Words Myte Bite

Software And Business Method Patents Are A Bad Idea

In a world of business method patents this is possible:
A Great Business Method Patent Joke

Business method patents allow the state to give someone a monopoly on a how they might do business.

Those pushing for their acceptance and those considering their acceptance should be aware of the fact that in the US the landscape has changed somewhat since a Supreme Court Judgement in a case commonly known as the “Bilski case”.

Groklaw article on Bilski.

It has been said that the patents and copyrights are heading  in a direction that might be compared with buying a car from a garage and finding you might only be able to get that car fueled in a garage of that brand. Work out how restrictive that would be, do you find that acceptable?

What To Say When Someone Says No More GNU/Linux Distributions

When someone gives the:

We have too many free software programs talk and that is bad, we need fewer higher quality ones and unite.

I have the following stock answer now ready.

We have too many cars and that is bad, we need fewer higher quality ones and unite.

BSA in Czech Republic need to be pointed at

The Czech Republic Ministry of Finance And the BSA came up with this brilliant idea (ok that is a scarcastic comment):

http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/mfcr-bsa-open-source?page=1

No tax relief on hardware bought without software on it. I don’t know about you but I try to buy “white boxes” as they used to be called, that is hardware built to my spec with no software on it, why because I use GNU/Linux.

Why, not just as a hobby, where I work we save in excess of a hundred thousand euros because we can, by not paying Microsoft for their software and using as a viable alternative GNU/Linux.

Where I am it is not an IT or Web company, it is a service company with people doing administrative work and one IT person, me. We manage lots and do almost all of it with GNU/Linux, it really is that simple. Why do we have any Microsoft software at all? Because some external suppliers require it, because they are not neutral in the way they build web sites, yuk.

However they are few and far between. At least we have some competitive advantage in that we can claim these expenses. I hope the person who made that decision in the Czech republic ends up understanding what they are doing to their own economy, piping money out for no internal gain, great trick if you can do it.

Distributed Social Networking 5 (The Simple UI)

How do you actually read data on this Distributed Social Network?

I suggest that the model of a web server run on the local machine would serve many purposes.

In web services there is the concept of the “vhost” that of a virtual host a named site that lives at the same address as other sites.

In this way one computer can host many web sites.

The second part of this is to introduce something like “webmin” not webmin but something like it.

http://www.webmin.com/

For every group Mary sets up she has a “vhost” like envronment.

To control her local settings and privacy she uses the webmin like tool.

This presents a few problems, such as firewalls, however there are ways to deal with this. It will need to be a little creative but should not cost too much effort.

Distributed Social Networking 4 (Paradigm Change)

Today if you want to find a persons server on the internet, you find their Internet Protocol Address (IP)  and you connect to it.

This is done via the Domain Name System (DNS) which converts all those addresses like funnycan.be to a number (IP) so computers can find each other using a method called routing.

This is invisible most of the time.

For the purposes of this article, let us take it that how Mary finds Sarah in the complex world of IP and routing has been resolved on the distributed social network.

Sending a package would be something like this.

Mary has a group called Lunch Time People.

Mary writes her message to this group, something as simple as: “Lunch today in our favorite place people?”

This message is destined for 10 people.

It has a couple of qualities.

One is timeleness, it needs to be delivered before seats are booked so maybe it has a life span of 2.5 hours.

Another is it has the right to be delivered without anyone in the middle being able to read it, or alter it.

It has a quality that is not spoken about often nonrepudiation, that is the ability the group to not only know it is from Mary but that she can’t deny sending it. Perhaps you may say this is a little extreme for a lunch time invite, but it could be a please take money from my bank account, so there are messages that it would be good to be able to say that about.

So how do you do this.

Simple tools already exist for this, my one of choice is GPG  (Gnu Privacy Guard).

It is a non proprietary encryption program, with its source code available for peer review.

If Mary signs the message with her electronic signature using GPG then everyone knows that the message is from her.

If she then encrypts the message to Sarah, and other members of the group it can only be read by them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

What this means in practice is that the message is hidden from view of anyone involved in its transit to its destination and thus can’t be altered.

This provides secure computing between the people involved, however when you send data to a person in this way, if their computer has some other compromise (some kind of malware) then the message when it is generated on the compromised computer or opened on the compromised computer is vulnerable to being copied.

We can’t do anything about this much as we can’t do anything about people having badly configured computers, weak passwords, non existant security setups other than advise them as we go.

So that is the message packaging sorted.