Sorry for the brevity of comments on these stories from yesterday. I am trying to quickly catch up. Most of my reading and blogging time was preempted by the June CopyNight event with Cory Doctorow last night. More on that shortly.
- Another distributed, secure social network
A brief post at the P2P Foundation about Peerbook that is frustratingly scant on details. What is clear is that from a coding standpoint, this is further along than Diaspora. Otherwise, all that is clear is it makes heavy use of encryption, though no specifics on what algorithms and how exactly they are applied. I’d be very curious to know if this is purely point-to-point or if it is using multiple keys to enable broader but still encrypted sharing. Also, while the blurb says it will be made available for free in the near future, there are no details, not even a mention, of under what license. - DVD Jon critical of Google’s curation of the Android Market
Via Hacker News. His views seem pretty reasonable, not calling for the same sort of ridiculous micro-management Apple exercises over its store. Smoothing out infrastructural issues like simple world-wide transactions to purchase apps seems like it should be a top priority. Tackling the obvious infringement is, I think, a bit more legally fraught in terms of whether Google is trying to keep the Market well within DMCA safe harbors but not actively policing. The Viacom ruling should make it clear that knowledge isn’t enough to trigger secondary liability and the intent of the channel is clearly not to induce infringement. - Bill to highlight conflict materials in computers
Curt Hopkins has the details at RWW which seem pretty straightforward though what the additional cost incurred by this reporting is unclear to me. It also occurs to me that this might provide an incentive, if only a small one, to recycling more materials, as much as possible, as those should be exempt. - Amazon patents predicting computing resource usage
Mike Masnick at Techdirt has some good preliminary analysis. Mostly he is incredulous at how these patents cleared the test for non-obviousness. He even managed to dig out some prior art from CACM, dated 1968. Hopefully someone will issue a challenge. - Creative Commons response to ASCAP plea for help fighting it, EFF and PK
- ASCAP members pissed off at its actions towards CC, EFF and PK
- Government 1.0 famous quotes in binary
- Interview with Steven Levy on Hackers 25th anniversary edition
- Improving parallel programming using data flow languages