Monthly Archive:: January 2012

"Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech is considered one of the most recognizable collection of words in American history. It's the rhetorical equivalent of a national treasure or a national park. The National Park Service inscribed it on the Lincoln Memorial and the Library of Congress put it into its National Recording Registry. So we might hold it to be self evident that it can be spread freely. Not exactly. Any unauthorized usage of the speech and a number of other speeches by King - including in PBS documentaries - is a violation of American law. You'd be hard pressed to find a good complete video version on the web, and it's not even to be found in the new digital archive of the King Center's website. If you want to watch the whole thing, legally, you'll need to get the $20 DVD." I'm probably too young and too non-American to really fully grasp just how important Mr King was to a segregated America, but the fact that his influential and world-changing speeches are locked up because of copyright, as well as the fact that EMI is actually actively pursuing its copyright, is downright insane. If anybody ever needed even more proof the content industry is a vile, rotting, stinking and utterly putrid clump of pure, concentrated evil, this is it. Absolutely unbelievable.

"Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of Bill Gates's trustworthy computing memo, which made securing applications from the ground up a key priority at Microsoft for the first time. The directive followed a period during which Redmond took a sustained shelling over the instability and insecurity of its software, especially in Internet Explorer and Outlook, highlighted by the damage caused by high-profile malware outbreaks such as the rampaging Love Bug, Melissa and Nimda nasties."

For most of you, Samsung's Bada will be a bit of a mystery. As far as I know, it isn't sold in the United States, and Samsung isn't pushing it very hard in Europe either. Still, it has a 2% market share, and since my brother has a Bada phone, I can confirm it is a surprisingly good, fast, and easy to use smartphone operating system. Still, Samsung seems to have greater plans for it than just this 2%, since it has announced it will merge Bada with Tizen, the successor to MeeGo.

It really hasn't been Google's week. First the entire internet exploded because of some uninteresting nonsense regarding social networking (really internet?), but today something happened that's actually a bad thing and worth talking about: in Kenya, Google has been caught accessing the databases of a competing business, and offering Google's own product to the people in the database. Google has already apologised, and is currently investigating the matter.

Some people already submitted this news last week, but it wasn't until today that it became official: the FreeBSD team has announced the release of FreeBSD version 9.0. As you may expect from the major version number change, this is releas eis packed with new stuff.

"Raspberry Pis started being made a couple of days ago, but I was forbidden to tell you about it until signed contracts and receipts for payment had arrived - it's been killing me, especially since I've had tens of you asking me when manufacturing would start every day for the last few weeks. I am not good at keeping secrets." No more secrets to keep, Liz! I can't wait to place my order.