wayner.org

After much consideration I am opting out of the Google Book Settlement. While I still hope that Google's entry into selling content will make it more aware of the needs of content creators everywhere, I think the current structure is short-sighted and destructive. The information ecology will be hurt more than it will be helped.

For the last fifteen years the world gorged on the free information flowing on the Internet. Free news, free comics, free stock quotes, free dating services, free medical advice, free recipes, and free history are just the beginning of a seemingly endless list of free things. Along the way, a fair number of philosophers and armchair economists tried to explain just how wonderful free things happen to be. I was one of them when I wrote Free for All, a book trying to understand free software.

Cory Doctorow released his new book Makers under a Creative Commons license and so I decided to use it as a further experiment with my iPhone software for books. This is a very simple tool that builds upon Vladimir Olexa's CiUI framework by adding some simple paging features. All it takes is a tap to the bottom or top of the screen to advance one page or go back.




Click Here to Read It




Some features:

• This web based version doesn't require Apple to sign off of the book, something that's a big pain. ( See here. )
• Paging takes just a tap of the finger. Tap on the bottom to scroll down. Tap on the top to scroll up.
• I can update this quickly with bug fixes. Write me if you have thoughts or suggestions. (p3 at-sign wayner dot org)
• You can install this as an icon on the main panel of your iPhone by just clicking the plus key at the bottom. There's a custom icon and a nice splash page with a classic image from James Wright of Derby.

Instructions for installing are below the break. Click through to read them.

The kind folks at Geekbrief.tv found the worst seat in the new stadium built for the Dallas Cowboys. It's not for someone who sees the glass 80% empty, it's for the optimist who doesn't want to be bothered by all of that dithering around the 50 yard line. When someone is ready to score, then they'll pay attention.

There's some new startup called PollyTrade that wants to make it possible to trade stock with Twitter. And why not? A ticker is only a few characters. That leaves more than 100 characters to specify the number of shares. Whoo hoo.

According to this story and Slashdot discussion , the UK government carefully checks out each RAF officer who might handle sensitive information. They don't want the wrong type of person who might be subject to blackmail. But then they store taped copies of these interviews on hard disks and then the hard disks disappear. (A smarter thief would just make a copy.) Who has them?

Heartland, a company that suffered a massive data hemorrhage, is now looking to split up their data between 50 or more servers. The data won't be encrypted and they won't use any other translucent techniques, but the damage from a break in to a single machine will be limited to 1/50th of the data. Chris Walters at Consumerist has a long interview with Evan Schuman who lays out the limitations forced by Visa and Mastercard.

You can get a free version here .

It was not easy to get this through the Apple iTunes police. Sheesh.

A few weeks ago I started to think about revising my ten-year old book, Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers. Last year, I had a good deal of fun brushing some of the dust off of my book about steganography, Disappearing Cryptography and my book about privacy enhancing technology, Translucent Databases , so I started wondering if there were other books that were worth revitalizing.

The book about compression algorithms hasn't sold many copies lately, but I think the topic is still as useful for someone who needs a quick introduction. I tried to target the high-end programmers and the academics looking for an introduction to the topic and the result was a book that has been used as a textbook in simpler courses but also purchased by people in industry. While my heart has always been in the world of encryption, I've written a number of staples like this and the sales have always been good enough to make it almost worth my time.

When I started mousing around on the Internet, I found a few good reviews, a few negative ones, and what is best described politely as the ultimate complement: the book is a proud member of the pirated ISO "Great Science Textbooks DVD October 2008". Someone loved my book enough to scan it in and steal it.