About a month ago, the friendly neighborhood UPS delivery person deposited a giant box on my doorstep. When I picked it up, it felt as though it weighed several pounds. I set it on the kitchen table and slowly peeled away the tape and eventually gazed at the shiny cover of The Best of 2600 (A Hacker Odyssey).

Clearly this book was lovingly crafted. It contains over 800 pages of articles, news, and reports from 2600 over the past three decades of its existence (spread over 24 years).

When I started reading 2600, it was in mid 2004, and most of the articles and resources in those issues focused on comptuers and a little bit on social engineering. I always wanted to read some of the earlier issues, where the emphasis was on phone phreaking, but didn’t know how, or which issues to get, nor did I have the $325 to order them all, or the time to read them all if I did.

This tome contains a lot of information from just as many sources: Phone phreaking, computers, law, the beginnings of the Internet, lock picking, and hacking, just to name a few. You don’t have to be interested in any of those fields in order to gain enjoyment from this book.

http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/11552

Of course, when people are involved, accidents do happen. Yesterday around 4:30PM EST, Bloomberg accidentally published their most recent obituary for Steve Jobs. Presumably, the obituary went live accidentally while the writer did touch-ups.

Steve Jobs, who had been battling pancreatic cancer over the past several years, is not dead yet.

In the book, Mr. Zittrain states that in the beginning of the computer networks that would eventually form the Internet, computers connected to it would run whatever code or programs they encountered because all there was was free and good code.

Then came along the Morris Worm in the late 1980s and that started to change peoples perspectives on running every piece of code that flowed down the turnpike. People became afraid that one day their computer would encounter bad code such as viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, etc.

Slowly, over the years with the advent of Web 2.0, computers and programs started to become less and less generative, to the point where most devices are becoming “tethered” in a way.

A tethered device is a device that for all intents and purposes “calls home” from time to time to get new code and programming from the company that created it. No user serviceable parts inside.

One of the more interesting examples of tethered appliances given is that of the TiVo. Everyone knows of the TiVo, that little device that allows you to record television shows to its hard disk for future viewing. One thing I found interesting was that in a small Texas town TiVo, Inc brought a lawsuit against the makers of EchoStar charging that the EchoStar device infringed on several of TiVo’s copyrights.

The judges decision in this case was that EchoStar was to remotely disable the offending units through its tether to EchoStar.

Countless subscribers of the EchoStar box are going to be punished (and forced to buy a TiVo box) because of the decision of a court in Texas. To me, this is almost like someone knocking on my door telling me the airbag in my car will have to be disabled because it infringes on some other car company’s copyrights

To this end, Mr. Zittrain argues that people need to be mindful of what they do online and know that somewhere out there Big Brother is watching.

http://futureoftheinternet.org/

“Open Tech is For sale. This includes all trade secrets and brand equity. Thank you for tour time.”

For those who have not followed the Open Tech story, they are/were a company that created a line of computers able to install and run Mac OS X.

Apple filed lawsuit after lawsuit trying to drive the small company under. It seems the house that Steve built finally dealt the crushing blow.

I recently recieved a copy of Gridlock Economy by Michael Heller. The premise of the book is that too much ownership hurts more than it helps. The core example given in the book is that of a possible cure for cancer or Alzheimers.

A drug company wants to make and test a drug, but the owners of the 50 components of the drug want insane amounts of money to allow the research to continue. The drug, if successful, would naturally be a tremendous public good and earn the drug company and the patent holders piles of cash.

Heller calls instances such as this “big inches” - named after a Quaker Oats promotion that granted 21 million deeds of one square inch of land in the Yukon to many, many boys, girls, and anyone else who bought a box of their cereal.

When I started reading it, I expected a very “dry” reading, “just the facts.” But Heller’s writing style was more fluid, I loved his anecdotes use of concepts everyone can relate to (such as airline delays).

He goes on to give examples of how some of the gridlock can be unlocked. I do not want to go too much into the brunt of the subject matter, but this book is excellent and you will learn something without realizing it.

I fully recommend this book even if you’re not into economics.

http://www.gridlockeconomy.com

In related news, Apple’s new MobileMe service went live on July 10th. MobileMe, which replaces .Mac offers email, calendar, and other services.

Normaly software is build so it runs on all kinds of different processors, so speed / memory footprint is, in a way, the lowest common detominator (keep in mind that I’m oversimplifying things here, to explain the benefits of optimized builds). However, if a software is optimized for just one archicture, one can throw in all kinds of extra features, that architecture has to offer (like for example SSE or MMX). This, of course, enhances the speed of the whole software.

So without further ado, here you can find the optimized Firefox (erm Minefield) builds. My first tests showed a strong enhancement in startup and scrolling speed.

Oh and btw. these builds use the beautiful MacOSXified Firefox-Icon from Adam Betts which I’ve been used myself for years by manually applying it to Firefox after installing. This icon fits into OSX way better than the original Firefox-Icon (imho, that is).

If you’ve ever worked with Ubuntu’s Synaptic or Debian’s dpkg you know how easily software installation via package management can be.

For Mac OS X, there’ve always been several solutions to package management: Fink, MacPorts, DarwinPorts and even Gentoo Portage.

While some of these already come with a solid UI, MacPorts doesn’t. It’s standard distribution contains the powerful but not-so-easy-to-use “ports” commandline application. Porticus is a 10.4+ GUI package manager which tries to fill this gap. It offers a (quite synaptic-like, if I might say so) overview over available and installed packages, and allows of easy package installation.

Features:

• Viewing the current MacPorts categories
• Installing, uninstalling, updating, activating and deactivating ports
• Port variant handling
• MacPorts self-update support
• Growl Integration
• Sparkle Software Update

Porticus is freeware and can be found here.

Mondrianum goes one step further in that it allows to access the kuler palettes directly from the Mac OS X system-wide color-picker. Which means that the colors are available from (for example) iLife, iWork, Photoshop, Coda, CSSEdit, and more.

Mondrianum is 10.5 only and can be found over at Lthoglyph Software.