Recent Posts
Hackerspace incorporation patterns
As a mere participant of Revelation Space, a hackerspace (or makerspace, if you will) in The Hague, who also happens to practice law (but not corporate law), I found this article on hackerspaces.org interesting. Interesting but incomplete. Incomplete because it doesn't really explore perfectly reasonable combinations of the patterns described. ...
Happy Tree Friends as Copyright War Fodder
Google published a Happy Tree Friends animation this week that apparantly aims to educate the unwashed heathens of the internet about copyright. For those who are too lazy to click the preceding link: the Happy Tree Friends are a bunch of lovely if not a bit moronic woodland creatures that ...
Useful idiots/so-called hackers
Last week two bits of news struck me as misguided. First there was a court in Amsterdam stating that abuse of a WiFi network, does not equal breaking into a computer system, even if such a WiFi network had some form of security measures such as password protection. Lots of ...
Korean Zombie PC Prevention Bill
One can hope that legislative stupidity is not contagious, but would be terminally naive to do so. So although the Korean proposals for a bill that makes security software on computers mandatory and grants the authorities the power to check for the existence of mandated security software on computers seems ...
Rant: why digital levies won’t work
Last week the Dutch artist's union and the the Dutch consumer association jointly proposed a levy for digital media and internet connectivity. The flipside of this deal would be that downloading stays legal in the Netherlands (as it currently is). And no three-strikes-and-you're-out legislation either. Hurray! Obviously, the electronics industry ...
Website Idea: Tree of Technology
First of all, there is this brilliant project called the Tree of Life web project. It is a gorgeous catalog of the taxonomy of all species known to man. Which gave me the following idea: like species, most technologies have precursors (the economies of building steam engines aren't so nice ...
Rant: the elusive open source/free software desktop
Every once in a while there is this happy, chirpy announcement of an organisation (usually a public body) that it will start a project to replace its current closed desktop with an open source one. And while I hate Windows XP (any edition, and let it be known there is ...
Kick off
Let's kick off with an idea that is definitely not mine, but something profoundly silly and rather well executed.