Choosing Creative Commons Licenses

I've just changed the licence my blogs are published under.  Everything that's published in most of the world is automatically covered by copyright and by default the author has all rights to their words (or images) and also by default nobody else has the right to republish the work. Some people choose to allow others to republish their works with or without modifications and there are a number of licences that give these permissions, they are all based in and depend on copyright law.

If you are going to use a free licence you need to carefully choose one that allows your work to be used in the way that you are happy with while blocking uses you consider inappropriate. "Carefully" both to give effect to your wishes and because all the free licences I'm aware of are perpetual and once you've licenced someone to use your work they can continue using it under that licence for the life of the copyright.

The free licences I'm most familiar with are the Creative Commons but there are alternatives. Since the first of April 2005, 4 months after its start, this blog has been under a creative commons licence, but it was an old licence that wasn't ported for New Zealand law and I've been planning to update to a current licence for a while.  My other blogs were under a mix of different licences and in some cases even non-CC restrictions. Yesterday I decided to do something about it and discovered this licence chooser on the Creative Commons site.

When I dialed up the current version of the licence I'd been using, I was surprised that it said "This is not a Free Culture License". "What" I asked myself "is a 'Free Culture License'?" so I followed the link to the Definition of Free Culture Works site and read what it said about my preferred Non Commercial restriction. Among other things it said "there is no generally agreed definition of where the border line is between Commercial and Non Commercial uses with very many cases falling in the undefined area in between" - a problem I'd encountered when wanting to reuse CC-*-NC works on my advertising supported sites: Does the advertising make the use commercial? There is a definition of Free Culture Works on their site and it talks about freedoms that are very similar to the freedoms in the Free software definition. As a concept it made a lot of sense to me and I decided I was more comfortable publishing under a Free Culture licence.

After a bit of thought I decided the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License (CC-BY-SA) was right for me. Attribution means you have to acknowledge my authorship and I ask for a link to the original page as that attribution. Share Alike means that it's copyleft, like the GPL, if you republish you must do so under the same (or very similar) licence.

At the top of this post I said "once you've licenced someone to use your work they can continue using it under that licence for the life of the copyright."  This obviously applies to the earlier postings in this blog as well. Anyone who is already using content from before the change from here under the original licence (and obeying its provisions) is free to continue using it under that more-restrictive licence. I was happy enough with it when I chose it and until I found the Free Culture site only wanted to update it.

---

Note to spelling pedants: I'm writing in New Zealand English and "Licence" is the correct spelling here. Where I use the word "License" above it is because I'm quoting something in US English.

MaKey MaKey Almost anything's a keyboard

Well, anything that's even a bit conductive that is.

This is a seriously cool gadget, Arduino based and developed at M.I.T., MaKey MaKey connects via USB to a computer and lets you build touch pads or keyboards out of bananas, modelling clay and even people. 

MaKey MaKey Mario
Flikr: CC-By-NC

Like the conductive "Squishy Circuits" from a couple of years back this looks like a great way to interest young minds in electronics.

More information and how to get one (US$ 45 including shipping) at their KickStarter page or read more at their own project page.They also have a Flikr set of their own projects.

At the time of writing there are more applications on the KickStarter page than the others but I guess that will change over time.

Kiwis cashing in on YouTube

Interesting

"More than 100 New Zealand "video bloggers" have so far joined YouTube's Partner Programme, which was first offered to producers of popular content and has been extended to everyone in the 20 countries where it's available."

NZ Herald News

"Big Music" may have put Kim Dotcom out of business for offering unsigned musicians a platform to promote their talents, but Google is a lot bigger and less touchable than he was. Are services like this the beginning of the end for "Big music" or will Google simply add "Big Content" to it's existing "Big Data" role? 

"The hand of Vengeance found the bed
To which the Purple Tyrant fled;
The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head
And became a Tyrant in his stead."

William Blake

E.R. Bumper Sticker

I feel this should be her bumper sticker, but then I would love to see a Rolls Royce with a bumper sticker saying "My other car's a Lada" so who am I to say?

The story behind the picture: A couple of weeks thought, an image originally from NASA (in the public domain), 2 minutes adding a caption and cropping with The Gimp.

Hope you enjoy it.

Affiliate Programmes Update

A little over four years back I was thinking about using affiliate links on my websites and discovered it wasn't very easy to find suitable affiliate programmes (affiliate programs?) for the New Zealand webmaster.

Being me, I decided to start an affiliate directory instead and list the ones I could find that were prepared to be open about their programmes and paid in NZ$ or at least in some form that was easy to cash over here. After a few months I had a second unhappy go at finding sites and reported my not very happy experiences on one of my other blogs ¿Que? - Biting The Hand:

"Over the last few days it feels like I've looked at close to 1,000 affiliate scheme sign-up pages, probably only half that in reality. From these I've extracted 50 that I've added to the directory and another 20 where I've queried the scheme owner"

Since then I've added very few new entries to the directory and  just purged ones where the site went away. The directory has been a bit of an open wound that I didn't want to touch.

Last night I decided it was past time to refresh the directory. I purged out all but one of the schemes that still hadn't replied to my 2008 query (I re-queried the other one) and went looking for more. Things have changed a lot in the last 42 months and I was pleasantly surprised. I just searched Google for "affiliate", New Zealand sites only and started following links. Out of the first 60 links I've added 19 sites. OK, 10 of those I queried for some information, but usually just 1 or 2 minor points. Of the others, some were programmes I already listed, some were blog entries about affiliate programs, some were duplicates (Google listing multiple pages from the same site on different pages), a couple were me and only a very few were genuinly bad ones.

One thing I've noticed is that there are programme owners who are now offering 20% or greater commission, in one case 75%. Four years ago commissions under 10% were pretty common. Today I found a program that actually apologised for offering only 10% and explained that it was because they used live sales people to close the deal and human trainers to deliver the product. They neededn't have worried yet, 10% is still pretty mainstream for high value sales.

OK, Webmasters are now much better at creating and explaining realistic programmes on their sites, but how responsive are they? One person I queried late last night responded first thing this morning, despite it being a Saturday. He gave me all the answers I requested. It will be interesting to see how long the others take.

Are things perfect? Not yet. The fact that I had to query basic facts about payment and cookie retention from half the programmes that I felt worth listing means that they still aren't thinking it through properly.

Finally, one local business is offering a massive 0% commission ... it really makes me feel like promoting their products.

Bulk Directory Submission Spam

Hardly a day goes by when I don't receive at least one spam offering to improve my search engine rankings or offering bulk directory submissions, often several. If you own a website with a contact page you probably get a few too. Here's why you should never give them your business.

Dumb Phishing Attempt

This was in my spam folder today, dummied up to look like it was from a major New Zealand bank

This wasn't pretending to be from my bank, but even if I did bank with the company that was being impersonated there is no way I would believe a message with such poor grammar would have been from them.

If, as we are constantly told, phishing is a profitable business, why can't they afford to have their pitches translated or at least proofread by someone who actually speaks English? I wonder if it is arrogance or stupidity?

Study shows just how complex cancer tumors can be

From "Not Exactly Rocket Science" by Ed Yong: "

Cancer isn’t a single disease, so we can dispense with the idea of a single “cure”. There are over 200 different types, each with their own individual quirks.

Even for a single type – say, breast cancer – there can be many different sub-types that demand different treatments. Even within a single subtype, one patient’s tumour can be very different from another’s. They could both have very different sets of mutated genes, which can affect their prognosis and which drugs they should take. Even in a single patient, a tumour can take on many guises. Cancer, after all, evolves. A tumour’s cells are not bound by the controls that keep the rest of our body in check. They grow and divide without restraint, picking up new genetic changes along the way. Just as animals and plants evolve new strategies to foil predators or produce more offspring, a tumour’s cells can evolve new ways of resisting drugs or growing even faster.

Now, we know that even a single tumour can be a hotbed of diversity."

Full article

Aussie Kids Believe Yoghurt Grows On Trees.

Australia once rode to prosperity on the sheep's back, but nowadays children are so divorced from rural life many believe yoghurt grows on trees and 40 per cent of the Year 10s believed cotton came from an animal. NZ Herald

NZ and Auckland Linux User Group mailing lists down

The list maintainer, Mark Foster, has reported that the virtual machine that normally runs AuckLUG & NZLUG mailing lists has suffered a misfortune.

As a temporary measure he has set up a new mailing list at http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug.

If you are a subscriber to either of these lists and Mark hasn't subscribed you to the temporary list you can subscribe there. Equally if you're interested in Linux and you'd like to subscribe, you'll be made most welcome.

Indian call for affirmative action on Free Software

Erosion of privacy and personal freedom on online media drew worried mention at the just-concluded Fourth International FOSS (free and open source software) Conference-Kerala (FOSSK4). [...]

It demanded affirmative action by Governments around the world - especially in the Global South - to promote the use of FOSS as a cost-effective, customisable and robust technology option.

The Hindu, Business Line

Linux package dependencies show predator/prey relationship

Computer people often talk about a "software ecosystem" on various computer platforms, but it's rare to see someone take the terminology seriously. Evolutionary biologists Miguel A. Fortuna, Juan A. Bonachela, and Simon A. Levin of Princeton University have used the tools of ecosystem analysis to look at the evolution of Debian releases, examining things like package dependencies and software incompatibility.

"Overall, the key feature of the modularity the team identified seems to be that the decreasing number of conflicts across modules means that more of the software available for the operating system can install, since it's rare that a conflict will completely block an entire module from installing and running. The authors suggest that we might learn something about biology by studying software, but they don't actually provide examples of how this might work; at this stage, then, it's not an especially compelling argument. "

Full Article at Ars Technica

Facebook engineer talks about how they made FB mobile run everwhere

Facebook has the most downloaded smartphone application ever and over 350 million users accessing their website from both smart and dumb phones.

This is a talk by Dave Fetterman of Facebook on how they evolved their smart phone interface from fairly thick client to a progressively thinner one with more Html 5 features in the mix.

How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere:

Zurker A New Social Network

Over recent days Zurker a new social network has gone into alpha test.

For the benefit of anyone who has been trapped in a windowless room for the last 7 years, social networking is a web phenomenon where individuals interact with other individuals through sharing information. Usually there is a way for businesses to spread their message as well.

Today the 800 kg gorilla of social networking is Facebook who took the mantle from Myspace and Bebo in 2008. They are being challenged by Google, but look to be weathering that storm. They are also challenged to an extent by special purpose social networks like linked-in for business connections.

Previous social networks have had privacy issues as people didn't really trust the corporations to whom they gave all that personal information. Zurker has turned that on its head by allocating a portion of their ownership to be owned by their members. Currently these are "Virtual shares" but they say that when they launch their corporation they will be turned into real shares.

Zurker is being rolled out on a country by country basis and today it's New Zealand's turn! A couple of days ago I was approached by one of the founders I've had previous dealings with and asked to help with the Kiwi operation, which I agreed to. Just after midnight I registered the .nz domain name zurker.co.nz and today it's live.

Technically it's invite only at the moment but they make it pretty clear that they welcome invites via blog posts, so here's yours ... Click here ... send me a "Convo" when you sign-up. Yes, like all the others, they have their own jargon, but it translates fairly easily to the terms you are used to.

As alpha quality software you can expect a few glitches, and so far I've found a couple of fairly minor ones, but the quality seems pretty good.

Disclaimer, I'm not an executive but subject to negotiations, I intend having a personal stake in Zurker.

13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition

I've been thinking about Internet start-ups a bit recently and was impressed when I stumbled across this article
13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition by Jason L. Baptiste who is the co-founder and CEO of a growing venture backed startup.

He's got thirteen points and they are all different, but if I had to produce a summary it would be under two headings:

• Be your own business - leave the competition to make their own mistakes and don't copy them.
• Make sure you have sufficient funding in place to survive.

There's a lot more and I have no qualms recommending reading and thinking about this article.

Tis the season ... for cute rescued animal stories

First-up this report from the Herald: A dog in remote north-eastern Bangladesh has become a local celebrity by breastfeeding a baby monkey back to health after it was rescued from angry villagers. The monkey sleeps with foster mum and rides around town on her back. It shows no interest in returning to the wild.

Then this report: on how a cat napped in a car's engine and was found 300km later, with a few minor burns but otherwise unharmed. It wasn't even the car of the cat's owner.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Virgin TV's Sunthorpe Problems

In the UK a new system, which automatically checks the Virgin TV programme guide, went into over-drive over the weekend with programmes such as The History of Canals showed up as ‘The History of Ca**ls’, the Will Smith film ‘Hancock’becoming ‘Hanc**k, ‘Charles Dickens’ became ‘Charles D***ens’ even the name of London football club, ‘Arsenal’, was blocked out in a bid to remove inappropriate language from the TV menu. Full article at the Telegraph

Isn't it amazing how they just don't learn? The UK, after all, contains the place that gave its name to the generic name for this effect as the Scunthorpe Problem way back in 1996.

You'd think they'd an*lyse their software better before deploying it.