Bin laden caught?
lørdag, februar 28, 2004
The iranian state radio is reporting that Osama was caught long ago, in Pakistani areas. But both American and Pakistani officials deny this. I'm not going into a discussion about the fact, cause those are impossible to get when there is war.
What is interesting though, is why he hasn't been cought when all countries around afghanistan are in with the US war against Bin Laden's associates.
Saddam Hussain was 'officially caught' when there had been period of falling support for G.W.Bush over the war in Iraq. So it's tempting to imagine that US and pakistan high officers are holding Bin Laden in the same secret place Saddam is now, just to reveal him as being caught just before the US presidential election. With so much dirt comping from that administration, it wouldn't surprise me a bit. They keep on saying he will be cought, and I have to wonder how they can be so sure, and why the whole administration is smiling so darn wide much the time.
MS offices, uh ...
fredag, februar 27, 2004
The part of the distribution contracts that said vendors had to give up their rights to their patents when facing microsoft has been removed! "For customer satisfaction reasons". Yuck.
And further:
"Microsoft believes that the patent-related provision is lawful under Japanese, US and EU law,"
Funny how they think it's OK to circumvent patents themselves, while they "believe in Intellectual Property".
MS offices raided in Tokyo
torsdag, februar 26, 2004
Quote from the BBC:"The Fair Trade Commission alleges that Microsoft insists that if the companies - such as NEC, Hitachi and Sony - want to pre-install its Windows software on their computers, they must sign away their right to sue the US giant, even if they find it has used their patent technology."
...
"Unless Japanese companies agree to the clause, they cannot pre-install Windows in their computers."
Interesting indeed. How the hell is this even possible for companies to sign on such a thing? I'm sure the commision wouldn't raid if they didn't have evidence. The allegation is pretty straight forward, they've probably seen the contracts.
I just hope the judicial system in Japan isn't bribable or lets itself be fooled by MS' statements that "its the customers who will suffer" like they do in Europe right now. You're damn right it will be the customers. Your customers. - There are other products but yours, and if you didn't hide your interfaces to your technology while bundling your products, it would be a fair game.
(Not that the two are directly related though...)HipHop is everything is ...........
tirsdag, februar 24, 2004
I just watched the movie Scratch. It's a really funky film about HipHop culture, breaking it into it's various parts, looking back in history, looking at present state commercialism and the future hiphop version of that.
The movie itself feels like made by a DJ, every Point is scratched upon, everything is one long set of intertwined scenes and it really, really flows. I got kinda tired at about 1hr10min, but the last 12 minutes were summarizing so it didn't really matter.
It has a really good theme of collaboration and using hiphop as a way of avoiding conflict. DJ Shadow points out that [inaudible] were the first to take the secrecy out of dj'ing by revealing what records they were using. 'They' said like hey; This is what we use, take it and make something better so that 'we' can improve on it.
"Take this and improve on it so that we can learn". Taste that and compare to software.
Qbert is another DJ whose history is told. He is really mental about hiphop. Not mental in the stupid phrase describing a psyciatric patient, but he really feels hiphop is about more than just being cool and playing the right stuff. Not that any of the other charachter in the movie are all about being cool, but Qbert talks about it alot, having alien figures in his apartment. At the end of the movie, this mentality is expressed as "We are all us. If you hurt anyone, you hurt a part of yourself."
And the end musical theme? Edvard Grieg's Dovregubbens hall.
Mullah Krekars attorney speaks
fredag, februar 20, 2004
You all know about the north Iraqi group Ansar al Islam, and its former leader mullah Krekar. Krekar is in Norway and is being prosecuted by what seems like the entire norwegian legal apparatus. The allegations have been varying, the first terrorist-allegation was dropped a few months ago, but there are now 'new' evidence around.
The claims are that Krekar has been directly involved in many attacks in Iraq, even though he resigned as leader a long time ago to move to norway and live with his refuge family. Ansar al Islam is the prime link between Saddam Hussain and Al-Quaida, and as long as the US doesn't find the WMD they claimed were in Iraq, the group seems like the only justification left talking about. But noone has evidence of such a link.
So what do you do?
Without evidence, you need to make evidence appear legal or otherwise, and this it seems, is what the US, Iran (yes, iran), Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Økokrim (Norwegian Police' Economic Crime Unit, by the way the one that lost when accusing DVD-Jon...) in norway have done. Krekar was recently released (again) from custody because the court found that the 'new' evidence, namely information aquired from a few ex-ansar al islam members wasn't any good.
Why? These members were tortured into saying the right things. Krekars attorney says they have firm and detailed evidence of this. They've been kicked, beaten, put naked in the freezer, gotten arms broken.
First they're interrogated by american military, then left for the group opposing ansar al islam, PUK, to torture, then interrogated again by the americans, then PUK, and then finally, the norwegians come in. They 'were present' at the interrogations, and so they say noone was tortured into saying anything.
Imagine youself being tortured every time you do something you're not supposed to do. Again and again. Wouldn't you try to say what you're supposed to say? What the interrogators want to hear? Thought so.
The justification factor
Certainly, Ansar al Islam is violent. The US is violent. Saddam was violent. Other groups in Iraq are violent. Israel is violent. Groups in Iran are violent.
I just heard an interview with a (female) socialist expert who lived in Iraq for quite some time. She compared Iraqi affairs, where a lot of groups in northern Iraq have control over limited areas and constantly fighting, she compared it to Norway around year 1000, when there were lots of 'småkonger', little kings, ruling here and there.
Who are we to take one of those groups and compare them with our civilized (dangerous word nowadays) lives in the west? Who are we to superimpose our way of living on their affairs? What if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran started accusing John Kerry of adultery? Claiming thats bad in Iran so he must be put in jail in Iran? With a "fair trial"?
Oh the dangers of trying to prove something you want to be true. I'm currently reading Jan Guillou - Coq Rouge
Windows NT4/2000 Source code leaked
lørdag, februar 14, 2004
Yep. Someone has brought the source-code of w2k and nt4 into the public.
This will be really interesting to see play out. Microsoft has already posted a note on their press page saying it's not a result of their shared source sheme nor is it leaking in-house. So who did? The obvious answer is an ex-employee. It appears it comes from someone at mainsoft.com; a crash-log generated by Linux(!) when the editor Vi crashed, reveal details of the state of the system at that time, ca 2000... (Mainsoft does UNIX<->Windows porting etc. of software, MS is one of their customers)
But the official answer will probably be something like an ex-employee currently working on an open source project while stealing code from windows and forgetting for a moment that windows wasn't open source.
I've always wondered, how much open source is in Microsoft products? We know much BSD stuff is in (they can say that), but why reinvent the weel when nobody can catch you copying it anyway?
In the days of SCO suits and microsoft loosing the offence, I can't help wonder if this is a simple (but risky) ploy by MS themself, with the intention of scaring customers away from open source. Yes. If I was deciding purchase of some systems, I'd stay away from software where unauthorized MS code may turn up, cause MS has a legal system of their own and I don't have enough money to fight that.
But it might backfire on MS too. What if lots of open source code is found there? Code that isn't BSD or public domain, only with the copyright comments snipped? Or did they make availiable only original code? (Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is playing down the security aspect while telling reporters that the main issue here is Intellectual Property.)
How much will this add to the confusion of source code (Will your neighbours put up a taller fence if you tell them you write open source code)?
Who's first in suing who?
RSS validity
lørdag, februar 07, 2004
In an effort to improve a stylesheet for RSS, I went googling for +http OR +www OR +the filetype:rss OR filetype:rdf OR filetype:atom. The search returned 241.000 results. Seing how XML is used in many none-rss applications like web-pages, I excluded that type.
Anyway, if you are interested: The stylesheet worked perfectly on 87.875% of the first 800 feeds, leaving 12,125% barely readable. The percentage was the same in the first 400, indicating no difference in implementation between high and low rank/status pages. The feeds that don't work are mainly specific namespaces like foaf, but a few also have invalid RSS markup (but only 3 feeds were invalid XML). About 0.8% are styled with CSS themselves, while approx 3% are served as text/plain (which I didn't count).
Why 400 at the time? Because I got tired in my left little-finger from holding down ctrl+shift while opening the pages in the background in Opera. - Thats right, I ran RSS feeds in 400 pages simultanously. Yes, RSS is light, but 400 is quite a lot anyway. It's so many I didn't see a page button at all with 1280 solution.
Was the MyDoom creator an American?
torsdag, februar 05, 2004
The Norwegian e-mail provider runbox has been touched by the FBI in relation to the MyDoom worm(s).
When the Bugbear virus broke, one of their customers was in the spotlight, and the individual has been paid close attention to for the past year.although the name he is using on runbox has now changed slightly. A person with a name suspiciously alike that is using a runbox account now.
Yeah, yeah, we all hear MyDoom is russian, and how easy isn't that to believe in these times? Unsecured Russian bio-weapons, Afghan terrorists (Afghanistan borders with russian republics) and links between Saddam and freedom-fighters in Chechnya (Hard to figure the english spelling of that country).
It's just to easy to believe. Although the two are otherwise unrelated, it's tempting to remind you that Al-Jazeera was hacked into a patriot website by an american. The general picture of Russians (or eastern europeans in general) seems to be that they're a bunch of (ex-)communist thugs. It's too easy to label something on the internet as russian just because the lead stops there.
It kinda reminds me of "gang-crime" in Oslo nowadays. The media is all over a recent killing, citing immigrant crime, and begun discussing this 'immigrant crime', even though the police time and time again tell them some of the worst crime is performed by native Norwegians, most notably by bikers of Hells Angels and the like. But if it isn't Hells Angels, it has to be immigrants right? No Norwegians who arn't Linux users would ever do something like that, would they?
English and Norwegain
tirsdag, februar 03, 2004
After having spent much time online where the the langauge I read is predominantly English, I like to tell myself that I know english quite well. Natively norwegian and having been tought english since 4th grade should also help that though.
It is however, much easier to express oneself in ones own language, even if I write mostly in english as evident in this blog and most of my other online activities.
Therefore I've created another blog in Norwegian where you'll be able to find more of the real me and what I care about. The host of the other service, weblogg.no also lets me upload images, which makes it easier to maintain without me having to upload them elsewhere. It also has RSS summaries, and it's all free in contrast to blogspot.
I think I'll keep this blog mostly as my technical half, although I'll try to write here what I think is interesting for international readers. So drop by :-)
