Author Archives: ward

junk mail from the bank

Posted on December 5, 2006 by ward

So, my bank sent me some real-world spam today. The seem to like to do that, trying to sell me all sorts of subscriptions to services I’m not interested in. Anyway. This letter was particularly cheeky, here’s how it began: … Continue reading →

Posted in Completely clueless | 1 Comment

bad start for Deval Patrick

Posted on November 29, 2006 by ward

I was pretty excited that Deval Patrick won the elections here in MA. It was high time to get rid of our current narrow-minded governor. However, Mr. Patrick has made his first bad decision. He’s basically put a wolf in … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Standards, Politics | 1 Comment

6 new copyright exemptions

Posted on November 23, 2006 by ward

The US copyright office at the Library of Congress has issued 6 new copyright exemptions. Basically, there are 6 new (narrow) exemptions from the DMCA: * anyone can now ‘unlock’ cell phones * film professors can break CSS to make … Continue reading →

Posted in Copyright, patents, and trademarks | Leave a comment

total rip-off

Posted on November 22, 2006 by ward

While in Hamburg for the LinuxBIOS summit a couple weeks ago, I called home a couple times. The hotel had a helpful piece of paper stating ‘dial 777 for credit card calls’. Foolishly, I thought I’d better not use my … Continue reading →

Posted in Fraud | 4 Comments

newsweek on DRM and Defective by Design

Posted on November 21, 2006 by ward

Newsweek has a pretty good article on DRM that mentions the Defective by Design campaign. The only thing I don’t understand is this bit at the end: Music industry observers agree that once the public catches on to the limits … Continue reading →

Posted in DRM | Leave a comment

broadband in the US sucks

Posted on November 10, 2006 by ward

I’ve said it for a long time, and it seems at least one person in the FCC is starting to speak up. Why is it that in the richest country of the world, in one of the major metropolitan areas … Continue reading →

Posted in Completely useless | Leave a comment

gnewsense

Posted on November 3, 2006 by ward

Gnewsense 1.0 is out! At last we have a 100% Free, state of the art GNU/Linux distribution. The FSF press release can be found here. For the curious – the FSF has contributed (a lot of) bandwidth and a high-end … Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

the upgrade to edgy eft

Posted on October 28, 2006 by ward

I upgraded my laptop to Edgy Eft, which has many cool new features. Nothing too serious broke for me, except maybe for this one: opening Gmail crashes Firefox 2, consistently. Apparently this is a consequence of this bug which is … Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

the Google trademark

Posted on October 27, 2006 by ward

Google’s trademark lawyers are obviously getting nervous: they want people to only use (variations of) the word ‘Google’ in relation to Google Inc or the services it provides. I think this is probably a loosing battle – people ‘xerox’ things … Continue reading →