Copyrighteous

Mika and I are hosting a guest visiting who has decided to do many of the normal tourist things while in Boston. Yesterday he went on the freedom trail and saw Old Ironsides.

Old Ironsides is, of course, the USS Constitution and it is the oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy. Constructed from 2,000 oak trees (!) it is one of the few ships in the US Navy whose sides are not made of iron. In this sense, Old Ironsides is a bit of misnomer. Admittedly, the nickname is catchier than the more accurate Old Sides.

Can graphical representations of asexual reproduction accurately be called "micro-organism porn?"

Binary Fission: Porn or Not?

Mitosis: Porn or Not?

There's a disturbing little press release floating around where the Sun-backed Open Media Commons announces it's release of a new DRM specification to be implemented using free software. That people are creating DRM systems under open source and free software licenses is not surprising; much of the encryption technology on which DRM is based has been free and open for a long time. What is disturbing is that it contains what appears to be an endorsement by Lawrence Lessig:

Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School: "In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology. We applaud Sun's efforts to rally the community around the development of open-source, royalty-free DRM standards that support "fair use" and that don't block the development of Creative Commons ideals."

Lessig's position seems to be that DRM is bad and should not exist. But in a world where it does exist, he thinks that not-quite-so-bad DRM is better than the alternatives. Is that the sort of message we want to be sending?

The fact that the software is "open source" is hardly good enough if the purpose of the software is to take away users freedom -- in precisely the way that DRM does.

It doesn't help that EFF has already spoken out against this project.

Lessig is on the board of directors of both EFF and FSF. I think it is smart for members of either organization who are opposed to DRM, even when it's sweetened up, to contact those organizations and let them know how you feel.

On the OMC website, there is a photo of two young attractive people listening to a single pair of headphones. Apparently, the people in the picture need to share a single pair of headphones because the Open Media Commons rights management system won't allow them to share the digital media itself.

Yesterday was St. Patrick's day. I saw a group of WASP Harvard College students wearing green St. Patrick's Day sombreros.

In the words of Joe Wenderoth, "This Freak Show is too long."

I was very concerned by Martin Krafft's appeal to voters in the Debian Project Leader election to shut up about their own "biased" opinions on the race. He argued that the candidates should campaign and that anyone who wants to spread their point of view should be running themselves or keeping their opinions to themselves and getting real work done.

Perhaps I just buy into the whole deliberative democracy concept but I think this attitude is dangerous. In fact, I think it's essential that Debian publicly weigh the benefits of possible decisions and discuss, argue, and debate as a group. I think that every instance of public discourse (and no, flaming is not discourse) on project policy or leadership is a sign of a healthy and involved electorate and I'd like to see more of it.

The leadership of the Debian project is at stake in this election. Our organization is more complex than a wheel with the DPL at the center. Our decision should be made as a project with a complex organization. That means conversations need to work the way the project does.

Obviously, we vote as individuals. But that's precisely why conversations and discussions, through which we can make decisions as a community, play such an important role in informing our votes.

I'll leave talking about enfranchisement in Debian, and the lack thereof, for another day.

We often hear about the technical advances that occur at Debconfs. For example, using only Debconf signage, I once invented a portable toilet that was the size of a single sheet of A4 paper.

The picture is a bit blurred but you can get the idea:

I kicked a new version of RubyVote out the door last week. This version has support of Instant Runoff Voting contributed by Alexis Darrasse. Thanks! I'm not a huge IRV fan but others are so it's important to have it in the library.

There's a gemified version with range voting plus an improved IRV implementation that may have landed in the SVN repository by the time you read this. I'll release another version in the next week or so once everything has settled.

I haven't blogged recently and have been somewhat quiet and out of touch over the last few weeks more generally. I've certainly been busy but have also been trying to find words to describe the recent death of my friend and colleague, Push Singh.

Push was a next-door neighbor at the Media Lab, an academic neighbor in the Electronic Publishing research group, and a neighbor in my building at home. If you've come to parties at the Acetarium, chances are you met him. Push was an up-and-coming AI researcher and something of a protege of Marvin Minsky. He had recently accepted an appointment to the MIT Faculty starting next year. His loss has come as quite a shock to everyone, to say the very least.

Last Thursday was the last of several organized memorial services for Push and it now seems that its time for those of us effected by his death to get back to our lives.

Rather than poorly summarizing Push and his impact on me here, I can point you some of the things that I and others said about him on a wiki page we have created to collect remembrances and in the obituary published in MIT Tech Talk.

Push will be missed and I will continue to mourn his loss.