Den of evil II

Sticky update: Wow, how very frustrating. Each update has sent another ping. I am a ping spammer! Sorry, Matt and Prof. Felten.

While I’m on the subject of copyright absolutism, here’s a post from the normally-much-smarter-than-me Matt Yglesias that totally
misses the point.

Which is: finally, Bush’s petulance has done some good.

The trade agreement in question, which we’ve signed sith Singapore but piquefully declined to sign with Chile, has a huge, ugly tumor in its heart: the DMCA.

As Charles Cooper (among others) writes, the agreement obliges all parties to adhere to the DMCA‘s circumvention-device and speech restrictions, effectively:

1. exporting this stupid, awful law to other countries, and,
2. making it harder to overturn, repeal, or amend it here.

So, if the people of Chile are free for a little longer to do cryptography research, to watch DVDs on their Linux computers, modchip their Xboxes, and tell their friends about it—all without being liable for huge civil judgements or jail time—they can thank George W. Bush, and his petty, vindictive, mean little heart. For once, though sheer spite, he’s done the right thing.

UPDATE: D’oh! MT’s magical trackback autodiscovery combined with my copying the trackback URL resulted in Prof. Felten’s site getting 2 identical pings. Oops. That really seems like a bug; why would you ever want to double-ping a single story?

UPDATE 2: Looks to me like MT isn’t being very rigorous about stripping whitespace from ping URLs. There’s an effort at avoiding dupes:

MT/Entry.pm
294 my %to_ping = map { $_ => 1 } @{ $entry->to_ping_url_list };

Both ‘http://foo’ and ‘http://foo ’ will both make it into %to_ping in this case. The whitespace is stripped only immediately before the ping is sent:

MT.pm
597 for my $url (@$pings) {
$url =~ s/^\s*//;
$url =~ s/\s*$//;

Simple fix ought to take care of it:

—- Entry.pm.orig Mon May 19 22:28:15 2003
+++ Entry.pm Mon May 19 22:28:17 2003
@@ -291,7 +291,8 @@
my $blog = MT::Blog->load($entry->blog_id);
if ($blog->autodiscover_links) {
my $archive_url = $blog->archive_url;
– my %to_ping = map { $_ => 1 } @{ $entry->to_ping_url_list };
+ my %to_ping = map { $_ =~ s/^\s*(.?)\s$/$1/; $_ => 1 }
+ @{ $entry->to_ping_url_list };
my %pinged = map { $_ => 1 } @{ $entry->pinged_url_list };
my $body = $entry->text;

And hopefully that will be the end of double-pings from me.

Filed under: copyright