At last someone has produced a free-to-download User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop (there may be others but this is the first general purpose one I’ve heard about). You might also check out “the O’Reilly site”:http://linux.oreilly.com/ for a few free chapters from some of their many Linux books or take a look at “Learning Debian/GNU Linux “:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/debian/chapter/book/index.html which is completely free – one of O’Reilly’s “Open Books”:http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/.

Thanks to “Slashdot”:http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/04/08/22/1955204.shtml for the link

Ubuntu Linux, sponsored by South African entrepreneur “Mark Shuttleworth”:http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bio.html is not just available free – the organization behind it will “send free CDs”:http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/ to wherever in the world people want to get their hands on it. (Note: if you have broadband and can download it rather than getting the CDs please do so and save money that could be used to send discs to developing world organizations that do need it). If you want a review of the current version with all the geeky details read “Kuroshin”:http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/9/28/211242/712. To summarise, it includes the main applications you would need (the Firefox web browser and OpenOffice) but at present if you don’t want it to take over your whole hard disk you have to partition it manually, which doesn’t say much for its user-friendliness. It’s early days though.

Search Engine Watch publishes a good roundup of the latest coverage of flaws and bias in the way Google News’s automated news gathering works in practice. They link to a New Scientist article revealing “Google China has suppressed links to ‘forbidden’ news”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996426 on the grounds that:

“In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons. These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible.”

. It’s an explanation but not really a justification…

The world’s second largest ISP, Savvis (who?) has at length agreed to kick 148 of the worst spammers off its network. It was initially reluctant to do so (one source claimed it earned $2m a month from hosting them) but a whistleblower went to the “Spamhaus”:http://www.spamhaus.org/ anti-spam organization who threatened to block access to all email from Savvis for everyone using their spam blocking software. Frankly I find this kind of quasi-blackmail morally dubious at best, but it does seem to have worked.

The BBC report ends, ‘as they are thrown off one service provider, there is always another one ready to take them on for the lucrative business they bring,’ but I am more sanguine. If spammers could be thrown off all the large, reputable ISPs and driven onto fringe players, they would be easier to find and their cost base would rise.

P.S. Interestingly (to me, anyway) Savvis inherited many of these offenders from its purchase of Cable and Wireless, a UK company I used to work for (on the digital TV not the ISP side).

It always seemed a shame to me that the commercial nature of documentaries like “Fahrenheit 9/11”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361596/ and “Outfoxed”:http://www.outfoxed.org/ meant that they would not also be available free – at least not officially – but Robert Greenwald who made Outfoxed found a clever way around this.

Rather than releasing his whole film he has simply released the raw interview material from it, allowing independent filmmakers or the curious to make their own use of it. An excellent use of “Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/’s “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ license – I hope more journalists and their organizations start to adopt this practice.

Robert Greenwald’s comments and the interviews in a variety of formats are available on “archive.org”:http://www.archive.org/movies/movies-details-db.php?collection=election_2004&collectionid=outfoxed_interviews&from=thisJustIn

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/09/15/outfoxed_interviews_.html who led me to Lawrence Lessig who led me to “Torrentocracy”:http://www.torrentocracy.com/blog/archives/2004/09/outfoxed_torren.shtml and “Demand Media”:http://demandmedia.net//?op=displaystory;sid=2004/9/15/1612/10512

If you are based in the UK and have a personal home page (this includes weblogs and journals), please visit this home page creation survey and fill it in – it should only take you ten minutes.

If you are an academic I would also be interested to know what you think of it as a survey and how I might improve it (bearing in mind it is only a very rough pilot at the moment!), and if you have a weblog or home pages (anywhere but particularly one that might be seen by Brits) please publicise this survey on your site. The survey will only be up for a month (or less, if I get enough respondents before then).

I don’t expect to publish anything from it as the sample size will be too small and it is very open-ended at the moment so I can get some idea of the kinds of answers people give, but if anything interesting comes out you will hear about it here.

P.S. I am using “QuestionPro”:http://www.questionpro.com/ to do this survey, which from what I have found appears to be one of the best options around for serious surveys (I did some earlier “investigation of survey software options”:https://blog.org/archives/001183.html). If you want to try it out too, please “contact me”:http://davidbrake.org/contact.htm so I can invite you (I would get $10 if you end up using it).

In “California”:http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/9588858.htm?1c a man attached a cellphone to an ex-girlfriend’s car and used it to stalk her (The woman eventually caught the guy under her car attempting to change the cellphone’s battery). Of course it is much easier to simply track your target’s cellphone – something that is apparently being done more and more frequently in Korea. I think all services should require the tracked phone user to acknowledge each tracking attempt.

See “this item from my archive”:https://blog.org/archives/000712.html for info on UK cellphone tracking services.

The Guardian (back in April) took a peek at the Librie EBR-1000EP which costs c. 220 pounds (only available in Japan at the moment) and sports a 6in screen with a resolution of 600×800 dots at 170dpi, (better than the 70-90dpi of a regular computer display). It’s using the microcapsule display technology pioneered by “E Ink”:http://www.eink.com/ working with Sony and others.

It’s potentially a very exciting development – it’s a pity that according to “a recent review in Fortune magazine”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/peterlewis/0,15704,685443-1,00.html Sony predictably enough married this potentially revolutionary technology to a boneheaded copy protection scheme.

Cory says, ‘I don’t know where he [Dennis Hastert, GOP house speaker] gets his money from’.

I thought it would be easy to find out but I haven’t found a free site that provides an index of politician’s interests in the US the way “They Work for You”:http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ does here in the UK. “Open Secrets”:http://www.opensecrets.org/ seems to be down and “Fundrace 2004”:http://www.fundrace.org/ only deals with the presidential race. Anyone fancy spending some money with “Political Money Line”:http://www.tray.com/ to find out where Hastert does get his funding? Anyone know a good site that would let you find out for free?

P.S. This is sparked off by the “row”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/09/01/soros_responds_to_drug_money_insinuation.html over Hastert’s seeming claim that George Soros could be receiving funds from ‘drug groups’.

Following on from my brief mention of “blogs from US troops in Iraq”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_world.html#001217 I have discovered a collection of “pictures taken by troops in Iraq with picturephones”:http://www.yafro.com/frontline.php – you need to click on the ‘comments’ part or mouse over the photos to see the context they give them.

Incidentally (and probably not coincidentally) the blogger who was interviewed on NPR I mentioned earlier has now had to pull his weblog down.

Thanks to Torill Mortensen for the link