Blackmoor Vituperative

I found a real gem today: Jack London: Writings.

I am going back and forth on terminology in Spider Season. On the one hand, I am already using “goblin” and “ogre”, and I will probably use “troll” as well. On the other hand, I am averse to using “elf”. It just seems so hackneyed. I have been reading up on mythical creatures from India, Persia, Scandinavia, and elsewhere: “asura”, “jinn”, “dev”, “huldra”, “kropel”, “haldjas”, and so forth. But some of these terms are popularly associated with images that may or may not have anything to do with their traditional mythical meanings (“jinn”, for example). Also, if I mix and match terms from wildly different cultures (Estonian “haldjas” and Hindu “asura”, for example), I think it’ll just annoy people who actually know something about mythology, and they’ll think I am an ignorant twit who is just using terms he found in a thesaurus without understanding them. Not an unfair accusation, really. So I feel like I have three options: 1) stick to English terms even though it strikes me as hackneyed, 2) stick with the terms from one culture (probably Persian, because I think fewer English-speaking people are familiar with those myths), or make up words from whole cloth. I really don’t want to make people learn a whole batch of vocabulary words just to read a silly fantasy novel. But is making up new words any worse than using existing words that people may not know — deliberately mis-using them, in many cases (much like Tolkien misused “wight”)? I guess I do have a fourth option: use common words and apply them to these creatures: “hidden folk”, “moon people”, “forest folk”, and so on. Bleh. I don’t really like that.

Maybe the simplest method is the best: use English words (“elf”, etc.), and be clear to describe their referents so that people won’t think an “elf” is a little man in a green coat riding an earwig. Sigh. It still strikes me as hackneyed. Maybe my problem is that it really is hackneyed — not just the terminology, but the entire concept of having human beings that aren’t quite human beings. People in latex appliances, to use a Star Trek metaphor. Maybe non-human creatures should be really, really non-human. The only problem with that is that the less human a character is (not just in appearance, but in behavior and speech as well), the harder it is for people to sympathize with it. Can we really empathize with an eyeless, six-armed creature that eats rocks and communicates through rhythmic stomping?

What makes this such a nuisance for me is that I have a character — a minor character — who is for most intents and purposes a conventional elf. He is definitely not human, but for the character to work he has to look almost human. He will probably be the only creature of his kind in the entire book (although there might be another).

When in doubt, go with the simplest answer. Use English.

Or maybe Estonian.

Fun With Shorts: A Touch of Magic

Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against an alleged hacker who broke through its copy protection technology, charging that the mystery developer somehow gained access to its copyrighted source code.

For more than a month, the Redmond, Wash., company has been combating a program released online called FairUse4WM, which successfully stripped anticopying guards from songs downloaded through subscription media services such as Napster or Yahoo Music.

Microsoft has released two successive patches aimed at disabling the tool. The first worked — but the hacker, known only by the pseudonym “Viodentia,” quickly found a way around the update, the company alleges. Now the company says this was because the hacker had apparently gained access to copyrighted source code unavailable to previous generations of would-be crackers.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft sues over source code theft)

I see two possible explanations for this. Either it is inconceivable to Microsoft that anyone could break their Digital Rights Mafia scheme without having inside information, or they are subverting the legal system in order advance their corporate interests (again).

Here’s what is on my nightstand right now:

Hindu Myths
The Historian
Persian Mythology
Persian Myths
The Superhero Handbook
Wicked
Wicked: The Grimmerie

I haven’t done much actual writing on Spider Season over the last few days, but I have been laying a lot of groundwork: figuring out relationships, mocking up scenes in my head, deciding on plot points, and so forth. I have decided not to use units for anything if I can help it. Instead I will refer to a day, half a day, most of the morning; a pace, a day’s travel, a week’s travel; and so on. One unit of measure that I will keep is the “stone”, because that is sufficiently archaic without seeming too tied to our specific world. I could see people in a primitive society measuring things in “stones”.

I think the maguffin is a ring and a book. The book is magic: the ring is anti-magic. This is what protects her against the evil sorcerer that wants the book. But if the ring is anti-magic, how can she learn magic from the book? If she takes the ring off to cast spells, wouldn’t the evil sorcerer strike then? Maybe the evil sorcerer is a ruse to get her to go to the Ivory Tower. She needs to stay focused on her goals, though. She looks at this bit with the sorcerer as a distraction.

The Free Software Foundation has recently clarified “inaccurate” information about GPLv3. The clarification closely follows the release of a position paper signed by top Linux developers, in which they announce their objections to the proposed GPLv3. Linus Torvalds was a noteworthy exception. He recently explained why he didn’t sign the GPLv3 position statement, but why he still supports the GPLv2 open-source license.

As much as I despise the Digital Rights Mafia, I have to agree with two of the points made by the Linux kernel developers. First, adding anti-Digital Rights Mafia conditions to the GPL imposes something that GPL v2 is justly praised for lacking: end use restrictions. You do not have to agree with anyone’s politics or agenda to work with them on a GPL v2 project — all you have to do is agree to share your work. It’s politically and culturally neutral. I don’t think enough people appreciate how valuable that is. Second, the additional restrictions section is a huge problem. The Linux kernel developers declare that this section “makes GPLv3 a pick and choose soup of possible restrictions which is going to be a nightmare for our distributions to sort out legally and get right. Thus, it represents a significant and unacceptable retrograde step over GPLv2 and its no additional restrictions clause.” That’s about as clear as anyone can put it, I think.

So as much as I sympathize with the goals of the people working on GPL v3, I don’t think I’ll be using it, or working on any projects that do. (Not that I am doing much open source programming — or programming at all — now that I am at Circuit City, but I hope that this is a temporary situation.)

As concerns about Internet privacy (or the lack thereof) continue to increase — and as users worry about the ability of governments, criminals and businesses to spy on their Internet usage — more attention is being given to tools that are designed to help users surf the Web anonymously.

The leading method for anonymous Web surfing is currently the Tor Network (which I discussed recently in my Tech Directions column).

Tor works through a technique called onion routing, which uses numerous routers through which communications will pass. As data passes through points on the Tor Network, each point knows only where the data is going and where it came from. As the network grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to trace a connection’s origin.

eWEEK Labs has been impressed with the functionality of Tor-based tools such as Vidalia, but these tools require full system installs and lack portability.

Hoawever, a recently released tool makes it very simple to get up and running quickly with a secure and anonymous Web connection. The free Torpark is a Firefox-based browser that automatically connects to the Tor Network and lets users surf anonymously with a minimum of fuss.

Even more impressive, Torpark, which runs straight from an executable and requires no installation routine, can be run directly from a USB drive. This means users can carry a privacy-enabled browser with them wherever they go. (No data is stored on the drive; only the app itself.)

(from eWeek, Torpark Makes Anonymous Web Surfing Easy)

I wonder how long it will be before this is made illegal and/or made the target of a domestic spying law?

The British Library has called for a “serious updating” of current copyright law to “unambiguously” include digital content and take technological advances into account.

In a manifesto released on Monday at the Labor Party Conference in Manchester, the United Kingdom’s national library warned that the country’s traditional copyright law needs to be extended to fully recognize digital content.

[…]

“DRM is a technical device, but it’s being used in an all-embracing sense. It can’t be circumvented for disabled access or preservation, and the technology doesn’t expire (as traditional copyright does). In effect, it’s overriding exceptions to copyright law,” Brindley said.

[…]

“One of the key problems is that the limitations and exceptions to copyright law are being ignored by business, which is imposing restrictive licenses on digital content,” Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told ZDNet UK.

Charman said DRM restrictions could be particularly damaging for academic research.

“If a library carried a printed journal, academics and students could photocopy it. Digital journals have restrictions on access, which is a dangerous road to go down,” Charman said. “If we allow companies to create their own licenses, we undermine copyright law. If we say contract law is more important than copyright law, it allows publishers to write whatever license they like, which is what is happening now.”

[…]

The British Library also called for the question of “orphan works” — content whose rights holder is hard to find — to be addressed.

(CNET News.com, British Library calls for digital copyright action)

Way to go, British Library!

The local government in the German city has transferred 100 staff members in the Lord Mayor’s department to a Debian configuration, and it intends to migrate 80 percent of the city’s PCs by mid-2009.

It has not been an easy transition for the government, which first announced its intention to move to Linux in 2003 and which had scheduled the first launch to occur in 2005.

But the project, dubbed LiMux, hit numerous delays after a dispute over software patents, extended contractual negotiations and a 12-month extension to the project’s pilot phase.

“The tests are over. We have fixed the bugs and solved some of the problems,” Florian Schiessl, deputy chief of the city’s Linux project, told CNET News.com sister site ZDNet UK on Monday. “Everything we wanted done for the first release is working at the moment.”

Schiessl said it would be impossible to migrate all city workers to open source, but that 80 percent would move across by between late-2008 and mid-2009.

(from CNET News.com, Munich fires up Linux at last)

It sounds like Munich is taking a measured, common-sense approach to migrating away from expensive, proprietary software to open source and open standards. The up-front cost of migrating is significant, of course, as it would be for any large-scale migration. Migrating their entire infrastucture to XP or Vista would cost as much or more. In the short term, they will benefit from the additional security Linux offers over Windows, as well as being free from Windows’ onerous licensing restrictions, but the real savings from migrating to Linux and open source software is long-term, and I am glad that Munich’s administrators are farsighted enough to realize this.