Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

From Networkworld, here.

Horacio just sent me the link to Allpeers, a nice Firefox Extension that promisses no more attachements in emails, and allow to share files with the people you want in a easy way and using efficient P2P technology.

I went to the website to get more details. So here we go:

Spyware, according to FAQ:

AllPeers does not and will not contain these software pests. There are no Adware, Spyware or any other nastyware in AllPeers.

Now, the privacy page says the typical blah blah:

When you register to use AllPeers, we collect the following information from you, and you need to give it to us in order to use our service: (i) username, (ii) password and (iii) email address. We do not look at the content of any message or files you share through our service. However, we sometimes collect anonymous information about your use of AllPeers. We need this information in order to operate AllPeers, but we do not share it with anyone. If we ever did contemplate sharing it, we would ask your permission first. We will use your information to authenticate your use of the service. Occasionally, we may use your email address to send you notices directly regarding AllPeers.

So, I was a bit exceptic. What do they collect? Even if they promisse to not share such information. There are goverments forcing to log such data in order to get it later with any excuse. Sounds crazy, but, bad people use anonymous systems for bad things. But bad goverments use people’s information also for bad things.

Then I saw:

AllPeers is a privately held European company with offices in Oxford, United Kingdom and Prague, Czech Republic.

The company being outside the US. is great news. That is the main problem of Google, no matter how hard the try to not be evil, they are a threat, being such society database in a country which goverment is every day more hungry for such data (yeah they even want MySpace data). Now, the UK s not doing really well in this topic.

What do you think about Allpeers? Oh, it runs on Linux too. How will it compete with built in instant messaging file transfer?

from InformationWeek article…

The pushback is not that significant but irritating to some at Red Hat, especially as rival Novell prepares to once again touts the recent release of its SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this week, said one source close to Red Hat.

Leo sent me this interesting article to learn how the RIAA suing machine works. You will be really dissapointed how easy is for those pigs to abuse the court system and randomly sue people. Also, for further daily read about the topic, the blog Recording Industry vs The People has updated information about some cases.

Many years ago, people predicted that snail mail would decline as result of the growing usage of email. Well, e-commerce has resulted in millions of packages being sent by snail mail and postal services are making more money.

This is interesting, because in another market, music and movie entertaiment, they have been unable to come with something innovative, and instead of helping the boost of digital entertaiment, they tried to protect the CD and DVD markets via lobby, abusing and spreading , uncertainty and doubt about copyright laws, and making customer their enemies. Whose have made digital music a profit, are not the same ones selling CDs. They failed to understand what customers want and keep trying to sell people something they now use only as fan collection items.

The internet will never make a company die. The internet kills markets at the same time it creates new ones. Whose die are the ones not wanting to accept it, and therefore not moving fast enough.

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.” - James Michener

“El que ha dominado el arte de vivir, tiene poca o ninguna distinción entre su trabajo y su pasatiempo, su labor y su ocio, su mente y su cuerpo, su información y su recreación, su amor y su religión. Difícilmente sabe él cuál es cuál. Sencillamente busca con afán su visión de excelencia en lo que sea que haga, dejando que otros decidan si está trabajando o jugando. Para él, siempre está haciendo ambas cosas.” - James Michener

As you may have seen in Slashdot, Former Microsoft employes launched a site called Ohloh which is basically a Web 2.0 opensource software directory with tags, metrics and other useful information other directories don’t have.

It was nice to find Kopete there. The project was estimated in a US$ 735,875 cost, with 54,763 LOC. That surprised me, since last time a measured the codebase, it was above 100,000 lines of code. It also surprised me my level of activity, giving the fact I haven’t coded anything since long time and most of today’s coding work is being done by our beloved “kids club” (the young generation leaded by Olivier, Michael and others), and most release and package management by our very own Matt .

I quicky noticed they got the data from our old repository in Sourceforge, which was migrated to KDE’s repositories years ago. So they estimated a very old version.

Anyway, it is so amazing to see something that started from nothing, inspired by a bored night could cause a chain-reaction that generated a product that would cost a million dollar to develop in a commercial environment and that anyone can use for free.

K3b is also indexed, and estimated in $611,652, also from a sourceforge repository, which I imagine, is also outdated.

We deserve a million dollar party

The [Electronic Frontier Foundation[3] published a list of 10 patents that should be killed or redefined, as they are obvious or vague and are being used by the companies that got them to threat small companies or individuals not able to afford a lawyer.

There is also a nice article in Wired.

Another boring case if a failure company that needs some cash so they go the “sue just in case we win” business model.

No I am not talking about SCO. This time is Firestar. They patented Object Relational Mapping in the year 2000. That technique is pretty obvious. Most developers have written their own mapper for simple purposes, even without knowing how to do it because it is likely you will always came with the same solution.

They were not the first ones. Next introduced Enterprise Objects Framework in 1994, and it has everything (and more) Firestar describes in the patent. There should be also lot of tiny less serious implementations made by developers around the net by these years. Basically the patent is invalid.

The most known object relational mapper in the Java enterprise world is Hibernate, which is an opensource project. Hibernate was latter part of the bigger opensource project JBoss, and the company behing JBoss (called by the same name) was acquired by Redhat some months ago.

So Firestar saw a nice opportunity to get some cash and sue.

This again shows that US patent system is full and overloaded of stupid, invalid obvious patents. And this shows again how any centralized system sucks, like the process the patent office uses to grant patents. Patents (if they should exist at all) should be reviewed in a peer to peer based process, where everyone could provide information of prior art. Redhat can spend a bunch of millions defending themselfes against them, but small companies and developers can’t, so the whole system is flawed.

I hope they get crushed like a bug in the court. And if that happens the same day SCO files for bankrupcy, a nice party could be made.

Google checkout has been launched. It allows any online shop to handle checkout and payment trough google. It seems pretty convienent as you won’t need a unique password for every website.

Now they know what you buy, so they can cross more information in their database.

What is the problem:

• _Google account _ has turned to be the password I use more. I use it for my homepage, chat, email. And it is becoming a kinda of Microsoft passport in the web. Proprietary and centralized. I would like to see support from Google for some distributed and open identity system like OpenID or whatever works.
• With the fact that USA walks slowly towards a state where the goverment and corporations have more and more power. The president decides what is legal or not. Intrusive laws are passed and the excuse of terrorism is valid for everything (even when it is obvious that those laws come from corporate lobbies). I am every day more worried about having all my personal data under those laws. Just because a matter of principes. I just don’t trust where is it, even if there is nothing important there. Google, that is a serious problem for you. I can trust you but not where you are.

Appart of those problems, the idea is great. Want to sell something? Just implement the shopping cart, and leave checkout to Google.