I have just received my first phishing email in French. Here it is: Monsieur/Madame le possesseur de carte de crédit MasterCard, Nous sommes désolés de vous informer que nous avons dû bloquer temporairement l’accès à votre carte de crédit pour avoir été avisés qu’il avait été compromis par des personnes Read more…
From the same people who brought us the War on Terror, and who has successfully continued to wage the War on Drugs, here comes the War on Piracy. The Commerce Secretary of the United States, Carlos Gutierrez, is appointing the new anti-piracy tsar in the United States. He commented that: Read more…
A light story for Sunday. I met some of the people involved during the OSS 2005 Conference, led by Roland Alton-Scheidl. They are also involved with Creative Commons Austria, and have decided to release open source water. The water comes from a source in Dornbirn, Austria, that has been exploited Read more…
This is an excellent article in PC Magazine (how can that co-exist with Dvorak’s now infamous article?). Microsoft is planning to implement RSS support into their future version of Internet Explorer and Windows (Windows Vista, formerly known as Longhorn). The point of the article is that this could very well Read more…
The International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) has released data announcing that music downloads from licensed providers (that sounds better than legal downloads, doesn’t it?) has trippled in 2005. According to the site: Single track downloads in the US, the UK, Germany and France have risen to 180 million in Read more…
Many of us are familiar with university rankings. There is a new index that ranks universities by their web presence. This index is achieved by a combination of factors. The first is the size, the actual amount of files in each university. Then there is the impact, which is the Read more…
This is perhaps the worst researched column that I have ever read. It is so wrong that it is difficult to choose from many of the statements. Here are some choice pickings: First, Creative Commons is similar to a license. No, it IS a licence. A set of licences to Read more…
More developments in the growing war between Creative Commons and Free Software. There has been an interesting debate in the iCommons list and other lists. The growing animosity between the FS and CC camps have come to a boil at the Copyright 2005 conference, where Richard Stallman launched a fierce Read more…
It has been more than a week since the Commission text of the Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions was defeated 648 to 14 votes, proving that the Commission’s dodgy strategies have failed. This is already old news in the Blogoshpere, but as I missed the entire round of posts the Read more…
I am back from my conference spree in Italy, and I have brought back a good number of ideas. The OSS 2005 was particularly interesting, and I was struck by the presence of many industry representatives, and particularly by the presence of people from the Business Software Alliance, Microsoft and Read more…