Internet Alchemy

This is the first part of a history of the Domain Name System, which manages to remain surprisingly impartial considering the current NSI farce.

There is a project to produce an Open Source implementation of the XQL spec. It’s at a very early stage at the moment with the XML parser yet to be fully integrated. Worth a look every now and then though or keep up to date on the XQL mailing list.

I think Jorn has hit upon something here, with his example of what Search Engines could be doing a few years from now. (via Robot Wisdom)

Just taking the time to say welcome back to Wesley Felter’s Hack The Planet.

XSA stands for XML Software Autoupdate and is an XML based file format that describes change and version information for software packages. Sites maintaining software directories can use it to automate the production of updates. XMLTree is maintaining a list of sites publishing changes as XSA.

This article suggests that DejaNews has been tracking users email and click thoughs so as to get a profile of customers. Nothing new you might say, but they are a member of TRUSTe and their privacy policy makes no mention that they are collecting this information.

This guy has become the first person ever to get the maximum score at PacMan, 18 years after it was first released.

“after the exhausting six-hour game was over, Mitchell backed away from the game in disbelief and then did the improbable: he announced his permanent retirement from playing Pac-Man. ‘I never have to play that darn game again,’ he sighed in relief. ‘Theres nothing more I can accomplish.’”

I’ve fixed a couple of the RSS Maker channels that were causing problems: MTV news and Rolling Stone should actually have some content now.

This is a little scary. The recently published proposals by the UK government on encryption policy include jail sentences for not handing over your private keys. Even more scary is the implication that

“Even discussing an investigation in public, such as complaining about alleged abuses of law enforcement to the media, may also be punishable by imprisonment”

This is a major problem in the UK - we have no bill of rights or freedom of speech act. On the one hand it’s more flexible - the laws are shaped by judicial rulings which can actually keep laws up to date with public opinion. On the other hand it’s too easy for draconian laws like this one to be imposed from the top down.

The Aglet mobile agent project is under threat from IBM. Development on the project has been slowing down for several months and there are
rumours that IBM intend to kill the project off. Rather than see the
project die completely Todd Papaioannou has started a petition to release the source to the Aglets framework to the community. Aglets was one of the first Java based mobile agent technologies and has a lot of support from many developers. It suffered a setback when Danny Lange, one of the key developers left to join a rival team. It would be good to see this project opened up since so many of it’s rivals are still proprietary, closed-source efforts.