Blogging Roller

• State of the Blogosphere, pt. 1
  Doubling every 5.5 months (not counting spamblogs) and 55% of blogs are active
• Intro to Atom
  On atomenabled.org
• Snell's Atom overview
  Technical overview of the popular Atom Syndication Format
• Windley paraphrases Graham
  "Open source and blogging show us what real work looks like"
• Blog 500
  Jason: "I’m sick of the Technorati 100"
• Rating OSS
  Steve: "I'm not so sure about is this proposed rating system for OSS apps"
• Boycott IE7
  Slashdot: Windows Guru Calls For IE7 Boycott

Cory Doctorow: It means that the price of being a Mac user will be eternal vigilance: you'll need to know that your apps not only write to exportable formats, but that they also allow those exported files to be read by competing apps.

Cory can't trust Apple anymore and he's got a point. But no matter what OS you use, you still have to be vigilant. Even without DRM and so called Trusted Computing built into the OS, app developers can screw you over and lock you down. Look at Intuit's CDilla spyware/DRM fiasco for example. I'm prepared to be vigilant, so this news alone won't stop me from buying a new Mac.

From the EFF statement: "Rackspace may claim to provide its customers with 'fanatical support,' but in this case it looks like it was more interested in serving the government," added Kevin Bankston, EFF attorney and Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow. "Despite these new revelations, a key question remains: Did government agents intentionally mislead the web host into thinking it had to hand over complete copies of the Indymedia servers?"

To summarize the story: when the US government requested the server logs for the grassroots media network IndyMedia from internet service provider RackSpace, RackSpace couldn't find the files. So RackSpace handed over IndyMedia's servers. I wonder how the government agents worked their magic? Did they threaten to declare RackSpace an enemy combatant and lock the whole company up without a trial?