From the leaflet boxed with my new phone:

Your device supports easy, network-assisted e-mail set-up. […] During the e-mail activation process, your e-mail address, user name, and password, along with technical information, such as your device ID, may be sent to Nokia. Nokia will not process or store any personal, identifiable information after the activation, without your consent.

I understand why they need the e-mail address - the domain name is probably used to figure out the server configuration options - but the password? The only reason they’d need the password that I can think of, is that the configuration server tests the settings by logging-in, before sending the settings to the phone. That’s an innocent, but not a good reason.

Somehow, between the legal and the usability department, it was decided that a friendly leaflet in the box would be better than a pop-up at configuration time. I would have preferred the pop-up notification, which might have offered the option to decline auto-configuration.

It’s a one-time only thing, and it’s done with the best of intentions, and I’m sure the little leaflet covers them legally. Nonetheless, it puts a man in the middle, and that’s not a best practice.

This is kind of interesting: the open-textbooks company Flat World Knowledge writes a guest-post about their business for opensource.com, a Red Hat sponsored community-site. Right after the post gets accepted and published, Red Hat people comment and take Flat World Knowledge to the doghouse over their “fauxpen” licensing (their CC licenses are the non-commercial flavour).

It’s almost as if they lured them into a trap.

Here’s what I think: the Red Hat guys have too much of a black-and-white view on licensing, but that doesn’t take away the fact that the Flat World Knowledge guys sadly have a very troublesome business model.

For a long time, I used to have this naive reaction when friends quipped the usual smarts about executive performance-bonuses: that we’re all just envious, and banning such practices would discourage achievement. But lately my views have shifted - a lot - and I’d dare say they’re getting a bit more sophisticated and a tiny bit more mature.

Thanks to Shawn for sharing this link!

Lots of publicity this week. Rather sceptical discussions both at Ars and at The Guardian. The New York Times however writes

Mr. Sridhar contends the Bloom boxes, with reasonable maintenance, will have a 10-year life span.

This is the information every geek wants to know, and it’s not on the Bloom Energy website - not even in the data sheets. As a result, the Guardian and Ars reporters think it may all be hot air.

But perhaps Dr Sridhar understand something that most geeks don’t. That maybe, to the lay person, 10 years doesn’t sound so great for an 800 kilodollar piece of equipment - even if it’s a break-through engineering achievement. That what sounds great is that you have Colin Powell as a director, that Google was your first customer, and now you have Ebay and Walmart. That Mayor Bloomberg is recording you a video with congratulations. It’s a better sales talk.

It’s that, or hot air.

This is important knowledge, because it’s not likely that you can change how millions of people’s brains work. If you want to change their opinion on anything, you’d better be pragmatic and use these findings to get your message across.

In other research the Yale team found that Hierarchical Individualists were more open to scientific evidence of man-made global warming when coupled with the suggestion that nuclear power might be a way to address the problem.

Looks like Bill Gates is onto something good.

I’ve mostly outgrown my love for cars, but seeing this facelift hurts all the same. In the end though, I still want one :)

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero. This, indeed, is the biggest challenge of our time. Even if you don’t “believe” in anthropogenic global warming.

This is so broken, I can hardly believe it. There’s no fixing it either - the whole protocol is rubbish.

The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a PIN, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it’s doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it’s chip-and-PIN.

This could use your up-votes. I have quite a few precious chats I’d like to keep on a local disk too.

Ksplice Uptrack is now available for users of six leading versions of Linux: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, CentOS, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, and OpenVZ. The subscription fee starts at $3.95 per month per system, after a 30-day free trial. A free version is also available for Ubuntu.

I’m very grateful they’re keeping the free version in play for now - I use this on my laptop and it lets me keep a whole bunch of windows open in GNU screen for months. I’d be happy to pay, but I’m not sure if I’d pay that much. It’s hard to valuate the extra productivity I get from it…