The recently announced Microsoft patent action against TomTom has brought the Groklaw blog out of its semi-retirement.  Groklaw made it's name by documenting, often in surprising detail, the SCO vs Linux debacle, which is still continuing with SCO in bankruptcy protection (actually the case was a series of legal actions involving SCO, IBM, Novell, Red Hat to name a few).  Since the SCO vs Novell case, upon which much of the rest of this legal fiasco depends, is essentially over, with SCO sitting in the bankruptcy courts, Groklaw has been in semi-retirement with its prime author, PJ, taking time out to consolidated the library of posts and documents she has acquired over the last few years.

Over the years, Groklaw has followed a variety of cases where Open Source Software (OSS), and in particular software released under the GPL, and in many cases the shadowy presence of Microsoft has been inferred by contributors.  Now it seems that Microsoft has finally decided to direct the big guns of the broken US software patent system at the GPS manufacturer TomTom.  This is a complex action, including the use of the FAT file system.

The Which? report on Phorm and BT Webwise (Phorm uses legal muscle against critical press reports), and which was suppressed by legal action threatened by former spyware company Phorm has surfaced on Wikileaks (UK media suppressed Phorm survey and article, 2009).

As usual on our annual trips over to ride the Port Talbot Wheelers two-up '25', we take the opportunity to visit antiquities.  This time we visited two castles in the Towy valley near Carmarthen.

Dinefwr Castle is located in the grounds of a National Trust property (so car parking is £2 - admission to the house is more still, though it wasn't open when we visited).  There's a nice tearoom in the House.  The castle itself is perched on a  craggy rock overlooking the valley, and is in quite good shape considering what it's been through, including being remodelled into a "romantic ruin" in the 17th century and having (bizarrely) a summerhouse added to the top of the round tower.  The picture below shows the view up to the castle, plus a couple of tetchy sheep.

Adzilla, another vile company aiming to use deep packet inspection to monitor internet users' browsing behaviour to deliver targetted adverts has bitten the dust, according to to a report at Wired.com (Another ISP Ad Snooper Hit With Lawsuit).  This follows the demise of Nebuad's plans to carry out similar nefarious activity.  Adzilla may be no longer with us, but a class action lawsuit has been launched against it and its ISP partners.

In early June of 2007, Susan Simon noticed odd things happening to her internet connection and traced the troubles to an outfit called Adzilla that turned out to be spying on everything she did online. 

I have a (probably half-baked) plan to carry on blogging while on cycle tour this summer.  Well, for as long as I can keep a Vodafone signal going.  One of the aims is to report on the cycling before I forget everything we see during the day.  To keep tabs on the routes we've cycled, I bought a Globalsat DG-100 GPS logger.

This little device is a basic GPS datalogger, which comes with some pretty basic software which, though a little on the clunky side, does seem to work pretty well.  I plan to use this with a small OQO pocket computer running Windows XP while travelling.  The unit is 3.15"x2.75"x0.7", so is pretty compact.  The silver coloured plate is the battery cover - it's powered by two NiMH cells (supplied), which are recharged via the USB connector.  Other than that, there are only two controls - the big silver cover power switch and a mode selector on the side.  The device comes with three preset modes, for pedestrian, bike and car travel (they differ in the data sampling rate), but these can be adjusted using the supplied software. 

In addition to the two software packages for downloading data, the unit comes with an application for adding location data to digital photograph files (so no more wondering where the heck we took those snaps of different Highland views!).

This event has become Team Grumpy's annual season-starter.  It's a well run two up team time trial event run on the R25/24 course.  This course uses a dual carriageway section for the first half, before switching to the old road running roughly parallel to the dual carriageway, but which is quite a bit hillier, with several short but quite steep climbs.

Over at the Team Grumpy blog, we'd been doing a count down to this event, ruminating on training and preparation.  In the event, we finished our "rigorous" training programme off with quite a lot of Belgian beer, takeaway curries and (on the evening before the event, pasta).  Two evenings-worth of system abuse was not, perhaps, the ideal fine-tuning of our finely-tuned physiques (in particular, I've had trouble keeping and/or getting the weight off), so we were feeling a little apprehensive and 'inwardly disturbed' on the way over to the course.

The Register reports (Phorm unleashes legal attack on critics) that much-criticised former spyware company Phorm has unleased legal missives in the direction of Which?, who conducted a user survery which supposedly found that internet users were deeply unhappy about the intrusive and possibly illegal Phorm system, which scans all internet activity in order to extract keywords for targetted advertising.  According to The Regiser,

News articles based on a survey indicating public opposition to Phorm's web snooping and advertising system have been withdrawn after the firm made legal threats to their publishers.

The BBC reports (Protest officers seized balloons) that some unusual items were confiscated from a power station protest group.  Supposedly items are meant to be confiscated to prevent offences being committed, but a FOI request reveals that along with the aforementioned balloons,

items taken included blankets, a walking stick, a clown outfit and soap.  [...]  A mountain bike, cycle helmets, bin bags and party poppers were also taken from protesters entering the camp site.

I'm visiting friends in South Wales, and I'm using their BT internet connection.  This gives me the first check that the BT-Phorm warning system is still working (it is - if you're on BT, you'll see the grey box with warning script on the right.

If you see this warning, click on the  InPhormation Desk link for more information about what Phorm, BT Webwise and deep packet inspection are, and why yo should be worried.

This morning, Ben Goldacre, the Guardian columnist and Bad Science blogger) has written on the difficulties and dangers of datamining to identify criminals and terrorists (Datamining would be lovely if it worked).

He's written this on the back of an IPPR report (The National Security Strategy: Implications for the UK intelligence community), and he's raising issues of accuracy and false positive rates - clearly analogous to evidence-based medical trials, which are closer to his usual blog fare.  Goldacre quotes the author of the report:

The Cramps' Lux Interior died earlier this month.  There's a story at the Mojo website (Lux Interior: October 21, 1946 - February 4, 2009)

I've inserted a video of my favourite Cramps track below the fold

Two reports in the press highlight the database dangers the UK is sleepwalking into.

The Guardian reports (DNA details of 1.1m children on database) that the details of over a million children remain in the national DNA database,  despite over half of these individuals having no criminal convictions.

 This cute little fish is Macropinna microstoma. The green objects under the transparent carapace are its eyes: the dark blobs above its mouth are olfactory organs.

 [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM9o4VnfHJU 480x295]