Hmm... well, been stumbling over piracy and DRM stories all day, so I figured I'd pass along the joy.

First up, Cory Doctorow does the Daniel in the lions' den thing and tries to convince the folks at Microsoft that anti-piracy techniques like Digital Rights Management are ineffective and worse, (from Microsoft's standpoint) bad for business. It makes a good primer for many of the issues being discussed regarding copyrights, copy protection, and the full-court press by the RIAA and MPAA to legislate away some of the American citizen's rights, because they are inconvenient.

Meanwhile, back in the other Washington, Orrin Hatch (well known composer and sometimes legislator) is introducing a bill that might make any device that could be used to violate copyrights illegal. As with most other cases these days, this one is sold as vital to protect our children (which is, of course, just behind preventing terrorism as the excuse du jour for taking away your rights).

For a brief commercial announcement.

My employer, Laszlo Systems, makes some cool XML-based technology for so-called rich internet applications that run in Flash players. For those of you who don't have a current degree in marketing buzzspeak, I'll explain that that means you use Laszlo's stuff to write nifty interactive web apps that don't require page refreshes, and that the language in which you write them doesn't suck. See the little blogging widget to the right for a micro-example.

As of yesterday Laszlo has greatly liberalized its free-for-developers and free-for-noncomercial-use policies. If you do any web development you really should go get the download. It's cool, and it's free.

I’ve heard people wonder about what sort of artificial intelligence or biological system is involved in google. Web searches are really quite mechanical. Here’s an overview of what really goes on within Google.

(If you like this sort of thing, see my backgrounder on Baysian Filtering of Spam. [Read More!]

Spam sucks, or at least, it used to. In less than two years, filters have been developed and made available for free that work as nice as you please. I may never now the whole story, but I find this little part of it to be a nice tale of good triumphing over evil on the Web.
[Read More!]