Queen Mary University of London

Martin Paul Eve

GNUCITIZEN has been going on about this for some time now, but the truly devastating impact of what he has been saying only actually hit me today when reading about his JavaScript interface to Johnny's Google Hacking Database. The scenario is as follows. The interface contains NO SERVER SIDE SCRIPTS and no iframes or other such methods for loading offsite data but instead utilises the JSON data format to include remote script files.

Bypassing Same Origin Policy using Mash-Ups

Stefano Di Paola presented an interesting paper on Flash security at OWASP 2007 which highlights the dangers of HTML being rendered from within Flash via GET querystrings. Of particular note is the non-sanitization of comments (filter evasion by // .jpg) so check it out.  XSF: Cross Site Flashing was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 19, 2007.

XSF: Cross Site Flashing

University of Lincoln

As is now fairly common knowledge, HEFCE expects green deposit on all journal articles to be included in REF2020.

 EDIT:

just to clarify: HEFCE has not finalised its position. This is my expected outcome. The deposit must be made upon

 article acceptance

and not later. In the case of embargoes, this should be set in the software. However, I then wondered how we can determine what the embargo period should be.

HEFCE (REF2020), IR deposit and embargoes

University of Sussex

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon has entered into a partnership with Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. LMU have generously provided the funding that we need to cover our technical costs for the entire coming year. In turn, Orbit is offering editorial experience to several postgraduate students at a crucial time of transition to the Open Access model.

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon receives funding from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

This post is written in response to a question by the ace Bernie Folan, from Sage publishers, who asked whether ORCID has the potential to disrupt, or conversely endorse, the problems in publication driven by accreditation structures. Here's a few of my hastily assembled, initial thoughts...  First off, for those who don't know, ORCID is an identifier system for scientists and scholars.

On ORCID, accreditation structures and altmetrics

I've had several conversations in the past few weeks on the different modes of dissemination and the REF's undervaluation of the book collection. The argument goes that essays in a book collection are less valued because they're not peer reviewed. Except... they are. They're just not shipped out by an editor of a journal to multiple experts to formulate consensus. In some ways, the edited collection is reviewed to a greater extent.

The undervalued book collection and peer review

The third conference I attended last week was a day called SuShI. The idea was to bring together the humanities and business worlds. It was, from my extremely critical Leftist perspective, a somewhat strange event. I attended talks on advertising and creativity schematising business theorists. I have to say that, although left still not entirely persuaded by the contents of their papers, it was an extraordinary fusion.

Sussex-Southampton Initiative: SuShI. An interdisciplinary fusion.

Birkbeck, University of London

This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’,

 Journal of Library Administration

, 54.3 (2014), 217–32 &lt;https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166&gt;. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital infrastructures.

On participatory design in library architecture

Crossref

Some remarks that will be presented at the SHARP plenary roundtable: AI in the Communications Circuit. Last week, the CEO of Microsoft’s AI division said, in an interview with CNBC, that “I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use.

AI and Open Cultural Licensing (remarks to be presented at the SHARP plenary roundtable: AI In the Communications Circuit)

This post picks up an argument that I made in [Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Metaphors-Digital-Textual-History-Stanford-Technologies/dp/1503614883/ref=sr_1_1) about facts and copyright. Namely, that although facts are exempt from copyright, factual status is not necessarily stable. Some thoughts reproduced from the book: The Catch-22 situation in which factuality finds itself is as follows:     1.

Are metadata facts?

There is a proud tradition in many fields of the humanities of critical thinking. Linked to the Enlightenment Humanist tradition, this critique achieves its positivity (better citizens, better societies) through negation: we criticize and think critically because only in negating those wrong aspects of the world can we hope to put things aright.

On the Impurity of the Humanities and Critical University Studies

Research England has dropped the mandate for OA books in its guidance for the next REF, saying that it will, now, apply instead by 2029. It is hard to see, given the extensive trailing of this mandate, what will be different by 2029. We seem stuck in a doom loop whereby RE announces its policy decisions years in advance, but far from enough people systematically try to implement them until the last minute, by which time they say it was too late.

On dropping the REF OA mandate for books (this time)

I am very pleased to say that my book, _Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History_, is out today!

Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History is out today!

There are lots of things that I have learned about kidneys and their functions since BK virus destroyed mine. Kidneys regulate potassium in your blood; they also control phosphate levels; they remove urea from the blood stream; they take excess fluid out of your body and blood; they produce the hormones that stimulate the creation of red blood cells; and a whole host more. Kidneys are the Swiss Army Knives of internal organs.

Rollercoaster days

One of the questions I see most frequently on Freenode's ##csharp irc channel is how to use a MySql Database in .NET. I've therefore provided the class that I use for basic database operations.

C# DataExecutor class available

The UK currently has an assisted dying bill going through parliament and I am very conflicted about it. On the one hand, I am a member of DIGNITAS, the organization that supports assisted dying and that runs a “clinic” in Switzerland to which members who are terminally ill can travel to end their lives. I have no desire for the end of my life to be a mess of literally unbearable suffering and nausea, even with palliative care.

My conflicted thoughts on the UK’s assisted dying bill

Just a quick note to point out this invaluable resource for those interested in XSS attack vectors; rsnake's XSS Cheat Sheet.  XSS Cheat Sheet was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 16, 2007.

XSS Cheat Sheet

Friday, 27th January 2012: 4pm. 2 years and four months into my efforts. The first draft of my Ph.D is now done! I have 81,000 words excluding introduction and conclusion, so some cutting needs to be done. Editing this is going to take at least a couple of months (some parts need beefing up, others paring down), by my estimates, but my last AHRC funding installment arrives in June, so I'm feeling confident.

First draft of my Ph.D is done!

People are obsessed with the short-term effects of Covid, prioritising them over the longer-term impacts. "It was just like a minor cold, really", they say, perhaps not realising that [even mild cases of Covid have been shown to cause lasting cognitive impairment](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/236034/lasting-brain-impacts-severe-covid-19-equivalent/). But I also take exception with this comparison to the common cold.

Why it’s worth avoiding as many viruses/common colds as possible: mine led to permanent disability

Having set out in part 1 some of the differences between the British and American PhDs in English, this here part 2 is a guide to applying to America, should its system seem preferable.

Britain or America for the PhD in English? Part 2

A few personal notes on the clamour around OA for books (written from the perspective of [an author of 10 books](https://eve.gd/books/) that are all openly accessible): 1. The REF mandate for books has been argued and trialed over an eight-year period, starting with the 2016 ‘Consultation on the second Research Excellence Framework’, published by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Some personal notes on the REF OA mandate for books

I have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for almost twenty years now, which is almost half my life. If I had known back at the start of my diagnosis what I know now, I do not know for sure that things would be very different, but there was a heck of a lot I did not know. How complex is this disease and the things it does? This complex:  "Rheumatoid arthritis" sounds like the sort of disease that old people get that isn't very serious.

On Rheumatoid Arthritis and the Things Most People Don’t Know About It

Today’s big news is that Crossref has acquired the Retraction Watch database of expressions of concerns and retractions and has made it openly accessible to anyone who wants to use it. I’m waiting for full confirmation of the license or public domain dedication under which it will be released, but this is still a great commitment of Crossref to the POSI principles. The liberation of this database is good for science and scholarship in general.

Retract this!

I have read, with some dismay, the draft of Ithaka S+R’s most recent report. I offer here some critical remarks that I hope will allow for revision of the work, which I believe offers an insular, digital-nationalist, exclusionary vision for the future of scholarly communications. The views herein are my personal take, not those of any organization for which I work.

The latest Ithaka S+R draft report is hugely regressive

The Critics of OA and Acknowledging “Predation”   Several of the critics of OA, most notably in recent days Jeffrey Beall and John Bohannon – the former of whom believes, with an almost McCarthyite tone, that Open Access is an anti-corporatist movement – have pointed out the practices of so-called “predatory” gold open access publishers. They have a point.

Predatory Publishers: Not Just OA (and who loses out?)

Like many years, 2022 was a year of health problems for me. The entire year has been overshadowed by the episode of kidney failure that I suffered as a result of BK virus associated nephropathy. It is fair to say that I have been quite seriously unwell. I also spent a long period of this year, in my spare time, campaigning for protection of the immunocompromised with the monoclonal antibody therapy, Evusheld.

My 2022 year in review

I run Google Apps for Domains to handle my email. Recently, a friend was having trouble emailing me. I asked her to send me the source of the message. In there, I found this:  My A records point to my server. My MX records point to Google Apps.

Can't receive emails from Hotmail: fixing their buggy DNS process

Well, first off, this is the first post using the new blogging solution! Let's hope it works!

C# MemoryManagement Class

I've just been asked on Twitter as to whether it's worth presenting at postgraduate conferences and thought I'd share my thoughts in a short post. Answer: it depends what you want to get from a conference. If you are looking to meet intellectually stimulating people, get experience presenting and genuine feedback on your work, then a postgraduate conference is great.

Is it worth presenting at postgraduate conferences?

Featured image by Пероша under a CC-BY-NC license.

I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's

 Eichmann in Jerusalem

and came across the phrase "

 in dubio contra reum

" on p. 214. My Latin being a little rusty, and it being late in the day, I whacked the term into Google and was disappointed to find that there was no adequate definition of the term in the search results; merely band names and a German entry.

In Dubio Contra Reum: a definition

DataExecutor.cs:  tableAdapter.cs:  C# MySql DataExecutor class was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on June 25, 2007.

C# MySql DataExecutor class

The economy of prestige in academia is odd. We often like to think that the prestige of our institutions – whether that be a university or a publisher – is not made on the basis of a monetary or financial decision. But I think there are lots of things that give the lie to this. Consider the debate around new open-access book publishers.

Thoughts on academic prestige and institutional solvency

I am frequently asked, by libraries, to provide usage statistics for their institutions at the Open Library of Humanities. I usually resist this, since there are a number of ways in which the metrics are not usually a fair comparison to subscription resources. A few notes on this. We do not have or require any login information. This means that the only way that we can provide usage information is by using the institutional IP address.

Open Access Resources and Evaluation; or: why OA journals might fare badly in terms of conventional usage

I’m delighted to say that I have taken up an editorship, alongside Professor Bryan Cheyette, of the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series. I think this is an exciting time and opportunity to consider what it means to study contemporary writing in the present age and to deliberate upon the diverse methodologies, approaches, and concerns in my area of academic work. We therefore invite proposals as per the call below.

Now accepting proposals to 'New Horizons in Contemporary Writing' series

This week, cOAlition S endorsed the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model. This group of international funders is committed to a complete transition to open-access publishing. To date, critics have claimed that the cOAlition has been too wedded to the (inflationary) Article Processing Charge business model, although Plan S is theoretically neutral on this matter.

cOAlition S endorsing Subscribe to Open is a great start. We need the same thinking about books from the beginning.

Just to share my response to a comment on the PLOHSS project from somebody who claimed that: Any form of APC was unacceptable All APCs would be viewed as vanity publication  Me: I think the "vanity publishing" argument is totally fallacious; it's clear that the review process would be completed utterly independently well before any consideration of finance would be made.

On Opposition to *any* APC model

A quick post to state that Orbit is now preserved by the CLOCKSS archive. For more on this, see the press release, which even features a quotation from me!    Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon is now digitally preserved by CLOCKSS was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on July 13, 2012.

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon is now digitally preserved by CLOCKSS

A few days late, but this is a quick post to highlight my statements, and photograph, on the Guardian books site. The piece was to highlight events pertaining to reading/celebrating authors in public, which linked in with the Pynchon in Public Day event which I organized last weekend. The piece has been widely circulated and I'm grateful for all the exposure!

Photograph and Interview in the Guardian

I'm very pleased to announce that I will speaking in the opening plenary session at the UK Scholarly Group conference on March the 26th, 2012 at the University of Glasgow. My paper will focus on the many problems in academic publishing through a typology of computer malware, arguing for a deep infection within the system.

Conference Paper: "Autosubversive Practices in Academic Publishing", UKSG, 2012-03-26

I've been playing with the new setup of Unity on Ubuntu Natty 11.04 beta, which now comes preloaded with the forked LibreOffice. This has caused some problems for installation of Zotero, so I want to here give the walkthrough instructions that I used in a LiveCD environment to get everything working.&lt;/p&gt;

 Featured image by Wyatt Kirby with unspecified copyright or licensing provisions.

Installing Zotero on Ubuntu Natty (11.04/Beta)

Having read two great posts on OpenSSH best practices, I decided today that I wanted to upgrade my SSH key architecture to use Elliptical Curve Cryptography. There were several gotchas involved that I thought it would be worth sharing here. There are, at the time of writing, no packages for Fedora 15 or Debian stable that I could find, so I've worked from source. Getting ECC working on some systems can be a bit of a pain.

Using Elliptical Curve Cryptography in OpenSSH

This is a quick post to announce the first code drop of a project I worked on yesterday. It's called Djiscography and it generates nicely formatted javascript hide/show style discography information. It supports track listing, samples, multiple artists, releases and editions. A live version of the project can be found at: http://discography.2bitpie.net.

Djiscography: a Django-based discography generator

It's always frustrating to find errors in a work that has already gone to press/been through peer review, but unfortunately my friend Pete Christian has unearthed a few minor mistakes that I want to put out here. Thanks to Pete, who also says that none of this detail affects the overall argument of the text. On p. 154, I’ve made a mistake when quoting Hollander – he says (correctly) that “home” is a Germanic word.

Errata for Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History

Introducing sshsplit  sshsplit is a GPL-3 licensed application that multiplexes ssh dynamic tunnels. &lt;/img&gt;  For example, you might normally run:  to get a tunnel on 127.0.0.1:54321 that goes through remote-host. However, if you are using a network-resource-intensive application (torrent clients for example), this single tunnel will not suffice for, say, 1000 concurrent connections.

sshsplit: a dynamic tunnel multiplexer

The next few months mark a series of “10“s for me. On the 10th September, it will be 10 years since my Ph.D. viva. In November, it will be 10 years since I got my first lecturing position (TT Assistant Prof) at the University of Lincoln. It’s 10 years since I met Dr Caroline Edwards and we began publishing

 Alluvium

together. And it’s 10 years since we began planning the Open Library of Humanities.

Moving On: My Infrastructural Turn

This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting.

18th-Century British Isles

As part of my ongoing quest to try to ensure that as much of my work is as accessible as possible, I was negotiating a contract with Bloomsbury Academic, asking for permission to deposit. It turns out that Bloomsbury already have a process for this. If you follow it, you are allowed to deposit “the final Version of Record”, albeit not under an open license. Still, this could be very good indeed.

Did you know that you can deposit the version of record of Bloomsbury Academic book chapters in your institutional repository?

As part of my 2021 research leave project, I am reading various encyclopaedias of the novel. As there is no way I could remember all that I have read, I have decided to make some notes in publicly accessible blog format. This post will serve as the coordinating index. The notes on these pages are much condensed and provide some indicative readings on the subject matter but by no means cover the full breadth of the encyclopaedias themselves.

Aspects of the Novel

Something I am not very good at is decoupling the amount of effort I am expected to put in from the output result. That is, my academic contract has a nominal number of hours that I am expected to work and that should serve as a guide for how much I can get done. In the two full years where I have time tracked everything I do for work, I have ended up substantially “in the red”; i.e. I do many more hours than the contract states. How much more?

Input-Output

I was reflecting this morning on the following propositions: Higher-tier (high prestige, high exclusivity) journals, to which most academics submit their work first, often have extremely high thresholds for admission. They require three peer reviewers to agree to publication and they also set exacting (and sometimes flawed) criteria for novelty.

Why 'Lower Tier' Journals Might Contain Better Work

I asked, yesterday on Twitter, whether anybody had written about one of the most prominent verbal tics in humanistic academic discourse: “I am interested in”. This phrase is used to justify critical attention to almost any object while also placing the idea of such scrutiny beyond any challenge. Why should we

 care

that you are

 interested

in something?

A Bibliography on "The Interesting"/"I'm Interested In"

Today I have written to the University of Leicester tendering my resignation as an external examiner. The text of resignation is below:  Dear Professor Canagarajah,  I write, following my previous correspondence of the 22nd January, to tender my resignation as an external examiner in the department of English at the University of Leicester. I wish to reiterate the concerns that I made in that email, to which I have had no response.

My resignation as an external examiner at the University of Leicester in the wake of proposed cuts to English

So, it transpires that the Oxford University Students Union have had their freedom of information request rejected on the grounds that it is scheduled to be published. The exact wording reads: "I am therefore satisfied it is in the public's interest to withhold this information until it is published by the Russell Group." This is slightly troubling.

OUSU Freedom of Information requests

There’s an article out in The Times Higher Education Science Magazine (edit 11:38am) about Learned Societies and open access. As usual, it points out the thorny problem that Learned Societies derive revenue from subscriptions that they fear will be lost under an OA model. A few points spring to mind on this. 1. There is no guarantee that moving to an OA model will cause a loss of revenue;

Learned Societies, Open Access and Budgetary Cross-Subsidy

Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to reading academic research). Indeed, this is one of the many points when the discourses of neoliberal* governmentality intersect with open academic publication.

Transparency agendas are being used to legislate against consortial open-access models even though it has good cost outcomes

Consortial OA funding models such as Knowledge Unlatched, the Open Library of Humanities, and others are non-classical economic setups. They are susceptible to free riders. These models have worked thus far because: Academic libraries are not necessarily classical economic actors; They spread the cost well and are often cheaper than options under the classical model; They are aligned with the desire of most library actors to achieve open access;

On consortial OA funding models and renewals

It is a common step in the ongoing reform of research practices to criticize the set of proxy measures that we use to evaluate research. I’ve certainly done this. The argument for DORA – the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment – is that one should judge the research work, not judge where it was published. Parts of DORA read:  and  Worthy sentiments indeed.

Judging the painting (research) without the frame (the journal)

We have a third-party Angular app and want to override the isolate scopes that are provided by its directives. We don’t want to modify the original app. How can we do this? We use a decorator in our app controller to specify that only the code in the local app should be run.

Overriding AngularJS directives' isolate scopes

kishord today presents a tool, called XSS in eXceSS and hosted by .mario that will allow you test attack vectors against a page in different contexts. On top of that it also incorporates PHP IDS, allowing you to skip whichever rules you choose.  From kishord's post:  Good stuff!  XSS in eXceSS: A "learn-XSS tool" was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 16, 2007.

XSS in eXceSS: A "learn-XSS tool"

In the past few weeks I've had several peer review requests and it has always struck me that it is far too easy to come across as a heartless bastard when blind reviewing work. That's why I have decided to always be kind in my reviews, even when offering the harshest of criticism.

Reviewing with Kindness

I’ve heard reports that the journals

 Science

and

 Nature

want the metadata on forthcoming articles to be embargoed. In other words, they are saying that they do not want a repository version to become discoverable before the work is published, even if the article itself is not available through the repository. I think this is really unhelpful.

Embargoing metadata?

When training PhD students and other postgraduates, we often have a section on publication. It covers the basic background process, the rudiments of peer review, and what to expect. There is often, also, a lengthy discussion of ensuring that you publish in the place that will do most for your career. What is the _prestige_ status of the journal, for instance?

Preservation as a Memento Mori and Matter of Ethics

This morning I gave the third of my keynote talks this week at the Janeway conference: The Lower Decks. It’s been quite a week and I am exhausted with my kidney failure. Indeed, today is a macabre one year anniversary, precisely, since I had the kidney biopsy that revealed my BK Virus Nephropathy and that my kidneys were going to be totally destroyed. Of course, I didn’t know that quite at that time.

Points mean prizes

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full

 personal

(

 not

institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 26: I am responding here in a personal capacity and so cannot write on behalf of an institution; I will instead address the benefits to the wider sector and the general public.

HE Green Paper: response to question 26

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full

 personal

(

 not

institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks in Question 12: Provisional response: a.) I think, in general, that the proposals to further improve access are laudable.

HE Green Paper: response to question 12

This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full

 personal

(

 not

institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to refine this. The Green Paper asks (as question 4): Yes. Access agreements should be a pre-requisite for any TEF award, if the TEF goes ahead. However, there is a further aspect to consider.

HE Green Paper: response to question 4

If you think carefully about research publication and its economics, a strange (but also obvious) point becomes clear. In university ecosystems where we have tuition fees (and probably in those without) we determine how much material can be published through the frame of reference of teaching. This can be seen if you accept that research in the academy serves the dual function of dissemination

 and

assessment.

The link between teaching, tuition fees and research publication economics

The Sacred Unreadable Artefact: Digital Preservation, Computational Abundance, and Scarce Access   Martin Paul Eve Birkbeck, University of London  This is the text of Eve, Martin Paul (2019) The Sacred Unreadable Artefact: Digital Preservation, Computational Abundance, and Scarce Access.

Text of Digital Library Futures keynote (Cambridge, 21st May 2019)

Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’. The Adorno Reader. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor &amp; Frederic Will. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 92–111. Print.

Notes on Adorno's "The Essay as Form"

There’s an article out today in Research Fortnight detailing some of the frustrations that we had with a recent AHRC/UKRI grant proposal.

Rapid-response grants and disciplinary boundaries

First of all, let me say that I found the piece of work I’m about to discuss really interesting in its own right. I know one of the co-authors and I’m an avid Soundcloud user (for electronic music, no-less!) so I thought this would be right up my street.

Researchers are altering their methods because of uncertainty over Creative Commons licenses

This event will debate how and in what ways the web has complicated, enhanced, and changed the rights of citizens for better or for worse. The ongoing fallout from the Snowden revelations has both sharpened awareness of how our rights are changing and highlighted a culture of indifference towards once cherished rights and freedoms.

"A Web of Rights": Roundtable and Conversation at the British Library (Feb 19th, 2015) #bldigital

At the end of 2013 and 2014 I wrote blog posts on Occam’s Corner (over at the Guardian) to list and briefly review the books I read in each of those years. I am trying to develop this practice into a good habit because it spurs me to read; and I hope it might also serve to flag up titles of interest to others.

Stephen Curry (@Stephen_Curry) reviews Open Access and the Humanities

Come along tomorrow to celebrate the launch of two books on "openness" in higher education! From 2pm UK time tomorrow, this room will be open for a discussion with Martin Weller and me. This event promises to be really interesting and to showcase a range of thought on open access.  Martin's book, The Battle for Open was just published by Ubiquity Press while my own Open Access and the Humanities just came out with Cambridge University Press.

Online p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ webinar to talk open access with @mweller and me: Tuesday 16th December 3pm

ha.ckers are reporting that their book on Cross Site Scripting has finally been released! Buy a copy at Amazon!  RSnake + Jeremiah Grossman's Book Released was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 20, 2007.

RSnake + Jeremiah Grossman's Book Released

At a recent talk I gave, I was asked whether open access in the humanities is a "solution without a problem". Without wanting to disparage my questioner, I consider this to be a question born of institutional privilege and of conservatism. Firstly, I consider it a perspectivized take on the situation; just because one cannot see a problem does not mean that it doesn't exist, merely that it is invisible to that particular questioner.

Is open access a "solution without a problem" for the humanities?

OK, so this was utterly painful and I needed to share what finally worked for me. I have 2 x Nvidia GTX480 cards. I have 3 x monitors. I wanted to be able to run all three off the same box, using it as a single X Screen (i.e. so I can move windows between screens and it acts correctly). No matter what I tried, it wouldn't let me do so with the proprietary driver. I asked on Stack Exchange and got somewhere closer.

Enabling a triple-head (3 monitor) setup on Linux Mint 16 ("Petra") with two Nvidia cards

Lawrence Lessig, "Introduction to Free Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman". Available online at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/lessig-fsfs-intro.html. Licensed under a CC-BY-ND license.  "Every generation has its philosopher" was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on January 19, 2014.

"Every generation has its philosopher"

For those who haven't yet seen this, .mario and christ1an over at sla.ckers has been working on a PHP Intrusion Detection System and the results are fairly promising! The system is based on regular expressions and seems to catch everything I've jammed into it so far.

PHP IDS

While I agree with much of what they say, in a post on the LSE Impact Blog, Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby write, of the latest round of HEFCE consultations on OA for a post-2014 REF:  This isn't how I read the proposed document at all.

Has "the licensing battle been deferred" in the latest HEFCE document?

Although I'm nothing to do with the organization of this, I wanted to give it a plug!

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Live Stage Version at the ICA

Admittedly of limited use, here is a JavaScript function I wrote to detect the presence of httpOnly cookies. In Firefox the function will overwrite the real value of the cookie, so before using this function it is vital to try and read the cookie normally! Here is the script embedded in a test PHP page.

httpOnly Cookie Detection

I'm pleased to announce the publication of the open access booklet, Collins, Ellen and Milloy, Caren and Stone, Graham, Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors, Baker, James and Eve, Martin Paul and Priego, Ernesto (eds.), OAPEN-UK and Jisc Collections: 2013. As you can see from that list, I was privileged enough to be invited to edit this important guide.

Publication: 'Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors'

With his fastest turn-around in well over a decade, Paul Thomas Anderson completed production on Inherent Vice last summer, just around a year after initial screenings of The Master began.

First Impressions From Paul Thomas Anderson’s film of ‘Inherent Vice‘

Now in its third year, we invite you to submit, on Twitter via the #Pynchon2013 hashtag, the Facebook Event page or even just by emailing me, your photographs for Pynchon in Public Day 2013! The event was founded to mark the birth date of one of the most important living American writers, Thomas Pynchon.

Pynchon in Public Day 2013

Yesterday, Thursday the 14th of March 2013, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the University of Sussex to an entirely mixed audience of humanists, scientists, librarians, OA enthusiasts and OA sceptics on the topic of the Future of Peer Review.

The Future of Peer Review

Co-presented with Dr. Caroline Edwards: "Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Finch: Adorno, Utopia and Open Access Publishing",

 Lincoln University

, 21st-Century Research Group, Weds 27th Feb 4.15-5.30, MC0024 This paper addresses the specific threats faced by the recent Finch Report and will be a practical introduction to the future problems that will occur from the way in which Open Access is being implemented.

Conference Paper: "Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Finch: Adorno, Utopia and Open Access Publishing" (Lincoln University)

As the title says, heise Security have found a backdoor in the Artmedic CMS system. The interesting question is how this backdoor was implanted - giving the benefit of the doubt it's possible that the development server was compromised and the code injected (the changes date back to the 2nd of May), but on the other hand the developer's not to heise's emails could be indicative of something more sinister.

heise Security reports backdoor in Artmedic CMS

It is my pleasure to announce, with both great excitement and the inevitable slight sadness, that as of January 2013, I will be leaving the University of Sussex (the inevitable slight sadness) to take a permanent position as a Lecturer in Literature at the University of Lincoln (the great excitement!)  I have had several excellent years at Sussex, where I started my Ph.D. in 2009, and have been treated extremely well throughout;

Moving on from Sussex and joining the University of Lincoln

http://websecurity.com.ua/category/moseb/  MOSEB month of search engine bugs was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 16, 2007.

MOSEB month of search engine bugs

Here is a nice tool for encoding JavaScript into eval(String.fromCharCode(x,x,x)) format. A full HTML page is listed here, or you can try it out live at the bottom of this post.  Encode    JavaScript eval String.fromCharCode encoder was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 15, 2007.

JavaScript eval String.fromCharCode encoder

It seems that 2012 really was the “tipping point” for Open Access, especially in the UK. The Finch Report has mandated OA for RCUK-funded projects and the implementation phase is now hastily underway. No longer can Open Access be seen as a minority issue; it's here and it's here to stay. As one struggle ends, another begins though, like a grim phoenix rising from the ashes.

The Grim Phoenix: The New Challenges for Open Access

ASP.NET comes preloaded with some default XSS protection which is actually pretty nifty. However, it turns out that the system can be circumvented by a variety of methods, as illustrated by this test input:  Turns out that IE will still process attributes on closing tags which circumvents the filter for &lt;a whilst also treating /**/ as a null comment but obviously breaking .NET's filter regex. Thanks to Hong @ sla.ckers.

Bypass ASP.NET XSS Protection in Internet Explorer

pdp has an interesting post from last month about amendments to the British Computer Misuse Act that specify the illegality of "making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in computer misuse offences". Time to make a "terms and conditions" for this site.  Amendments to the British Computer Misuse Act was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 15, 2007.

Amendments to the British Computer Misuse Act

After the excellent, "What Happens Now" 21st-century fiction conference, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing the Prezi that I created, in case it's of any interest:  &lt;/embed&gt;  Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Twenty-First-Century Utopianism on Prezi  &lt;/div&gt;  Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and 21st-Century Utopianism (presentation) was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on July 19, 2012.

Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and 21st-Century Utopianism (presentation)

Following on from part 1, part 2 and part 3, this is the third in a series of posts designed to get a new journal off the ground. Copyediting and Proofreading   When I started out work on Excursions journal almost three years ago, I didn't know the difference between copyediting and proofreading. In short: copy editing is the process of bringing a piece in line with house style.

Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 4

I'm always on the lookout for good, free image sharing sites and somebody pointed out MorgueFile to me the other day. It's not CC licensed. In fact, in many cases it's even more permissive.  Hope that helps somebody.    Another great source for free images to use in blogging was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on June 24, 2012.

Another great source for free images to use in blogging

A teenager has been arrested for posting a picture of a burnt remembrance poppy. Nick Griffin walks free despite tweeting the address of a gay couple who won their appeal against discrimination advocating a "British justice squad" who should "show them a bit of drama".  Free speech assumes the agency of the speaker, but the justice system presumes the opposite for the listener.

Integration testing locally and on GitLab CI using LocalStack