DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

I’m furious! I came across a site today, technorepublic.com, that reproduces my entire Blog entry “Video Blogging using Django and Flash(tm) Video (FLV)” (which was on the Digg front page and has been linked to from a large number of places) without my permission. This guy has the audacity to copy and paste my entire posting (with apparently some minor reformatting) to his Blog. The Blog is, of course, littered with AdSense and other banner advertising. Oh, and to add insult to injury, the images contained in the posting are linked from my server. So I get to pay for the bandwidth, while he gets the AdSense revenue.

The site contains no contact information that I could find. A more thorough analysis of his site reveals that almost all Blog entries are lifted from a large number of sources, including a recent posting from Guy Kawasaki. Of course, technorepublic.com doesn’t credit most of his sources. Not only that, but his site claims “Copyright 2006 TechnoRepublic.com”. What a laugh!
Especially annoying is that he rips off a lot of Blog entries written in the first person form. So now he has a Blog claiming “I just added Flash-based (FLV) video blogging support” (no he didn’t! I did!) or “Ever wondered how you draw a ribbon in Adobe Illustrator? A while ago a reader e-mailed me with this question.” or even “Blog reader Curtis Thompson asked me a very good question a few days ago:” (the last one taken from the posting by Guy Kawasaki, the other from a designer’s extremely cool blog).

I’ve been following the GPLv3 debate as an interested bystander, have formed an opinion on the matter, which I’ve kept to myself, though, not being an active contributor to any GPL projects. I just read this post by Glyn Moody to linuxjournal.com (”GPLv3: What the Hackers Said“). While it contains some of the same familiar argments from both sides, it’s still a good and informative read, as it contains a few issues which I had not previously seen expressed this clearly. What I found most interesting is the following quote from Greg Kroah-Hartman about the Kernel developers’ position, which I had not previously seen voiced:

Also, please note that the DRM issues have changed over time from being very broad (which was at least admirable), to being explicitly targeted at only the Linux kernel. Now the license is worded to try to stop the “tivoization” issue.

This is the where a bootloader or bios determines if the crypto signature of the kernel is acceptable or not before it decides to run it or not. This means that only “approved” kernels that come from the company will run properly on the hardware.

Now this kind of restriction pretty much _only_ affects the kernel, not any other type of program. This is because only if you can control the kernel can you ensure that the system is “secure”.

I blogged about Valleyschwag before (see the archives). I quite liked the service: A surprise package of IT goodies from the states. Despite some hassle with customs, a number of duplicate stickers, I enjoyed the service.
Now, following a major hiccup with the last VS package, it appears that Valleyschwag is now dead as a doornail.

After a posting announcing “big changes afoot” and announcing a Valleyshwag “store” on Oct 3rd, nothing more was heard from Valleyschwag headquarters. No reactions to all the negative remarks about the new “store” model. Nothing. Despite pages upon pages (8 pages so far) of comments asking for a response. This from a group of guys (and gals) who were previously ultra-responsive, providing excellent cusomer support.
It seems that Valleyschwag has become a victim of its own success. Collapsed under its own weight and didn’t manage to turn itself around.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I got a couple of cool t-shirts and a few nice caps. Plus lots of stickers from valley companies.

Tags: valleyschwag; dodo; roadkill

Thanks to this blog entry: My Top 10 Best Wordpress Plugins, by John Chow, I am just exploring the Wordpress Related Entries plugin for Wordpress.
If you’re reading this entry on its own page (as opposed to on the main page), it should give you a list of related posts below the entry.
So far, I like what it’s doing. I haven’t explored enough yet to know what it bases its “related” decision on (other than the fact that it needs a full-text index). There’s a lot of comments on Mr.Wasabi’s page and I’m a bit confused whether it honors Technorati tags, for example.
On thing I discovered about the installation: Whatever I did, the related_posts() call kept ignoring the parameters I passed it and simply dumped the titles of the related entries in a single row. No matter which parameters I gave. In the end I just edited the related_posts PHP script itself and plopped the values right into the script. That appears to work.

Edit: Ironically, the plugin shows no related posts for this post. It seems to work OK for the other entries, though.