...more recent posts
You guys know when you see this at the bottom of spam email that you should not (under any circumstances) believe them?
To be removed from any future mailings, send email to "anything@percode.com" and type "Remove" in the subject line. We appologize for any inconvenience.If you reply they will not remove you. In fact they will put your email address in another pile marked "confirmed address" (i.e., confirmed that the address does exist and is read by a human.) Now it is worth even more money and will be sold to more and more spammers. Nice, huh?
And since I can't go one day without talking about Napster (which I really don't care that much about - really - it just leads to an interesting discussion) here is todays piece: a Salon interview with Talal Shamoon, described as a "key technologist" behind (at?) the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI.) I read this closely, but couldn't really find anything being said. At least he's not claiming they can really protect the music. He keeps falling back to the rather nebulous position that the music industry will make the secure music experience so pleasant that everyone will adopt it. Sounds good, but then when he describes the value-added part that the industry hopes will lure consumers from the already available free product, it starts to sound not so good.
"You can do things like super-distribution, for example, where you can e-mail the song and say, 'If you get 10 of your best friends to buy it, I'll give you free tickets to the Britney Spears concert next month.' So you get on AOL and you e-mail the thing to 50 of your best friends and so on."How is that good for consumers? Sounds more like his line to sell this to the industry. Anyway, the real meat of the interview comes in the final reply, where he is talking about how the industry is working with the media-player software companies (real, winamp, ect...) and the consumer electronics industry (who build portable mp3 players, ect...) This is key because for any protection scheme to work, it has to be built into the data that is the music, as well as the player that is playing the music (in other words, the data is marked to say 'hey, I'm protected' but it is the player (either software on your computer, or stand alone devices like home stereos) that have to read and respect that message.) The reason why everyone keeps maintaining that you can't protect digital information (including music) is that the industry no longer controls the creation of the playback devices. As much as the music industry would like to get us all to listen to their secure music only on their sanctioned secure music players, the fact is that most people will be listening to this music on their general purpose computing devices. And that means they can choose what ever play back software they want. Some will pay attention to the security protocols, others will not. The ones that don't will probably be free (made by people who just want to play the music) while the ones that do will probably cost money (made by companies in agreement with the recording industry in the hopes of making big profits.) Shamoon as much as admits this after laying out the secure player pipe dream by saying "...[n]ow, there's a lot of twiddles there because computers allow you to do a lot more stuff than consumer electronics devices, but that's basically where we'll stand." Where is that again?
Here's an article detailing the results of last weeks experiment which sent some bacteria from extreme earth environments into space. The bacteria survived.
"The experiment lends credence to the theory that primitive life might hitchhike between Earth and other worlds aboard debris from meteorite impacts."
I love to watch as bloggers go through the required ritual of second guessing and self doubt which seems to crop up every 6 months or so. Why am I doing this? I'm a loser. Stuff like that. Here's an exceptionally good one."<snip>...You're supposed to write about sex and drugs and things. Jenni from Jennicam slept with her best friends' boyfriend ON CAMERA. What have you done lately?...</snip>"
The plot thickens. Looks like Napster won't be shut down. I sense deal making time.
Great article from Joel about Microsoft Passport. This is a really understandable description of how cookies work, why they are usually no threat to privacy, and how Microsoft is routing around this "problem" to build the worlds biggest database about... you. They are trying to sell this "service" as a help to the consumer because using Passport, you only have to remember one password, and it will remember all the rest for you (as it collects info on what you are doing on each of those sites you are accessing by a password stored in Passport.) Why no one listened to my plea for the password watch, which would solve this problem much better, I do not know. I submitted it to shouldexist but nobody seemed to understand the genius of my idea :-)
I had to unsubscribe from that Chi-web mailing list. After a few weeks of skimming the subject fields before throwing everything away unread, I've decided it's not for me. And just in time, Cam has started a new list on Content Management Systems. Already very busy, and its only been up a few days. I think this will be more up my alley.
In all the Napster hysteria the DeCSS trial is getting overlooked. I guess it's a little more technical, so it's harder to report on. I won't even try, but I had to post this little exchange from the trial that was quoted on techdirt.
Q = Mr. Garbus, attorney of 2600.comWhat do you mean "get back to work Jim"? - I'm not surfing; I'm investigating.
A = Ms. Reider, Chief Operations Anti-Piracy, MPAA, witness of plaintiffs
"Q. How did you know to go to the LiViD website, download the material you downloaded in October and November? A. I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q. Tell me what the trail was. A. I read about it on Slashdot."
So, Napster will be down today. In unrelated news, Hack the Planet points out the top two downloads from SourceForge yesterday were The Freenet Project (6521) and Open Source Napster Server (1932). Get busy.
If your reading this from work, don't forget to thank your computer system administrator. What? You didn't know it was sysadmin day? Shame on you. In honor, here's the original usenet post that went on to become the most desired sysadmin t-shirt of all time.
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery
Subject: ADMINSPOTTING
Message-ID: <5cl3le$q24@infoserv.aber.ac.uk>
From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary Barnes)
Date: 28 Jan 1997 14:49:18 -0000
Organization: Ripoffs R Us
X-No-Archive: Yes
Choose no life. Choose sysadminning. Choose no career. Choose no family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose hard disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why the fuck you're logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate. Choose your future. Choose sysadmining[1].
Gaz
[1] It might fuck you up a little less than heroin[2].
[2] ObFootnote.