Off you go… into the purple yonder!

So now the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, a non-fiction book from 1982, are suing Dan Brown in the UK for copyright infringement. They claim he “lifted the central theme” from their work and used it in The Davinci Code. The contested ‘theme’:
The theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene [...]

This article is simply unbelievable. A UK ‘Trading Standards Officer’ confiscated Firefox CDs that were being sold by a company in the UK. Key quote: ‘If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation’.
Somebody bring [...]

I missed this earlier in the week, but it seems Sun has promised to release the full chip design for their new UltraSparc T1 “Niagara” processors under the GPL. They’ve already released some more general information at the OpenSparc website.
The T1 is a pretty interesting beast. It has 8 cores with 4 pipelines [...]

There’s a lengthy but interesting article at the Washington Post about botnets. Brian Krebs interviews a guy who makes quite a lot of money running such botnets and infecting people’s computers. He gets paid by spyware companies as he installs spyware on the computers of his unknowing victims.
The article is good, but has one gross [...]

If you’ve ever read Greg Bear’s Vitals, you might find this article about mind control parasites more than a little disconcerting…

Our tea kettle broke. It’s an electric model. I took it apart, and sure enough, the heating element inside that was supposed to have a 10 Ohm resistance now has an infinite resistance.
So I thought I’d get a replacement part, and I’d be all set. Google’s my friend, right? Forget it. I couldn’t find spare [...]

OK, today I learned a most impressive German word from a Spanish friend. In German, when you want to say ‘receding hairline’, you say Geheimratsecken. It sounds mysterious, doesn’t it? Litterally, it means ‘the corners of the secret council’. How cool is that!

The Google blog has a short entry today about Vint Cerf’s excellent testimony [PDF] before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. He was speaking in defense of the crucial network neutrality principle. Go Vint!
In other news, the Post reports on how the greedy management at Verizon thinks that they are entitled to [...]

The first in a series of reports titled “The Producer Electronics Revolution, Part I” by Doc Searls is an excellent read, and it touches on a lot of the pressure we’ve been seeing to close and lock down our open world - be it on the level of content, network infrastructure, or software. Doc says [...]

Paul Murphy asks what the costs of IE/Windows chauvinism are. For me, that’s quite simple - any organisation that is so braindead that it only supports IE and/or Windows clients loses my business. Can’t buy airline tickets on your site with Firefox on GNU/Linux? I’ll go elsewhere.
Fortunately, things have improved quite a bit lately. It’s [...]