Where I live the media goes on and on about how The Iranian people is using web technology against its regime - for example Twitter, Youtube, e-mails and also cellular phones, SMS, etc… These technologies are described as giving an upper hand to the people as opposed for example to the revolution which took place 30 years ago.

I think this technology is actually being used against the people. You can not use it without being completely exposed. Anyone using it is being monitored and ironically has his/her social network mapped. Once someone is determined to be an organizer or worth the effort of taking down, he/she can be easily arrested.

Standard captcha are either broken or are an accessibility nuisance or both. In its most noble form - reCaptcha - it is used brilliantly to digitize books and provide people over at India with a living:
http://recaptcha.net
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1835
http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

Smart engineers all over the world are busy trying to invent the most inaccessible new generation captcha possible, which typically involves analyzing or playing around with images.

However, it came to my mind recently that there might be another way, accessible and more faithful to the original Turing test (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test). Can a computer administer an effective textual reverse Turing test to block registration spam? Can Eliza, the friendly nonsensical therapist, the famous first Turing test runner up, do that?

Imagine you try to register a new account at web20.com and suddenly Eliza pops up and asks you to elaborate on why you chose to submit the spammy looking email address john23kjdsf784@mail.ru

Seriously, spam filters such as Akismet (for blogs) or Gmail have become so efficient that they have practically eliminated comment and email spam. By requiring a registrant to submit enough textual information it may be possible to apply these filters to registration spam.

In addition, such a conversation, while being entertaining enough for the casual registrant, can be too time consuming for professional-human-captcha-solvers, relieving the potential problem of relay attacks.

Finally, if a new developer vs spammer war ensues around chat captcha we will soon see the first computer to pass the Turing test

LAMP web hosting can evolve to offer the scalability of Google App Engine (GAE for short).

As discussed in the post “Google App Engine Limited”, GAE does not currently scale bigger than a dedicated server. What it offers is “natural” scalability up to that size and “pay for what you use” billing.

With traditional VPS hosting you can allocate resources manually. You do not have automatic resource provisioning, and as a result you either don’t have enough resources for your service or you pay for more than what you use.

However, Xen virtualization (used by VPS hosting) could evolve to offer automatic resource provisioning, and “pay for what you use” billing as well. It is already possible to move VM between physical servers with no service interruption. A controller could be designed to optimize resource allocation per server, migrating VM as required, for example migrating small services in response to slash-dotting, combining high-bandwidth low-CPU services with low-bandwidth high-CPU services, or automatically matching services which have complementary load patterns.

Here is my five-months-late take on the Negroponte-Microsoft love story announcement. It is an ironic story in which the FLOSS community is harnessed to pull the OLPC wagon to Africa and goes ballistic when told that they have to carry Microsoft in that wagon as well. I say that anyone in that community feeling betrayed can only complain of his or her own ignorance.

Take a look at Negroponte’s announcement (http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/nicholas_negroponte_sugar_olpc.html): The term Open Source appears 27 times in the announcement and comments while Free Software appears in one comment only where it is being slammed. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on OLPC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olpc): The term Open Source appears 7 times but nothing there on Free Software.

Well, isn’t Open Source all about that corporate-friendly magical method for creating high quality software? Not about user freedoms or hating a particular corporate. You would think the FLOSS community members who feel strongly about something would actually know what it means, right? wrong.

And guess what, there is a two years old interview with Stallman on YouTube in which he warns of such an occurrence (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBogiLGPMwA). This is what he says beginning on minute 08:45: “I ask you to please always call it Free Software because that way you will encourage other people to pay attention to the question of freedom. The term Open Source was formulated by people who did not want to talk about freedom and that is the stupidest thing any people can do. If people don’t talk about freedom it gets forgotten and then somebody says ‘if you will just accept these little restrictions, here is this convenient pleasure you can have’, essentially saying ‘we will sell you something in exchange for your freedom’. And if you have not been thinking about freedom and realizing what freedom means, you might accept that poisonous deal and then your freedom is gone.”

First I chose GPL for Winpdb, then only 2 years later I actually discovered Free Software, what it stands for and the fascinating universe behind these two words, but now a year later I have stumbled on a problem.

GPL is a tool that uses copyright to enforce software freedom, but… in order to be able to enforce that there must be a copyright holder that can take action. The FSF is aware of this and is carefully requiring contributors and their employers (!) to sign legal papers of copyright transfer: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-assign.html

The problem is that most GPL projects can not afford to force potential contributors to get their employers to sign legal papers as it will reduce the number of contributions to 0 and therefore the copyright to their projects is either dispersed among the different contributors or even worse, is questionably held by a single person or entity (with emphasis on questionably).

What does that practically imply on GPL?

On my search for answers I stumbled upon an interesting article from the year 2000 in Advogato (A recommended site). It became even more interesting when I spied a comment by one Bram Cohen who at the time was little known in the Universe as he did not yet leave his job to write BitTorrent: http://www.advogato.org/article/183.html

I would appreciate your educated opinion or a reference to articles on this subject.

Tychod stands for Tycho debugger which is a reference to a story/article by Richard Stallman called “The road to Tycho” about a world where possession of a debugger has been made illegal to prevent people from working around DRM mechanisms.

An interesting point that Stallman discusses in another article “The GNU Project” is that popularity of free software is spreading faster than the philosophy of freedom that motivated it. This is what he says:

Estimates today are that there are ten million users of GNU/Linux systems such as Debian GNU/Linux and Red Hat “Linux”. Free software has developed such practical advantages that users are flocking to it for purely practical reasons.

The good consequences of this are evident: more interest in developing free software, more customers for free software businesses, and more ability to encourage companies to develop commercial free software instead of proprietary software products.

But interest in the software is growing faster than awareness of the philosophy it is based on, and this leads to trouble. Our ability to meet the challenges and threats described above depends on the will to stand firm for freedom. To make sure our community has this will, we need to spread the idea to the new users as they come into the community.

But we are failing to do so: the efforts to attract new users into our community are far outstripping the efforts to teach them the civics of our community. We need to do both, and we need to keep the two efforts in balance.