Month: October 2004

I have resigned from my role as ALAC’s liaison to the GNSO Council: Other obligations don’t leave me the time needed for doing the liaison’s job effectively — I wasn’t in KL, and I’m not going to be in Cape Town.

HRS is an excellent hotel reservation service I’ve been relying on often in the past. Recently, I complained that I’d rather be able to include availability of Wi-Fi in hotel rooms with my room search, or at least see it prominently in the listings.They just sent mail to let me know that they will have this feature, that it’s in testing, and will be available soon.That’s what I call customer service. Thanks, guys!

My old Palm Vx was about to give up, so I recently started looking for a replacement. I settled for a Tungsten E, the “entry” model of PalmOne’s business series of PDAs.I’m quite happy with the new toy so far: Migration from the Vx was smooth, it properly interoperates with Linux, and it’s working well as an MP3 player.Elements I don’t like: Graffiti 2, and some aspects of the Palm version of RealPlayer. I have been using Palm’s old Graffiti short-hand for years. Learning Graffiti 2 now is cumbersome, and in some cases definitely a step back. (Two strokes where one was enough with the old short-hand — the character e comes to mind. Also, old-style Graffiti for E is often mis-read as a Q. Ugh.)Realplayer (I use that as the software MP3 player; it’s the one that was included) is rather bad at building playlists on the Palm — but that’s what you do when you don’t use the Windows version of the software to transfer MP3s to the handheld. It’s also lacking a “just play mp3s” version of the keyboard lock mode — after all, the five-way navigation thing on the Palm is rather susceptible to being triggered by pocket fluff.

This in today from EDRI’s Andreas Dietl: Yesterday’s Commission Contact Committee Consultation on DRM went badly for civil society participants, most of whom had been scheduled to speak in the last segment of the consultation. At the time at which the earlier slots were done, time for the meeting was up, and the last segment was dropped.In short: No time for civil society, after the other participants had exceeded their allotted speaking time.

Joerg-Olaf Schaefers reports that Alvar Freude has been found guilty of spreading hate speech by linking to it. His documentation was not considered as such by the court; the satirical offer to read banned content over the phone was not considered satirical by the court.

On Thursday, a court in Stuttgart (Germany) will hear a hyperlinking case: Alvar Freude is an online activist who has been fighting against controversial web blocking attempts by the Düsseldorf district authority. The authority had attempted to block access to some hate speech content (Lauck, Stormfront) by ordering ISPs to modify DNS records on their name servers. In the context of an (excellent!) documentation of these activities, Freude had linked to the incriminated material.He is now accused to have contributed to the further distribution of the incriminated material, despite the fact that the links in question were in the context of protected political speech.In short, the court ought to throw this case out. More on Thursday.