October 30, 2004
Can Foma phones be unlocked?
16:52 UTC » Gadgets - Wireless and Mobile
I just tried taking my NTT Docomo Foma (3G) SIM out of my F900iC and put it in my unlocked Nokia 7600 which is also a 3G phone. The SIM worked fine, but I couldn't send international SMSs. When I put the US T-Mobile SIM into the F900iC, it said "please insert your Docomo SIM". So obviously, the phone is locked. The question is, is there a way to unlock it? And, is there a way to use it on foreign networks. The Good news for Docomo users is that it appears Docomo now has roaming agreements so you can keep your Japanese phone number overseas, but the big question for gadget freaks is if you foreigners can use the new swanky Docomo phones. ;-) I'll look into it, but if anyone has any info, let me know.
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My F900iC
11:25 UTC » Gadgets - Wireless and Mobile
My phone also has a nifty fingerprint thing that actually works. It's really fast. To access secure features, instead of punching a pin, I just swipe my finger across a fingerprint pad. It also has the standard 2 screens, 2 cameras, mini SD and a QVGA TFT display.
As a side note, I noticed that when I turned on my Nokia 7600 the other day, both J-Phone and Docomo showed up as available networks. I was able to send and receive SMSs internationally using my US T-Mobile SIM card in my Nokia while in Japan. Some SMSs took days to get to me so it's not perfect yet, but what a change! We have a multi-operator 3G network that allows foreign SIMs and phones! It looks like I have SMS on my Docomo Foma phone, but I can't seem to figure out how I can send international SMSs. Does anyone know how to do or if I can do this?
UPDATE: Reading the manual, it says that I can only send SMSs to other Foma owners only. Which is weird, since my Nokia roaming on the Docomo network using a US T-Mobile SIM lets me send international SMS. Go figure. I wonder what happens if I put the US SIM in this Japanese phone...
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October 29, 2004
Hello Kitty Blog
16:44 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Japanese Culture
Copyright Sanrio Co., Ltd.
via Andrew and Springveggie
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IM switchboard operator
14:07 UTC » Joi's Diary - Social Software
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OK, She was "suspended without pay"
14:06 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
Jonas and Shelly have taken exception to the somewhat inflammatory headline "fired for blogging" in a previous post. To be honest, I stole the headline from Loic without thinking and I probably should have said "blogger suspended without pay" or something like that.
I've scattered comments around about my response to their responses, but I'll consolidate some of points here:
Accusation - Bloggers are attributing everything to blogging and being typically self-important. It wasn't about blogging, she broke company rules by posting the photos.
Response - The company rule was about using uniforms in photos. She says in the BBC interview that others had done so without being reprimanded. She did have a blog and the picture "outed" her identity and that of her employer. The fact that the blog was an anonymous semi-fictional account of a flight attendant until the photo probably didn't help. I would assume that blogging had something to do with it and the rule about the pictures was the technical reason. Also, blogs make it much easier to "post your picture on the Internet" and easier for people to find them. Therefore, I don't think it's silly to talk about blogging. More importantly, it's a good wake-up call for companies to be clear about blogging policy since more and more people are doing it.
Accusation - She broke a company rule. What's wrong with her being reprimanded for it?
Response - Companies have lots of rules that are broken every day. Companies need to think of what is in the best interest of the company and for their stakeholders. If a company does something that looks unfair or produces bad publicity, it's stupid whether it's a rule or not. It reminds me a bit about people who talk about "breaking copyright law". It's not like a speeding ticket. You don't "break copyright law". People use copyright law to go after people who are hurting their business. I think Delta should think about whether going after people who post pictures of themselves in uniform hurts their business or not and whether shutting these people down hurts them more.
UPDATE: She was fired. From the comments:
Queen of Sky @ October 31, 2004 10:41 AMActually I WAS fired yesterday, so Loic was correct.
The only reason given for my dismissal was "inappropriate pictures in uniform on the Web."
I have combed through Delta's HR manuals and found no rule against this.
The only rule is that they can fire you for anything they deem "inappropriate" behavior. Sounds rather arbitrary to me.
-Q of S
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Rebecca MacKinnon on Wikinews
13:15 UTC » Media and Journalism - Wiki
Rebecca MacKinnon is a the former bureau chief for CNN in Japan and now a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She's one of the people I turn to when trying to understand the future of journalism and she writes about some of the difficulties Wikinews will have and provides some thoughtful suggestions.
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1001: a desktop Flickr client
1001 is a desktop client to be used in conjunction with Flickr, the online photo-sharing website. 1001 not only uploads photos to your Flickr account, it notifies you anytime new photos from either your contacts, everyone, or your favorite tags are uploaded. 1001 allows you to step into the stream of photos passing through Flickr and to quickly see what's new at the moment. Just run the app in the background and if triggered, 1001 pops up a small unobtrusive window to notify you of new photos.Groovy new OS X client by Adriaan for Flickr.
disclosure: Adriaan works for me and I'm an investor in Flickr.
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Delta Airlines flight attendant fired for blogging
01:31 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
LoicThe BBC talks about Ellen, a flight attendant fired for blogging by Delta AirlinesEllen Simonetti, who writes the Diary of Flight Attendant, has been fired (BBC article) by Delta Airlines because she posted pictures of herself in uniform. Maybe a blog to protect the rights of fired bloggers should be launched ?
The images were removed as soon as she learned she had been suspended. As far as Ms Simonetti knows, there is no company anti-blogging policy.I think this is a stupid decision on the part of Delta Airlines. If they didn't have a policy and didn't like it, they should have told her to take it down, not suspend her. What they should have done is not cared. I'm sure her blog would INCREASE the number of Delta Airline flyers, not decrease them. I for one now have a lower image of Delta.There is guidance which suggests the company uniform cannot be used without approval from management, but use in personal pictures on websites is unclear.
UPDATE: She was not "fired". She was "suspended without pay".
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October 28, 2004
BT appears to be blocking third-party VoIP
20:37 UTC » Network Technology - VoIP
If this is true, this is VERY bad behavior. 5060 is the port that SIP uses. I can understand why a phone company wouldn't want "free phone calls over the Internet" running on their system, but this is exactly the kind of behavior that makes Internet folks dislike telephone company control.David BeckemeyerBT appears to be blocking third-party VoIPI've been biting my tongue on this since I first ran across it several months back. But now I have to say something. If someone can prove me wrong on this, fine, I'll post a retraction, but now I'm going to say it: British Telecom appears to be explicitly blocking VoIP for their DSL subscribers.
I've worked with an associate to examine the situation and all signs point to an explicit blocking of VoIP. In Cisco ACL-speak, it appears there is a rule somewhere in the BT network being applied to inbound packets of the form:
deny udp any eq 5060 any
Can anyone else corroborate this fact?
VoIP stands for "Voice over IP" and SIP is the open standard "Session Initiation Protocol" used to set up calls over the Internet
UPDATE: Looks like it is a customer router issue, but still may be BT driven. Update on Mr. Blog.
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October 27, 2004
www.georgewbush.com
21:05 UTC » Information and Media - Japanese Politics - US Policy and Politics
Speaking of unreachable sites... George Bush's official site used to time out when you tried to access it from Japan, Australia, New Zealand and a few other places I think. I blogged this back in August. Now it tells you formally:
Much more formal than just timing out on us. But it's more clear now that it is intentional. Why would the Bush campaign want to block access from Japan?www.georgewbush.comAccess DeniedYou don't have permission to access "http://www.georgewbush.com/" on this server.
via Jim
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Blog outage
17:06 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Joi's Diary
The day before yesterday, I received a notice from my hosting service that I was 80% through my bandwidth limit. I replied and asked for m.m.m.more bandwidth please. Then suddenly, I was at 100% and some trigger kicked in and shut down my site. It appears to have been a flood of requests from a singe IP address. (Who would want to DoS my blog...?)
Bloghosts has been generous on their pricing and Jace who runs it has generally been fairly responsive. For some reason, I haven't been able to get any response from anyone from Bloghosts. It is very unlike Jace so I'm going to hold back my criticism until I have more facts. It could be that there is some reasonable explanation.
Anyway, thank you for the flood of emails letting me know my site was down. I'm so glad you all care. (sniff) But the real thanks goes to Jason who set me up with space on his machine (where are you are reading this now) and Adriaan for getting my blog moved over to the new machine after a 24 hour outage. Since Jason doesn't seem to mind, I think I'll hang out on this server for awhile... so move over and give me some more room Sean, Chey and Gary.
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Sony announces pricing for PSP
Sony delayed the beginning of the meeting announcing that one of their directors was caught in heavy traffic. (right...) Eventually, they got their act together and announced that they would not be announcing the price. ;-)
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October 26, 2004
Diebold Brand Media Player?
12:23 UTC » Computer and Network Risks - Software - US Policy and Politics
Take a look at the site for details, but you can imagine how much fun they had. The picture above is Windows Media Player running on the ATM. As they point out, the scary thing is that Diebold are also making the voting machines.Midnight Spaghetti & The Chocolate G-StringsDiebold ATM Media PlayerMarch 17, 2004
Midnight Spaghetti causing a ruckus as always.
The Scene: Carnegie Mellon University
The Event: A newly installed Diebold Opteva 520 ATM crashes, then reboots. Suprizingly, it's vanilla-style Windows XP operating system initialized without the actual ATM software.
The Result: A desktop computer with only a touch screen interface is left wide open for the amusement of the most wired university in the U.S.
via Meta-Roji
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Wikinews
08:23 UTC » Media and Journalism - Wiki
Angela, Dan and Ross have blogged about Wikinews so I assume the idea is "out" and I can blog about it. Wikinews would be to journalism what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias. Reports and articles would be written by a community wiki-style and would follow the Wikipedia rule of Neutral Point of View (NPOV). There would be controls in place to decide when an article was "finished" and a lot of thought has gone into the workflow of how this would work. The idea of accreditation of contributors has also been proposed.
I've been spending some time hanging out on IRC with the Wikipedia community ever since I met Jimmy Wales and a few Wikipedians in Linz. I've worked on a few articles, but I'm fascinated as much by the community as the product of their efforts.
That's why I'm against Wikimedia doing Wikinews. I think Wikinews is a great idea and a noble experiment. Someone should do it. I'm just worried that it will change the tone of the Wikipedian "bookworms for the common good" community. Competing with encyclopedias is very different from competing against journalists. it reminds me of the Jack Handy quote: "To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other."
On the other hand, who would have thought Wikipedia itself would have worked in the beginning. To their credit, they do have some rather politically charged articles that have managed to stay quite NPOV, but pumping a consistent flow of these out is another matter. I've posted more thorough comments on the Talk:Wikinews page.
In any case, it looks from the votes like the project will happen, so I will support and participate in any way that I can.
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October 25, 2004
Followup on the Japanese hostages
01:35 UTC » Global Politics - Japanese Culture - Japanese Politics - Media and Journalism - Warblogging
I blogged earlier about the very negative reaction that the Japanese taken hostage in Iraq received in Japan. The main reason was that when the parents asked for their release, they didn't apologize to the Japanese government and even denounced the war. I believe it was a rather unfortunately, but understandable reaction in the context of Japanese culture for the Japanese to say, "we told you to stay away from there, and how dare you cause such shame on Japan without even apologizing."
I recently talked to someone involved in the Arab press and learned that if the parents had apologized and sucked up to the Japanese government, there was a good chance that the hostages would not have been released. So if I had to choose between whether my children were released alive or whether they would be happily received by the Japanese government, I think I'd choose to have my children live. Whether it was done on purpose or not, their parents made the right decision.
Then there is the story of the Australian journalist who was freed because a Google search revealed he was not CIA or a US contractor.
I don't think that all of the kidnappers are smart and politically motivated and ethical, but they are clearly sending a signal that their targets are not all random.
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October 24, 2004
Wired Magazine's Creative Commons CD is on the stands!
16:09 UTC » Creative Commons - Music
Yay! Thanks to Wired for pulling this off and all of the artists for participating.Creative CommonsThe WIRED CD: Yes, We Have ArrivedYou can now get your copy of the WIRED CD, free with the November issue of WIRED, at your newstand. Get yourself two copies: one for you and your friends, and one to save, in plastic, for your grandchildren.
See the full track list.
Has anyone ripped and posted it the music anywhere?
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How not to make YAPSN
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October 23, 2004
Bush's debate notes
WARNING: Partisan humor
via Screenhead
UPDATE: Another version of the debate notes. Which one are the real ones?!?
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Ann Coulter attacked by Al Pieda
05:34 UTC » Heckling - Humor - US Policy and Politics
MSNBC: Columnist Coulter hit with custard pies
The Smoking Gun: "Al Pieda" Targets Ann Coulter
According to a copy of the police report from the University of Arizona Police Department on The Smoking Gun, the "Al Pieda" were involved.
UAPD reportSearch incident to arrest I located on both Wolff and Smith pieces of paper (propaganda) involving Coulter's name and the explanation of "Al Pieda".
via Markoff
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October 22, 2004
last.fm and social networking
18:03 UTC » Music - Social Software
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Get down and get taggy
15:20 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Emergent Democracy - Photo
I'm going to quote David's whole post because it has a bunch of good links.
I totally agree that this "ethnoclassification" is really an amazing solution to the metadata problem. Although, as they point out, there are some problems, I think that we'll find solutions. I feeling very taggy these days. I think there should be more cross-site tag linking. Blog categories, wiki pages, music meta data, and many other things can be "tagged". TAGCON 2005! Sorry. Just kidding.David WeinbergerMetadata without tearsPeter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the Masses:
But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them.He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of "ethnoclassification" (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star),. (I am enamored of the branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us if only because people have started calling it "folksonomy.") He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we're making for ourselves.
Jay Fienberg points us also to Jon Udell's article on "collaborative knowledge gardening." I've also been looking at some related issues (e.g., here, here, here, here and here), but Peter has the advantage of knowing what he's talking about.
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Ever increasing ignorance
11:17 UTC » ICANN - Joi's Diary
Sorry about the light blogging. I've started immersing myself in reading and studying ICANN related stuff. I know this is generally true, but the more I study, the more I learn how little I know. Soon I will probably convince myself I know absolutely nothing. OK. It's not THAT bad, but it quite daunting. I hope it gets better by the time I have to go to the first official board meeting. I'm trying very hard to understand as many of the points of view as I can and am still looking for more views and opinions.
I do promise to blog more about my thoughts in the future, but I'm still very much in learning mode.
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October 21, 2004
Accidental comment deletion
01:11 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
I was de-spamming my comments and I think I accidentally erased a few legitimate comments. I'm really sorry. It was truly a technical error and not an attempt to censor anything. I think I deleted one or two comments, but didn't catch the details since it was a quick click and an oops.
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October 20, 2004
Copyright Takedown Experiment Reveals Horrible ISP Policies
21:56 UTC » Intellectual Property
The reaction of the ISPs is natural. Be more afraid of people who are more likely to sue you. It takes some guts to be firm about stuff like this, but I think experiments like this and praise to those companies and institutions who are diligent are important to encourage companies to care about these issues. I remember that back in the early days (I don't know about these days) ISPs used to get too friendly with the police and often ended up giving them more information than appropriate about their customers. ISPs have a huge responsibility to uphold the law as well as protect their customers. Hat tip to the ISP that asked for proof from alleged plaintiff.Jason SchultzCopyright Takedown Experiment Reveals Horrible ISP PoliciesDutch civil rights organization Bits of Freedom has run an interesting experiment: They put up a text by a famous Dutch author, written in 1871 to accounts with 10 different ISPs. Then they made up an imaginary society that is supposed to be the copyright holder of the author in question, and sent copyright infringement takedown notices to those 10 ISP via email (using a Hotmail account). 7 out of 10 ISPs took down the material, sometimes within hours and without even informing the account holder. One ISP doubted the legitimacy of the claim and asked for some proof that the alleged plaintiff was in fact the copyright holder. Yet another ISP actually realized that copyright had long since run out on the work. That's real scary, don't you think? Made up society, Hotmail addresses and a website is gone.BOF's paper is available here (PDF)
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Embedding CC licenses in files
16:10 UTC » Creative Commons - Music
One of the difficulties with Creative Commons licenses for music and images is that the images and the music are often copied or forwarded without the licenses. By embedding the license information inside of the mp3 or jpeg data itself, it makes it easier to keep the license attached to the file.
Nathan has just released a nice drag and drop embedded license lookup tool. See the page about metadata embedding on the CC site for more information on our thoughts on this issue.
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RIP my moin moin
Boris and Ado just turned off the old Joi Ito Wiki running moin moin and posted the pages as static pages. You can no longer edit the pages. Please use the new wiki for new stuff.
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Here comes Tokage
UPDATE: TSR says it's just a tropical storm, but it feels stronger than the other one. It's supposed to hit early in the morning...
UPDATE: 17 dead, 19 missing and 207 injured as of 10PM (1 hr 40 min ago). 187,000 homes evacuated. This one seems to be worse than the last one. It should hit our town in about 30 minutes. Doesn't seem so bad yet, but should probably shut down desktop computers...
UPDATE: Now 22 dead, 30 missing. The typhoon veered NorthWest and missed our region.
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iDebate
04:09 UTC » Humor - US Policy and Politics
This image may be copyrighted. I don't know the origin of the image. If someone knows, please let me know.
UPDATE:
Larry Angell via EmailHi Joi,
I was the original poster of the iDebate image. I posted it on my blog
back on Wednesday, the 13th. It was an original work done by one of our
MacMinute.com readers (I'm the editor over there) who let me post it.
Thanks for any possible link :-)http://www.happygolarry.com/2004/10/13/bulge
Cheers,
Larry Angell
Editor-in-Chief, MacMinute
http://www.macminute.com
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VoIP crime
03:25 UTC » Global Politics - VoIP
Such illegal communications services hurt telephone companies and in many countries these telephone companies are run by the government or wield a great deal of power. Sometimes it's easy to forget that competition with monopolies is illegal in many countries.David WeinbergerVoIP crimeUS citizen Ilya Mafter has been detained by the Belarusians for committing the crime of Voice over IP. The government says that he caused about US$100,000 in damage to the country's telephony providers "as a result of illegal communications services using IP telephony that were organized by Mafter."
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October 19, 2004
Jon Stewart on his Crossfire appearance
18:44 UTC » Media and Journalism - US Policy and Politics
Cory Doctorow @ Boing BoingJon Stewart on his Crossfire appearanceHere's a clip form Jon Stewart's Daily Show monologue following on his now-legendary Crossfire appearance in which he post-mortems his performance. Very good stuff.
(via Waxy!)
Jon StewartThey said I wasn't being funny. And I said to them, "I know that, but tomorrow I will go back to being funny, and your show will still blow."
Thanks Cory and Waxy!
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Off to Tokyo
Flight is boarding now. See you later London and thanks for the Fish and Chips. See you on the other side.
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October 18, 2004
Feeback on Operation Clark County
20:16 UTC » Heckling - Humor - US Policy and Politics
The Guardian had an interesting project to try to get readers to send email to people in Clark County and influence the US vote.
They got some feedback from Americans.The Guardian[...]
It works like this. By typing your email address into the box on this page, you will receive the name and address of a voter in Clark County, Ohio. You may not have heard of it, but it's one of the most marginal areas in one of the most marginal states: at the last election, just 324 votes separated Democrats from Republicans. It's a place where a change of mind among just a few voters could make a real difference.
Writing to a Clark County voter is a chance to explain how US policies effect you personally, and the rest of the world more generally, and who you hope they will send to the White House. It may even persuade someone to use their vote at all.
KEEP YOUR FUCKIN' LIMEY HANDS OFF OUR ELECTION. HEY, SHITHEADS, REMEMBER THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR? REMEMBER THE WAR OF 1812? WE DIDN'T WANT YOU, OR YOUR POLITICS HERE, THAT'S WHY WE KICKED YOUR ASSES OUT. FOR THE 47% OF YOU WHO DON'T WANT PRESIDENT BUSH, I SAY THIS ... TOUGH SHIT!
PROUD AMERICAN VOTING FOR BUSH!
UPDATE: They actually got the idea from a blogger. See here and here.
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p2p-Politics.org
15:01 UTC » Cool Web Sites - US Policy and Politics - Video
p2p-Politics.org is a cool new site that lists video ads supporting Kerry, Bush and Nader. Although the site was launched by known Kerry supporters and currently there are only ads from the Kerry campaign and some of MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 Seconds ads, there is a tab for Bush and Nader and are soliciting ads from them. They also ask people to submit their own ads. The idea is that the site would be a non-partisan site that allows you to view ads of the candidates and email links to the ads to friends. The ads are hosted by the Internet Archive and licensed under a Creative Commons license. The "p2p" here stands for people-to-people or peer-to-peer but is not p2p as in the file sharing protocol. This site is a volunteer effort by J Christopher Garcia and Aaron Swartz, "with some ideas by Lawrence Lessig" and support from the Internet Archive.
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Small but growing number of corporate bloggers
14:59 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
David Sifry has posted another cool graph of showing the number of corporate bloggers. See his blog for the details.
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Where did Microsoft Passport go?
13:18 UTC » Privacy - Software - Technology Controversy
Anil points out that Microsoft Passport seems to have withered away silently.
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My last.fm radio channel
You will have to register, but if you click the button below, you can listen to a internet radio station composed from personal playlist.
My last.fm user page shows my profile, friends and my neighborhood.
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October 16, 2004
I love the Daily Show too thanks to Bittorrent
17:54 UTC » Media and Journalism
Craig of Craig's list says: "now The Daily Show is my most trusted source of news." It maybe tongue-in-cheek but it's not far from the truth.
The amazing thing is, the only reason I am able to watch it at all is because of P2P filesharing / Bittorrent. I think file sharing of videos is a key component of freedom of speech and public discourse when so much attention is focused on television. Although we can dance around singing "fair use", is there any chance news programs can make their content available via Creative Commons for people to share so those of us not in America and have better access to your "public discourse"?
UPDATE:
'Daily Show' viewers ace political quiz
Survey reveals late-night TV viewers better informed
By Bryan Long for CNN.
via Lisa Rein
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No "Fishing License" for the RIAA
17:31 UTC » Intellectual Property - Music - Privacy
I love it when the good guys win. Congratulations EFF!Electronic Frontier FoundationNo "Fishing License" for the RIAAThis just in: the Supreme Court has denied cert in RIAA v. Verizon, the case in which the recording industry initially won the right to unmask an anonymous KaZaA user with a special non-judicial, PATRIOT Act-like subpoena under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DC Circuit reversed (PDF) that ruling, but the RIAA appealed. Now the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case.
[...]
Said EFF's Wendy Seltzer, who worked on the case, "The Supreme Court's refusal to take the case leaves the DC Circuit's well reasoned opinion as law: The DMCA doesn't give the RIAA a blank fishing license to issue subpoenas and invade Internet users' privacy."
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Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance on bittorrent
16:37 UTC » Media and Journalism
Crossfire is an a nonconstructive form of "talk show" and represented the divisive and shallow television media news and politics of today. I'm glad Jon Stewart had the guts to point this out and call them on it. Yay Jon! And yay for Bittorrent too!Xeni Jardin @ Boing BoingJon Stewart's Crossfire appearance on bittorrentBoingBoing reader bryan says, "Jon Stewart blasted the hosts on CNN's Crossfire for hurting the democratic process instead of helping. He also calls Tucker Carlson a dick. Bittorrent: Link, and transcript here.
BoingBoing reader Hal points us to Salon's coverage (Link), and describes the interview/buttkicking alternately: "Tucker Carlson gets his ass handed to him on a platter -- without falafel to sweeten the taste."
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Creative Commons Sherlock Channel
16:25 UTC » Creative Commons - Search
If you're using OS X, you can now search for Creative Commons content using Sherlock! Just connect to sherlock://drop.creativecommons.org/sherlock/ccsearch.xml
If you don't have OS X, you can still use our search engine to find licensed content.
More info on the CC blog.
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Off to London
See you later Helsinki and thanks again for the yummy reindeer steak. I'm off to London today.