Bill on Net Neutrality passed 20 to 13
The broad, nonpartisan movement for Internet freedom notched a major victory today, when a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee passed the “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006″ — a bill that offers meaningful protections for Network Neutrality, “the First Amendment of the Internet.”
The bipartisan “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006″ (H.R. 5417) next moves to the full House after Congress returns from its Memorial Day recess. The SavetheInternet.com Coalition is urging people to continue writing and calling their members of Congress until Network Neutrality becomes law.
The fight is far from over, but today was a good day for Internet freedom and open democracy.
From: Save The Internet
Oblivious No More
Two weeks ago, I recounted the tale of Dale Frantz, CIO at Auto Warehousing Co., who had been harassed by a Microsoft sales apparatus that appeared to be oblivious to the ramifications of its shameless business practices (see Rotten Effort).
Since the column appeared, tens of thousands of people all over the world have become aware of the practice. Many others who were already aware of it, including readers in Scotland, New Zealand and Singapore, wrote to share similar experiences.
"As Microsoft continues these types of practices," [an] IT director noted, "it makes a much stronger case for me to push more and more of our systems toward Apple and Linux, which I've been doing for the last two to three years."
From: Computerworld
Subversion and Bugzilla downtime
The subversion and bugzilla server is in need of some maintenance. The root partition is filling up quickly so I need to rearrange the partitions a bit. The server will be offline on Sunday, May 21 between 17:00 and 18:00 Central European Time.
Web developers are standards acrobats
by Sander MarechalSometimes people ask me "What is the most important thing in web development?" I used to reply along the mantra of standards based design, using CSS to separate design from content, but I don't think it's the most important skill anymore. Not that standards are a bad thing, it's just that there are so many of them.
On the Art (?) of Disinformation: telling the Big Lie
This blog entry is a rarity for me: an exegesis on the deliberate disinformation of a single vendor. [...] What persuaded me to take up the cudgels in this case was a quote I read earlier this week in eWeek, and then spotted again at Bob Sutor's blog today:
“You can achieve interoperability in a number of ways,” said [Microsoft's] Robertson. Among them: joint collaboration agreements, technology licensing and interoperability pacts.
All of these statements share a common characteristic: each is a blatant misstatement of fact, and it is that which I find to be so offensive. True, there isn't a vendor alive that isn't guilty of spin, and spin has a heritage that goes back to time immemorial. But we generally recognize spin as spin when we read it, and can discount the exaggerations accordingly. But the Big Lie (which is what each of these statement is) has a more shameful geneology, and a more insidious and cynical intent.
From: Consortium info
Hearts bling!
by Sander MarechalJust a quick update to show you what I have been working on lately besides what you see in the commits list; I'm trying to find/create some new art for Hearts.
OpenDocument Approved by ISO/IEC Members
The six month voting window for ISO/IEC adoption of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard closed on May 1, and at midnight (Geneva time) last night it was announced internally that ODF had been approved by the ISO members eligible and interested in casting a vote. The vote passed with broad participation and no negative votes (there were a few abstentions), and ODF is now ISO/IEC 26300.
From a press release (pfd) by the OFD Alliance:
"Approval of the OpenDocument Format by ISO marks an important milestone in the effort to help governments solve the very real problem of finding a better way to preserve, access and control their documents now and in the future," said Marino Marcich, Executive Director of the ODF Alliance. "There's no doubt that this broad vote of support will serve as a springboard for adoption and use of ODF around the world."
From: Consortium info
Driving nails with a jackhammer
Why does Spamhaus blacklist innocent mail servers?
By all reasonable standards, I should be the poster boy for the anti-spam movement. I've locked down the mail server for my domain so that only authorized users can send outgoing mail. I've published Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records for my domain, so that people can check if spam using my domain really came from an authorized server. I even operate two honeypots for Project Honeypot (http://www.projecthoneypot.org/).
Why, then, is Spamhaus, a UK-based organization that maintains a blacklist of spam-producing mail servers, listing my server?
From: Linux Today
