I don't often read Spiked mostly because I'm too busy trying to keep up with all the technology. But every time I do I'm enormously impressed with the quality of writing and the level of research that goes into it. And because they frequently take a contrary line to the more immediate media. This one is excellent and poses some serious questions. America's axis-tential crisis President Bush's 'axis of evil' tells us far more about the USA than about Iraq, Iran or North Korea.

The one annoying thing about the website is the tiny font they use for the main body text, but that's easily dealt with.

Here we go again. "Dear Yahoo! Groups Members, The service is down for maintenance. During this time the web site will be unavailable and all email will be queued. All email sent during this time should be delivered once service has resumed, but further delays may occur due to backlog. Please do not resend email to your group. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. The Yahoo! Groups Plumber"

The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference promises to be one of the best conferences of the year. So how do I get myself to it?

I've been vaguely watching Userland's latest corner turn, the beginnings of the Radio Community Server. It looks like it's time to see if non-Userland clients can play too.   

So the latest version of War in Afghanistan is not over yet. Perhaps we should remember that the Russians were there for 10 years and eventually got their asses kicked out. Just like every other invader in the last Millenium. So how long will the US stay there?

With all the shenanigans around Morpheus, I thought it was about time I go and check out Gnutella again. One download and install of Bearshare later, I was up and running and collecting a Timo Maas track. I have to say that Gnutella still has this "not quite ready for primetime" feel about it. It does basically work, but in Bearshare there's still a bit too much weird parameter setting going on. I know plenty of people who would manage to screw this up due to lack of technical knowledge and some weird home firewall that someone else setup. Interesting that even Bearshare has a Heart of Iron as it's first point of call as it tries to find an entry point to the network is three Bearshare.com servers. Making a genuinely distributed starting point is a non trivial problem. And as long as there are persistent initial starting points, they will be attacked either legally or technically.

I haven't done a "what's playing" blog for ages. Well yesterday I had one of those marathon tech days where you reboot Windows endlessly trying to get networking to work. The scary moment is when everything's apparently up but you have no DNS, despite being able to ping both DNS servers. Lots of dead chicken waving going on, in fact I was right out of dead chickens and ended up waving a dead albotross. And all because NTL Cable has a DHCP server that ties a lease not to the cable modem but to the Ethernet card behind the modem. So if one setup works, swapping to another machine won't work until the lease expires in 4 hours.

Anyway, I digress. In the background, was an early Global Underground CD of Paul Oakenfold in NY, followed by the Carl Cox compilation on one of those Essential Mix sets, and finally Fila Brasilia "Another late night". I find this sort of Dance quite soothing on low, even though it's designed for playing at 11. 

Here's a completely unretouched (hah!) photo that's been discovered of Buzz Aldrin, on the moon wearing his Masonic apron and sash, thus proving once and for all that the Moon landings were faked by people manipulating us for their own dark eldritch purposes. When you realize that the word NASA contains two pyramids, all becomes clear.

The Austin Chronicle Screens: Information Wants to Be Worthless : The Net is becoming the planet's water cooler. It's all about the schmoozing and the gossip Great, great, great article by Bruce Sterling.

Metafilter | Comments on 15214 : Today with the release of Morpheus Preview Edition, now connected to the Gnutella network, you can witness its 345 trillion (sic) users put the Gnutella network to the test. In a little over a couple hours it has grown to roughly 3 times the size it was last week, and still going strong.. how much bigger can it get? A CNET comparison has Bearshare being the most effective at finding songs. Presumably Morpheus will now match it. The one issue I have with Gnutella is that in my experience, it expands to fill your bandwidth. That's not so good if you're on a cable modem or DSL where the small print says "no servers". Your're drawing attention to yourself.

Truly excellent analysis of the recent Dvorak kerfuffle.The Register : Even our favorite blogs are unapologetically self-referential. Dan links to Dave and Doc and Glen. Dave links to Dan and Doc and Glen. Doc links to "new">JoHo, and so do Dave and Dan. Yup, that's the old "Via Trail"

Need a Dead Man's Switch to blow the whistle electronically and encrypt the evidence, if you don't sign in periodically? Well here it is from ArsWare: (It ain't your mama's software). Dead handy for the corporate desktop. Just don't forget to turn it off for the two week break in the summer.

Meatball Wiki: ConflictResolution : Collected on this page are some techniques to resolve [online] conflict.

Especially AssumeGoodFaith.

There's a CERT Advisory about a potential exploit in PHP. If you don't have access to php.ini or are unable to get your hosting company to upgrade PHP, create a .htaccess file in the root of your htdocs area. Include in it these lines.  

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
   php_flag file_uploads             off
</IfModule>  

This will disable file uploading which is a key part of the vulnerability. It will of course also prevent you from using file uploads.

Scripting News reports Mike Gray found an even lighter Google. I really like the IE extension that converts the Search button into a link to Google. Check this page for other options.

What does the Internet sound like? You might as easily ask what is the sound of humanity or the world. The difference is that the computer readable nature of the net means that we have a chance of tracking it. If you try and look and listen at the level of the individual, clearly it's a cacophony. But as you look at a greater and greater scale, both of groups of participants and of time, patterns emerge. Here's a few.

There's definitely a 24 hour cycle in a 7/4 time signature (1-5-1 or 2-5)

There are several waves of attention that sweep across the net. As a Meme rises it attracts more and more activity, peaks and then dissipates. Blogdex, Daypop are good places to watch this.

These "Meme Waves" work on different timescales. From "Linux" to "All Your Base" to "Russian ice-dancing scores" we've moved from decades to months to days.

This is only a first superficial look. Further analysis is left as an exercise for the enterprising student. ;-)

William Gibson pictured all this activity as a 3D landscape that could be viewed from the God's Eye position or flown into and examined in greater and greater detail. The major landmarks were relatively static but it was possible to visualize the data flows along the US NE and zoom in right down to a single packet. I'm suggesting a synesthaesia where instead it is experienced aurally and maybe in a non-representational visual form as well.

Take a bass riff. Big events of the order of magnitude of Sept11 change the time signature. Smaller events change the chord progression. Very small events tweak the resonance control and the proportions of the harmonics. Is this beginning to sound the progressive changes in whale song over the years? (and what do whales sing about?)

I don't like going back and editing previous posts, but I really must pay more attention to the spelnig bfore hittng the save & publish button. Ah, well. Maybe it'll encourage me to build a spell checker into the blog part of my desktop blog and news publishing thingy.

I finally got fed up with clicking on links to "About:blank" and changed some code in my desktop RSS aggregator to use the feed.link when an item.link is missing.

On the next collection run a whole load of items came to the top of the list because my data cache of items depends on looking for uniqueness partly on item.link. And of course, most of them were from Radio sources that use 0.92 RSS and don't send an item.link at all, at all.

And that reminded me that the Radio item.description doesn't include the permalink "#" that most Radio users leave in the default theme. So when I want to blog a comment about one of these people's posts, I have to scratch around on their site trying to find the entry and then the permalink, so that I can post a link back to them. Hey ho! But then,

"We don't need no steenking permalinks"

Morpheus' File-Trading Fiasco So I hope I've got this straight. Kazaa upgraded it's software to 1.5. This changed the way authentication worked. Previously if the central authentication servers shut down, an individual peer just checked in with the nearest Supernode it knew about. But with 1.5, the peer had to check in to the central machine. So 1.3 users got shut out of the system. I had exactly this happen with grokster so I downloaded a new copy and everything was hunky dory again. But Morpheus was slow in getting the 1.5 client out so all it's users were shut out. The problem with all this is the reliance on a central server. Not least because a major part of the defence against the RIAA law suits is that there is no central server.

The Kazaa group is in a cleft stick with this. On the one hand they need their proprietary protocol for the business plan. On the other hand, having a proprietary protocol means they need some centralization and this opens them up to legal attack.

I cannot imagine the RIAA backing down, despite their recent reversal requireing them to prove they owned copyright on files shared on Napster. And they've got a lot more money than the Kazaa group. So I still maintain that they are better off cutting their losses and making the protocol public domain. The Kazaa system is a significant improvement on plain old Gnutella (as it's currently built) and it's time we had some 3rd party alternatives for the clients. And if this happened we could ditch the need for central servers completely. I'm actually surprised no-one has reversed engineered it, or at least I haven't been able to find anyone.

Guardian | Egg delivers money transmission by email : Some 10m customers of Microsoft's Hotmail service will be able to email money to each other by next month as part of a new service to be offered by Egg, the internet bank. Hmm? Egg plus Microsoft go after Paypal.