I expect this American court decision to be all over the weblogs soon – not only is it a decision in favour of the music industry, it also represents a clear threat to Internet privacy (or the little of it that remains anyway).

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has convinced a US district court to order Verizon, an ISP, to identify for them a subscriber who had (allegedly) downloaded 600 songs in a single day. Verizon is appealling and has not yet identified him (or her).

A Verizon spokesman suggested that this would allow the RIAA to conduct “fishing expeditions” to find pirates and said that it was in any case possible that the subscriber themselves might not have been responsible for the crime. Perhaps it was a friend passing by? A child in the house?

Well, it seems that the RIAA had in this case identified the pirate uniquely and had some evidence against them so that doesn’t sound like a random fishing expedition to me. The argument that subscribers shouldn’t be held to account over copyright violations is a more interesting one, particularly as wireless Internet access becomes more widespread.

I can certainly imagine a situation where broadband subscribers are held responsible for violations by anyone in their home – that should encourage parents to keep an eye on what their kids are doing online! – but what happens if you make your broadband connection available freely to your neighborhood and a neighbor abuses this? This might have a chilling effect on wireless freenets – or it might encourage those who do share their access to put some kind of monitoring software on their connection to attempt to stop illegal use. Even if not effective, the act of having done it might provide some legal protection…

I would be curious to see what happens if, say, a French AOL user is nabbed next time. Would AOL have to hand them over?

It’s good to see strong reactions to the recent Sp!ked piece critical of the UK Government’s pilot projects providing Internet access to disadvantaged neighborhoods.year personal unsecured loan repayment 10loan money 11 16 paycheck paydayhome 125 credit loan equity125 secured loan ukpayday loan 19 software free 132000 loan bad credit forloan 228hour cash 24 loans Map

And weblogging is still too difficult, says Stef “Whitelabel.org/UpMyStreet” Magdalinski.

I love using MT but I can only do so because I have a tech-savvy friend to set up and host it.

Trackback is a hard concept to explain and implement (though I think it is rather useful once you start using it). But there seems to be a larger danger here. With everyone concentrating on enabling and improving on weblogging – the flavour du jour – I haven’t seen any work being done to enable more complex self-publishing like simple web forms for creating online newsletters.

To quote from a recent essay I wrote:

it is now possible to produce simple websites or photo albums without cost by filling in forms online, though sites created in this fashion may be less likely to show up on many search engines, they are limited in the number of visitors that providers will allow over a given period, and the primitive design templates used often make such sites visibly un-professional.

For more sophisticated users, weblogs (regularly updated websites) can also be produced and maintained free of charge… and message boards and chat rooms can also be easily set up for free on personal websites. Moreover both Microsoft and AOL have noted the growth in weblogs and intend to provide improved tools for people to express themselves online.

(What’s the name of that Microsoft “organize my life” R & D programme?) But I’m guessing all the action for MS and AOL is in helping people publish individually. What is needed is free – preferably open source – tools that let people make their own newsletters jointly with others or coordinate online to accomplish something (not just messageboards – though tailored ones could be part of it but shared document creation tools) – even create their own streaming audio radio stations without having to program anything.

I hope that is part of what Matt Jones and friends are working on at the BBC’s New Politics Initiative.

Later Is Textpattern part of the solution? It requires, the author says, “Little knowledge of internet technology to install and use it” but having to have “an account with a hosting provider who offers PHP and a MySQL database” to use it doesn’t sound like a good start.

It would be handy to see a sample site with some greeked text using its standard template to see what a Textism site would look like.

Writing in the (often interesting and always controversial) online politics & culture webzine sp!ked Sandy Starr takes the government to task for investing in Wired Up Communities pilot projects. Why? Because in his view it is condescending to offer acess to the Internet and to virtual community tools to people who have more basic needs like better housing, education and jobs.

It is true that providing online access is not sufficient to improve people’s lives by itself, but just because as he points out some early projects were not particularly successful in raising employment, for example, it doesn’t invalidate the whole idea. These are only pilots – there is still much to learn. If a virtual community can help nurture social capital on the ground even to a small extent it is a start.

Sandy concludes:

“If the circumstances in which people live were genuinely improved, then they could get wired up on their own. And they could form online communities – if that’s what they wanted to do – without interference from a third party”

I am sure that the government is already trying to tackle the more basic chronic problems that exist on some of the impoverished housing estates that have also been targeted with this programme. Why not see if kick-starting online usage could help matters?

Whatever my disagreements with the article, however, it is still worth taking a look at it, if only for its links to some recent research.

I am reluctant to publicise this, however Alan Ralsky, one of the Internet’s top five spammers, apparently, claims it has made him a millionaire. Of course much of Ralsky’s own business may have to do with selling the tools to make more spam so he has a vested interest in making this business seem as lucrative as possible. Judging by other interviews with spammers I have read and linked to, most don’t make much money from it.

Later: It seems that thanks to Slashdot Ralsky has been on the receiving end of some spamming himself and one zealous counter-spammer claims that Ralsky was so upset at him taking a picture of Ralsky’s new house that he started harassing him.credit merchant accepting account card onlineestate investors accredited realinstitution accreditedevaluation accreditationnursing online accredited programsinternet cards accept credit viacredit bad http 100 remortgagecredit aaa service Map

What Would Samuel Pepys Do [in the 21st century]? Keep a weblog, of course. Phil Gyford, who I know slightly, will be publishing Samuel Pepys’ diary online as a weblog a day at a time, complete with links to more in-depth historical information.

Pepys, probably the world’s best-known diarist, wrote about his life in 17th Century London – Phil provides more detail here.

If you prefer the text in an easy-to-carry-around form or want to “cheat” and read ahead, Project Gutenberg has the whole text for you to download thanks to Dr David Widger, who has also added a lot of other etexts to the public realm.

Later Phil has been interviewed by the BBC and a passing reader of the story pointed out that Pepys would not have kept a public weblog – his diary was in a very hard-to-decipher shorthand.

… and make a point at the same time. Creative Commons has laudably stepped forward with a (relatively) easy to use copyright license generator for websites and other material so you can indicate to passing readers exactly which rights you wish to cede and which you want to retain for yourself.

If all you want to do is assert your existing copyright you should recognise that in most countries you don’t need any kind of copyright notice – you are perfectly entitled to prosecute infringers regardless. Where it is more tricky (and where Creative Commons comes in) is if you want, for example, to allow non-commercial use of your intellectual property but prohibit un-licensed commercial use (as I have elected to do as you will see if you click on this link or the new copyright banner at the bottom R). Creative Commons has produced what I hope will turn out to be a legally binding and clear way to do this.

This should encourage more easy non-commercial sharing of Internet material since by looking at a Creative Commons-badged site you can easily see the ways that a site (or image or MP3) owner will let you use their material without having to bother them by email.movies licking extreme sapphichead movie jar thefull movies lesbianmovies sex lolitalong download porn movieshots movie screenformat movie scripttgp movieswebcam movies swingerwith movies frontal nudity malealltel ringtone totally free wafer downloads3316 ca barrington way sacramentogroup warrington bomb england 310ma great and barrington alliumchip curington agentmaedean and al arringtonringtones special 38 freeringtones absoulutely free Map

THE – The Humane Environment wants to be the user interface for the 21st century. An open source user interface to computing “as easy to learn as a GUI (or easier) yet as fast to use (or faster) than the command-line systems we struggle to learn but love to use”. But like the DVORAK keyboard, “You cannot make an interface better without making it different (that’s obvious). If it’s a lot better, it will be a lot different. This means that it will feel unfamiliar to anybody familiar with present interfaces.”

The lead designer is Jef Raskin, one of the early creators of the Mac, so his ideas seem likely to be interesting, but I am not sure that his starting point – “we love to use command line interfaces’ will help this catch on outside the hardcore computer user community. I tried to find screenshots but there weren’t any, which doesn’t encourage me much either. Has anyone tried this out yet?

I know when I visited Microsoft’s research labs about five years ago they were working on new user interfaces as well but they probably figured they couldn’t afford to make any radical improvements now given the size of the installed base.

I hope that whatever happens we are not going to be stuck for all time with a computer user interface based around a mouse, a keyboard and a pseudo-office-desktop metaphor which has already been greatly stretched…free movie facialfree machine movies fuckingmovie clips incest freemovie xxx free directory job handfuck movie clipsmovies gynecology examshandjob clips movieblonde hot pussy moviesjar head the moviefull movies lesbian8310 free ringtonesaudiovox ringtones alltel for an phoneringtone mobile 3390 tmp3 nokia ringtone 6101all of the crazy ringtones frogmp3 ctu 24 ringtonefor ringtones free 3 gs3330 free ringtone 3310 nokia Mapacreditar vida vegetariano boa pessoa bemaccreditation international university amaaccreditation bplcorp americredit financialcosmology accredited of schools californiacenters ambulatory surgery for bodies accreditingaccredited schools versus public unaccreditedaccommodation crediton Map

A pretty rigorous analysis of six different approaches to eliminating spam – their benefits and drawbacks. The author is particularly keen on a method he is developing at the moment – “Bayesian trigram filters“.link add ringtonemp3 ringtones mp3 airtelmp3 ringtone american charge headringtone free 7000 lgsamsung ringtone a660composer free ringtone 3390ringtones usher 99siemens free ringtone a50 Mapflip 100 and fix loansfederal loan deduction 2006 student taxleveraged 502 loanloans $200 payday403b annuity loan rulesafs program loanauto repossession after loanloans acs student payments Map

Frank Boosman makes an excellent point about the need to find a way to set levels of privacy on one’s weblog (because it would be better to do that than to have to create several different weblogs each with mostly the same posts but different levels of security.

livejournal has this feature.

One might also extend this idea to “quality rings” where different levels of depth of your thinking were available to different readers, or eventually “payment rings” (like the Salon Premium model) where people could read your blog at one level for free or pay to be able to see the deeper level (or pay per post read at that level?)