No Such Weblog

Then you must be joking — or so, T-Mobile seems to believe.

Playing around with my new mobile phone a little more, I attempted to send an MMS (a multimedia message sent from a mobile phone) to a mobile phone in Luxembourg. First surprise, the phone launches GPRS in order to send the message — it seems this is actually an Internet-based service. Second surprise, the recipient didn’t get the image she was supposed to get, but instead an SMS telling her at what URL she could view the MMS that had been sent to her.I’m amazed ever again by the unflexibility often found in so-called “intelligent” network designs, and amused by the fact that smart services deployed there have to resort to the well-functioning “stupid” Internet under the hood. (But at least they have DRM (specifications here), so the controlled, intelligent mobile phone networks must be a much better environment for commerce than that stupid, uncontrolled Internet thing is, don’t you think?)Related reading elsewhere: Decentralization and Commodification, Cell phone user rights considered harmful.

I finally had to get myself a tri-band mobile phone — goodbye to my trusty and robust ME45 which will enter history as the perfect mobile phone with just one frequency band too few. While browsing the manual of the successor, I noticed a full page of legal caveats related to using WAP. Most importantly, I’m told, any repair or exchange of the new device is likely to erase everything I’ve downloaded, so I should better keep backup copies on a PC. Siemens takes no liability for this.However, I’m told, the new mobile comes with DRM technology included, so I may just be unable to make any copies at all of DRM protected content that I’ve downloaded through WAP, not even for backup purposes. And they don’t make any representations (and don’t take any liability) that I’ll be able to get the same for-pay content again.So I’m supposed to pay for stupid ringtones and wallpapers that I’m going to lose when I switch to the next mobile phone, and that I’m going to lose if I have to turn in this one for repair? I’m supposed to pay for crippled content when there’s a wealth of MIDI files available online freely, and when creating a wallpaper is as easy as firing up Gimp and creating a small JPG that’s then transferred to the phone with obexftp?Building a business model on customers’ stupidity looks like a bad idea to me.

I’m told that current Gmail users occasionally have an opportunity to send out invites to others. Lacking an invite so far, I haven’t tried Gmail, yet, and would be interested in having a look at it.(Although, of course, I won’t quit using mutt. 😉Later: Whow, that was fast. Thanks! (You know who you are.)

From Apple’s Tiger Preview – Safari RSS page:

Safari protects your personal information on shared or public Macs when surfing the Web. Go ahead and check your bank account and .Mac email at the library or shop for birthday presents on the family Mac. Using Safari痴 new privacy feature, no information about where you visit on the Web, personal information you enter or pages you visit are saved or cached. It痴 as if you were never there.

Who guarantees that the Safari you see on that public computer hasn’t been changed? Who guarantees that there are no programs which sniff the keyboard, and the screen? Who guarantees that no hidden cameras are hidden in strategic places?Privacy features in some particular piece of software don’t mean that software is running in a trustworthy environment. Suggesting that users perform sensitive activities (such as banking) in untrusted environments, using untrusted computers, is terribly bad advice.

Read these blogs: Michael Froomkins’ discourse.net; Goldstein Howe’s SCOTUS blog (this item in particular)…. and this dissent: Stevens in Rumsfeld v. Padilla.

Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no conse-quence. For if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.

The 2003 CDT spam report is often cited as evidence that WHOIS data mining is not really responsible for any significant amount of spam.In early May, I changed the contact e-mail address displayed in the WHOIS records of most of my domain names to a fresh address that is not being spam-filtered. For six weeks, the address did not receive spam. I almost forgot about it. Now, I’m getting daily spam at that address.Seems like the CDT report’s findings are outdated.

WHOIS Task Force 3 (accuracy) had its (first? only?) open conference call. The call was intended to extend the reach of the ongoing public comment process. It wasn’t too successful at that.I believe I hogged the line for the most part of the call, going through the individual “best practices” proposed in TF3’s preliminary report. In a nutshell, the proposed recommendations either don’t make sense, are harmful, or moot.

The most interesting part of today’s GNSO Council call begins 98:30 minutes into the MP3 recording, and takes about 17 minutes. It’s on the agenda under “any other business”: new gTLDs.My notes are below the break; if something sounds wrong to you, go listen to the MP3 recording.

On its call today, the GNSO Council has extended the public comment periods for the three WHOIS Task Forces until July 5.

There’s a new kernel for Fedora Core 2, and it seems to take care of the IRDA problems I had previously.No more kernel re-building to move the serial driver into a module: Just make sure you do

setserial /dev/ttyS1 uart none

before attempting to load the FIR driver, and everything should work fine.With the new kernel, the only remaining driver that needs to be taken care of separately is the one for the built-in Centrino Wi-Fi.