Day: October 1, 2004

John Robb on Kerry’s global test

John Robb thinks that Kerry lost this first debate, given that all Bush needed to do was hold Kerry to “tactical victories,” but he also provides much needed context for Kerry’s “global test” remark. At the time, I thought Kerry was just foolishly playing into right-wing paranoia about new world orders. It turns out that, according to Robb, he’s referencing part of Col. John Boyd’s “grand strategy” concept, the moral connectivity vector:

A key test of moral connectivity is proper conduct within alliances.  If a member of an alliance takes independent action that puts the other alliance members at risk, it needs to have a strong moral justification for that action.  If it fails that test, the alliance will melt away, and the independent actor will become isolated.

The post points to a fascinating article on Boyd’s strategic thought at Global Guerrillas. Thought provoking.

Win some, lose some

When you’re challenging the draconian DMCA, there are good days and bad days. Yesterday was both. On the good side, a federal judge issued a smackdown to Diebold for misusing the DMCA in trying to bully Swarthmore students into taking down links to material that was critical of Diebold’s voting machine security.

On the bad side, a St. Louis court ruled in favor of Blizzard in their DMCA suit, in which Blizzard sought to suppress the open source BnetD, a clone of Blizzard’s Battle.net service that enabled multiplayer options for Blizzard customers who didn’t want to use Battle.net.

What’s the commonality? Other than the DMCA, very little. Yesterday’s rulings in a nutshell say that the “safe harbor” clause of the act should not be misconstrued as an excuse for companies to send infinite numbers of takedowns, but the core anti-circumvention portion of the act stands. Even though the BnetD team was doing reverse engineering to enable compatibility with their free product.