Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity

The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially "generic top-level domains" — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web's address system.

Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop.

"Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."

ICANN needs to be stopped. They proposing and prompting concepts that will irrevocably damage the Internet with essentially no one to keep them in check.

Something seriously must be done about the pollution of the TLDs.

From RFC 1591 in 1994:

2. The Top Level Structure of the Domain Names

In the Domain Name System (DNS) naming of computers there is a
hierarchy of names. The root of system is unnamed. There are a set
of what are called "top-level domain names" (TLDs). These are the
generic TLDs (EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, MIL, and INT), and the two
letter country codes from ISO-3166. It is extremely unlikely that
any other TLDs will be created.

Postel must be screaming in his grave to know ICANN rolled like a dog in heat to special interests and already created bullshit TLDs like:

*.aero
*.asia
*.biz
*.cat
*.coop
*.info
*.jobs
*.mil
*.mobi
*.museum
*.name
*.pro
*.tel
*.travel

This is insanity. ICANN's mission statement is not to facilitate "the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history." Its to manage and preserve the operational stability of the Internet's addressing systems! When the hell did it become being a stooge for the world's ISPs?

Fuck. This. Shit.

ICANN == Whores

Nothing is original

This website is intended to be an offloading point and information depot for a number of archiving projects, all related to saving websites or data that is in danger of being lost. Besides serving as a hub for team-based pulling down and mirroring of data, this site will provide advice on managing your own data and rescuing it from the brink of destruction.

Main Page - Archiveteam

Jason Scott's Protection From Online Eviction? and his follow up post make the argument that services like AOL, MySpace, flickr, or Skype should be treated like landlords.

The power landlords have over tenants is overwhelming, unless restricted by law. The argument: if they want to shut down a service, essentially evicting users, they should be required to give notice and keep things running for a year.

This would allow people to safely migrate their digital objects like photos and videos and blog posts, renew relationships with people in their contacts and agree on where to move, file change of address notices for their businesses, and otherwise minimize the logistical, economic, political, emotional, and familial havoc forcible ejection can create.

The Power to Fight Eviction

Last month, the music industry pulled out its stun guns, aka PR flacks, to bring you the following breaking news:

In a stunning turn of events, the US music industry has ceased its long-time litigation strategy of suing individual P2P file-swappers.

Earlier today, Apple briefly summoned the world's attention to bring you the following incredible (!!!) news flash:

Apple said it would begin selling song downloads from all four major music companies without the anticopying measures that have been part of its iTunes store since it opened in 2003. It will also move away from its insistence on pricing songs at 99 cents.

In other words, Apple's software engineers are so distraught over Steve Jobs' failing health that they have resorted to spinning the deletion of annoying source code as a major product innovation.

Does this sound familiar? Let John Markoff take you back:

Long assailed within the computer industry for routinely adding too many features to its software programs, Microsoft will tacitly acknowledge that criticism today when it starts a Web marketing campaign for its new Office XP software suite that ridicules its notorious Office help system.

The Clippy campaign, which will cost about $500,000, also includes a Web-site-based computer game in which irate users, many of whom have long found the paper clip program annoying to the point of distraction, will finally be able to retaliate by shooting virtual staples, tacks and rubber bands at the animated Clippy figure.

The story behind the story, of course, is that the "music industry" -- by which I mean the cartel engaged in organized trafficking in an artificially scarce form of antique "performance capture" -- is an industry in decline, and the major players are desperate to stanch the flow of attention to other "new" (and more participatory) media. Regardless of these late-stage efforts, the decline, which is both inevitable and inexorable, may be viewed as a leading indicator of a broader, long-term phase shift in celebrity culture.

From the archive:

The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.

Also:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

In this case, what's unsustainable is not just the artificial scarcity of individual captured performances, but rather of the underlying capture technology, not to mention the performance itself.

Finally:

But for everyone, surely, ... this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Very different is the mood today.

Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

Digital Domain - What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting - NYTimes.com

A series of Paul Graham's articles has led me to something I'm calling the Innovation Problem. Essentially it started when I read his article After Credentials. I enjoyed it article, but found this part is odd:

Do they let energetic young people get paid market rate for the work they do? The young are the test, because when people aren't rewarded according to performance, they're invariably rewarded according to seniority instead.
...
If people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies than by working for existing ones, the existing companies are forced to pay more to keep them.

This statement about motives seemed out of sync with his essay Great Hackers:

Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it.

Perhaps this is because Graham is talking about a general case of person in the first essary and a subset of people (Specifically great programmers) in the second.

Now, I don't consider myself a super hacker and nor would I ever compare myself to someone like RTM or others Graham has mentioned. Quite the contrary I've gone out of my way to deny unwarranted comparisons. I do however consider myself a hacker and I understand exactly what Graham means in his 2nd essay.

I think that performance metrics are one half of a two sided coin, depending on what drives you are a person: pay or project.

Let me explain. I work for a Fortune 15 technology corporation. They pay me very, very, very well. However in return I'm subjected to (with a fair bit of good things) unbelievably stupid bullshit. They don't seem to realize that I couldn't give 2 shits about their money otherwise I'd have alot less bullshit in my life.

Jay Chaudhry met with me twice in the spring of 2008 and asked me to join his new start up Zscalar. I turned him down for a couple reasons, the biggest being he kept appealing to the wrong side of me. He kept talking dollars, he never talked projects. How are you doing "in the cloud" security. Are you buying or building? ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

The Innovation Problem

Vesela Lecheva, Chairman of the State Agency for Youth and Sports, supported the bid of the Bulgarian Chess Federation to organize the semifinal match for the world championship title between Veselin Topalov and Gata Kamsky, Radio Gong reported. Having in mind the importance of the competition and its complex preparation, and in order to provide optimal conditions for the players and the media, Bulgaria suggested this match to take place from 3rd to 15th February 2009. Possible hosts are Sofia, Plovdiv, Veliko Turnovo and Bansko.

In a letter sent to FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, Ms. Lecheva stressed that all necessary financial guarantees are ready. Meanwhile, Bulgaria is surprised with the change of financial parameters for the match, which expanded to 300 thousand U.S. dollars, without clear argumentation.

Bulgaria to host Kamsky - Topalov match in 2009

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against the NSA, President Bush and Vice President Cheney on behalf of AT&T's customers to fight illegal wiretapping.

I know this is totally beside the point, but don't you wish that this actually was the NSA logo?

EFF sues Cheney, Bush, and the NSA to stop illegal wiretapping - Boing Boing