Today Flickr! started requiring Yahoo! accounts. Some of its users got pissed off. What if a couple of years down the road Flickr started asking for money?

Many early internet services were inherently distributed services based on open protocols. I like that. It’s a guarantee for independence. In the ’90s the slow home connections and the rapid commercialisation of the net instituted the client-server model for ‘net services’ and consigned the distributed model that services such as email, dns and, indeed, the www to history. Suddenly everything was centralised. The trend continues today under the banner of ‘net applications’. Flickr, Gmail, Youtube are just examples of this. In a time when always-on extremely fast broadband connections are (gradually) becoming the norm, perhaps it’s time to decentralise once again.

…And the patent jokes never end.

BlueJ, a free educational Java IDE primarily aimed at students, has contained some innovative debugging features for many years. Features that the largest software developer in the world, Microsoft, blatantly copied (without any attribution) a few years ago in its expensive commercial Visual Studio IDE. But copying was not enough for Microsoft; it would really like to patent them as its own, despite the fact that BlueJ has had them for about 10 years. Ah, let’s all cry in unison: ‘prior art’. Some of the comments on the linked page are very interesting.

[Update: The Reg reports that the patent application has been withdrawn.]

And while I am in total agreement with this statement, I don’t believe that the 27 member EU in existence today is capable of any more integration. There are so many countries that disagree with the idea of a United Europe; it’s not just the Brits anymore. The EU of 2007 is too heterogeneous, too large and there is lack of political will. Two-Speed Europe here we come…

If Norway’s ruling is followed by EU members France and Germany [1] it might. On the other hand, Johanssen’s work on reverse engineering FairPlay might push Apple towards licensing its technology to third parties anyway. But then again all this might just be wishful thinking.

John Searle, arguably one of the most interesting philosophers of our time (well, philosophers are very seldom ‘interesting’ anyway) gave an interview on his views and ‘fascination’ on the topic of consciousness on Australian Radio’s (ABC) “The Philosopher’s Zone”. (Thanks Olga)

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The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary on the importance of the business corporation in modern society. While it had a very limited theatrical release in Europe it was acclaimed for its rational, well-thought out presentation and the important concerns it raises with regards to the nature and power of corporations in our days. The film is based on Joel Bakan’s synonymous book. While the book is well-written and concise (although no match for Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’), the expressive power of the film far exceeds that of the book and is complemented by interviews and on-the-field footage that makes the message crystal clear. I watched the film in autumn 2004 and I found it to be a rational, convincing portrayal of the effects of megacorporate power. In November 2006 the producer of the film, Mark Achbar, released it for free via BitTorrent, although he’d appreciate a donation. You can also buy it on DVD. It’s definitely worth seeing.

Stephen Colbert comments on the iPhone. Wow! :)