OLDaily
By Stephen Downes
July 21, 2003

Attack Update
OK, here's where we stand. I have no email into or out of downes.ca - this means that if you are sending me email to stephen@downes.ca it will fail. It also means that newsletter mailouts are failing (at least, I think they're failing...). Additionally, all scheduled processes have terminated, which means that Edu_RSS will be updated manually. I have no tech support until at least tomorrow, so it looks like we'll be limping along like this for a bit. Again, please note, email sent to me at downes.ca is not reaching me. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, July 22, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Attack on Downes.ca
Downes.ca was off the air for a few days following a denial of service attack. We are back for now but things are still touch and go. I'll keep you posted. By Stephen Downes, July 21, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

IMS and OKI, the Wire and the Socket
Description of progress in MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). It is important to recognize, reports the author, that OKI is not an open source learning environment. Nor is it even an architecture, though as the author note, OKI's layer-cake archietcture has become famous. Rather, the heart of OKI is a set of "OSIDs: definitions of particular slots in a computer program. In an application that allows you to do searches for learning objects in repositories, for example, the programmer can just say 'put the code that talks to the repository here' without actually having to program very much beyond calls to the list of commands that the OSID specifies." Cool stuff. Too bad so much of this work is happening behind closed doors; as the author notes, "the success of OKI depends almost entirely on the support it gets," and the more open the process, the more likely the support. By Wilbert Kraan, CETIS, July 17, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Government of Canada Newsroom (Phase II)
Funny how things work. Yesterday I asked a questions, to which a reader responded and, in passing, suggested I visit the Canada website. I haven't been there for a while, so I did, and as I passed the news page, I sent a suggestion about formatting. I received a prompt reply which, in passing, mentioned that the Government of Canada is planning to implement, among other things, RSS feeds in Phase II of the Newsroom web site. This is something I have encouraged (and here) for some time, so I asked for more information. With permission, I have placed a copy of the fact sheet on my website. "Phase II of the Newsroom will be launched with a primary focus on a new distribution strategy for government news and related resources. Phase II of the Newsroom will give people choices regarding the types of news that they receive and the technology that they use to access it." I will of course provide more information when it becomes publicly available. A French version of the Fact Sheet is also available. By fact Sheet, Government of Canada, July, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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