Nice freeware fonts…
Quick plug: Misprinted Type has several nice freeware fonts (plus a few commercial ones) available for download for Mac and PC.
Nice freeware fonts… Read More »
Infallibly copyrighted
The news last week was that the Vatican is now enforcing their copyright on the Pope’s writings, including ex-cathedra pronouncements which according to Church doctrine are written “with the assistance of the Holy Spirit”.
Which to me just begs the question: who owns the copyright on these pronouncements anyway, the Pope or the Holy Spirit? Was this a work for hire?
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Event: Douglas Hofstadter at Stanford 2/6/06 @7pm
For you local folk, on Monday evening Douglas Hofstadter will be giving a special lecture at Stanford University on Analogy as the Core of Cognition. The event is free and open to the public. (Thanks to Perlick for the link.)
Update 2/7/06: Perlick and I both attended, and he posted a summary on his blog.
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Optimus mini-three keyboard
I’m not sure yet what I’d do with it, but the Optimus mini-three keyboard looks very fun: it’s an auxiliary keyboard with three keys, each with its own little OLED screen displaying the current function (potentially animated). The most compelling examples are where not only is the button’s function displayed but also what effect it’ll have in the current context, like what image, song, or PowerPoint slide is coming up next when browsing through media.
USB 1.0, currently Windows only for the configuration software but others are coming. Pre-orderable for $100 until April 2nd, shipped to arrive on May 15th. This is coming out of the Art. Lebedev Studio in Russia — looks like they’ve also got a complete keyboard coming soon too.
(Thanks to Nerfduck for this link too!)
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On the Internet, no one knows you’re a pigeon…
Via Reuters: UC Irvine professor Beatriz da Costa will be releasing 20 pigeons into the San Jose skies during this year’s International Symmposium on Electronic Art. Each pigeon will be equipped with a camera, GPS, air-polution monitor and cellphone, and images and location-based polution data will be automatically posted to a PigeonBlog. (No word on whether PigeonBlog will comply with RFC 1149.)
Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!
On the Internet, no one knows you’re a pigeon… Read More »
Google VOIP?
Almost exactly a year ago I made fun of the UK newspaper The Times for suggesting Google was gearing up enter the Voice Over IP space. Now it’s starting to look like they were right…
iPods for the Senate
The “balanced intellectual-property policy” advocacy group IPac has a new campaign to educate senators about media in the Internet Age by sending them iPods:
Last week, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on the “Broadcast Flag” and “Audio Flag,” a set of proposals by the MPAA and RIAA that would stifle innovation by giving content holders a virtual veto over new technologies and existing user rights.
But Senator Stevens, the 82-year old committee chairman from Alaska, surprised the audience by announcing that his daughter had bought him an iPod, and suddenly Stevens had a much greater understanding of the many ways innovative technology can create choice for consumers. Content industry representatives at the hearing found themselves answering much tougher questions than they typically receive.
I’d thought this same thing when I first read about Senator Stevens, but figured it’d be illegal for Senators to accept the iPods as gifts. IPac’s FAQ says they’re donating these to the Senator’s campaign offices (for use in campaign-related activities) and so they get around the rules — whether the Senators will accept them given the current scrutiny over lobbying scandals is another question.
(Thanks to Amy for the link!)
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Congressional staffers try to whitewash Wikipedia
The Wikipedia community is trying to respond to whitewashing of politically-sensitive articles that appear to be coming from congressional staffers themselves (with the staff of Marty Meehan (D, MA) being one of the biggest culprits).
I’m always amazed that Wikipedia works as well as it does — hopefully the bad press Meehan and other congress-critters get over this flap will outweigh any good press specific staffers may have hoped to achieve.
Detailed coverage at Lowell Sun, C|net and Slashdot.
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PDFs that fink
Here’s a tricky little privacy hole: Adobe PDF Reader 6.0 and later will automatically (and silently) execute Javascript that’s been embedded in a PDF file, and LWN reports that a company called Remote Approach uses this “feature” to tag a PDF so it’ll phone home to their servers whenever it’s opened. Their customers can then go to a special webpage to track when the PDF was opened and at what IP address.
I’m sure you can think of your own scenarios where this would be a Bad Thing™, but the case that brought it to my attention was from a supposedly-anonymous reviewer of an academic paper who discovered Remote’s website in his firewall logs.
The simple moral of the story is that content formats should not be able to run arbitrary code, but the more general point is one of setting limits and expectations. End-users need to be able to limit what’s run on their own computers, and when the actual limits are broader than what a naive user might expect (such as when their supposedly-static PDF document can actually access the network) it’s extra important for the system to alert the user what’s happening and get permission first.
To their credit, Adobe seems to have heeded the moral: the current version of Acrobat Reader (at least on the Mac) gives a pop-up warning saying the PDF is trying to access a remote URL, and allows you to save your security settings on a site-by-site basis. I don’t know when they added this alert or whether it was in response to problems like those I mentioned, but regardless it’s nice to see the feature.
(Thanks to Dirk for the link.)