etbe

The Planet installation for the Linux.Conf.Au (the main Linux conference in Australia and one of the biggest and best Linux conferences in the world) is designed to only syndicate posts about the conference. I think that this is a bad idea, people who attend the conference actually see things and don’t have a great [...]

The portal http://www,softwarefree,org/ aggregates many blog feeds related to free software without regard to license.
The About Page for my blog links to my Blog License page which states that “The contents of my blogs (unless otherwise noted) are licensed under a non-commercial share-alike license. This means (among other things) that you may not put my [...]

I have decided to run a contest for security related blog posts that appear on Planet Linux Conf Au [1]. That Planet is for people who are attending Linux Conf Au [2], and the prize (or prizes) will be given out at the conference.
The aim will be posts on the topic of computer security [...]

I’ve been thinking about the comment policy for my blogs. I have started deleting comments when people subscribe to comments and use fake email addresses (I get the bounces and it’s annoying).
Also I am deleting comments that don’t make much sense or which don’t address the topic of a post. Some people seem [...]

There are some people who’s blogs I read and often comment on or reference in my own blog posts. Some of them regularly make comments on my posts and reference my posts in their own posts. Of these people some of them I have never met or don’t seem to have conversations with [...]

I’ve just read an interesting article in the New Yorker titled “Twilight of the Books” [1].
It started with some depressing statistics about literacy. One comment that I couldn’t figure out concerned “the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed“. The decline in literacy concerns me because I [...]

A recent news article has Doris Lessing (a Nobel prize winner for literature) claiming that the net has “created a world where people know nothing” [1].
However the Internet is a great tool for learning for people who choose to use it in that way, for example I have learned many interesting things from reading Wikipedia [...]

A common feature in blog software is a Blogroll, this is a list of links to blogs which are associated in some way with the blog in question - most commonly it’s a list of blogs run by friends of the blogger in question.
Now in the case of friends with very similar interests (IE same [...]

The site http://maxfeed.ath.cx/ is copying the entire Planet Debian feed for the purpose of splogging. I’ve sent one DMCA take-down notice for one of my pages (hopefully they will go through and remove all pages that were illegally copied from my feed). Other people who have non-commercial use licenses for their blog feeds [...]

A widely cited unofficial rule on the Internet is known as Godwin’s Law [1]. In it’s original form this rule states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one“. Mike Godwin noted that “overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because [...]