Professor David K. Levine of UCLA has posted drafts of chapters one and two of his new book The Case Against Intellectual Property, co-authored with Michele Boldrin. The first two chapters (in Acrobat format) are a good read about the problems and potential solutions to current-day intellectual property issues. Generally …

A Malasian newspaper last week had an article about what it would look like if someone did a big budget version of the Lord of the Rings with Chinese action stars. The scans1 are well worth taking a look at. No longer available. ↩

In an article on O'Reilly's Macintosh Development Center web site details a method for getting Python and Objective-C to inter-operate directly.

According to an article on Space Today, Russia has announced that they have agreed on plan with NASA to keep the ISS manned while the Shuttle is grounded. The basics are that the existing crew will return to earth on the currently attached Soyuz craft in April. At about the …

A review has been published on InfoSync about the P800, the new phone from Sony Ericsson with the big screen in a small space.

Leave it to Sony to come up with a Portable Wireless Web Server to drag your web site around with you. The info here is in Japanese, but you'll get the idea from the pictures. If somebody wants to read the Kanji and post a translation, I'll be happy to …

An article in Wired describes a series of social-engineering attacks on PayPal users. The attack is based on supposed "Security Alert" messages that are received by users and include Visual Basic components in them (.vbs files). If you receive a note that appears to be from PayPal telling you that …

An article in Wired reports that Symantec knew about this month's slammer worm before most security organizations did and didn't share the information for hours (except with their own customers). The article details complaints from a number of other security groups and ISPs who complained that Symantec should have raised …

An article1 in The Daily Yomiuri (a Japanese newspaper) reports that a 21 year old man was arrested for attempting to sell a virtual house in the game Ultima Online that belonged to another player. Article no longer available. ↩

According to an article on CNet, the Bush administration is supporting a plan by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) to implement ENUM, which grew out of an initial plan by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) to map numbers to the domain name system.

CNet is reporting that FTD (the floral company) had a significant bug that caused personal information to be made available to hackers. Unfortunately for FTD (and the customers) this is one of the busiest times of the year for them. Information from the company indicates that the data that …

For those of you who are fans of Jackie Chan, it's always good to see him working, and he definitely does that in Shanghai Knights, the sequel to Shanghai Noon (Read More below to continue, no spoilers) I can't come out and say that this is some of Jackie's best …

Sometimes, the gnu readline stuff is useful. To install it: Download the latest readlines source A mod must be made to compensate for a file location change in 10.2 which affects the 4.3 makefile. To fix this, edit support/shobj-conf to change line 151 from SHLIB_LIBS='-lSystem' to …

I've been doing some pretty serious python work as of late and have recently had the need to parse some XML. To my delight, I looked into the /usr/lib/python2.2 directory (included with OSX) and found that the xml directory is in there... cool, I thought, they've included …

For those of us who have the occasional need to add Python pieces to our systems, there is a small problem with the Makefile that comes with OS X 10.2. In particular, there is an unnecessary '-arch i386' in the targets line immediately preceding the '-arch ppc' (which is …

According to an article in BusinessWeek, the Canadian Copyright Board is looking into compensating labels for the theoretical loss of revenues that they propose are attributable to piracy. According to the article, it is looking at raising the current $.21 CD levy to $.59 (that's nearly 200%) and adding a …

According to an article on StarTribune, the US House and Senate have agreed to limit the TIA in a manner similar to the proposed Senate amendment already discussed last week. It appears that there are few people in either chamber that like the idea of Mr. Poindexter (convicted of lying …

Apple has today published the XML format for the files used by Keynote, their new presentation package. This publication was announced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld in San Francisco four weeks ago and is expected to open the door to automatic updating of presentations by external software.

X111 is now at 0.2.1. (Note: Developer's kit is still at 0.2, as released 2 days ago) Safari is now at 0.6. x11 is no longer available for download. ↩

An article on CNet reports that a grand jury in California indicted six people on charges that they violated the anti-decryption portions of the DMCA, primarily related to signal theft on satellite TV. Of the six, one has apparently plead guilty to violating the DMCA. The trial dates will be …