So got an email from Brett Roberts @ Microsoft this evening saying he wanted to stick an op-ed piece he did for Computerworld up on the web but he didn't have anywhere to put it. Now usuall I'd be a snarky little bastard and remind Brett that his company has a blogging platform (Live Spaces) which they must have invested oodles into and maybe he should start blogging..... but instead I volunteered to post his piece up here. So herewith the piece that Brett did for Computerworld alongside Don Christie from the NZOSS. The opinions below are not mine (except where I am quoted) but I do share some similar sentiments and I was on the 'Yes please' side of the ledger in the whole OOXML process.

Computerworld Q&A

1.       Why should we care about global standards, or in this case the debate around Open XML?

The Office Open XML format is gaining momentum. There are literally thousands of developers already building applications which utilise or interoperate with the current Ecma 376 standard across a variety of platforms including Linux, Windows, Mac OS and Palm OS. These span the industry from big players like Apple, IBM and Novell to innovative companies in New Zealand like Intergen.

In the past, document formats have been closed and this has caused problems for developers but it’s also been an issue for companies and government organisations who need to retain long-term access to information stored in those documents. Opening up the document formats via a published and freely-available specification is a great step forward. Placing that specification under the stewardship of the International Organisation for Standardization - ISO – is even more significant for the broad IT community because it means the standard is permanently in the public domain and subject to the strict controls and processes of the independent International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

2.       What are the benefits or otherwise of Open XML to New Zealand businesses and the New Zealand public?

The Open XML specification empowers developers to create a host of new innovations for customers.  Chris Auld, Intergen’s Director of Strategy and Innovation says, “having an internationally documented standard such as Office Open XML allows innovative New Zealand companies such as Intergen to reach a global audience.

Demonstrating this, Intergen has announced it groundbreaking new software product TextGlow. A world-first, TextGlow allows users to view Office Open XML Word documents without having to download them, irrespective of whether or not they have Microsoft Word or any other Microsoft Office application installed.

“TextGlow is a unique product combining Office Open XML and Silverlight for the first time,” says Auld. “Microsoft Office documents have traditionally required software to be installed on the local machine. The new XML- based file format, coupled with Silverlight, has allowed us to make documents viewable directly through users’ web browsers. We are already cross platform on Windows and Macintosh and hope to be supporting Linux in the next couple of months.” 

With many organisations storing documents in web based document management systems such as SharePoint products and technologies, a quick preview of documents within the browser will boost productivity significantly.

In addition, a recent blog by Jan van den Beld, former Secretary General of Ecma International in Geneva, http://janvandenbeld.blogspot.com/2008/02/six-benefits-you-can-get-from-isoiec.html  highlights six  key benefits to Open XML. In brief:

1. Transfer of control

2. Transfer stewardship

3. Chance for industry and implementers:

4. Evolution of the standard

5. Interoperability

6. Conformance and interoperability testing

3.       Why is a standard for legacy documents required in light of the fact that Microsoft has just published the specs for those documents?

The rigorous technical review associated with the standards process is making it possible for Open XML to support an ever broadening set of requirements.

OpenXML is built around a small number of really important design goals. Top of the list is the goal of being able to represent existing binary documents in an XML based mark-up. To achieve this you have to have a document standard that fully represents all of the elements that are in those existing binary documents. OpenXML is the only document standard capable of doing this. Other document standards would have to be extended beyond their design goals to provide this capability.

The publishing of the binary file formats is an additional piece of the jigsaw puzzle that ensures the availability of all Microsoft Office documents for generations to come. Providing the capability for developers today to fully understand the Microsoft Office binary files will encourage both a rich array of tools to convert files to the new OpenXML format, and create additional opportunities for a limited subset of customers to just archive existing documents in their current format. This is especially  important to some customer groups, the legal community for example.

To ensure that documents are protected for generations to come organisations like the British Library and the US National Library of Congress have stepped up to act as digital archivists of the binary file format specifications. Sitting side by side with OpenXML as an ISO standard we now have an environment where documents are truly open and access to them can be guaranteed in perpetuity.

4.       If Open XML is rejected as a global standard, what will it mean for businesses and the public?

I don’t think we’ll know initially but over time strong opponents of Office Open XML will lobby governments in particular, to adopt technology procurement preferences which favour ODF-based solutions.

As a taxpayer, I’m not convinced that removing choice will increase innovation, increase competition and therefore lower costs. I suspect the opposite will happen. More concerning is the fact that there are tens of thousands of highly-skilled programmers in New Zealand who build innovative technology solutions and are quickly becoming known in the global marketplace. We should be offering them more opportunities to win export dollars– not less.

5.       Why not just one standard for all?

There are many reasons. Firstly, Office Open XML and ODF were built with very different design goals in mind. The argument that we only need one ISO standard document format makes as much sense as saying we only need one ISO standard programming language.

The “one standard for all” concept makes the assumption that the first standard “out of the starting blocks” will encompass current and future needs. It’s a tenuous argument.

And a report published by the Burton Group in January of this year agrees, stating that ODF is insufficient for complex real-world enterprise requirements...and...libraries and large businesses, faced with storing and using years of Microsoft Office legacy documents, will prefer OOXML, as OOXML can more faithfully recreate the look and metadata (such as spreadsheet formulas) stored in Microsoft’s binary file formats.

6.       Why does open XML not include macros, scripting, OLE serialisation, and leave so much to be "application-defined"?

Competition between Office Automation suites has always been an important factor in driving much of the innovation that we enjoy in the industry and as users today. The process to standardise OpenXML is a process to standardise the data format, not an application. Standardising the full application would remove the ability for different office applications to compete with each other and slow that pace of innovation.

Macros are a great example of this point. They’re an application behaviour that is unique to Microsoft Office. Macros provide the user with a way of telling the Office Suite what to do with information once it is loaded into memory. Standardising the macro language from Microsoft Office as part of the OpenXML process would force any future applications that implemented the data format to also implement the same macro language. In reality other applications may choose to implement a wide array of other macro or development languages that are more relevant to their own target users. 

7.       Should governments adopt OOXML as a document standard?

 Absolutely. Government use the older binary formats today along with Office Open XML, PDF, HTML, RTF and TXT files. Government, like all customers, choose the best tool for the job and Office Open XML offers them another option. Government is also dealing on a daily basis with Office Open XML documents being sent to them by individuals and businesses and it seems to me that adopting it as a standard makes sense from a purely pragmatic perspective.

So it's not official yet, but, things seem to be leaking like a sieve.

Undy Updegrove has details of what looks to be the final vote. http://consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080401033558908

I'm looking forward to moving our products to support OOXML and to continuing to participate in the development of this standard.

Result of voting

P-Members voting: 24 in favour out of 32 = 75 % (requirement >= 66.66%)

(P-Members having abstained are not counted in this vote.)

Member bodies voting: 10 negative votes out of 71 = 14 % (requirement <= 25%)

Approved

"I am deeply concerned that some national bodies have considered approving DIS29500 'in their national interest'. It is not in the interest of the UK or any other country for DIS 29500 to be published as an international standard in its present form as there are a significant number of unresolved issues, including incompatible licensing conditions, single vendor interest and control as well as those other factors uncovered since the original comment period closed."

He concludes by urging the BSI not to change its stance on OOXML."

"There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk. Nonetheless, following the close of the ISO-BRM meeting in Geneva, SFLC's clients and colleagues have continued to express uncertainty as to whether the OSP would adequately apply to implementations licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In response to these requests for clarification, we publicly conclude that the OSP provides no assurance to GPL developers and that it is unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation, whether under the GPL or another free software license."

Feel free to take a look at the comments to the last post as this is a followup. You may want to ignore the snipey content devoid comments from our friend in the NZOSS community.

Herewith a follow up post that hopefully addresses the substantive questions that were actually raised (thanks Stu)

Sorry for the delay. I've been busy trying to get a high quality specification progressed through the ISO standards process. Oh and I've also managed to get outside to do some skiing in the Montana backcountry.

The issue is that the GPL aims to enforce the distribution of any derived work under the GPL also.

I do not want to release my applications under the GPL and inparticular I do not want to release any Open Source code I write under the GPL as I do not believe in the 'Copyleft' philosophy to which it subscribes.

Now that's fine. As a general rule I avoid GPL code like the plague (we do use LGPL code in some of our products). In fact our contracts at Kognition included a clause requireing neither party to the agreement to provide GPL code to the other.

So the question then comes to can I implement ODF without having to derive my work from any GPL based code.
My feeling is that even looking at the code for say OpenOffice will get me into trouble.
Likewise decompiling the code will be problematic.

I am actually comfortable reverse engineering by observation for features like 'blink', I do not believe that is going to breach copyright in the work.

But the question is, will reverse engineering by observation be sufficient. And to be honest I just don't know the answer to that question. I don't really see myself spending that much time working with ODF as I tend to agree with The Burton Report as to its likely levels of adoption and indeed the likely market segments to adopt it- selling software to people who are philosophically opposed to paying for software is unlikely to be a sustainable business. That said I did find a very interesting bit of commentary on the web about just this problem quite recently.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.8/gnumeric-1.8.shtml

"The Gnumeric team does not envision using the OpenDocument Format as its native format.

The spreadsheet part of ODF, in its current form, is ill defined and has many, many problems. For example: (1) there is no meaningful discussion of what functions a spreadsheet should support and what they should do. Without that, there is little point in trying to move a spreadsheet from one program to another; (2) there is no provision for sharing formulas between cells; (3) there is no implementation -- writing an ODF exporter consists of reverse-engineering OpenOffice to see what parts of the standard it can handle. (Note: the preceding comments relate to the spreadsheet part of ODF only; we do not have an informed opinion on ODF for word processing documents, for example.)

We may revisit this decision in the future, should the situation improve. In the meantime, we will strive to maintain a reasonable importer and exporter."

Those guys look to have actually broached the problem and to be honest that kinda answers my question. If I can't realisitically use ODF without reverse-engineering OpenOffice then I'm pretty much stuffed in terms of writing a GPL free implementation.

The Standards Meeting last week decended quite quickly into OOXML vs ODF.... a KEY argument from the ODF side was that OOXML was too long- had too much detail.

So here is a question. Is ODF under-specified?

Do any of the implementations of ODF to date implement it *without* including proprietary extensions? As Stephen McGibbon posits- “implementations effectively have no option but to implement proprietary extensions”.

Computerworld (US) have a great article on the whole OOXML standardization row.

This article makes great reading with the following useful points from Jan Van Den Beld.

• Any standard is going to have flaws in it.
  Certainly ODF will have flaws (the inability to represent the billions of historic documents acurately being one of them). Can you imaging the furore had Microsoft and Apple and the legions of Microsoft developers around the world waged war on ODF as it went through the process?
• A long standard isn't necessarily bad- Java was over 8000 pages when Sun submitted it to ECMA. IBM are still a member of ECMA and one is OBLIGED to ask why they didn't kick up such a stink around OOXML as it went theough the ECMA Technical Comittee?
• ECMA and ISO have fast tracked technically similar standards before- the example he gives are DVD formats.
  Multiple, similar standards, while "not a good result, are, because of patent wars, often an inevitable result," he said.
  Of course the war here is not around patents- but if you think that there is any hope of harmonizing OOXML and ODF then just look at the comments from Gary Edwards (he's the Editor of the original ODF standard). “The current memebership of the OASIS ODF TC is clearly and uequivocably on record as opposed to the interoperability the marketplace is screaming for.“

Germany yes with comments

US yes with comments. Voting here. IBM, Oracle, Farance against. IEEE abstaining.

Brazil no with comments. News item on ZDNet. A friend who was at the meeting tells me that this was a decision passed/pushed down from government circles.

I would have simply posted this as a response on the NZ Open Source Society blog. But the requirement for me to register kinda put me off so here goes. This is a direct response to some of the comments in this post from Don Christie. For the record I was at the ENTIRE Standards New Zealand ECMA 376 meeting.

“The tone of this comment was unexpected, and perhaps even libelous to those that participated the two day Standards NZ workshop on OOXML this week.”

As I said to Ken from IBM on Friday..... ‘Is that a legal opinion Don?’. I found the commentary by the NZOSS the most valuable of all the objectors. They had actually done some of their own research and brought along their own expertise. Contrast this with Ken from IBM who basically just read out the same old IBM crap that has been parroted at pretty much every meeting around the world and, of course, having told all that he was not a lawyer Ken then proceeded to proffer an opinion on the intellectual property issues.

I’m pretty comfortable that the comments by Jim and particularly Doug Casement were targeted not at Kiwi folk like the NZOSS or myself.... but rather were targeted at the obvious corporate interests in the room seeking to further their commercial ends. I speak here of course about Microsoft, IBM and Google NZ (if you can call a contract lobbyist ‘Google NZ’).

“Of course the technical debate was rigorous and sometimes very detailed, but it was also valuable as the Mircosoft expert from Redmond, Gray Knowlton, asserted. That was also the direct feedback I received from all members of the SNZ committee present. Indeed, they seemed pleased that the meeting hadn't descended into name calling and zealotry that people like yourself and Rod Drury had been predicting.”

I would agree with Don that the meeting was remarkably well behaved and really didn’t descend into the sort of Black and White bigotry that one might have expected given the participants. I do however continue to note my concern at the obvious hopes of some participants (Don included) that the process might be used as a means to effect competitive change in the market- such matters are not an interest of the ISO standardisation process and I have placed such concerns on the record. I actually felt that the technical conversations didn’t add all that much value over actually just sitting and reading the documentation. In particular I found the IBM technical comments, the ECMA response document and the NZOSS white paper particularly useful. Have read a LARGE amount of documentation on the issue over the past few months I am confident that there were no new major technical issues raised here in New Zealand that have not already been aired elsewhere- I also note that ECMA has publicly committed to resolving these technical issues at the Ballot Resolution meeting stage and that a number of other standards bodies (German and USA on Friday) have voted Yes with Comments on this basis.

“The fact that all the NZ government agencies took the time to consult, run workshops and, come to a common conclusion and to send four representatives to the SNZ workshops is an indication of the importance of this issue, Microsoft and software in general to our country.”

I MUST add a little more detail here. The ‘New Zealand Government Agencies’ were a very interesting bunch. They were certainly well prepared though lacked technical depth and seemed to have a bee in their bonnet around screen readers. They slipped a couple of times (though corrected) into saying they represented the views of the New Zealand Government- something that they clearly did not. The point I want to pick up on here however is that at the end they felt the need to respond to comments by Microsoft that only a small section of Government was represented- said response was by way of reading out some of the agencies involved in their consultation from a list they had carried with them. When I asked the SIMPLE question that this list be added into the Standards NZ record they refused. Their reason? ‘Participation in the workshop by government agencies was confidential’. As such I hardly think that the statement sets out the fact of the matter-certainly the four people at the table reflected the views of ‘some’ of the Government agencies, BUT, the actual extent of their mandate shall remain unknown. I do wonder if an Official Information Act Request might reveal more details. I was, quite frankly, ASTOUNDED at their response to my request to put the participants on the record.

I shall not restate the issue here- If you need to get some context around what I’m about to rant about take a look at this post from Rod and the comments around it.

I was one of the 20 or so attendees at a standards New Zealand meeting to discuss the vote by New Zealand to JTC1 on the ratification of ECMA 376 as an ISO standard.

I’m going to try and quickly remember who was there.

Pat Rossiter from Hyperion Management Services

Tom Robinson from Kowhai Computing

Colin Jackson from Google New Zealand (it.gen.nz is Colin’s personal site, he was there either as a contractor or volunteer for Google. I think he was also one of the Technical Advisors to the Government Agencies working group)

Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia

Richard Donaldson and Liz (last name forgotten) from the New Zealand Computer Society

Three people from IBM (one from Canada, two from NZ)

Three people from Microsoft (one from NZ, one from US, one from Singapore)

Matthew Cruickshank, Don Christie and one other person (who I don’t think said anything the entire time- he was in charge of stopping Matthew’s laptop going into power save mode while he gave a  presentation though which was useful) from the NZ Open Source Society

Four people from The ‘New Zealand Government Agencies’.

Myself J representing Intergen

Peter Lambrechsten from Novell (although Peter told me on Friday that he wasn’t actually representing Novell views but rather his own... not quite sure what all that was about really...)

There were also plenty of people there from Standards NZ.

The meeting was very well behaved and really not the sort of OSS vs Microsoft death match that you’d think it might have turned into.

It started out with some introductions from the COO of Standards and then an introduction to the whole ISO/IEC JTC1 structure by Nelson Proctor of standards. I asked Nelson if he could explain the relationship between ECMA and JTC1 and he ended up going on a bit of a diatribe about how ECMA is not a ‘real’ standards body.... which wasn’t particularly useful. What I was really trying to have explained was the details around the ECMA liaison with JTC1 and thus the Fast Track process. I probably should have pushed back a bit harder but it was the first question of the day.....

We then kicked of proceedings proper with a discussion of 5 questions (3 on Thu and 2 on Fri) + a ‘What is good for NZ Inc’ session on Friday afternoon.

The questions were those from the Free Software Foundation here (my Foxit PDF Reader is failing on cut and paste so I can’t paste the actual Standards NZ ones). Basically of the Free Software Foundation questions we covered verbatim #1, #2, #3, #4, #6. The question of Dual Standards, #5, was covered several times through the other questions.

The process for each question was basically Microsoft and IBM got to have a say and then it was basically a roundtable of questions and comments. This ranged from detailed discussion around technical points to simply reading out a prepared statement.

Ken Matheson presented for IBM and Gray Knowlton for Microsoft.

I’m going to post on each of the questions separately as I get time over the next couple of days- I’m feeling a bit crook with a cold and cut my days skiing at Cadrona very short @ about 1:30pm because I was feeling very broken.

This site is proudly blocked by the Great Firewall of China....

I guess I'm jst a little too subversive for them.

Test your own site here:

http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/test/

Well done to those who eschewed the ethnicity brackets in this years Census.

New Zealander has been reported as a seperate category.

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411749/916391 it got 11%

Another post on Intellectual Property for y'all.

So recently Microsoft and Novell did a deal whereby they will collaborate and cooperate to make SUSE Linux and Windows work better together. Importantly it also provides for patent indemnity for users of SUSE Linux and non-commercial contributors to SUSE (and by proxy other Linux distros).

So you'd think this would be a good thing, right?

Well it seems that the chunk of the open source community have their knickers in a twist over it.

I guess, to a degree, it all comes down to whether you support software patents or not. Now this is indeed a highly controversial area, but, as a talented software developer I fail to see why innovation in our field should be any less deserving of patent protection than say engineering or biotechnology.

Yet that's what the folks on the Samba team seem to be suggesting. Their opinion isn't just that open source software and patent rights do not go together, for the MS/Novell deal shows that they quite happily do. Instead they are quite vehemently opposed to software patents altogether.

Now I'm not always a huge fan of those enforcing their so called rights (see here on trademarks and parallel importing for example) and we should certainly be discussing and criticising the bredth of some of the patents that have been awarded by IP offices around the world- software and business process patents being the worst examples in many cases. But, a few bad apples or a bad interpretation of scope does not render software patents bad, per se.

We have patents for a reason, to encourage and reward innovation. They are a VERY powerful right to be able to enforce and as such we should be careful when awarding them, but, I really struggle to see why software should be any different to any other technological pursuit- people should be rewarded for genuine innovation. 

I'm having some interesting discussions here:

http://www.vorb.org.nz/ftopicp-1055971.html

about the laws surrounding parallel importing. Specifically as they relate to the territorial exhaustion of trade marks. May be interesting for some of you PoliTechLaw-ites

Google now has a Code specific searching mechanism...

“

Syntax and Examples (more about regexp syntax)
regexp	Search for a regular expression go{2}gle  hello,\ world  ^int printk
"exact string"	Search for exact string "compiler happy"
file:regexp	Search only in files or directories matching regexp file:\.js$ XMLHttpRequest  file:include/ ioctl file:/usr/sys/ken/slp.c "You are not expected to understand this."
package:regexp	Search packages with names matching regexp. (A package's name is its URL or CVS server information.) package:perl Frodo  package:linux-2.6 int\ printk
lang:regexp	Search only for programs written in languages matching regexp lang:lisp xml  lang:"c++" sprintf.*%s
license:regexp	Search only for files with licenses matching regexp. license:bsd int\ printf   -license:gpl heapsort

“”

Dare has posted a PR about MSN Spaces now being the largest blogging system on the net.

This kinda got me thinking.

There's all this MSFT vs Google stuff at the moment. MSN Search (or whatever the %*&%$ they are calling it this week) vs Google. Wil Google become the next Microsoft... blah blah blah....

And it's all got me thinking. Who cares about search really anyway.

I mean search is now such a fundamentally ubquitous internet feature that it's almost becoming genericized beyond commercialisation. What I mean to say is that I think it's going to become harder and harder to make search make money.

How many of you actually ever click a Google Ad Link on Googles site?

I find that really the only time I click em is on other peoples real estate. And I think that's quite important. The battle for the years ahead is not around search but rather it's around controlling the channel by which others deliver their content. To this end Yahoo, MySpace and even MSN have a big jump on Google in my opinion.

Peter Jones of sometimes Dot Net User Group has launched a new more politically oriented Blog site.

Vent

“Vent is here to help.  Use it to have a random rant.  Blow off some steam and get it out of your system.  Send a warning to others.  Enlist an army to take on the ‘system’.  Let people know where you have had bad service, seen a crappy over-hyped movie, witnessed some road rage… whatever you like.   Things may not change but you’ll feel a lot better for it.”

Looks like it's gonna be a hoot.

Ever seen a REALLY nasty SQL Injection attack in action.

Check this out.

http://www.rockyh.net/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=7a7542fd-f95b-40c6-b464-c30e560dd90d

Includes a demonstration of how to script an SQL injection attack to do a bitwise determination of any field in the vulnerable database too.

This is MUST WATCH material.

So the govt. has announced that they will unbundle the local loop. For those non techies among you what this means is that organizations other than Telecom NZ will be able to place equipment in Telecom's phone exchanges and plug the copper wires that run to your house into their own equipment.

The argument for doing this is that it will encourage more investment in broadband in New Zealand- that it will, but, it will be utterly the wrong type of investment.

I really fail to see how having 3rd parties spend millions of dollars putting their own DSLAMs into the exchanges can be considered good use of the limited pool of broadband investment dollars in this country.

The primary issues with Telecom and ADLS at the moment are

1. Backhaul capacity (Easy to regulate a fix)
2. Requirement to have a voice phone line to use ADSL.
   This is really a the primary block to competition in the local lines market. Let people have broadband without a phone line and you'll see heaps of new VOIP based local line providers pop up. (Easy to regulate)
3. Connection service times, price etc.... all easily regulated

It seems REALLY stupid to me that we're going to have what limited capital resources we have in New Zealand being spent on duplicating what is perfectly functional hardware in the exchanges. We should be finding ways to encourage investment in new infrastructure- the stuff that will be replacing copper phone lines. ULL does just the opposite. We want people to invest in laying fiber, deploying wimax etc... not putting more DSLAMs into phone exchanges

[Disclosure]
Most of the rest of the package seems great- things like preventing predatory pricing etc....FWIW: I am not a customer of Telecom NZ and have not been for a long time. I have a TelstraClear Cable Internet connection at home. No phone line and use FX networks to provide VOIP telephones for my Wellington office.
As of yesterday afternoon @ $4.73 my company is a shareholder in Telecom NZ. A 14% odd dividend yield from an NZ Blue Chip is just too good to pass up.

THe ACT Party have moved their website from JSP to .NET.

Gavin has the details here, here and here.

Sounds like they are doing lots of REALLY cool shit such as dynaimically generated RSS feeds- i.e. do a search and then save the search as an RSS feed.....

“Making the switch to a Microsoft product isn't an issue of ideology, it's just that .Net is a great platform for doing the stuff we want to do. Rodney loves the Open Source, but our existing platform had a couple of really frustrating bugs. So we rebuilt it.”

Amen Brother!

Could have given the UI a bit more of a makeover though....It's not immediatly obvious how I use all the whiz bang features.

of IP data... and I wanted to travel from Hangzhou China to Wellington, NZ I'd try to take a nice direcdt route.

But OH NO. Just did a trace route from here to TRademe.

We went through 30 hops to get there. But get this. We went

China (China Telecom)->Japan (Sprint) -> USA (Sprint) -> Australia (AT&T) -> F'ing Japan Again (AT&T) -> NZ

Would the telcos in this world PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE sort your shit out. You are f'ing up the internet for the rest of us.

FWIW a trace to Telecom.co.nz looks to come directly through a Telecdom Global Gateway router here in China in 20 hops.....

— Ken Pier, Xerox PARC

His book is availbale for pre order here.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321336437/nova-20

Well... I was really looking florward to watching this. Much as I loathe the politics of JC I think he's quite a good journalist. But... his new TV show SUCKED THE FAT ONE for the first night out.... and that Max Cryer thing! What was the producer thinking!

Rating for Mr JC... 4/10

DPF is discussing the fact that the TelstraClear depeer decision seems to have killed TradeMe.

Stupid Stupid telcos....

Bruce Schneier has a detailed post on the recent cryptanalytic attack on SHA1.

It's still not an easy task... but they have significantly lowered the bar for brute force attack.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/15.html#a9204

Scoble has been fanning the flames around the copyright nature of blog material. Wearing my techno-legal guy hat for two secs... how about incorporating some sort of license metadata into the RSS standard... that's what XML is for isn't it? It's eXtensible for a reason.

This would allow publishers to indicate to aggregators how their content may be used- it's almost like DRM but without the big stick. Like an advanced form of robots.txt. It could allow things such as a copyright/attribution notice to be appended and so forth.

Scoble posted on the Spyware problem in Windows.

It's a pretty simple problem to solve- build virus and spyware protection.

So... why hasn't MS done this? Simple! Three letters D O J.

The anti trust implications of MS bundling virus protection are huge. The 'new look' Microsoft (of which Scoble is serious flag bearer) will not stand up against the US Anit Trust laws any more- been there, tried that, got bitten in the ass once already. Result- piss poor Virus protection baked into the OS. Who loses... you guessed it... Joe Public.

Me..? I say %%$&^$ 'em.... bundle it anyway- this has to be the most blatant case of Anti Trust hurting the consuming public that I have ever seen.

Berend de Boer another ACT supporting software engineer has