Back to the subject of words whose meanings have shifted. This afternoon I read an article on The Register named “EC jacks up Microsoft fine by €899m.” Good article. Informative, lovingly crafted, all that good stuff. The comments, however, rankled me something fierce. A small sample:

I always thought the ideal remedy would be to require Microsoft to write in big print at the top of every contract (including corporate and government procurement contracts) and prominently on every consumer package “Notice: Microsoft, the publisher of this software, is a convicted monopolist.”

Who convicted Microsoft of being a monopoly? Being a monopoly isn’t a crime. Not even in socialist Europe.

Microsoft a monopoly? Funny, I can’t get three posts into one of these threads without someone mentioning Linux or whatever the iComp uses now. If there’s competition, then Microsoft is not a monopoly, it’s just very good at shutting the competition out from the mainstream.

Of course they are. That’s what copyright and patent law confer: legal monopolies over the protected work. Apple isn’t allowed to sell Microsoft products without acquiring the appropriate licenses, the proceeds of which go directly to Microsoft. Neither can anybody else; they have a legal monopoly on their intellectual property.

The author of the actual article, John Oates, gets it right: they were fined for abuse of their monopoly, they exhausted the appeals process, dragged their feet, and were fined again for failure to comply with the orders that went along with the original fine. People seem to think that monopolies are inherantly bad. If you’re not in favor of communalizing just about everything (do you have a monopoly on your car? your toothbrush?), then this is a knee-jerk reaction you should probably strive to avoid.

I’ve had a link up to xkcd.com for several months now, having treated it merely as a frequently-funny webcomic chock-a-block with geeky goodness. I never read the xkcd blog or looked up the author; I was content to assume that whoever wrote those comics was a legitimate math nerd that spends too much time around computers. It took 4chan implementing its new /r9k/ board for me to catch on. Material like the recent article on the Laser Elevator is far and away more interesting than when the constraints of a comic-strip format come into play.

Anyhow, the folks at 4chan have implemented the Robot 9000 concept in what promises to be a mid-to-long-term replacement for /b/. I’m mildly tempted to see how many times I have to copy & paste the word “desu” into a post in order to get it past the filters, but won’t try. Aside from /b/, the various boards were topical and had rules. /b/ is non-topical and has a marked lack of rules. /r9k/ is non-topical and has automatically-enforced rules. I wonder what anon will be filling it up with a month from now? Will the attempt at forced originality help or hinder the entertainment value? Should I set up a betting pool? How many ways can you clearly communicate that somebody should do a barrel roll? So many questions…

Well look what we have here, Anonymous actually showed up. And here I figured this was all just going to fall apart into a massive sweaty pile of failed Internets conspiracy. Don’t get me wrong, Anonymous isn’t going to take out the Scientology people. Not by a long shot. But for a loosely-knit, leaderless mob of image board junkies to get helicopters and riot police involved far exceeds my low, low expectations.

Looks like nobody got nutty and started firebombing stuff, and I don’t see a bunch of mainstream press on the matter (a quick search shows some local coverage in various places, though). Lots of folks have been uploading photos to Flickr documenting their events, with the results ranging from ominously-large crowds of people in masks and fake afros to sad little hodgepodges of a couple guys with fliers.

Got your tinfoil hats on, gentlemen? Then let’s get down to business.

• January 23, an undersea high-speed link near Bandar Abbas (Iran) was cut.
• January 30, an undersea high-speed link from Alexandria (Egypt) to Italy was cut.
• February 1, an undersea high-speed link between Dubai (UAE) and Oman was cut.
• February 3, an undersea high-speed link between Haloul (Qatar) and Das (UAE) was cut.
• Yesterday we find out that there’s another cut on a link out of Alexandria, apparently on the same line that went out on the 30th.

Lots of very important and knowledgeable people are bending themselves in pretzels to keep from prompting the press into any wild speculation. Of course they are, transit providers and government security officials don’t want panic. More curiously, the press has been rather quiet about it. Since when did journalists avoid rumormongering that might lead to widespread fear and panic? Particularly in regards to this region of the world? Any word on this on the nightly news?

My personal theory is that somebody (the CIA, Mossad, MI-6, whomever) is working a NSA-style dragnet on data crossing through somewhere in that area, and are taking steps to increase the portion of middle eastern communications that are passing through their sniffers.

The fine folks at Torrent Freak have been all puffed up with righteous indignation that companies like Comcast have taken to undermining their file-swarming activities. They’re active participants in the inevitable arms race that followed: users try to maximize their throughput, the ISP tries to minimize congestion, users bypass the ISP’s mechanism, ISP implements new mechanism, etc. That’s fine. It’s the invisible hand of the market and all that good stuff. Friday, one of their contributors took the high road and posted a list of proposed solutions to the Bittorrent problem. A heavily-snipped summary:

1. Ask for voluntary cooperation.
2. Keep connections within the providers network.
3. Usage based quotas.
4. Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.
5. Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.
6. Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges.

The author has the presence of mind to present downsides for each of these, but missed the major downside for each. I suspect that Torrent Freak as a whole is blinded by its own bias. People expect to get whatever it was they felt they paid for, and if you tell them that there is some limitation on what they’re paying for and your competitor doesn’t tell you (or denies the existence of the limitation), you lose business. tl;dr follows:

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Looks like the hive-mind of Anonymous has picked February 10th as a big day of action in its war on the Church of Scientology. Security experts have reported that attacks against the church’s Internet presence has been waning since the first big outburst on January 18th, which makes sense due to the frivolous nature of Anonymous.

I’m certainly curious what these “IRL” raids will turn out to be. Apparently February 10th is the date that “The times they are a changing” was originally released by Bob Dylan (in 1964), and this has been offered as an explanation for the choice of date. I have no idea what idiot drew that connection, as a far more relevant February 10th is that of 1959: the birth date of Lisa McPhearson. Along with Elli Perkins, McPhearson is one of those very sore subjects that apparently the Church of Scientology just doesn’t like to come up in conversation. I suppose that we can expect a big push for March 13th event as follow-up (the date in 2003 that Elli was murdered by her untreated schizophrenic son).

Warren Ellis, noted comic-book author, is apparently totally down with these ominous threats, and offers a glowing review of the above video. This strikes me as appropriate, as this is something that might happen in one of his works. Of course, in fiction Anonymous would back up its bluster with action. In reality, there will likely just be small mobs of youths in sweatshirts filming each other as they hand out fliers to disinterested passers-by.

[This article removed due to a copyright claim by the Church of Scientology International]