• His blog gets traffic via my blog. Not much but hey, someone might click. Now they can.
• He is properly referenced so that my readers can check what I’m disagreeing with, and also read his point of view.

It seems (at least the under the current legislation) also appropriate to mention that I found Posner’s blog via TechCrunch. Therefore, I’ll also link to their article.

Neither copyright owner was asked for consent before I linked to their content. That’s how the Web works. If someone doesn’t like the Web and the way it works, maybe they shouldn’t use it to publish their copyrighted content in the first place.

In the very same sentence, Posner also suggests we should extend copyright law to “bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. I don’t understand why a copyright law extension would be necessary for this.  As one of Posner’s readers notes (in case this isn’t obvious enough), we already need the copyright holder’s consent. The thing is, if you upload your materials onto the Internet and make it freely available to Web surfers, certainly everyone already has your consent to access it.

UPDATE Jul 6 – Simon Owens emailed with some figures on how much traffic he got from a single link on the notorious “leecher” of news content, the Huffington Post. One link, 37,000 eyeballs. ‘Nuff said.

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip
Unpacking the core update
Verifying the unpacked files
Installing the latest version
Upgrading database
WordPress upgraded successfully

That’s the way I like it. Thanks to the wonderful WordPress hackers for making my life so much easier again!

The site is a place for Ubuntu users to share their story. Why do you use Ubuntu? Tell your story about security, stability, desktop sexiness and all the other reasons to choose our favorite Linux distribution for your daily business and pleasure use!

The easier of these is using fuse and obexfs. I initially found this tip on Google Groups, and later David’s more thorough HOWTO. Here’s the drill:

• Find out your phone’s Bluetooth MAC address if you don’t know it already:
  hcitool scan
• Find out the OBEX FTP channel it uses
  sdptool search FTP
• Load the fuse kernel module:
  sudo modprobe fuse
• Make a suitable mount point for your phone:
  mkdir ~/Phone
• Mount
  obexfs -bXX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX -BYY ~/Phone
  (where XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is your phone’s MAC and YY is the OBEX channel)
• Unmount when you’re done with your file transfers:
  fusermount -u ~/Phone

That’s it!

Image: Browsing my phone via Bluetooth,
WebDAV and a Web browser

The other method is more exciting and far more geeky. It doesn’t actually involve mounting your phone’s filesystem at all, but making its contents available by running a web server on it. I’ve known about Nokia’s mobile Web server for some time already, but was inspired to try it out recently by Mikko‘s comment on a blog entry of mine involving phone/linux synchronizing.

You can selectively make all your phone’s information available on the Web for yourself, for a group of friends, or globally. Register on mymobilesite.net, download the Mobile Server software, and away you go. It works very well, but eats far too much RAM to be running permanently at this stage (it’s advertised as beta). For temporary access it’s a viable solution though, and here’s the strong point: no setup is needed on the receiving side, all you need is a computer and a Web browser! I will certainly keep an eye on the server’s development and play with it more in the weeks and months to come.