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<< Tuesday, May 11, 2004 >> |
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The whole picture
I mostly avoided the hearing today, but tuned in to C-SPAN's video stream just long enough to catch this brief segment in which Senator James Inhofe argues that "if pictures are authorized to be disseminated among the public, then for every picture of abuse or alleged abuse of prisoners, we [should] have pictures of mass graves, pictures of children being executed, pictures of the four Americans in Baghdad who were burned and mutilated." He concludes: "Let's get the whole picture."
Absolutely. The notion of authorized dissemination is problematic, though. In the transparent society that we are becoming, the whole picture most certainly is developing. The Net is a force of nature. It superconducts information and superdistributes awareness.
Of course the military, like every enterprise, is entitled to try to control the terms on which its employees can engage with the Net. So the Seattle Times reports that Tami Silicio, who gave us another piece of the picture, was fired for violating the Pentagon ban on pictures of flag-draped coffins. Likewise, Seattle's other paper, the Post-Intelligencer, reported last fall that Michael Hanscom was fired for his pictures of G5 Macs on a loading dock at Microsoft. Fair enough. In a similar position of responsibility, I'd have to make similar choices. But let's be clear: the whole picture, by definition, cannot be authorized.
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Xythos 'Intellittach'
In a recent column on how we use and abuse email, I mentioned the idea of passing attachments "by reference" rather than "by value." Unfortunately I overlooked a product recently reviewed by InfoWorld that does exactly that. The Xythos WebFile Server has a companion WebFile Client that hooks File Attach (in Notes and Outlook) and replaces attachments with secure links to an access-controlled and versioned instance of the document. Cool!
The $50K price tag, as our reviewer noted, "may keep smaller companies away." But other implementations of the idea are clearly possible. I've received a bunch of responses to the column saying: "We attach files because IT gives us no alternative." Xythos offers an alternative. I'd like to see the "Intellittach" concept turn into a broadly-adopted convention.
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Trademarks, acronyms, and Orwell
The other day I wondered why some well-known technology acronyms -- notably UPnP -- aren't expanded on the home pages of the organizations promoting those technologies. In the case of UPnP, at least, the reason is that it isn't (any longer) an acronym:
The UPnP mark is not an acronym and should not be represented as such. The mark is a single entity that happens to consist of four symbols (i.e., letters), which individually do not have any particular meaning.
[Tips for using the UPnP Certification Mark]
Why the switch? Apparently it's because you can't trademark an acronym. So, for example, JDBC, like UPnP, has been uprooted and now exists as a free-floating string of "symbols (i.e., letters)". JDBC is a registered trademark, and although Sun was not able to expunge all references to Java Database Connectivity from its website, the JDBC home page nowhere mentions the term.
I found this puzzling in light of this Q and A from the trademark FAQ of a Boston technology law firm:
13. Can I register an acronym of my company name as a trademark?
Companies with lengthy trade names will sometimes use the acronym of their trade name as their primary service mark: e.g. Columbia Broadcasting System, National Broadcasting System, and American Broadcasting System, use the acronyms CBS, NBC and ABC, respectively, as marks for the service of providing news and entertainment services over electronic media.
NBC hasn't, to my knowledge, ceased to be the National Broadcasting System. Of course JDBC and UPnP are trademarks, while NBC and CBS are service marks, so perhaps the distinction lies there. But whatever the explanation, the pretense that JDBC and UPnP don't mean "Java Database Connectivity" and "Universal Plug and Play" is simply Orwellian. It's already way too hard to explain technology in ways people can understand. We can ill afford to drain the meaning out of our language.
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