Recent blog entries for mcr

I'm very pleased that I can now read advogato by RSS. I'm much more involved.

But, I have my own blog at: http://www.sandelman.ca/mcr/blog/

but it seems that I can't have it syndicated at the current level that I'm at.

I am curious about a statement from lkcl:

Like the dog that fetches the stick even if you pretended to throw it, SPF is better implemented by Spammers than it is by everyone else. This should tell you many things, not least of which is that spammers aren't too bright.

I agree that SPF is certainly not well deployed, and I know that I don't do SPF checking. The most annoying part about SPF is the way that it breaks .forward files, of which I seem to have a lot of, since I have a lot of accounts all over the place.

But, how exactly do spammers use SPF better than the rest of us? Are they now sticking to verifiable zones, i.e. no longer forging email from hotmail.com/aol.com/etc. or are they using wildcard SPF records in some way?

I read mako's article on CC (I'm not yet certified) and I was moved by it.

I think that I understand his point, and I think that I agree with it. I don't agree that the the opportunity has been lost, rather I don't really think that the opportunity is there yet.

As mako says, free software existed before the GPL. At one point, one could simply assign things into the public domain, and since we had a relatively small community that trusted each other, that was okay. But, some bad things happened and we needed to create some protections for ourselves. Had the GPL not been created at the time that it did, I think we would have actually had quite a number more licenses that were less clear in the four basic freedoms.

The only reason why we could see that we needed those four basic freedoms is because there were people who were burnt in at least those four ways. I think that the "content intermediaries" have scared everyone who produces content over a number of decades, and we KNOW EXACTLY what Disney and others did with lots of PUBLIC DOMAIN content (Grim fairy tales, etc.) before. If music or writing was just new, and had a small semi-closed community like software was in the 1960s/1970s, I think that they would start from public domain, figure out what the right set of freedoms are to protect, and do that. But, that's not the situation, so artists are much more willing to start with "All rights reserved" and try granting "Some" rights.

After we have 5-10 years of experience with CC, we may figure out what the appropriate set of freedoms are for each kind of media.