Indistinguishable from Jesse

I had a great time at the San Diego Firefox party, organized by numist. Most of the people at the party were a lot of UCSD computer science students, but there was also at least one Cog Sci major and an English major. Many of the computer science majors were juniors who had just finished struggling with difficult OCaml assignments in a Programming Languages course.

Not everyone who was at the party uses Firefox as their main browser. While some of them use nothing but Firefox trunk builds, the host uses Safari for most of his browsing.

Lawrence Eng, a market researcher at Opera Software's San Diego office, also joined the party. We discussed differences in anti-phishing approaches: Opera's default protection involves contacting the server with URLs you visit, but Opera promises to only use the URLs it collects due to the feature in specific ways. He also admitted to having tried out Thumbs, saying that "Firefox has Opera beat there".

Some people at the party were disappointed at the lack of Firefox t-shirts, but said they weren't going to switch to Opera or Safari as a result. I replied that it was a good thing Lawrence hadn't brought along any Opera shirts.

I brought my copy of Apples to Apples. It is one of my favorite party games, along with Taboo and Scattergories. About half an hour into the party, I tried to start the game. Not many of the partygoers knew the game, so we started with four players and let others join gradually.

Like any good party game, Apples to Apples is fun even if you're not winning; it's possible to play without keeping score at all. This was good for me because I'm not an especially strong player and many of the other players had the advantage of already knowing each other.

Perhaps in part due to my overall low score, I was very satisfied with how I won the last round. The adjective to match was "Frightening" and I played "A sunrise", initially hoping to win on irony. But after seeing that my "sunrise" was up against the Anne Frank card, I had a flash of insight. I explained: "You've been up all night working on a project, you're not even close to done, and you look out the window and see the sun rising." Another player had been in exactly that situation the morning before the party, and the judge picked my card.

Today's Java security update includes a checked-by-default "Install Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer" option. Shame on you, Sun and Google. Automatic security updates are no place to push unrelated, bundled software. Making security updates annoying hurts security almost as much as making security updates complicated: users will be less inclined to update next time.

This is similar to how Flash updates attempt to install the Yahoo Toolbar. It's certainly not as bad as the frequently updated AOL Instant Messenger, which turns on the "Today window" popup on every AIM account and adds a "Netscape ISP" icon to the desktop with every security update. But I thought Google was trying to set a good example.

I made this using the On Notice Board Generator.

Cory Doctorow gave a keynote at ToorCon about DRM. During the Q&A, an audience member asked him to give additional comments on the infinite copyright situation. Cory's answer focused not on the effects on the general public, but on the effects on artists.

It's bad news because for most of us, 45 years after our work is created, a hundred years after our work is created ... figuring out who you need to talk to before you can re-use that work -- before you can bring it back, archive it, or put it back in the stream of commerce, make a new work from it -- is almost impossible, and certainly costs more than you'll ever hope to earn from those works. As a result, the works languish. You might have a piece that would be interesting to use in your new transformative work, but figuring out who you need to pay, let alone paying them, costs more than you'll ever be able to earn back from it.

What that means is that the library is burning in slow motion. All that film ... is turning to slime and we can't bring it back. [As long the early Mickey Mouse shorts] remain in copyright, all those other works disappear. It's a kind of radical denuding of the marketplace.

There are a lot of bad things you can do to artists: you can plagiarize us, you can rip us off, you can leave us to die in penury, you can write nasty things about our books on Amazon. But of all the things that you can do to artists that horrify artists, I think that the one for which we reserve a special creeping horror is the spectacle of the mountain of books on fire. It's being removed from the public eye ... it's being forgotten by history.