Archive for the ‘open source’ Category

What is Masdar’s Special Free Zone?

Masdar’s Special Free Zone (SFZ) is a unique, integrated 'Green Community’ in the heart of Abu Dhabi.

This new energy and technology Community will open in 2009, covering six square kilometers and offering the finest practical facilities for the Masdar Institute, the Research Network, light industry, development units and laboratories, plus a carefully selected pool of international tenants.

The Zone is an inspirational expression of Masdar’s vision, hosting an iconic campus leveraging the fullest use of innovation in energy-efficiency, sustainable practices, resource recycling, biodiversity, transportation and green building standards. Every building in the Zone will be designed and constructed to provide a model for sustainable living and working.

The Masdar SFZ will offer opportunities unique in the Middle East for synergy between academic resources, research facilities, industry, the financial community, entrepreneurs and family businesses. The Zone will provide up to 1,500 companies with an attractive package of incentives, including a one-stop-shop program of government services, transparent laws, 100% foreign ownership, tax-free environment and intellectual property protection. Proximity to nearby manufacturers, suppliers and markets rounds out the Zone’s unique value proposition.

As the Zone is developed, Masdar intends to leverage elsewhere the knowledge gained in developing the SFZ with a minimum carbon footprint, by building other sustainable communities that can also serve as showcases of environmental urban achievement.

via masdaruae : further reading at architecture.mnp

Know Thy Enemy

There’s so much spam on the internet these days, pervading everything and it’s quite annoying. Running a blog is like a constant battle in the war against spam. People spam your comments in order to direct a minuscule amount of traffic to their sites, which most people wouldn’t even be dumb enough to click on. A while back we directed you to a link which was talking about why spammers do what they do.

From the article, and from experience, it is evident that spammers operate a system which basically works on the principle that even if you only get a tiny return (ie number of clicks on the spam comments on our blog) the return will be greater than the costs you spent doing it.

Anybody else could easily verify the reality of the situation by remembering all the actual paper spam received at home on a daily basis. The average number of direct mail schemes per home per day might have dropped since e-mail went totally mainstream, but we all remember the days of getting about 6,000 AOL CDs in the mail. Funny how they (AOL) fought such long legal battles with spammers while using 99% of the worlds silicone to clog your mail slot (the other 1% went to Pam Anderson, who during the same period couldn’t seem to make up her mind). Don’t ask me why I was reading either of those links, just go with the flow. Anyway, we used those AOL CDs as coasters.

Some bloggers go as far as to say that spam as we know it is the result of organized crime rings that can afford to conscript the cheap labor for their spam schemes. However, we know this isn’t 100% true given that we know personally college grads who make decent money spamming for spamming companies.

Ita€™s organized crime rings who hire programmers to automate everything they possibly can (domain registration, ISP registration, free email account registration) and hire menial workers for pennies an hour halfway around the world to do all the manual things they cana€™t automate (like get past image-based login systems). Which brings me to the second thing.

THIS IS NOT A HOBBY. If you want to be an anti-spam advocate, if you want to write software or maintain a list or provide a service that identifies spam or blocks spam or targets spam in any way, you will be attacked. You will be attacked by professionals who have more money than you, more resources than you, better programmers than you, and no scruples at all. They want to make money, this is how they have decided to make money, they really can make a lot of money, and youa€™re getting in their way.via

The author of the previous quote may be guilty of exaggerating but there is an interesting tinge of mobsterism. Especially given that spam companies have been known to take some pretty brutal retaliation methods… relatively anyway.

Such as:

• Charges quickly surfaced that Lycos was crossing the line by launching a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, which is illegal in the U.S. and most European countries. The antispam campaign also prompted quick retaliation from unknown parties, including a reported hack of the makelovenotspam.com Web site.
• September 26, 2003 (Computerworld) After fighting unsolicited commercial e-mail for several years by compiling and distributing Internet "blacklists" used by Internet service providers to block e-mail from known spammers, two online businesses have given up their efforts after their Web sites were crippled by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks they believe were launched by spammers.

And that’s just the beginning of the unethical tactics that seem to run the internet spam world. Here’s some more links for the curious. And here’s an OnPoint (NPR) link.

What seems to be the main troubling idea presented from all the articles about spam across the internet, which probably nearly rival in amount (warning: facetious) the number of spam, is that the spam world is all about business. There are a lot of huge players in the game, including search engines, which have major stakes in the internet, political agendas, mind control etc., and they don’t like to lose. It all boils down to hard economics in the end. That’s why algorithms stay proprietary. In a perfect open source world it would be easy(er) to combat spam. Then we wouldn’t have had that corny-ass Lycos scheme or these fools right here.

In 2004 the FTC’s A CAN-SPAM Informant Reward System: A Federal Trade Commission Report to Congress (PDF) asked whether rewards to whistleblowers are necessary for effective operation of US anti-spam legislation.

It commented that

potential whistleblowers would weigh the possibility of a reward against a number of opposing considerations: the likelihood of information they submitted actually being used, and whether the use would result in a successful legal proceeding; whether they would lose their own income; whether they would incur personal legal liability for their own part in the scheme; whether they would lose their anonymity; and whether they would become a target of retaliation by the spammer. via

By the most recent estimate, spam accounts for slightly more than 60 percent of all e-mail messages, triple the rate of only a year ago. That’s despite the efforts of Internet service providers to filter it out; despite ever-stricter state laws against spamming; and despite aggressive counter-attacks by anti-spam vigilantes. The reason for this, of course, is the fact that spam is the least expensive marketing ploy in history, which has obvious appeal for those with a something-for-nothing outlook. via

Understand your Enemy
The blog spammers i know have an intimate understanding of all the major blog software, the blog boom itself and how it can be used to further their own sites advantage in the search engines. Bloggers need to take this approach also.
Let me help you get up to speed…
It’s really rather simple: A link to a website with the right anchor text is valuable for search placement. Simple as that. By allowing users to comment and having their "name" as the link text that goes to their website you are enabling them to sign i[n] as "v|agra guy" or whatever - the keyword in the link text is what is important.
Contrary to popular beleif, it doesn’t really matter if your blog has a high PageRank or not, the anchor text is what is important.
With me? via

Stay on your toes, people.

yo-ho yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me

All I have to say about this is:

MY

NINJA

PLEASE!

This is absolutely ridiculous [and great]. No, there’s no Johnny Depp or Orlando Bloom here - or any other actors playing pirates, or even real pirates [at least not the peg-leg having, eye patch wearing, ship having type]. What I am talking about here is The Pirate Bay, a torrent site currently based in Sweden [or one of the other countries that has basically no internet piracy laws]. They’re currently in negotiations to ‘acquire’ the micronation of Sealand [they can’t actually ‘purchase’ it legally, as principalities cannot be sold - but the family in control of the small nation are taking bids for a ‘transfer of ownership’] - off the cost of England.

Here’s some history on Sealand, from the nation’s website:

Sealand was founded as a sovereign Principality in 1967 in international waters, six miles off the eastern shores of Britain. In late June of 2006, the island suffered a devastating fire which destroyed much of the country’s administrative centre and the main power generation facility which serves its population and industries. Fortunately, back-up systems exist which permit its activities to continue but the disaster has compromised significantly the quality of life of its inhabitants and the continued development of the island’s economic and social growth.

The history of Sealand is a story of a struggle for liberty. Sealand was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity. The location chosen was Roughs Tower, an island fortress created in World War II by Britain and subsequently abandoned to the jurisdiction of the High Seas. The independence of Sealand was upheld in a 1968 British court decision where the judge held that Roughs Tower stood in international waters and did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This gave birth to Sealand’s national motto of E Mare Libertas, or "From the Sea, Freedom" [source].

So basically, The Pirate Bay’s plan is to get their hands on this micronation - and use it as a new base of operations for their torrent site. The thinking here is that if they control the country, then they can simply have no laws regarding internet piracy and downloading, and allow themselves to serve torrents to anybody who wants to use the service.

My two thoughts on this [other than how incredibly gangster this move is] are that, 1] this opens the door for other companies to come up with similar plans - while a torrent site is barely hurting anyone, this could be done by a more dangerous and nefarious group, and/or 2] the US or Britain, or someone, invades / cuts the power / kills their internet…whatever - shuts the whole operation down leaving The Pirate Bay stuck with an old British naval platform.

Either way, I’d like to give it up to the [future] Pirates of Sealand - good luck, my ninjas.

Quite honestly, I don’t want to hate - if MNP was ever able to purchase it’s own NATION, however small…I’d be a ghost.

via Endgadget [thanks pheez]

[story from the architecture site…click those ‘the dojo’ links, my ninjas!!]

Khala

We want to facilitate the transition to a post-religious society through providing the world with a scientifically rational, coherent integrated worldview, co-existing with todays religions, worldviews & belief-systems.

Instead of teaching our children that man is evil, born into sin we want to show that the world is what we make of it.

"Designing an Open Source successor to existing Organized Worldviews" at ^khala

Daisy : open source MP3 player

Available from MAKE: online magazine…an open source MP3 player, ready to be designed, assembled, and improved upon my non other than you. get one here.

found at we make money not art

Make Your Own Bump Key!

No, not that kind of a bump key, you fiends. This kind of shady ninja teaches us how to make a key that can open any door. Those in the know call this a bump key.

Watch the video

via high t3ch