Standards

The Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) has finally created a standard for when a page has been taken down due to legal reasons. The new status code, 451, indicates that a host has received a legal demand to deny access to a resource. Via TheNextWeb

Amazing work by all the people involved! Venkatesh Hariharan reported on the Linux Delhi mailing list today: The open standards policy has been finalized and it incorporates many of the suggestions made by the FOSS community in India. In the previous draft dated 25/11/2009, our major objection was to section 4.1.2 of the policy which said. 4.1.2 The essential patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should preferably be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard.

Thanks to Vinay Sreenivasa for letting us know on the ILUGD list: The government has released a draft version of a Policy on Open standards for e-Governance. It is presently open for Public review. Please find the policy at the link below- http://egovstandards.gov.in/Policy_Open_Std_review The policy seems to have some really good points like- 5.1) Mandatory Characteristics: 5.1.1)Selected Standard should be Royalty Free for life time of the standard.

Boing Boing talks about QR Codes - the latest and hottest fad among mobile users in Japan. While machine readable languages have been here since the beginning of computing, this is the first time that they are also a statement of “art”. QR codes are graphical equivalent of any text that you want, something similar to barcodes in purpose. But while barcodes were one dimensional (vertical lines of variable thickness), QR codes are two dimensional - (like the image on the right).