I toured Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral this past week, an exciting time to visit because of the impending shuttle launch scheduled for Wednesday July 13 at 3:51 p.m. Eastern. The closest we got to the shuttle Discovery was the sight of the top of its external tank and booster rockets -- the rest was obscured behind launch pad 39B, from our vantage point on an observation tower.

NASA, which used to syndicate updates in a proprietary XML format, offers an RSS feed for news related to Wednesday's launch.

Florida · 2005/07/09 · Comment · Link

Sam Ruby identifies the IP address of every person who comments on his weblog, as you can see by hovering over a name.

For message boards and weblog software I have developed, I won't reveal user IP addresses out of privacy and security considerations. Some users have static IP addresses, either from a high-speed Internet provider or their workplace, and could be vulnerable to hacking or harassment.

When I want more accountability for anonymous comments, I present a page of posts from a specific address without revealing the address.

2005/07/01 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Headline Created to Enable Controversy

I've won Anil Dash's new intellectual dishonesty award for my item on Bram Cohen's technological manifesto. The award appears to be issued weekly, which means Karl Rove goes home empty-handed.

Dash faults me for not approaching Cohen in e-mail, where he could have explained himself before the story got more traction with weblogs and the media.

Perhaps he has a point, but I regarded an essay Cohen linked on his front page for two years as fair game for evaluation, independent of anything else he might say on the subject, and I don't know the guy. The idea his manifesto might be a parody never entered my mind, nor did it occur to anyone else I read yesterday.

The headline was based on my read of Cohen's statement "I build systems to ... commit digital piracy." It was a jaw-dropping thing to discover through a comment on Ed Felten's weblog.

I would never try to mislead people on Workbench to spike traffic or bait the media. I gave Cohen's statement the huge play I thought it deserved, and when I was told he called it a parody, I added an update to the post. Between that update and visitor comments, I think readers could fairly judge the justification for giving it a headline as big as "Boy Trapped in Refrigerator Eats Own Foot."

As for my last media hack, the idea I would use my 36 hours of fame to criticize the papacy was never entertained. Though I have concerns with the church that would explain the 26 years that have passed since my last confession, I'm not particularly eager to become the Catholic Salman Rushdie.

Domains · 2005/06/30 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

This morning's Washington Post reports that the military has corrected a decline in recruiting:

The Army has exceeded its monthly nationwide recruiting goals for June, stopping a four-month slide and giving recruiters hope as they try to make up a significant deficit in the remaining three months of the fiscal year.

Unless I'm overlooking something, this appears to be Enron accounting. In May, the Army reduced monthly recruiting goals by 17 percent.

Politics · 2005/06/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Wired News follows the discovery of Bram Cohen's technological agenda declaring "digital piracy" as one of his goals, which he describes as a work of parody.

Anybody who thinks that they might produce technology at some point in the future that might be used for piracy has to watch everything that they say.

I suspect this will continue to be true until a file-sharing technology gets a slam-dunk victory in the courts.

Politics · 2005/06/30 · Comment · Link

BitTorrent Creator Praised 'Digital Piracy'

Because so many copyright holders offer files legally over BitTorrent, some experts believe the file-sharing technology will survive the inevitable scrutiny of the courts. As Ed Felton notes, creator Bram Cohen has frequently promoted the legal non-infringing use of his creation.

Stories about Cohen frequently cite his good intentions:

Cohen denies that he wrote BitTorrent with the intent to assist piracy and says he is the last guy you would ever find stealing digital content.

A recently discovered mission statement on Cohen's personal web site online since July 2001 appears to suggest that he developed the software to enable piracy:

I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called 'vices', to be free of intruders, and to privacy.

I further my goals with technology. I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes. I release my code and writings freely, and publish all of my ideas early to make them unpatentable.

Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.

Despite my emphasis on technology, I do not view laws as inherently evil. My goals are political ones, even if my techniques are not. The only way to fundamentally succeed is by changing existing laws. If I rejected all help from the political arena I would inevitably fail.

By declaring intentions to enable piracy, Cohen makes it much easier for the courts to view BitTorrent software as a contributory infringer of copyright.

Instead of being able to build systems on BitTorrent and know that its servers and clients will be allowed to operate legally, we have a future Grokster smackdown waiting for us.

Thanks, Bram. Maybe you'll have more success with your plan to create undetectable new recreational drugs.

Update: Cohen has added a preface stating that the piece was a parody of another manifesto.

Programming · 2005/06/29 · 31 COMMENTS · Link

The elderly Pablo Picasso had an affair with a 45-years-younger woman who had once interviewed him for a school newspaper. Her recollection of the relationship reads like a surreal romance novel:

The affair began when she was visiting the 70-year-old Picasso at his studio in May 1951, when he was living with Francoise Gilot, the mother of two of his children. A thunderstorm approached. "I said I was going to go home," she said. "At that moment, it was like a fairytale. The room grew dark, and through the skylight I saw a sky like I had never seen before, except in the Congo during tropical storms. He told me, 'Wait a little while, there is going to be a storm' ... I have no memory of what happened next."

Did they have date-rape drugs in 1951?

2005/06/28 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

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