Liudvikas Bukys

The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page
“User interfaces occupy an important part of software development. This page provides a comprehensive reference on toolkits for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs), with emphasis on resources for Free Software (Open Source).”

I just came across the following in a David Friedman essay,
Mail Me the Money!, published August 2002:

My email contains much of interest. It also contains READY FOR A SMOOTH WAY OUT OF DEBT?, A Personal Invitation from make_real_money@BIGFOOT.COM, You’ve Been Selected….. from friend@localhost.net, and a variety of similar messages, of which my favorite offers “the answer to all your questions.” The internet has brought many things of value, but for most of us unsolicited commercial email, better known as spam, is not one of them.
…
There is a simple solution to this problem — so simple that I am surprised nobody has yet implemented it. The solution is to put a price on your mailbox. Give your email program a list of the people you wish to receive mail from. Any mail from someone not on the list is returned, with a note explaining that you charge five cents to read mail from strangers. Five cents is a trivial cost to anyone with something to say that you are likely to want to read — but five cents times ten million recipients is quite a substantial cost to someone sending out bulk email on the chance that one recipient in ten thousand may respond.

It’s a pretty good idea.
I must point out back in November 1992, when the “com-priv” mailing
list was where the action was, I made essentially the same proposal,
to quote:

A better “free market” social convention is that senders negotiate
delivery prices with recipients. People who want junk mail from some
source arrange for free delivery, people who don’t want junk mail
demand that senders pay them big bucks for the privilege of putting
something in their mailbox, tricksters try to make money by looking
like attractive targets for junk mail, the mailing list industry is
reborn as high-quality mailing lists become much more important for
reaching your target audience and avoiding the tricksters, an
electronic stamp industry is created for the purpose of organizing
third-party mailing lists that recipients like being on, and a
wonderful equilibrium settles over the network as the financial
incentives are there for people to receive only what they are
interested in.
Unfortunately, this requires a lot of work on the protocol side
(electronic money transfers, stamp authentication), but if the
protocols were there, I think that the social aspects are attractive
enough that people would go through the cataclysm willingly.

At the time, there were a few friendly remarks,from Steve Crocker
and Ken Laws, with Christopher Locke expressing a little interest,
but the itch wasn’t strong enough, nobody implemented or adopted,
so here we are ten years later with a spam crisis — one so severe
that (I predict) this will be the year in which solutions will be
adopted almost universally — and that solution will in most cases
be automatic text classification and machine learning tools applied
as spam filters.

But there may be room still for innovation in money flows
as well, for two reasons: (1) The population of people whose base expectation is “don’t send me email” may become significant —
and that population may have no resistance to adopting new protocols
for “pay me to read this”. (2) This population will balloon because
of the same issues arising on metered portable devices such as cell
phones.

Yes, “bonded senders” are a small incremental step along this path.

Yahoo: Reuters Internet Report: Music Exec: ISPs Must Pay Up for Music-Swapping

“We will hold ISPs more accountable,” said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (news – web sites) (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera.

“Let’s face it. They know there’s a lot of demand for broadband simply because of the availability (of file-sharing),” Rosen said.

…

Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to their customers who frequent these file-swapping services.

…

Rosen’s other suggestions for fighting online piracy were more conciliatory.

Jack Russell, the Inquirer:
RIAA’s attempt to hold ISPs to account is risible:
“
Hilary Rosen — Jack Valenti’s RIAA female clone — has now gone on record saying that as part of the fight against music piracy, ISPs should be held accountable for the actions of their users and charged a fee for giving their customer’s access to services such as Kazaa or Morpheus.
”

The year in scripting languages
« This is a joint review of 2002 for the programming languages Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. It was a cooperative effort by people from the five communities. »
[Zope Newbies]

Karen Kent: Evaluating Network Intrusion Detection Signatures:
[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
(via Bruce Schneier’s crypto-gram)

Vianney (IBM): Hyper-Threading speeds Linux: Multiprocessor performance on a single processor
The results on Linux kernel 2.4.19 show Hyper-Threading technology could improve multithreaded applications by 30%. Current work on Linux kernel 2.5.32 may provide performance speed-up as much as 51%.

Schoon, Rees, Jezierski (Microsoft):
Designing Application-Managed Authorization

IDC on
IBM: Business Transformation Through End-to-End Integration

Gary North, via Jude Wanniski:
The World We Are Losing

During World War II, the British cracked the Germans’ military code. The Brits knew the times and routes of the oil tankers that were to supply Rommel’s forces in Africa. To keep the Germans from figuring out that their code had been broken, the British would send a reconnaissance plane,
which would make itself visible to the men on the tankers, and then run for cover. The plane would send a message announcing the whereabouts of the tanker. The Germans on the tanker would conclude that they had been spotted from the air. What bad luck! If they radioed home, they would
tell the command that they had been spotted. Then a British submarine would sink the tanker. The Germans never did alter the code.

The reconnaissance plane was part of the deception. So are the random searches of passengers and bags. They are to provide camouflage: (1) from voters who demand action; (2) from lawyers who might otherwise get their swarthy clients released on the basis of racial profiling. Anyone who really expects searches like these to protect airliners is so abysmally dense that he might as [well] be a Congressman. The other purposes of the new surveillance system relate more to controlling average people than catching terrorists.