Blue Sky On Mars

Noam Chomsky writes ProjectCensored.org: “They fall in a domain in which corporate-state interests are rather different from those of the public. That such stories would tend to be downplayed, reshaped, and obscured â014″censored,” in the terminology of the projectâ014is only to be expected on the basis of even the most rudimentary inspection of the institutional structure of the media and their place in the broader society.” Project Censored looks like a very valuable resource for people who are willing to consider issues that the mass media may not be willing to publicize.

Morpheus is a decentralized Napster clone that works better than Napster itself. It is based on the FastTrack P2P engine. Gnutella, the other major fully distributed network, is quite slow because every node acts as a server and ends up proxying many requests. FastTrack uses SuperNodes to handle the “central server” function. Also very cool is that FastTrack will download from multiple peers simultaneously for added speed.
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Joe Barr writes: What Ximian’s trying to accomplish with Mono, July 27, 2001: “Is Mono a good idea or a disaster? I think it is a worthwhile endeavor, that choice is good, and that we need a free alternative to .NET.” I agree with this. There are some powerful ideas in .NET, and having an open source version is quite important.
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Lawrence Lessig, one of the most active and visible people working to protect American citizen’s rights to content wrote this article: Jail Time in the Digital Age: “Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive.” The article makes a very valid point about how the DMCA gives content makers more rights than they should be allowed.
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Reptile is a new project from openprivacy that allows you to read a bunch of syndicated content and publish your own syndicated links. Looks interesting at first blush, but I need to look a bit more to see if there’s more to it than a headline viewer.

IBM has a 50 page document that is a FAQ designed for new Linux users. This could be a big assistance for someone moving from Windows.

Someone has put together the excellent List of known Spyware. This is software that potentially sends information back to its makers. A good thing to be aware of…

SiliconValley.com – Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: “We’re not against the GPL, Mundie said today. All Microsoft wants is for people to understand the issues, and then make informed choices.” Gillmor’s coverage of this is pretty interesting. Maybe the open source advocates will learn a thing or two about taking a reasonable, balanced approach to debate.
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Slashdot had a mention of a paper describing a system for bonds for open source software. This seems like a viable way to get open source software made. (Not necessarily the only way, mind you.) I’m at a commercial company that is currently working on a to-be-announced open source project… and I fully believe that this undertaking will be a successful one for us.