Just read about Internet Evangelism Day which is scheduled for 24th April 2005 and seeks “to communicate the outreach potential of the Web among the worldwide church”. Sounds like a worthwhile cause though the sceptic within me says that many will not be able or want to see the potential of the Internet. Some will say that there are too many bad things on the Internet – I say that we should put more good things on there; turn on the light!

Beavers found a bag of bank notes stolen from a US casino, tore it open and wove the money into their dam. Police following a tip that bags containing some of the thousands of stolen dollars had been thrown into a river found the notes in the dam.

The tide of intelligent (at least, potentially intelligent) devices are leaving the confines of the house and will travel with you.

A new mobile phone which learns people’s daily habits could be used to predict what someone is about to do and judge how close they are to their friends. See my SociaLight posting

New Scientist magazine, reporting, also suggests that the phone could be used to help track how diseases spread, and societies form.

Whilst current phones are mini-PDAs with calendars and to-do lists, the new technology takes this much further. Instead of relying purely on what the user records, new models seek to learn about their users’ lifestyle by recording everything they do – every call and message is logged, application and peripheral (eg camera) usage is recorded. This information is used to send reminders or give advice.

These Bluetooth-enabled phones also log where a person is in relation to other phone users, so it can alert the user when friends are nearby.

This may be another application that aims to make Bluetooth really take off. Whether it does remains to be seen, It will probably divide people into three camps – those that embrace technology as soon as it is released, even if nio-one else has it; those that see it as another invasion of privacy, Big Brother style; and those who either don’t care or can’t afford the technology to make it work.

For me, still using an old Sony phone with dodgy WAP, no MMS, no camera, no Bluetooth, it’s not likely to make much difference. I don’t really want a phone to try and second-guess what I am going to do next, and if I want to find out where my friends are, I will send them a text message.

I haven’t really listened to Van Morrison‘s 1967 New York Sessions CD which came as a bonus on a different VM CD I picked up some while ago, but as I’d put my iPod into random mode, this track came up:

I can see
by the look on your face
that you’ve got ringworm.
I’m very sorry but,
I have to tell you that
you’ve got ringworm.
It’s a very common disease.
Actually, you’re very lucky to have
ringworm
’cause you may have had somethin’ else.
Oooh, aaahhh…
Uuunnnhhhaaahhnnn…
You’ve got ringworm.
Oooh-oooh, oooh, oooh-oooh, oooh, oooh-oooh….

For some reason (my friends won’t have any trouble understanding why) this appeals to me. I particularly like the heartfelt groans and ‘oohs’ at the end. I think I will have to give this CD a closer listen. Whilst it may not contain classics in the vein of “Brown Eyed Girl”, it’s the humble and slightly strange guitar-based minimalist-lyrics of a future musical legend.

Time to listen to “Just Ball” and “Goodbye George”

Found an interesting narrative on how to use punctuation correctly on the Web, even when the Web seems to fight against it.

I’ve just read a couple of interesting weblog articles on getting your site noticed:

• How your blog will get discovered from Scobleizer
• Promoting Your Blog by Biz Stone (some of the techniques in this article apply only to those with Blogger accounts.

A very good read, both.

Marijuana
First, Target oust the Salvation Army from the front of their stores, and then they sell Marijuana for only $25.25! Whatever next?

Urine weakens bridge
A landmark bridge in Indonesia’s Sumatra island may collapse because too many people are fond of urinating on one of its steel pillars, a report says.

Virgin Mary toast
A decade-old toasted cheese sandwich said to bear an image of the Virgin Mary has sold on the eBay auction website for $28,000. Article

SCO hacked

As if poor SCO hadn’t had enough from Denial of Service attacks, this morning they have been suitably hacked – replacing an image linking to the undoubtedly scintillating “Extending Legacy Applications and Databases to the Web and Wireless Devices with SCOx Web Services Substrate” with a graphic bearing the rather more promising “We own all your code – pay us all your money”.

Chances are they’ll have fixed it – although 2 hours after I read this on The Register feed, it’s still there. Maybe they really do want to convey this message, after all they don’t like Linux.

Update: Tuesday morning (GMT), still there, no response to email I sent them. Interesting.

Related Article: SCO has infringed OUR copyright, claims IBM

Kazaa is the latest target of the record industry, as Australian-based authors Sharman Networks prepare their legal defence.

In court, the four major record labels bringing the case for prosecution dubbed Kazaa “an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen”.

Put simply, Sharman argues that its software is created for legitimate global file sharing, and that it cannot be held responsible for the way end-users use it. It highlights cases in the US brought against other P2P networks Grokster and Streamcast, which the courts cleared because there were substantial legal uses for their software.

The issue is made more contentious because many companies, including some very large and well-known ones, are paying for advertising on the Kazaa system.

I am on the side of the P2P networks on this one. I certainly don’t condone or encourage piracy and infringement of copyright, but the fact is that the software, and the company, itself cannot be held to blame.

For starters, no files are actually stored on Kazaa servers – the very nature of peer-to-peer file sharing is that the files are stored on individual users’ computers – the software merely links them together.

Secondly, there are many legal uses for file sharing networks, and just because illegal file copying is so popular, prominent and media-hyped, it does not make the technology of the ideal wrong.

If the record companies get their way, where will it end? And why should they only target file sharing software?

Here are a list of other companies and services that companies and organisations should start targeting, if we’re going down this line:

• Google Image Search – displays thousands of images many of which are either copyright or illegal.
• Apple – makes the iPod which allows people to store MP3s from illegally copied CDs. (forget the people who use it legally)
• PC manufacturers – make CDRW/DVDRW drives which can be use to burn illegal CDs and DVDs of music, films and software
• ISPs (Internet Service Providers) – allow all manner of illegal traffic; spam; pornography; copyrighted material; through their networks
• Sabatier and countless other knife manufacturers: their products can be used to wound and kill
• Car manufacturers: Joyriders/carjackers use cars, resulting in property damage, theft, injury, death
• PC Monitor manufacturers: Illegal material can be viewed on this hardware
• Glass manufacturers: Glass can be smashed and use to injure and maim

and so on – I can’t be bothered to think of any more – I am sure you can.

If a service or tool is designed specifically to do something illegal, then it should be hit with the full force of the appropriate law. Cases like this, however, are plain lunacy, and show a lack of understanding of developing digital technology. Handled wrongly, this has serious implications for digital rights and the growth of digital services – we would then have to choose to keep the law (stifling creativity and technological advance) or law-breakers.

Once again, I don’t condone the use of technology to break copyright. We must see that technology in itself is simply a tool that can be used for good and bad. Don’t kill the technology – or the innovators that brought it to the masses – because of its negative user-induced side-effects.

OK so this Insta-Snow looks really cool…