the term “open source” and does not speak of “free software”. These two terms stand for different philosophies which are based on different values: free software’s values are freedom and social solidarity, whereas open source cites only practical convenience values such as powerful, reliable software. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for more explanation.

Evidently Microsoft would rather confront the practical competition of open source than the free software movement’s ethical criticism. Its long standing practice of criticizing only “open source” does double duty: attacking one opponent while distracting attention from the other.

For more see “Lest CodePlex perplex.”

during my vacation i began working on what i think the foundation of a browser based application should should look like.  easily extensible and easy to update.  i have a good portion of the core completed.  once i have that done and couple of useful modules i’ll post the code here under the gpl.  i not sure where it’s going but i suspect it will be a fun ride.  if you’re a bored php hacker feel free to introduce yourself.  for the latest info i’ll try to keep a dedicated page up here on the blog.  as i haven’t thought of a name yet for the project it’s currently called “the project”.  why do this when there’s drupal and many other solutions available?  why not?  it’s not that difficult and a good learning experience.

fun server.  nice folks.  watch out for the guy below…

the graphic above shows the many hours i’ve spent on this game.  yes i live in front of the computer.

I have been using this wonderful bastion of freedom for many years and I’m saddened to see it go.  Good luck to peter and the boys.

here’s a quote from their blog:

TPB might change owner

Yes, it’s true.

News reached the press today in Sweden – The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.

A lot of people are worried. We’re not and you shouldn’t be either!

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it’s value if the money would be the interesting part. It’s not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.
As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It’s the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.

We’ve been working on this project for many years. It’s time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!

you can read more here.

The Pirate Bay Sold To Software Company, Goes Legal.

This article borrowed from zdnet.  Many thanks to conz.

One of the overlooked advantages that Open Source development affords, is that it imitates perhaps the most fruitful and beneficial of all human endeavors: Science. How has the scientific-method evolved, and what can it teach us about the future possibilities of software construction?

Science, in its clearly understood modern guise, is unique. This essentially Western tradition of open inquiry is believed to have developed only one instantiation throughout the whole period of human history. While almost all human societies have developed language, art, and music, open inquiry into the natural and philosophical world sprung only from the eastern rim of the Mediterranean sea, in a number of ancient Greek states, approximately 27 centuries ago.

Helped along by the advantages provided by the recently formulated Greek alphabet, the people of this region bought forth the makings of the primary conceptual and philosophical machinery that was necessary to develop an understanding of Nature that surrounded them. In short order, they had conceived ideas which led them to believe that the Universe was understandable, that it was measurable and that it could undergo rational analysis.

Through the advantages bestowed upon the Greeks by virtue of their written language and undoubtedly their open, democratic political environment, these concepts spread. Where once these people would have been manipulators purely of the physical world (pottery, sculpture) they now also became masters if symbolic manipulation. Mathematics, logic, geometry, geography, mechanics, hydraulics, medicine, architecture, astronomy and cosmology, optics and dozens of other disciplines flowered. There has never been a similar period in human history, with the possible exception of the 18th century ‘age of reason’, the Enlightenment, interceded by the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome and the burning of the great library in Alexandria.

Luckily for all of us, these same ideas were storehoused and enhanced by the Islamic world. Eventually, after the fall of Muslim-held Toledo in the 11th century, these same ideas resurfaced slowly but steadily into Western and Southern Europe, to precipitate the Renaissance; the re-birth (of civilization.) The arrival of these Greek texts coincided with the development of the university as a legal entity with political and intellectual autonomy. Once again, the openness to new forms of thought, the cheap, efficient and accurate transmission of ideas through the wonderful machinery of technology (Gutenberg’s printing press,) brought forth an explosion of creativity and propelled Western civilisation forward. Open Source software is a direct descendant of this culture of open thought, as it prizes the same properties and philosophy which form the basis of the driving force of Science.

Openness is a key area of the scientific process which holds our interest here for comparison with Open Source development. Science is the process of verifying or culling hypothesis, and is in essence an open and self correcting system. Because of this, progress occurs at a much faster rate and in a more dependable/trusted fashion. This doesn’t mean that the self correction happens in minute, continuously flowing ‘chunks’. In reality, corrections arise as mini-revolutions, characterized by philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, as paradigm shifts. Nonetheless, over longer periods of time, progress does occur. In many ways, this progress is accidental, as there is often no ‘vision’ or nomenclature to describe where Science is heading, until after it has arrived.

The speed of progress is greatly enhanced by virtue of the fact the practitioners of Science publish not only results, but methodology, and techniques. In programmatic terms, this is equivalent to both the binary and the source code. This not only helps ‘bootstrap’ others into the field, to learn from the examples set, but makes it possible for others to verify or refute the results (or techniques) under investigation. In an almost guided-Darwinian evolutionary fashion, this makes the scientific process a powerful tool for the highlighting, analysis and possible culling of ideas and concepts; less useful ideas and hypothesis die, and likely contenders come sharply into focus. Newton made his famous comment about ’standing on the shoulders of giants’, in part, to indicate that his contributions to human knowledge could not have been achieved solely. He needed the ‘firmament’ beneath him hypothesised, tested and confirmed by generations of scientists, philosophers and thinkers before him, over centuries. With Science, in the medium to long run, all other issues (‘marketing’ and previous acceptance) fall by the wayside, and merit alone is the main attribute of the victorious memes.

By analogy, making the source code available for peer review and extension, is perhaps Open Source’s most powerful advantage as a development methodology. Besides the verification provided by peer review, refutation for issues such as security is possible, learning of techniques by new practitioners is a great advantage, as is modification and redistribution of the code under similar conditions. It makes it possible for anyone who has a background in, or can acclimatise to the technology and skills required, to continue development, extending the code into whatever direction that they need. This, in turn can be plowed back into the original system, causing eddies of strengthening feedback. This results in an ever growing base (or firmament) of quality code, upon which more and more programmers can benefit from, and contribute back to. The open communication of source and ideas, while progressing slowly at first, builds momentum as more and more practitioners learn from, extend or revive from obscurity, more and more code.

Another facet of similarity between Open Source and Science, is the respective cultures. Both are strongly technical, perhaps verging on the geeky, and both are meritocracies. A large part of the impetus of scientists is the applause of others. Peer recognition is also perhaps the single most important reason attributed by Open Source advocates and developers as to the reason why they pursue Open Source methods of software construction. Finally, much like the contemporaneous invention of the printing press helping propel Science, the Internet has provided both the human inter-communication and resultant software distribution vehicle, to help catalyse the Open Source process.

This chain of attributes and contingencies which made Science perhaps the most effective and pervasive of successful human endeavors, is finding resonant similarities in the burgeoning success of the Open Source process and may help explain its rise and rise.

I saw this on the freenet site the other day.  Made me smile.

Google’s Open Source team has donated US$18,000 to the Freenet Project to support the ongoing development of the Freenet software (thanks again Google!).

Their last donation funded the db4o project, which has now been merged into Freenet, greatly improving performance for large download queues while reducing memory usage, amongst other benefits.

We are currently working on Freenet 0.8, which will be released later this year, and will include additional performance improvements, usability work, and security improvements, as well as the usual debugging. Features are not yet finalized but we expect it to include Freetalk (a new anonymous web forums tool), a new Vista-compatible installer for Windows (that part will be out in a few days), and hopefully Bloom filter sharing, a new feature enabling nodes to know what is in their peers’ datastores, greatly improving performance, combined with some related security improvements.

I really want to make this an enjoyable summer.  Cruise around, see new places, wander out into the woods a bit more, maybe see Bar Harbor again…  Stuff like that.  Also stop taking the red line into work everyday.  That thing is a sweat box in the summer.  I am happy to say I’ve purchased my first new vehicle.  A 2009 Honda CRF230M.  Inexpensive, great on gas and fun to zip around on.  It’s a little light in the ass and underpowered on the highway but other than that an all around great bike.  Can’t wait to take it on some trails!  Here’s a pic.  (Yes that is a penguin on the helmet.)

i’ve been lurking on the freenet developers list.  they have just switched over to git for a version control system.  check out this very interesting project at their github profile.

this project is worth keeping an eye on.