A startling development is being reported by the BBC in the UK. It seems that the Internet Watch Foundation which looks like a quasi governmental organization, has taken offense with an album cover on Wikipedia and is “blocking” access to it. IWF claims it is an issue of child pornography, Wikipedia is calling it censorship.

As I wrote back on November 27, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to make software beyond its end-of-life work, and it is even more frustrating when it is really the best tool for the job.

Can I vent here for a moment about well meaning, but clearly out-of-the-loop, friends who seem to think everything on the Internet, especially when it comes to safety, is a real situation that needs our attention and should be sent to every mailing list they are on?

Over the years, I have turned to Linux and the Open Source community for a number of solutions to obscure and difficult problems. And, rarely, has the community let me down. But the community, like software development in general, has limited resources and sometimes limited interest.

As I was standing in the shower this morning, ruminating over the firings of several Verizon employees for snooping into President-Elect Obama’s phone records, I began to think about privacy and what it means and what it will evolve to mean in the coming days and years. After all I was in one of the most private places a person can be right?

Over the past month, two things struck me as indicative of our current time in space, and both are related to the availability of technology.

A while ago (a year?) I wrote about my attempts to get an IPv6 address block and start using IPv6. My carrier, Verizon, did not seem to know what I was talking about.

"Lawyers in the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit against Microsoft want a federal judge to force the company to use Windows Update to notify potential class members of the suit, according to court documents." This is the opening paragraph in an article in ComputerWorld. A number of people, including myself think this is a bad idea.

If you, like me, follow technology trends and issues as much as you do the underlying technology that makes them, then you have probably stumbled across a podcast out of Canada called Search Engine.

This morning I got a phishing letter. Since it was not from my bank, I almost deleted it without looking, and then this caught my eye:

Microsoft has been granted a patent on 'Page Up' and 'Page Down' keystrokes.

An issue near and dear to my heart, both personally and professionally is that of spam. Not the lunch meat, which, when prepared correctly, I happen to enjoy, but that bane of email, the unsolicited commercial email (UCE). At what point does legitimate communication cross the line to become junk.

What does it mean to be open.

My copy of Oxford defines open as: unconcealed circumstances or condition. Way back in the day when the GNU operating system was getting going, they coined the mantra: Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.

As a computer professional I take my sight for granted. Think about it, how much you rely on your eyes. How much of what we do is based on what is on the screen and where it is on the screen.

BALTIMORE (AP) - Mailboxes are going the way of phone booths. More of us are paying our bills online and using the Internet to send our correspondence, so the U.S. Postal Service has decided it needs fewer mailboxes. (WTOP)

What are we doing to expose new users to Linux and Open Source solutions? My wife, after coming back from a visit to our local electronics store asked me why there were no “boxes” of Linux on the shelves, or PCs supporting the OS on display?

One of the advantages, touted by the Open Source community is that you can read the source code and make changes to it if you need to. Now to be honest, how many of us even bother to look at the source code? Come on, fess up. Yes, that is about what I thought.

It would seem, that unless you are not actively involved in the current world (perhaps you are busy studying the galaxy or wondering whether that really is water on Mars), you might have heard something about going green.

A couple of weeks ago, I tangentially mentioned the need for contingency plans. Today, I want to look at them a little more closely. My current job is about as far away from Continuity of Operations (COOP) and disaster recovery (DR) as you can get, yet I still deal in the issues of disasters, and preventing them, both professionally and personally.

I was going to explore the new trend of green IT or perhaps talk about the morality of threatening or blackmailing (your choice) software companies into fixing security holes, but an article in Computerworld about a hospital selecting a Linux-based email sys