The v6.2 release of MSN Messenger has some new options on the Actions menu which link to the 3 degrees site. So 3 Degrees has effectively come out of beta.

So what's it all about then? [from: JB Ecademy]

As the USA Presidential campaign reaches a new low (Come on people. Don't you know about Godwin's law?) I have to ask myself, what is it about Americans and cookies?

Watch out! Incoming mass hack attack

So here's what the internet has finally come to. An unpatched flaw in MS IIS has been used to attack some major websites. This turns them into infection points for Internet Explorer users via an unpatched flaw in IE6. Some of these sites are rumoured to be major banking, shopping and shopping comparison sites. The irony here is that even if you had been religiously patching web servers and IE6 installations you're still at risk because there's no patch available for either part. The virus has not yet made it into Anti-Virus packages. The only solution is to change browser. And you can bet that at least one of those sites is IE6 specific and doesn't work without IE6.

Or maybe it's all just an urban myth. Move along. Nothing new to see here. Stop using IE6. Switch to Firefox/Opera/Mozilla. Or buy a Mac. Stop using IIS. Switch to Apache. Or buy a Mac. [from: JB Ecademy]

[from: JB Ecademy]

There's a huge amount of information on the web that is deliberately closed to the search engines. This is either because it's in odd formats, or that the owners have excluded the database from search engines. Or sometimes that the database navigation means that Search engines ignore it. Or that these sites have nobody linking in to them and so are never found.

Invisible-web.net - Searchable databases and specialized search engines Is a site that attempts to build a directory to these resources. Most of the sites allow free access and a link is provided both to the site's home page and to the search page within the site.

The Invisible Web resources we've selected range from a searchable bibliography about African Elephants to a road construction database for U.S. highways. From a database of Canadian statistics to an interactive calendar of events at the world's leading art museums. It's an eclectic collection, but we feel that every resource included represents one of the best sources of information available for its particular subject area.

[from: JB Ecademy]

I've just uploaded the first cut of a php FOAF parser for use in applications that need to read FOAF without needing to understand RDF. You can find it here.

Here's the readme. There's a test rig here.

Copyright:

  Original written by Julian Bond 

  This work is in the public domain:

  SEE: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

  So do what you like with it!



Description:

  A general purpose Person Class for use when reading FOAF into 

  non-FOAF aware Applications. It assumes that the FOAF file is a 

  personal profile  document for a single Person. It attempts to locate 

  this person using a  heuristic that works from an explicit PrimaryTopic 

  downwards to guesswork.



  Requires RAP v0.8 http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/rdfapi/

  A cut down copy of RAP v0.8 is included in the zip in the sub-directory

  api/ with unused files commented out in RdfAPI.php. Please note that the

  above license info only applies to this file. RAP has it's own license.



Usage:

  $data = foafPerson_FetchDataCurl($url);

  $thePerson = new foaf_Person($data, $url);

  print "<pre>".print_r($thePerson->values)



Data:

  $thePerson->model gives access to the underlying RAP memmodel

  $thePerson->Person is the single top level person

  $thePerson->values is a sparse array of values of types keyed 

  on the tag name.

  - Literal

  - URI

  - geo

  - Vcard address

  - knows Person



  eg.

  values["name"][0]

  values["weblog"][0]["uri"] or ["title"]

  values["based_near"][0]["lat"] or ["long"]

  values["ADR"][0]["Street"]or["Locality"]or["Region"]

or["Pcode"]or["Country"]

  values["knows"][0]["relationship"] or ["person"] where Person is 

 of the same form as values but without any knows array



Extensions:

  It's fairly easy to add new namespaces into foafPerson_ns() and

  namespace tags into foafPerson_rdfTags() The array of tags has three 

  elements

  [0] associative key into the namespace list

  [1] tag name

  [2] tag type



  New types can be added into the foaf_Person constructor with a 

 corresponding new function to create the array.

Microsoft Research DRM talk Cory Doctorow

This is a beautiful piece of work. It's the transcript of a talk Cory Doctorow from the EFF gave to Microsoft Research about the perils of Digital Rights Management and why MS should keep DRM out of products like Media Player.

The argument comes down to 5 points.

1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Particularly interesting is that last one and uses the example of Sony. During the early days of video recorder's Sony fought back against the entertainment industry and won a judgement that recording programs and tapes was fair use and the manufacturer of the device could not be held responsible for that use. That judgement was instrumental in creating the huge video industry we know today. This time around Sony bought a major entertainment corporation and ever since has been wasting time with a succession of hardware devices that are crippled with DRM. The end result is that they have effectively lost a whole series of markets beginning with the personal music player.

Microsoft is one of the few companies with a media player that is big enough, arrogant enough, independent enough and with enough spare cash to simply stand up to the entertainment industry and stick two fingers in the air. Unlike Apple or Sony, MS don't need an iPod or iTunes to survive.

Anyway, Cory's piece is quite long and detailed but if you're remotely interested in the future of music, video, consumer rights and DRM, you must read it. [from: JB Ecademy]

SWAD-Europe: FOAF Workshop @ DERI Galway (1-2 Sept 2004)

The first two suggestions

# Social network metadata standards
# Trust issues in social networks

mean that this is an important workshop for us. [from: JB Ecademy]

Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer - Lockergnome's Tech News Watch is a well written article by an MCSE.

Rather than accusing me of Microsoft bashing, why not read the article and make you're own mind up.

BTW. Firefox V0.9 is now out. Next week, "Why you should dump Outlook". [from: JB Ecademy]

New Preview Release of Firefox - Lockergnome's Tech News Watch

New releases this week of Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird. [from: JB Ecademy]

Go ahead and vote here. How Many Social Networking Services Do You Actively Utilize? - The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com [from: JB Ecademy]

TheyWorkForYou.com: Is your MP working for you in Parliament? Here's Cory Doctorow's words about it.

TheyWorkForYou.com -- a project from the FaxYourMP team -- has launched today. This is the most amazing, subversive piece of political webware I've ever seen. It scrapes the Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable. It compiles stats of which MPs vote against their parties most often, which ones speak most often, which have made the most motions and so forth. I've been beta-testing it and the code and UI are brilliant. It's like they've poured Parliament into LiveJournal -- and in so doing, have cutg overnment down to a human-addressable scale. We need one of these in every country in the world.

[from: JB Ecademy]

NotCon: golden age of the geekesque

What: NotCon '04 - an informal, low-cost, one-day conference on things that technologies were perhaps not intended to do.

When: 11am-7pm, Sunday June 6th, 2004.

Where: Imperial College Union, Beit Quad, Prince Consort Road, South Kensington SW7 2BB (nearest tubes South Kensington and Gloucester Road).

Cost: £4.00 on the door, £3.00 concessions (ie students, under 18s, journalists, OAPs, the unemployed, any webloggers not covered by one or more of the previous categories).

Also at http://www.xcom2002.com/nc04/

Be there, or be a real person with a life. [from: JB Ecademy]

Like OD2, iTunes, Sony, the new Napster or Allofmp3.com? What was your experience like?

I ask because the BPI has put out a press release that legal online downloading services are turning around the drop in industry revenues. It's the usual glossy half truths!

What you actually get is expensive, DRM protected, low quality, tracks. iTunes makes you jump through hoops to move your music from one device to another. Sony is in their own proprietary ATRAC 3 format so you have to use their software. And as for Napster in the UK, £1.09 per track + £0.99 per burn of the same track. They're havin a larf! I haven't tried OD2 so can't really comment.

Funny that nobody's mentioning allofmp3.com much since the initial burst of publicity. This is the real future of music distribution. $1 per CD, quality encoding (MP3 LAME -standard 192Kb vbr), accurate ID3 tags, no DRM. I've *bought* more music in the last 3 weeks from them than I have through normal channels in the last 3 months. I've spent more on downloads than I did on CDs. And I've stopped messing even with P2P programs like Soulseek as it's so much more convenient, fast and accurate. I really can't fault it.

One of these days maybe the labels will realize that the real problem with their sales is the price. Or maybe not. [from: JB Ecademy]

A thought from the weekend.

Google is very very good at only showing results in what it thinks is your native language. This means that if you speak English and do your search queries in English, you hardly ever see websites in other tongues. This then gives you a distorted view of reality as if the internet is exclusively English and predominantly from the USA. This is not true, even though the USA is still the biggest source of internet content.

So is Google giving us a distorted view of the web and hence of the world? I don't believe that's one of their goals, but it's a curious side effect of them being so good at giving the customer what they want.

There's probably a thesis in here as well about how it re-inforces provincial attitudes world wide but that's another story. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm looking for a set of wiki code that runs on php, mysql and is going to be able to use an external user table for authentication. Can anyone recommend anything?

I've been trying to get phpWiki to work but without success. The changelog for 1.3.10 doesn't fill me with confidence. If you've got some experience of making phpWiki 1.3 work I'd like to talk.

Or should I just give up on php and start looking at perl wikis instead?

Please email me at julian.bond @ voidstar.com if you can help.

Are you a Photoshop expert who fancies a bit of fun work on the side? Are you generally anti the Bush/Blair Axis of Coalition? Then here's a fun little project for you.

Can you fade in Bush and Blair's faces onto this poster or one of the other copies out there on the web?



BTW, there's a new Get Your War On cartoon.
"Come on June 30th! Come on baby! Almost there!
"... Whatever. You know what it's gonna be like in Iraq on June 30th? It's gonna be hot and dusty"
"Maybe. But July 1st is gonna be AWESOME!"

There's a press release doing the rounds from a Harris Interactive Poll called "Kids know downloading music is illegal".

Now IANAL, but I certainly thought that there was nothing illegal in any jurisdiction against downloading. It was uploading and sharing that was (probably) illegal. Or is the BSA claiming that downloading software is the same as the offence of "receiving stolen goods"? If they are then why aren't they pressing charges on that basis? In the USA at least, all the law cases have been against people sharing large numbers of files, not those downloading large numbers of files. And I say "probably illegal" because to my knowledge no case has been brought to trial and so there's no case law anywhere to add weight to their claims.

Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here, but I'm getting really tired of the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and all the other dinosaur pigopolists equating
Fair use == Breaking DRM == Copying == Downloading == Sharing == Stealing

Wouldn't it be better and more accurate to title the article "Kids know sharing music is illegal". [from: JB Ecademy]

Kurt Vonnegut produces one of his wonderful essays that is so filled with sound bites, you almost miss the message. Cold Turkey -- In These Times :

I'll ruin it for you by just quoting the last two lines.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on. [from: JB Ecademy]

Help: I Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do? - Lockergnome's Tech News Watch :
So, you didn't patch the system and it got hacked. What to do? Well, let's see:
You can't clean a compromised system by patching it.
You can't clean a compromised system by removing the back doors.
You can't clean a compromised system by using some 'vulnerability remover'
You can't clean a compromised system by using a virus scanner.
You can't clean a compromised system by reinstalling the operating system over the existing installation.
You can't trust any data copied from a compromised system.
You can't trust the event logs on a compromised system.
You may not be able to trust your latest backup.
If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications).

This advice came from Microsoft Technet.

Are you scared yet? Maybe keeping up with the patches, not opening unknown attachments and not downloading and installing disreputable software is a better option.

Or you could stop using all those "free" Microsoft products and try some alternatives. [from: JB Ecademy]