IT and more
Probably the worst underworld of the Net is known as the Russian Business Network. That’s their way of doing business.
Probably the worst aggressors in the real world call themselves the Russian peacekeepers in Caucasus. That’s their way of keeping peace.
A company specialising on Java has performed a small survey of some open-source Java applets and concludes that using open-source is inherently insecure? Wow, that is one big discovery… 
Due to a gap in my English postings (again!), I herewith give a well-delayed notice that I have taken over the Estonian translation of The Battle for Wesnoth. The latest version 1.4.3 should already contain my work (Ubuntu does not upgrade it and I haven’t had time for manual install, so cannot verify that).
Once, in a hilarious chatroom discussion, a friend proposed the formation of a Ministry for Dismissal of Good Offers. Right now, I could use its services.
Just received an e-mail from a guy named Daniel. Just as many others of his kind, he does have some command of business-sounding English. Apparently he had registered the domain kakupesa.com (although neither whois nor web could verify that) and generously offered me as the owner of kakupesa.net to buy it out.
No, dear Daniel. I am not interested, so please feel free to launch your “development plans” on your new domain. 
… is now complete and available at http://www.kakupesa.net/wordpress . There are major changes with about 3000 strings retranslated.
Ars Technica writes about just one more BSA report on ‘piracy’.
In the other news, the MPAA has officially admitted to have lied about the figures in their 2005 study, making them thrice as large as the real ones.
Go figure.
This is what Mr Jeff Gould asks at Interop News. And gets rightfully sneered at by his commenters for not understanding the situation. More quite insightful comments are available even at Slashdot.
Pretty educational.
FFII has made a really nice twist by giving their Kayak Prize 2007 to … Microsoft. The explanation is worth reading - especially telling is the sentence “By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is.” Clear enough.
Looks like the SCO guys have to show their stupidity even after losing the game.
Especially telling is this passage:
The slump, McBride said, “has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux.” McBride listedIBM ( IBM), Red Hat, Microsoft (MSFT), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) as distributors of Linux or other software that is “aggressively taking market share away from Unix.”
Hello? MSFT provides Linux? Or is Windows an “alternative operating system”? Funny man… The biggest irony of course is to blame the principal funding source in the court case for competition.
Gollum comes to mind. Or Grima Wormtongue.
I was invited to represent free and open-source software in a debate against a representative of Microsoft in the “Paving for eFuture” conference in Reykjavik. I’ve never feared arguing, so getting to play a PITA to Microsoft was a welcome perspective. Plus, I had never been to Iceland before. Of course, you hardly see anything arriving late Wednesday evening and leaving Friday noon - but still, I’ve at least been to Iceland now…
Given the business-related audience and short time (only 12 minutes for presentation) I decided to focus on practical reasons why FLOSS is superior - so this was more an OSI approach. But at least I mentioned the ethical/political issues briefly at the beginning and in the end, in addition I used a companion web page which lists much more on these issues. The main idea was to nag enough on Microsoft, but most of all make the audience think - I feel that I succeeded as several people came to talk later and express interest in FLOSS.
The slides are available from the page above (under the GNU FDL) and in SlideShare (under the CC BY-SA)