The largest collection of Darwin’s work in history, now on the web!

This is awsome!

Darwin’s private papers online – the largest publication of Darwin’s papers in history. Read about it here. Browse the papers here.
This site contains Darwin’s complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, [...]

Wall-Mart Puts the Muscle on Warner and BMG to Ditch DRM

You all know those stories we hear about the E-v-i-l Wal-Mart muscling the poor manufacturers and distributors to lower prices. Well this time Wally World is using its power for the forces of Good!

A Tipping Point For MP3s
(waaaay down the article we find this little nugget of good news)
… mass merchant Wal-Mart [is] alerting [...]

Nuke is back at WP

Nuke is back at WordPress.
Welcome back Nuke!

Zhelatin Worm; Botnet Spread to 10 Million PCs, Now Via Automated Blog Postings

ARS Technica tells us that the Zhelatin gang’s “Storm Worm” has now evolved way beyond spam and infected e-card greetings.
The “Zhelatin gang”—named after the trojan it installed—was responsible for what started out as the “storm worm.” First spotted earlier this year, the spread of the “storm worm” started via e-mails purporting to provide [...]

Net Neutrality

save the internet

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License Launched

The latest version of the Creative Commons licenses — Version 3.0 — are now available. Read more here. Via: /. & BoingBoing.

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

On June 16, 2006, Professor Lawrence Lessig gave a talk at the Center for American Progress entitled “The Withering of the Net: How DC Pathologies are Undermining the Growth and Wealth of the Net.” This talk was the second in a series of three. The first talk [...]

U.S. Cyber Counterattack Plans: Bomb ‘em!

We’ve all heard of Google bombing, well the US Government seems to take the expression sort of literally…

U.S. cyber counterattack: Bomb ‘em one way or the other

National Cyber Response Coordination Group establishing proper response to cyberattacks

If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nation’s critical information infrastructure, the Department [...]

Has your video been removed from YouTube based on a bogus Viacom takedown?

Unfairly Caught in Viacom’s Dragnet? Let the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) know!

Well, with its 100,000 DMCA takedown notices aimed at YouTube users, now it’s Viacom that is netting its share of dolphins. Among the 100,000 videos targeted for takedowns was a home movie shot in a BBQ joint, a film trailer [...]

Web 2.0: Explained in just under 5 minutes

Web 2.0 Explained … in just under 5 minutes.

Hattip: BoingBoing by way of Wonderland

Add Dailymotion Video to Your WordPress.com Blog

There was a petition for WordPress.com to add DailyMotion support, and here it is.
video of a Stirling cycle model engine …

Embedding instructions are here, you can also post to your WordPress.com blog directly from the DailyMotion player by using their “blog this video” feature.
Very Nice

Canada Responsible for 50% of Movie Piracy

50% movie piracy from Canada: Hollywood
As much as 50 per cent of the world’s pirated movies come from Canada, prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles in this country.
According to an investigation by Twentieth Century Fox, most of the illegal recording, or “camcording,” is taking place in Montreal movie [...]

One quarter of all computers are internet zombies

What does this mean to you? That one in four of you are reading this on a computer that you think you own and control, but that is really an infected zombie (and Typhoid Mary) controlled by a black hat “Bot-Herder”.

Vint Cerf: one quarter of all computers part of a botnet

Cerf told his listeners that [...]

Google has finally defused the “Google Bomb”

Google has been making some changes lately.

Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs.
After just over two years, Google has finally defused the “Google Bomb” that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on miserable failure. The move wasn’t a post-State Of The [...]

Music companies consider ditching DRM

Interesting article in on the International Herald Tribune website…

Record labels rethink digital rights management at Midem

Now that even digital music revenue growth is faltering amid rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are closer than ever to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to [...]

Turn your blog into a book, part II

Gina Trapani has posted Pat II of her Geek to Live instructional series:

Geek to Live: Turn your blog into a book, part II

Part I of How to turn your blog into a book covered the basics for blogging your book idea, getting an agent, and drafting your book proposal. Now you’ve got 300 pages due [...]

Our Techno-Utopian Future: Fallacies and Predictions

David Veksler waxes philosophic (as is his custom) on the subject of:

Our Techno-Utopian Future: Fallacies and Predictions

What’s the ultimate destiny of our civilization? Are we destined to become “living batteries” a la the Matrix, refugees in a post-apocalyptic radioactive desert landscape, or peons of a totalitarian surveillance state? Or, can be look forward to a [...]

Turn your blog into a book

Part one of a multipart article at Lifehacker…

Geek to Live: Turn your blog into a book, part I

There’s a world of difference between being a blogger and a book author, but more writers are wearing both hats these days. It’s not surprising that pro writers are becoming bloggers, but “amateur” bloggers getting book deals are [...]

Is Web 2.0 Communism’s Crowning Glory?

Here is an excerpt from a interesting Op-Ed piece on Bit-Tech:
The People’s Republic of Web 2.0

Karl Marx is famous for thinking up a system where everyone had a voice, where everyone was equal, and then went on to associate it with a political system. I suppose you can’t blame old Karl for the [...]

Well, Snap!

Snap Preview Anywhere™ WordPress Beta is now featured on PoliTech.
What is Snap Preview Anywhere? Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting PoliTech to get a glimpse of what other sites we’re linking to, without having to leave our site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to [...]

The Year in Review; 2006 Top Ten Lists

It’s almost 2007, and who doesn’t like looking back at the previous year by perusing the various Top Ten lists? Here are some of my favorites…
From Wired.com we have the 9th annual presentation of the Wired News Vaporware Awards, their ode to the year’s top technology products promised, hyped and scheduled, but not delivered. Click: [...]

Politically Correct & Liability Free, Season’s Greetings

From PoliTech to all of you!

From me (“the wishor”) to you (“the wishee”), please accept without obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, politically correct, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, [...]

And so it Continues: YouTube Adds “Hate Speech” Flag To Its Videos

This is not good…Who defines “Hate Speech? Are we to depend on the “wisdom of the group” to regulate what “is” and “is not” appropriate speech? Browse Digg.com for a few minutes and let me know how you think it will go.

YouTube Adds “Hate Speech” Flag To Its Videos
Posted by Noel Sheppard on [...]

Good question: why doesn’t the Xbox 360 have its own browser?

joystiq answers a darned good question:

Good question: why doesn’t the Xbox 360 have its own browser?

We don’t want a complicated solution that requires an operating system (though, at any given time, we’ve got all kinds of computers on around the house). We just want to turn on the dang console and be able to browse [...]

GooTube

This is just too funny to pass up, Gizmodo has named the YouTube / Google deal…

Google buys YouTube: GooTube.
Apparently the rumor that Google was buying YouTube was less of a rumor than someone on the inside letting it slip out to the entire world. But now that Google’s paid $1.65 billion in an all-stock acquisition—which [...]

Fight DRM: Ten things you can do today

“If consumers even know there’s a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we’ve already failed” – Disney Executive.

Defeating DRM is all about awareness.

The direct actions that we have taken are all about this. Today we are asking you to let the people around you know that DRM is bad for our society. [...]

DefectiveByDesign.org Takes Another Bite at the Apple

Taking another bite at the Apple

With 100,000 DRM warning labels now distributed, it’s time to start the action. Join one. Start one.

Join us in New York and London.

On Saturday, September 30th, hazmat suited DefectiveByDesign members will gather at the flagship Apple stores in New York and London, These high profile events will kick-off awareness for [...]

Software Defined Radio (SDR) or ‘Tower of Babel’ technology

Another sign of technological Convergence…

‘Tower of Babel’ technology nears

Software Defined Radio (SDR) can read and understand different kinds of radio waves

The problem of compatibility between wireless devices is being addressed at an international conference this week.

Scientists will be discussing what has been dubbed “Tower of Babel” technology – software that can converge different wireless [...]

Why Vista will mean the end of the Microsoft monolith

This is not to say it will be the end for Microsoft, but the way I read the the technology tea leaves here is that Microsoft will find itself slowly marginalized, similarly to IBM which during the “Big Blue” era was the only name in computing.

Microsoft has been continually outperformed by the Social/technological GNU/GPL movement [...]

A 1st Blog From Space

Hi everyone,

It is about 11:30 GMT here on ISS. It looks like my first entry from space made it down there.. Amazing, isn’t it…?

So first let’s take care of a few housekeeping items… I do not have realtime access to email. The email process is a batch process so it happens three times a day. [...]