TPile

An anonymous reader writes “James Boyle has released his new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Prses) under a Creative Commons License. It can be downloaded free or read online. There are chapters on Thomas Jefferson’s views of IP, musical borrowing and the birth of soul, free software, and synthetic biology. Lessig is impressed. Doctorow says he is a law prof who writes like a comedian (is this a good thing?), and credits Boyle’s first book for getting him involved in online rights.”

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Caution: Pokemon seizures may occur.

How to conduct ‘guerilla testing’ to perfect usability.

t can be tough putting together a good closed beta testing pool if you’re a small developer. Perhaps especially so if you’re developing for Mac, which, still has a smaller overall user base to draw from than Windows. MacDeveloper, a recently founded Mac testing community, wants to bring developers together with motivated, responsible beta testers.

The commando-style terror attacks that killed around 200 people in Mumbai, India, last week have been compared to the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. eight years ago. "It’s war," The Times of India proclaimed in an editorial.

As in the
case of the demolition of New York’s World Trade Center in 2001, Mumbai’s iconic
monuments such as the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Oberoi Trident and Chhatrapati
Shivaji Terminus have come under attack.

Like 9/11 did for America, the Mumbai attacks could boost India’s
involvement in foreign military missions. Particularly, in Afghanistan. To defeat terrorism, "India should
seek international help now to upgrade its own security apparatus, but also to
stabilize the entire region stretching from Afghanistan to Bangladesh. There is
no time to waste."

India long has played an important role in Afghanistan that largely has gone unreported in the Western press. "The Indians early on [were] willing help out in Afghanistan — their backyard, so to speak," a State Department official told Danger Room.

The Indian role has "steadily grown over the last couple years," the official added.
"They’re not involved militarily, but do a lot in [economic] development
and things like English-language promotion."

"The Indians been very constructive in Afghanistan." But New Delhi
and Kabul both have been quiet about their relationship "as a way of
accommodating Pakistan." Pakistan is India’s historical rival, a shaky
U.S. ally, and the major base of operations for insurgents fighting in
Afghanistan.

But now, with India eying a bigger military role in the terror war, New Delhi’s relationship with Kabul is going public. Afghan president Hamid Karzai phoned India’s prime minister to express his sympathies, and now is calling for a new "regional approach" to combating terrorism.

How this makes Islamabad feel is an open question. Pakistan has
offered up one of its top spies as a resource in the Indian
investigation of the Mumbai attacks, but has categorically rejected
Indian assertions that the terrorists had strong ties to Pakistan.

UPDATE: Noah here. Speaking of finger-pointing, the Russians are now whispering that America may have been oh-so-indirectly involved. According to the Times of India,
a "top Russian counter-terrorism expert" is saying that the Mumbai
attackers "were probably
trained by the special operations forces set up in Pakistan by the U.S."

"The handwriting and character of the Mumbai
events demonstrates that they were not ordinary terrorists," said
Vladimir Klyukin, an Afghan war veteran.

"Behind this terrorist attack there are ‘Green Flag’ special
operations forces, which were created by the Americans in Pakistan,
just an year before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the
initial period were under full U.S. control," stressed Klyukin, a
veteran of the special "Vympel" commando group of the former Soviet
KGB.

Obviously, this guy Klyukin is hardly a disinterested observer.

[Photo: B-R]

Film buffs rejoice: no longer will you be limited to Dude Where’s My Car when trying to find the perfect Saturday late-night movie on the Internet. The highly-regarded Criterion Collection has begun putting some of its films online for rent, although selection is still limited and parts of the site are confusing to use.

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Bootsy Collins writes “Last Wednesday, the Lori Drew ‘cyberbullying’ case ended in three misdemeanor convictions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 US Federal law intended to address illegally accessing computer systems. The interpretation of the act by the Court to cover violations of website terms of service, a circumstance obviously not considered in the law’s formulation and passage, may have profound effects on the intersection of the Internet and US law. Referring to an amicus curiae brief filed by online rights organizations and law professors, PJ at Groklaw breaks down the implications of the decision to support her assertion that ‘unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the Internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer.’”

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Antivirus companies typically bill themselves as offering critical protection when you need it most, but the timeliness of the protection is a matter of concern. There’s some reason to suspect AV companies may be moving too slowly on this one, with a majority of scanners failing to detect malware up to three days after it’s seen on the web.

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Science News has a fascinating look at an under-appreciated corner of the career of Florence Nightengale — as an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to argue for social change. Nightengale returned from the Crimean War a heroine in the eyes of the British citizenry, for the soldiers’ lives she had saved. But she came to appreciate that the way to save far more lives was to reform attitudes in the military about sanitation. Under the tutelage of William Farr, who had just invented the field of medical statistics, she compiled overwhelming evidence (in the form of an 830-page report) of the need for change. “As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria’s eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change.”

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