AlterNet -- CORN: Office of Strategic Lying? :
"So the goal is to maintain a level of doubt regarding all Pentagon statements. It confuses the enemy."

"Doesn't it confuse the American people?"

"We're not at war with the American people, sir."

A judge has ordered the RIAA's members to prove that they own the digital copyrights to the music that circulated in Napster's network. If they can't prove it, they won't have standing in court. Ha ha [thanks, bOing bOing] Seems entirely logical to me. But how hard is it to prove that "Birtney Spews - Whoops, I got pregnant" is actually a rip off from the song and not some satirical dance floor mix?

NTK... answering the age-old question: who was Playmate Of The Month when you were born? Except I'm too old

RICO! There was a interesting rant about standards yesterday on the De-centralization mailing list. Someone was suggesting (only partly in jest) that there really ought to be a RICO racketeering suit brought against the major standards bodies. I think there's a white paper or thesis to be written here on the life cycle of standards and standards bodies. Maybe something like The Hype Curve or The Chasm.

It's been fascinating watching and contrasting the developments of XML-RPC, SOAP/WSDL/UDDI, RSS, ICE/NITF, Jabber, Gnutella, Rosettanet and a few others over the last couple of years. There's a lot of similarities here with the life cycle of online communities. Although that's something of a truism as an active community is a pretty basic requirement for success in a standard. But we still haven't really worked out how to kick start a community to order. And similarly there doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on what it takes to kick start a standard to order.

There's another couple of truisms here that "standards are useless without implementations" and so "There are only de-facto standards". Everything else is just academic (mutual) mind games. Way too many of the standards that Todd was ranting against have no reference implementations or code, let alone an active community of developers pushing implementations forward and in the process validating the standard.

I'm still amazed by the clarity, precision and elegance of the early RFCs. They feel like polished and cut diamonds that have had everything extraneous stripped away. Just enough to get the job done and *no more*. I think we could do worse than go back and review the RFC process and style and apply it to the current efforts.

Don't you just love it when the Net throws this sort of thing up?

Is the Web Services hype curve reaching the tipping point? It certainly seems to be for MS. We get Steve Gillmore in Infoworld;  the media hounds crying wolf again, and again, and IBM releasing WoW (Web Services on WebSphere). And now Verisign want to own Web Services security. You'd think there'd be a third way between MS and Java? But when even Bruce Schneier (who is definitely not stupid) starts talking in the Cryptogram Newsletter about "Microsoft's SOAP" and how tunneling SOAP through firewalls on port 80 is BAD, BAD, BAD, you realize that it's all just noise and there is no reasonable analysis out there. And that's all just a sample from three days. I guess it's time to just put your head down and write some code.

This all seems horribly familiar to me. In the dot-boom (boom) years, you couldn't move for pundits telling everyone about how B2B would be revolutionized by auctions. Or was it procurement. Or maybe private netmarkets. Or that dealing with the last yard delivery problem was the only thing holding back B2C. Or portals, push and P2P. And that stuff was pretty easy to understand technology. This time around we're pumping a technology path that very few people understand.

It's like Burningbird says. Just Deja Vu, all over again!

I woke up this morning wondering what the Internet sounds like.

I started with an Orchestra. The mainstream media are the massed strings playing basically the same melody. The weblogs and private news sites in the woodwind section play a counterpoint. The tech sites in the brass section keep butting in. The analysts are playing the timpani and keep trying to change the tune.

What's strange about the music is that although it plays continuously, musicians keep coming and going. Through the day, the whole orchestra changes as daylight circles the globe. At 6pm GMT it's almost exclusively Californian, but at 6am, it's a glorious mishmash of US nightbirds, Australians and European early risers. At the weekends it plays sotto voce and takes on a more left field, jazzy feel.

Curiously, there are several orchestras playing in adjacent halls, but they can hardly hear each other. Just occasionally somebody opens an adjoining door and a burst of foreign sounds (Samba, Gamelan, The Marseilles or an Oompah Band) breaks through.

But I can't hear a heart beat.

Are The Illuminati watching your computer, and you need to use morse code to blink out your PGP messages on the numlock key LED? Then get Tinfoil Hat Linux, a bootable floppy for accessing your PGP keys on an untrusted PC.

Worried that your next door neighbour is beaming Psychotronic Mind Control Rays at you? Then you need an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie

The Secret Lives Of Numbers Delightfully cool Java Applet that lets you scan the relative popularity of particular integers in text from a large sample of the web.

There's a way of thinking that's developing in the media that to do Web Services you must fall into either the Sun or the MS camp with Java or
.NET. or maybe IBM. The media loves "Battles" between "Titans" as it makes good copy. But does it actually have any relation to the real world?

This totally ignores, Perl, PHP, Python, Apache-SOAP, PocketSoap, Glue, BEA, Borland, Mozilla, and on and on and on. See http://www.soapware.org/directory/4/implementations for a listing of ~70 toolkit implementations.

While the Titans Clash, us mice are getting on with writing code.

What is XWT -- The XML Windowing Toolkit? Great quote on the website. "I mainly think people should stop wasting time pontificating and philosophizing about open source and just write some good code."

They say that if you remember the 60s you weren't there. I've got a similar problem with the 70s. Glastonbury festival has been bought out by the Mean Fiddler organization. This prompted a leader in The Times today where they said that it was run only 3 times in the 70s, once free and twice as a paid event. But I have distinct memories of being there on 7-7-77 and also in 76 and not paying either time. And I'm sure the first festival (in 72? with David Bowie and T Rex) was free as well. Those were great times, little Temporary Autonomous Zones where anything went as long as you stayed inside the hedges or barbed wire that defined the border. You had to be careful to stay out of trouble when you arrived and left, but the forces of Awe and Boredom left you alone inside. I always used to travel by bicycle as you are basically invisible using this mode of transport. And any illegal consumables were in a cavity inside big candles that were melted over, although I was never actually stopped and searched. As well as Glastonbury, there were three years at Stonehenge, three at Rivington Pyke, Windsor twice and Woodstock (In Oxfordshire not NY State!). I saw Gong play live several times and  a key memory was Hawkwind at Stonehenge with their keyboard player doing a solo ambient set before them. Happy, crazy times.

Yahoo Groups Premium.I ranted on TEoF a while back about the lack of an ad-free option for Yahoo! Groups. It was just a matter of time, of course. Currently, they're doing a survey to research the reaction to a Yahoo! Group Premium. Personally, I'd pay just for the removal of all the ads. [thanks, EVHEAD] Me too. I used to pay eGroups for NoAds but recently wanted to do the same on Yahoogroups and couldn't find it. If they offered it, like Ev, I'd want ads removed from the web message archive displays as well. These are extremely annoying. And if I was paying a premium, I'd expect to have some method of copying the message archive to a local backup. This aspect wasn't mentioned in the survey at all. If you use Yahoogroups as a moderator, I'd strongly recommend filling in the survey and expressing your feelings.

For Jabberfans, Jabber Conferences : JabberConf Europe, Munich, Germany, June 12-14, 2002. JabberConf Americas, Keystone, Colorado, August 20-22, 2002

Nick Denton takes San Francisco to task: "During the boom, the region attracted thousands of highly-educated professionals from the East Coast of the US, and from Europe. And many of them are leaving because they are used to the buzz, wit, and bustle of a big city, and they are bored. San Francisco never quite achieved critical mass."  [thanks, EVHEAD] Typical damn Brit. There's always something to grumble about. Maybe he should go back to Faringdon and hang out with the graphics designers in London. .

My heart's in SF (grin). But the industry is not actually in SF, it's spread over a pretty big area. And driving from one end to the other can take you 1.5 hours in rush hour. It's hardly surprising that the buzz was missing. But that doesn't mean that SF doesn't buzz. It's just not all about money, fame and the computer industry.

Ivan Ristic: "I have created a really cool script that instantly creates an XML-RPC server from any existing PHP class!"  [thanks, Scripting News] How cool is that! Note that it needs the PHP V4 XML-RPC support, not the UsefulInc library, to work.

Distinctly strange story. DMCA Declares Serial Cables Illegal? I've recently had an interesting run-in with the DMCA... apparently, US Customs has rejected entry of a PCSega Dreamcast serial cable into the US, supposedly due to copyright violations. [thanks, kuro5hin.org]

Ars Technica: Microsoft .Net - Page 1 - (2/2002) : In a remarkable feat of journalistic sleight-of-hand, thousands of column inches in many "reputable" on-line publications have talked at length about .NET whilst remaining largely ignorant of its nature, purpose, and implementation. Ask what .NET is, and you'll receive a wide range of answers, few of them accurate, all of them conflicting. Confusion amongst the press is rampant.

No change there then.