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.

Microsoft Support FAQ:How to Remove Linux and Install Windows on Your Computer. Heh!  [thanks, EVHEAD]

Wholesale broadband prices to be 14.75 pounds per month from April 1, BT said. That's more like it. A retail price of £20 pm is within reach of many more people. I'll predict that the wholesale price will drop to £10 and the retail to £15 before the end of the year, at which point demand will explode. Now the big question is whether BT can deliver to meet that demand.

Dan Gillmor : My readers know more than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed. Now there's a scary thought for a mainstream journalist.

A Blogger Manifesto, Dvorak, Another ass-backwards story on blogging, help johhny get a clue, bloggers never criticize one another,  Boy, There's a Whole Lotta Meta-Blogging Going Down today.

When search engines roamed the Earth

"Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you."
"I know what you are."
"I'm indexing your apartment." [LOL and thanks again, bOing bOing]

The MIT Tech Review discovers blogging. So blog this, please. You want it? You got it!

Adbusters: The Zen TV Experiment : For 10 minutes simply count the technical events that occur while you are watching any show.

Interesting. The Nokia D211 combines 802.11b and GPRS in a single PCMCIA card. [thanks, Hack the Planet] Hedging their bets or providing realistic alternatives? You use 802.11 in the city and GPRS at reduced speed when you're out of town?