Liudvikas Bukys

Wired News: Pentagon Defends Data Search Plan: « The Pentagon submitted a report to Congress on Tuesday that said the Total Information Awareness program is not the centralized spying database its critics say it is. »

Shirky: Grid Supercomputing: The Next Push:

We have historically overestimated the value of connecting machines to one another, and underestimated the value of connecting people, and by emphasizing supercomputing on tap, the proponents of Grids are making that classic mistake anew. During the last great age of batch processing, the ARPAnet’s designers imagined that the nascent network would be useful as a way of providing researchers access to batch processing at remote locations. This was wrong, for two reasons: first, it turned out researchers were far more interested in getting their own institutions to buy computers they could use locally than in using remote batch processing, and Moore’s Law made that possible as time passed. Next, once email was ported to the network, it became a far more important part of the ARPAnet backbone than batch processing was. Then as now, access to computing power mattered less to the average network user than access to one another.

Jon Udell: SpamBayes rocks

OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint:
Eric Raymond dissects the SCO complaint lie-by-lie.

ZDNet: Testers angy over spam-blocking fees

Justin Mason (taint.org):
The ‘Overseas Spammers’ and ‘Do Not Mail List’ Fallacies

Confessions Of a Former Spammer:

“I know this all sounds like you’re hiding yourself and doing this illegitimately, but the reason you have to do it is everybody tries to shut you down,” Shiels said.

[via Techdirt]

Ed Felten
comments on copyright owners flooding P2P networks with bogus data:

… my prediction is that at least some file-sharing vendors will try adopting reputation systems, and that after a few false starts they will find a way to make those systems at least modestly successful to combating decoy tactics …

and I cannot help but correlate this to the other network (SMTP email) being flooded with bogus data (spam), and, lo, by coincidence,
yesterday’s
TRIPOLI proposal from Lauren Weinstein’s proposal that can be roughly be described (my words) as web-of-trust or certification-of-reputation, applied to email.

Oleg Tkachenko: Generating Word documents using XSLT

Lauren Weinstein:
“TRIPOLI” — An Empowered E-Mail Environment (Overview):

A key aspect of the Tripoli environment is the concept of a third-party certified, encrypted authentication token that would be cryptographically linked with every e-mail message. Within the Tripoli architecture, this token is referred to by the acronym “PIT” (Payload Identity Token, henceforth referred to as “Pit”) and is at the core of Tripoli. The Pit contains all of the certified information necessary to authenticate the associated message payload. The sorts of information within the Pit include authenticating identity information, special or extra capability data, the level of identity authentication in force for this particular Pit and its associated message payload, and potentially a wide range of other related data to be defined in a continually extensible manner.

…
It is anticipated that in most cases, in order for the sender of an e-mail message to become initially certified by a Pit Certification Authority (PCA), the sender would need to first formally accept Terms of Service (ToS) that may well prohibit the sending of spam, and equally importantly, would authorize the certification authority to “downgrade” the sender’s authentication certification in the case of spam or other ToS violations.

…
Again, the overriding principle in Tripoli is that the receiver of e-mail makes the decisions and decides which messages they are willing to receive. Senders of e-mail are free to try proceed as they wish, but their ability to have their messages transmitted, received, and read will be ultimately controlled by e-mail receivers and readers.