Years ago, Doug McIlroy, the inventor of the Unix pipe, published a paper on techniques for computing the terms of power series. The paper talks about a number of key concepts in programming, such as "lazy" evaluation, that were not well supported by most programming languages at the time, which is why McIlroy spent a good portion of the paper describing an implementation of his techniques in a new language designed by Rob Pike.

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I thought I was done with this topic for now, but I can't help adding one more quick post, because it now appears that it isn't just media companies who want to put a stranglehold on the Internet. Chanel is getting in on the act.

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This is just a quick update to yesterday's post. According to Ars Technica,

Last Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution ahead of a forthcoming summit between Europe and the United States. It included a section on "the need to protect the integrity of the global Internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names."

That provision was added at the urging of the civil liberties organization European Digital Rights (EDRi). In a presentation to the Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee, EDRi's Joe McNamee noted that "the United States has, up until recently, never sought to exploit its theoretical jurisdiction over the companies and infrastructure that are at the core of the Internet."

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I've posted twice now about the Protect IP Act, or SOPA (the former is the Senate version, the latter is the House version), which is the latest attempt on the part of big media companies to put a stranglehold on the Internet.

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Amidst all the news about Steve Jobs' passing, you may not have heard that Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and one of the original designers of Unix, also passed away this past weekend.

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Unusually for me, this post will be almost entirely links to and quotes from articles by others. But I should explain briefly why I'm linking to them and quoting them. It's not to set the stage for my own comments about Mac OS X, or about iPods and iPads and so forth. I made comments about OS X in an earlier post, and there's no need to rehash them here. Nor do I have any personal anecdotes to share. My reason for linking to these articles, and quoting briefly from them, is, quite simply, to draw attention to what they say.

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I've seen a number of online articles and blog posts recently with the common theme of being uncomfortable with Facebook. For instance, this at Slate, or this from a programmer, or this from a Facebook developer.

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Having spent enough time using all three of the major OS's to have a decent understanding of their flaws, it's easy to explain why I use Linux whenever I have a choice: its flaws are much easier to manage.

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Unless you're a Linux nerd like me, you probably didn't hear that the kernel.org site, the "home" of the Linux kernel and the "official" place to get a copy of its source code, was recently cracked. As far as I can tell from the Internet oracle, this hasn't made the news outside of the Linux developer and distribution community. If you're a conspiracy theorist, you might be thinking that this not making the news is some kind of nefarious scheme to hide flaws in the security of Linux. When a bank's server gets cracked, everybody finds out in a New York minute. Why should Linux's kernel source be any different?

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In a previous post I mentioned the Protect IP Act as an example of government making things worse instead of better when it tries to censor the Internet. Today I came across an article talking about another very bad effect that the Protect IP Act would have if it were passed: it would break DNSSEC, which is a key security mechanism that lets your computer validate DNS records, so that, for example, when you type your bank's URL into your browser, you know that you're talking to your bank's server, instead of some rogue site that has been set up to impersonate it.

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