Reading the Wired News discussion of the upcoming review of DCMA, reminded me of an exchange I had with Lawrence Lessig that ended in a letter to the editor of Industry Standard (Lessig was writing a regular piece for them at the time).
The quirk in DCMA is that it doesn’t say anything about the quality of the technology used to keep data locked up. You can use the dumbest encyprtion algorithm in the world, but I could still be breaking the law by trying to figure out which dumb algorithm you used.
Stephen Ambrose passed away today. I hope he is remembered for his great contribution in making important parts of American history accessible to a broad audience. I espencially appreciated his ability to provide a voice for people who were involved.
If you want to read more serious work by Stephen, I suggest “Americans at War”, a book of short essays. It differs from his recent books in that more of his own opinions and beliefs show through.
Very interesting note by John Robb about the role of the 14.4K modem in the rise of the Internet and Web as we know them today. He makes some excellent points, provoking thoughts on two points.
The first is to look at why the Web succeded in a 14.4 world, while other things fail with similar capabilities. One great example in the US is the total bust over the last few years of web-like data services to wireless phones.
Lots of action at Digital ID World today (Denise has some good coverage).
All of the focus right now is on the ID of people. This is a piece of the puzzle, but we need to figure out how devices fit into the picture as well. I certainly want to have certain properties in my relationship with devices I get data from or control the overall environment through. More to come on this, I bet it’s going to be a bigger topic at this conference next year.
A nice compendium of Blog Software.
GM’s skateboard concept car is too cool. Based on my experience I have a hard time believing that GM will make the big play and open it up as a platform for other’s to innovate on, but you never know!
Ray Ozzie on Software Platform Dynamics. Must read if you’re in the software business…
Interesting article from the LA Times about Lawrence Lessig…
Wired talks about companies banning IM in the workplace. This seems really short sited - I think a much more thoughtful approach is to setup an internal IM system (ala Jabber or Groove or something) and then look into securing bridges to the external world.
Unless of course these companies are also blocking all email and US Postal mail, in which case they are at least being consistent!
I am in awe of the inner strength of this country. We could be in a very different place today. Everything’s not perfect, but in many ways I’ve feel we’ve grown stronger.
God Bless America