Bonus: Netcraft explores SCO's options in the face of the MyDoom.a virus... which is set to attack www.sco.com this evening. I like option 4 where a similar virus is released uninstalling Windows from all the infected machines and installing Linux... that'd make Yuri happy.
Added bonus: In the process of writing this entry, I wandered over to the SCO website and it's damn slow right now... to boot, their PR firm seems to be targeting left-handed Mac users if the graphic on their front page is of any significance:
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Here's a great summary of some of Joseph Schumpter's work from the 1930's on the changing of industry ("The Churn - The Paradox of Progress", Fed. Reserve Bank of Dallas [1992]). The article points out how job loss, growth and repurposing is ultimately a good thing for our economy in times of transition. Specifically, the article addresses "the churn" which is a shorthand way of describing how jobs are created and destroyed, often times casting the employed into unemployment or into new unfamiliar jobs. How is this helpful? Well, jobs lost in one area are inevitably replaced in others. For example, in 1900, the top 3 jobs were farmers, agricultural laborers and general laborers. In 1991, the top 3 jobs were retail salespersons, teachers and secretaries. In all, more menial types of employment were replaced by more intellectual, higher-paid and higher-skilled types of labor. That's a good thing®.
The article makes a persuasive case that a professor of mine, Yale Braunstein, made the other day in class:
Throughout the 20th century, the demise of old industries and the creation of new ones coincided with rising incomes and huge net gains in employment in the United States. The transition, however, has been bumpy and uneven. Job losses can be traumatic for workers and their families. Yet, seen as a whole, the American experience certainly confirms Schumpeter’s thesis that an economy can’t progress without the revitalization that brings job destruction. Intervention to save jobs almost always fails. Policies designed to protect jobs retard economic progress and, ultimately, destroy jobs by short-circuiting the vital process of innovation. It is for this reason that we must stop focusing only on the number of jobs; we must also concentrate on the composition of jobs. Added emphasis should be placed on high pay, high productivity and high educational embodiment.
This is where some groups like the RIAA just don't get it. The only thing they still do that is hard for an artist to do herself is marketing... and people are working on that. The RIAA needs to recognize that technology has evolved to the point where they can't support the business models that they did in the past. Further, as Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel have noticed recently, making music is more fun, rewarding and easy if you do it yourself with help from your friends.
A bag of something edible in the shape of mustaches was passed around. An assortment of small paper cups with Champagne drifted by. When asked, the man hanging from the ceiling volunteered a few thoughts about acts of "urban reclamation" and "space hijacking."
"People need to find more interesting ways to have fun," he said.
The man with the mustaches, who identified himself as a graduate student in computer science, seemed irritated when questioned. But his idea: The point of the party was that there was no point.
"There doesn't have to be a reason," he said. "We're reclaiming public space and showing people that they can make things happen. It is not evolved from corporations."
That was the first clue for the reporter on board, who would soon appreciate what it must feel like to be in the employ of Bechtel or Halliburton and wander into an anti-globalization demonstration. Because as much as this party car was about impulsive revelry in a place open to anyone, there was some anger, nastiness and anxiousness about this person from outside the virtual clique.
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Your Chains - The Diverters
(track 10 off of Greaseball Melodrama) |
That'll put an end to the "Democrats are hippies" jokes...
Al Franken knocks down Dean heckler...By VINCENT MORRIS
January 27, 2004 -- EXETER, N.H. - Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean.
The tussle left Franken's trademark thick-rim glasses broken, but he said he was not injured.
Franken - who seemed in a state of shock and out of breath after the incident - was helped back to his feet by several people who watched the tussle. Police arrived soon after.
"I got down low and took his legs out," said Franken afterwards. Franken said he's not backing Dean but merely wanted to protect the right of people to speak freely. "I would have done it if he was a Dean supporter at a Kerry rally," he said.
[...]
Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional
Jan 26, 2:52 PM (ET)
By LINDA DEUTSCHLOS ANGELES (AP) - A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a portion of the USA Patriot Act that bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations.
The ruling marks the first court decision to declare a part of the post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism statute unconstitutional, said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who argued the case on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project.
In a ruling handed down late Friday and made available Monday, U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins said the ban on providing "expert advice or assistance" is impermissibly vague, in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments.
[...]
"The USA Patriot Act places no limitation on the type of expert advice and assistance which is prohibited and instead bans the provision of all expert advice and assistance regardless of its nature," the judge said.
Cole declared the ruling "a victory for everyone who believes the war on terrorism ought to be fought consistent with constitutional principles."
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As pointed out by PJ at Groklaw, "If Linux is a [national] security risk, why is there a National Security Agency version of Linux, Security Enhanced Linux? As OSAIA points out, open source software is subject to exactly the same export licensing restrictions as is SCO."The Honorable _____ ____ Cannon HOB Washington, DC 20515 I am writing to draw your attention to an important controversy that has become one of the dominant issues in the software industry. The way in which this issue is resolved will have very important ramifications for * our nation's economy * our continued ability to lead the world in technology * our international competitive position in the global software industry, and even for * our national security. [...] 3. The threat to our national security. I assert that Open Source software -- available widely through the Internet -- has the potential to provide our nation's enemies or potential enemies with computing capabilities that are restricted by U.S. law. SCO's UNIX software is subject to export licensing restrictions, and for good reason. With the powerful multi-processing features of UNIX software, someone could build a supercomputer for military applications. My company must adhere to these restrictions: we cannot sell to North Korea, Libya, Iran, Sudan and several other nations. But a computer expert in North Korea who has a number of personal computers and an Internet connection can download the latest version of Linux, complete with multi-processing capabilities misappropriated from UNIX, and, in short order, build a virtual supercomputer. [...] Sincerely, Darl McBride President and CEO The SCO Group, Inc.
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It's like a copyright-version of the Chicken Little story where the sky was falling.
Tech firms fail to squelch database bill
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer [a/k/a the baddest-ass tech reporter :) -jlh], CNET News.comA congressional panel on Wednesday approved a proposal to curb database copying, ignoring the objections of technology companies that launched a last-minute lobbying campaign to kill the proposal.
By a 16-7 vote, the House Judiciary committee approved an intellectual property bill that had been opposed by Amazon.com, AT&T, Comcast, Google, Yahoo and some Internet service provider associations.
The proposal, backed by big database companies such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson, would extend to databases the same kind of protection that copyrighted works such as music, literature and movies currently enjoy. Its supporters say that such protection is necessary to stop rivals from extracting information from proprietary databases like Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis service instead of going through the far more expensive process of compiling it themselves.
[...]
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UPDATE [2004-01-21 22:38:02]: Ernest Miller over at the incomparable The Importance Of takes it one step further and actually goes to the website mentioned on the packaging... http://www.insound.com/diesel. There's some really good indie music there!!! For example, The Gossip, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Death Wish Kids, Death Cab, Pretty Girls Make Graves (former members of the Murder City Devlis... of whom I wrote about in "Murderin' Music -- The Murder City Devils").
Another great article at Salon: "How Satan is propping up Bush's war on terror" (Andrew O'Hehir). To wit:
[W]hen our born-again president refers to Osama bin Laden as "the Evil One," he is not dealing in metaphor or analogy, even assuming he is capable of such things. Rather he is addressing his co-religionists in a not-so-secret code. "That makes perfect sense to a born-again believer," Ellis says. "Evil, like God, is One. So you can say, and believe in, an 'Axis of Evil,' because you know that the person who is giving the orders to bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and the leader of Iran and the leader of North Korea is, of course, Satan."
This article also has a neat description of how an Onion article, "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among Children.", was passed around as truth through circles of fundamentalist Christians. Weird.
I spent eight years of my life in Midland, Texas... birthplace and boyhood home of George W. Bush. Talk about desolation. I distinctly remember thinking when I arrived at age six, "Humans live here?"
I was also caught off-guard by Christian fundamentalism in West Texas; my family had just moved from San Diego, CA. I remember remarking to a classmate when I was about twelve that I thought the story of Adam and Eve was a bunch of crap... two people couldn't possibly spawn an entire race... genes would inevitably get mixed up in the process and the resultant race would be totally retarded. I said further, maybe we're just retarded versions of the beings that Adam and Eve were... but that I found it much more probable that the Bible was a crock of shit.
You don't tell Christian Fundamentalists that the holiest of holy books, the Bible, is a crock of shit. I got my ass kicked. Anyway, you can say that I've had my share of interaction with fundamentalist Christianity... and I think it is evil. Let me qualify that: I think that the "you're one of us or you're going to hell" attitude along with a blind devotion to irrationality breeds hateful speech and action that the receiving end often interprets as evil. The penchant for fundamentalist Christians to close themselves off to any and all ideas questioning their beliefs and what their flavor of "Church" teaches, is sickening. In fact, another tendency I noted during my sentence served in Midland, Texas was conformism. Fundamentalist Christianity not only needs evil to operate, it creates evil, real or imagined. If GWB is a hint of a beginning, we are in for dark days.
UPDATE [2004-01-19 10:06:45]:
Here's a relevant excerpt from Al Franken's new book (page 281):
During Bush's first campaign for governor of Texas, he told an Austin reporter that only people who accepted Jesus Christ as their savior could go to heaven. While most of the press felt it was a gaffe, Rove know it was the best thing his candidate had said so far. It let the people who like to exclude others from heaven know that he was one of them. That's why, in 2000, they kicked off South Carolina at Bob Jones University.
Here's great piece from Salon: "A legal black hole". (I should also note that it's good to see Salon get a financial boost from readers who are more prosperous that I... it would be sad to see Salon go.) The piece tells the story of a recent Supreme Court brief filed by military lawyers that accuses the Bush administration of doing much of what the British troops under King George did here in the New World before we secured our independence... but at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (a/k/a, "Gitmo")
A few choice quotes:
Unlike earlier wars, the struggle against terrorism is potentially never-ending. The Constitution cannot countenance an open-ended Presidential power, with no civilian review whatsoever, to try anyone the President deems subject to a military tribunal, whose rules and judges have been selected by the prosecuting authority itself.
[...]
Concerns that the Executive has usurped the function of the Judiciary are at their height when the Executive seeks to deny access to a right as fundamental as habeas corpus. This right is part of our Constitution's "bulwark" against "tyranny" ... and essential to the adversarial system.
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If you'd like to use this as a stencil... print this puppy out the size you'd like (here's a PDF), laminate the print-out, cut out the black regions with an exacto knife and grab your favorite brand and flavor of spray paint.
UPDATE [2004-01-18 10:14:24]: I've had a few inquiries about how I could get such a smooth stencil image from such a pixelated, low-res original. First, you've got to be judicious in including plenty of white-space bridges so that each black area is it's own, isolated path (compound or not) when exporting the paths to Illustrator (for more on stencil basics, go here). Then, it might appear hopelessly jagged in Illustrator... some people use the paths -> simplify command... but I find this to be a blunt instrument. Instead, I use the smooth tool with smoothness set to 100%... then I can pick the path (black area) I want to smooth and only mess with a few bezier points at a time in a given path. After a little sweat and blood, you should be able to remove all vestiges of pixelation.
Subject: SM4 Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:56:34 -0500 From: Steven Beckwith <...@stsci.edu> Reply-To: Steven Beckwith <...@stsci.edu> To: ...@stsci.edu Colleagues, A few minutes ago, we concluded a meeting at which Sean O'Keefe, the NASA Administrator, announced his decision to cancel SM4, the next servicing mission to Hubble. It was his decision alone, and I will discuss the details with your personally. I will be holding a town-hall meeting in the auditorium at 3:00 pm today for everyone who is interested to answer your questions about the decision and talk about the future.
Here's a one-line shell command to get the current threat level from the Department of Homeland Security:alias hstl 'echo -n "Threat Level: ";'" curl -s http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition | tail -n 1 | awk -F\"'"'" '{ print "\$2" }'"NOTE: Enter the above as one long line with a space before http and tail; broken up here for easier readability.
Example:macosx % hstl Threat Level: HIGH
UC girds for state cuts; 8,200 freshmen won't be admitted due to budget woes
Up to 8,200 students who would have been admitted to the University of California as freshmen this fall instead would be offered spots at community colleges -- free of charge -- under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget, UC's budget director said Wednesday.
Ernest Miller has a great idea... clone little stationary bookmobiles to be installed in libraries to print free books for kids.
| As mentioned by Sean at cheesebikini... graduate students here at UC are set to see the second tuition increase in two years... above 30%. Here is a Jorge Cham's take (Stanford student and author of the PhD comic): |  |
Here's another post to Farber's list... I first heard about this from Jeremy Kashnow... "Cell phone ring tone sales hit $3.5B". I include the text below.
Does this make sense to anyone? I don't know anyone who spends money on ring tones. Who the hell is floating this economical boat?!?!
* From: Dave Farber
* To: Ip
* Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 17:10:40 -0400-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 12:23:12
To:Dave Farber, Declan McCullagh
Subject: Cell phone ring tone sales hit $3.5B
esp. note the last paragraph below... -Joe---
http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/13/news/funny/ring_tones.reut/index.htmCell phone ring tone sales hit $3.5B
Those little jingles are turning into a big business.
January 13, 2004: 1:31 PM ESTLONDON (Reuters) - Sales of mobile phone ring tones, those tinny song
recordings programmed into millions of handsets around the world,
jumped 40 percent in the past year to $3.5 billion, according to a
study released on Tuesday.The worldwide sale of ring tones, which started as a marketing gimmick
for music labels and mobile phone companies, is roughly equivalent to
10 percent of the $32.2 billion global music market.[...]
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Joseph Lorenzo Hall http://pobox.com/~joehall/
Graduate Student blog: http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/
I love this book! From page 15 of Al Franken's new book Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them); A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right":
How to Lie with Footnotes #5: Overload a LexisNexis SearchFor those of you unfamiliar with LexisNexis, it is a state-of-the-art research tool/journalistic crutch. Like any powerful instrument, LexisNexis searches can be manipulated to produce misleading results. It's like a chainsaw, which can be used productively (say, as a prop in a movie like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), but can also be used for evil (such as in an actual chainsaw massacre). Throughout this book, I use LexisNexis productively. in Slander, [Anne] Coulter uses it to dismember the truth. Introducing ... the Overloaded LexisNexis Search.
On page 8 of Slander, Coulter refers to a controversial 1994 Christmas Day speech given by Jesse Jackson on British TV, "The New York Times did not report the speech," she complains. Checking the endnote reveals her methodology. "LexisNexis search of New York Times archives from December 1994 through January 1995 for 'Jesse Jackson and Germany and fascism and South Africa' produces no documents." Well, yeah.
A more reasonable search (Jesse Jackson and Christmas and Britain) shows that, yes, of course, the Times did run an article on December 30 about the controversy using excerpts of Jackson's speech, which was pre-recorded.
Using Coulter's technique, I can prove than no newspaper has ever covered anything. For example, I can prove the Washington Times did not cover the incident in which George H. W. Bush threw up on the Japanese prime minister. A LexisNexis search from January 1992 for "Bush and Japan and prime minister and lab and cookies and tossed" produces no documents.
I'm speechless... I'll post my thoughts once I can get them together. This is big... really big. It appears the Bush administration has decided on a firm space policy direction: the Moon.
EXCLUSIVE: Bush OKs new moon missionsFrank Sietzen Jr. and Keith L. Cowing
Thursday, January 08, 2004UPI Exclusive: Bush OKs new moon missions
By Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith L. Cowing, United Press International"American astronauts will return to the moon early in the next decade in preparation for sending crews to explore Mars and nearby asteroids, President Bush will propose next week as part of a sweeping reform of the U.S. space program.
To pay for the new effort -- which would require a new generation of spacecraft but use Europe's Ariane rockets and Russia's Soyuz capsules in the interim -- NASA's space shuttle fleet would be retired as soon as construction of the International Space Station is completed, senior administration sources told United Press International.
The visionary new space plan would be the most ambitious project entrusted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since the Apollo moon landings of three decades ago. It commits the United States to an aggressive and far-reaching mission that holds interplanetary space as the human race's new frontier."
Here's a couple of choice quotes from an equally great essay... "Heard It Through the Grapevine" compares music and wine criticism as penned by John Lomax of the Houston Press... which is a sister publication of our own East Bay Express. (This comes to me from my Clink editor Mike Smith):
"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence." -- Robert Fripp"The potency of cheap wine and cheap music should never be underestimated." -- Cole Porter
Furthermore, describing what something tastes like or what something sounds like is almost impossible. In music, you could use technical music terms, but relatively few people -- including most critics -- know what things like tonics and augmented chords and arpeggios are. Or you could play the "sounds like this other band" game, but then you run two risks. One is that the band in question may not sound like the other one to anybody but you. (They may not even sound like the same band to you on a another day, or when you're in a better or worse mood, or on a different sound system.) The second -- a hallmark of many indie rock reviews -- is that you play a little game of hipster one-upmanship and intentionally compare them to bands that nobody but you has ever heard of.
Thus are born album reviews such as this: "Feral Imp sounds like what would happen if you locked People Running About in a garden shed with Helping Robo for Combat and told them to fight over the Autonomous Action Unit's stash of Special K. Their angular guitar dissonance shades a little toward Great Angus's jagged panache, though the deliberately cheesy use of horns on several tracks puts them squarely in the Royal Magical Library camp. But its on songs like 'Remove Brainwashing' and the Des Koala-like 'Continuous Destruction Punch' that they shine with an almost Big Bang Shot-esque intensity." (Don't bother looking those bands and songs up -- they're all really Yu-Gi-Oh cards. But I had you going for a second, didn't I?)
Damn. He's got my style of review nailed. If we could actually communicate what we meant in a review like the above, it would make sense and be interesting to the reader.
So, I propose a solution... like document models in XML (where one businesses way of understanding things learns how to see work processes through the eyes of another business), we need a way of explaining the little hipster nuances we employ in our reviews in such a way that even our mothers and grandmothers could understand if they had the gumption and time to follow our references.
Unfortunately, this means that I'll have to try writing a review where nearly every comparison is linked or footnoted so as to make absolutely crystal clear sense... and when I compare a sound to another band, I'll include a short mp3 snipet to demonstrate what the hell I'm talking about.
That kind of thing would take some time. If I can pull this off, it could mean a new breed of indie reviews won't be as worthless as that last paragraph in the quote above...
(I've been reading Eric Raymond's blog "Armed and Dangerous" now and then... I had no idea that he was such an egocentric, right-wing, gun-nut (And those are just posts since January 1! Full disclosure: I am probably slightly egocentric, left-wing and know how to maintain and operate a few different types of rifles... handguns are made to kill people... I'm no gun-nut, though). ESR is, however, quite brilliant and a superb writer...)
ESR offers up an interesting read about the value of hardcopy books versus web versions when both are available. He suggests that print-versions of web-available books are more likely to be an identity good -- that is, a good that you feel you should have because of the type of the person (you think) you are. The corollary is that people will see such goods and associate you with an identity:
Here's the causal connection. A web version can't be an identity, good, because it doesn't sit on your bookshelf or your coffee table telling everybody (and reminding you!) who you are. But Web exposure can, I think, help turn a book with the right kind of potential into an identity good. I suspect there is now a population of psychologists and social workers who perceive the InstaWife's book is an identity good, and that (as with my stuff) that perception was either created or strongly reinforced by web exposure.
I, of course, have a different more-nebulous theory: people tend to use web-available books... perusing for information, entertainment, etc. whereas people tend to value, covet, dog-ear, etc. the hard-copy books... there just ain't no loving a computer for the eBook it contains (at least I think there isn't!). After spending a significant amount of time with a web-book, I bet people are more likely to 1) feel guilty that they don't own it and 2) convince themselves that their own experience with the content within necessitates owning a chunk of dead trees.
As for me, I tend to buy books of all sorts just because I loath reading large pieces of text on the computer... and they haven't made a eBook reader that is transparent enough for me to enjoy reading on one. However, I wish every book came with a text-version CD... most importantly so that danah won't have to throw books and scream "grep, you piece of shit! GREP!"
“321 infringes Macrovision’s intellectual property by offering products that enable users to make unauthorized copies that contain our patented process and sometimes illegally bypass our copy protection system,“ said Macrovision CEO Bill Krepick. “It is ironic that 321 Studios itself employs a sophisticated mechanism to prevent people from making illegal copies of its software, while at the same selling products that aid in the theft of the intellectual property created by moviemakers. This lawsuit is based on a fundamental cornerstone of the American economic system –– protection of intellectual capital. Macrovision is asking the court to order an immediate halt to sales of 321’s products.”
Here's a recent post accepted to Declan's Politech list...
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 10:17:01 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Reply-To:
To: Dave Farber, Declan McCullagh
Subject: text of FBI Almanac alert...
John Young has posted the text of the Christmas Eve FBI Almanac alert:
http://cryptome.org/fbi-almanacs.htm
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Joseph Lorenzo Hall http://pobox.com/~joehall/
Graduate Student blog: http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/
* Previous message:
If you use a news aggregator (like Bloglines) that produces an OPML file of all the blogs you read, consider uploading your OPML file to Dave Winer's "Share your OPML" site... it's totally fascinating to see what people have on their radars. Only two people syndicate NQB on that list... danah and myself!
Great Techsplotation article by AnnaLee Newitz... look for it in the SF Bay Gaurdian and the Metro in Si Valley... some juicy parts:
Last week I received a letter about the possible theft of my personal information from a UC Berkeley computer. It was dated Oct. 15 and had taken three months to reach me. The letter helpfully informed me that "an unidentified individual" had hacked into one of UC Berkeley's "datasets" and that "some information" about me "was potentially available in these records." It concluded with some information about the dangers of identity theft and the number of a detective in the UC Police Department whom I could call.I haven't been a student at UC Berkeley since 1998. But for some reason, my driver's license number and a very outdated address are still archived there. In fact, it was the outdated address that probably kept me from getting the letter in a timely fashion. Luckily, somebody I know is still in the flat where I lived in 1998. He passed the letter on to me.
[...]
These issues around disclosure go a lot deeper than you probably realize. One of the big debates among technical types in the security industry is how to report a vulnerability you find in a piece of software, or even whether to report it at all. Do you tell Sun Microsystems you've discovered a way to hack its server code if you know it's going to ignore you and let its users remain unprotected? Or do you tell other hackers about the vulnerability and let them fuck around with a bunch of Solaris boxes until Sun freaks out and releases a patch? Or, if you're a real mercenary, do you sell information about the vulnerability to the highest bidder and let the rest of the world be damned?
Geeks often say computer networks are a compromise between security and usability. The more you lock a system down, the harder it is to teach ordinary users to deal with it and the more difficult it is to administer. S.B. 1386, like many pieces of computer-related legislation, adds to this difficulty. The question is whether we can make the law usable.
Punchline:
"Siva Vaidhyanathan" is pronounced 'See-vuh (Shee-vuh) Vy-dee-yah-nah-thun'
(Here's a 20KB mp3: siva.mp3)
If you know me, you know I'm crazy about names. I have an uncanny ability to remember names and I truly enjoy being able to call people what they prefer to be called. Some people think this is spooky; I think it's polite, fun and it helps me remember other ancillary data as well.
An important part of all of this is being able to pronounce people's names... which is something the Net is especially bad at. For example, how the hell does one pronounce "Siva Vaidhyanathan"?
I've been a fan of Siva Vaidhyanathan's blog Sivacracy.net for a while now... Siva is a particularly good blog commentator (I'm mostly a quoter) and did his graduate work at UT; a place at which I've always wanted to spend some time.[1]
For all my muster as a techie, I couldn't find a single place on the Net that told me how to pronounce Siva's last name.[2] So, after asking politely, Siva supplied me with the phonetical pronounciation of his name:
See-vuh Vy-dee-yah-nah-thun
Even in phonetic-spelling, it can be a tad intimidating for a name... so Siva suggested I search for any NPR segments where he was referenced... I found this Anthem segment with Siva on it. The host (Rick Karr) pronounced it like this: siva.mp3 (20KB).
Yay! I'm now content.
Note: Before I get email talking about how I've infringed Anthem's copyright... know that this is de minimus copying. Check out this discussion at The Importance Of by Ernest Miller about a recent 9th Circuit case involving the Beastie Boys.
[1] For the record, I spent eight years of my youth in George W. Bush's hometown, Midland, Texas; calling Midland a "wasteland" is polite.
[2] I took a Hinduism class in undergrad. at NAU and knew that "Siva" is either 'See-vuh' or 'Shee-vuh'.
"On any given day there would be a line of 200 investment bankers that would kill their mothers to get the Google deal.''
While I may be behind the curve on this one if I'm not willing to kill my mother, I wonder how can we lowly public-types get a piece of this action? I mean seriously, it would be pretty stupid to not buy Google stock... my question is this: what's the smartest strategy for a small-time (read: graduate student) technorati to get in on this?
One of my new years resolutions is to post everything that I send to Dave Farber or Declan McCullagh's lists if they post the item to their lists. Here's the first (note I'm quoting myself here at the beginning... kind of weird):
From: Dave Farber
To: ip@listbox.com
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2004 18:41:18 -0500Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2004 15:14:59 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Subject: iTunes DRM cracked wide open for GNU/Linux...
To: Dave Farber, Declan McCullagh
On the heals of winning his trial and preliminarily cracking the
iTunes format, Don Jon has just integrated the stripping of iTunes DRM
into the VideoLan project... this allows one to play Apple AAC-DRM'd
songs on multiple workstations or any mobile player (part of the
problem is that Apple only supports its format on the iPod... which we
all know has other vendor lock-in problems (ahem... the battery,
lack of support in iTunes for other jukeboxes, etc.)). -Joe---
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34712.htmliTunes DRM cracked wide open for GNU/Linux. Seriously.
By Andrew Orlowski in San FranciscoExclusive Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who broke the DVD
encryption scheme, has opened iTunes locked music a tad further, by
allowing people to play songs they've purchased on iTunes Music Store
on their GNU/Linux computers."We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use,"
Johansen told The Register via email.Johansen cracked iTunes DRM scheme in November by releasing code for a
small Windows program that dumps the stream to disk in raw AAC format.
This raw format required some trivial additions to convert it to an
MP4 file that could be played on any capable computer.But in the best Apple ease-of-use tradition, Johansen has now made
this completely seamless, integrating it with the VideoLAN streaming
free software project.[...]
While Apple's iTunes Music Store is restricted to Windows and Apple
computers, and Apple only supports its own iPod player as a playback
device, VideoLAN is GPL software that runs on a wide variety of
computers including Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and even QNX. Although
users are at present permitted to burn a CD with music they've
purchased, only three Apple or Windows computers are "authorized" at
any time. These terms may be tightened at any time, Johansen himself
noted recently.[...]
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Joseph Lorenzo Hall http://pobox.com/~joehall/
Graduate Student blog: http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/
The videoblogginist of mistresses, Lisa Rein, just let us all know that there will be no more commenting on her blog due to the inundation of comment spam. That's really too bad. As a larger phenomenon, this is an unfortunate escalation in the spam arms race for those of us who value input and being able to comment on a post (for an example, see me getting reamed here on Eric Raymond's blog by a bunch of gun-loving right-wingers).
Fortunately, Movable Type is a powerful publishing system that allows users to write plugins... and Jay Allen has written the spam comment (and spam trackback) killer: MT-Blacklist. I had it installed and running in about ten minutes flat. After uploading the latest Blacklist file and adding a few IP addresses of my own to the list, I de-spammed my whole blog in another two minutes. Now I've got real-time comment spam blocking and I've also added the MT-Blacklist RSS feed to my radar to keep ahead of the spammers as they try to buy more URL and IP addresses.
UPDATE [2004-01-05 14:38:30]: Sean points out that most comment spam can be defeated by a simpler method (adding a personalized hidden field to your comment form... I'll include the directions below).
(this is taken in whole from here)
Both Sam Ruby and Phil Ringnalda had good advice -- don't spend a lot of time on developing a solution to fixing the comment spam problem. Whatever I can do within the form, it's a relatively simple matter for a spammer to read any form value and duplicate it in his spam blast.
I appreciate both their help in gently pointing out that I was spinning my wheels (but I have to get practice for ice driving).
So, here's a quick fix -- it will keep out the lightweights at least. It's a start as other efforts are underway.
This approach will require you modifying the following MT templates:
Individual data entry
Comment Listing Template
Comment Preview Template
Comment Error Page
You'll be adding the following field, on the line before the </form> tag:
<input type="hidden" name="snoop" value="goaway" />
You can change both the name and the value field, as long as you're consistent with the name throughout the templates and the code.
Next, open your mt-comments.cgi (or mt-comments.pl) file and add the following code just after the "use strict;" line:
use CGI qw(:standard);
if ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq "POST") {
my $data = param('snoop');
die unless ($data);
}
Most everyone should have the CGI.pm perl module installed. Make sure to change 'snoop' to whatever your little secret field is (let's all use different fields, make the spammer's job a little tiny bit harder.
That's it.
What happens is that when you post a comment, the code checks for a form field of "snoop". If it doesn't find it, it dies. Nothing fancy at all. This will show in your error log or web log file as a premature end to the script. It doesn't prevent others from using the application, and doesn't crash anything.
Again, this isn't fancy, but it's a start. Holler if you have questions. If you're uncomfortable modifying mt-comments, let me know and I'll help you. If you have a better solution, or see problems with mine, please let me know.
Again -- thanks to Phil and Sam for advice, help, suggestions.
Update:
Mark has put together a nice re-cap on the whole comment spamming thing. What I just created is a 'club'. I'm going in for an interview tomorrow and when they ask me what was the last application I worked on, I'll answer "A club". .
Speer - n. an equal parts mixture of "speach" and "beer".
Props to Rod Dixon at Open Source Software Law for this gem in his post about the MPlayer GPL incident:
"Call it Free Beer or Free Speech, but when either can be stolen, you've got free nothing"
I was so excited after discovering the stencilism community that I had to make my first stencil... it's an homage to the recently passed Elliott Smith, and his glorious song "2:45 AM"... what a way to go out, suicide by stabbing one's self in the heart, ho hum. For a good post-mortem piece on Elliott Smith, check out "Remembering Elliott Smith" by Carl Wilson at Clink (Here's a compressed EPS file (84KB) of the stencil if you want to writ it large... licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license):
I've just created a plugin for Rage Software's WebDesign 2.3.x that will allow you to add an event in a three-column HTML concert/event list like the one on my Shows page (where the three columns are Date, Artist and Venue). The plugin will allow you to add up to five artists and one venue (with links). This plugin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Download a tarred-gzip file (*.tgz) here: add_show.tgz (1.4KB)
Here's a screenshot:
Known issues:
1) As mentioned above, I can't seem to get the plugin icon to show up in the menu... no matter what I do.
2) add_show only supports up to five artists as of right now... that's all I need.
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I tell everyone that most Microsoft software is complexity coded too simply to do anything of value correctly... I've even wrote about the dangers of sending MS Word DOC files as attachments.
Here's more proof... if you use the "protect forms with a password" feature in MS Word (that prompts the end-user for a password in order to modify certain parts of the document), you aren't really protecting your content. A determined adversary could use the following procedure (via Bugtraq) to reset this password and change the document... all the time under your radar. Worse, this adversary could change the password, modify your content and then change it back again without you knowing the difference (what percentage of MS Word users have even heard of a "hex editor"?). If you're interested, read on...
Example: --------1.) Open a protected document in MS Word
2.) Save as "Web Page (*.htm; *.html)", close Word
3.) Open html-document in any Text-Editor
4.) Search "<w:UnprotectPassword>" tag, the line reads something like
that: <w:UnprotectPassword>ABCDEF01</w:UnprotectPassword>
5.) keep the "password" in mind
6.) Open original document (.doc) with any hex-editor
7.) search for hex-values of the password (reverse order!)
8.) Overwrite all 4 double-bytes with 0x00, Save, Close
9.) Open document with MS Word, Select "Tools / Unprotect Document"
(password is blank)Variation:
----------If the 8 checksum bytes are replaced with the checksum of a known
password it should be fairly easy to unprotect the document, make any
necessary changes, save, close and reset the password to the original
(unknown!) password by simply restoring the original values. Document
changed without even knowing the password. Nasty.(Note: Take care to get file properties (author, organisation,
date/time etc.) right.)Solution:
---------No solution is currently available. Do not rely on the "Protect
Forms" mechanism to protect a Word document against changes.
I'm no VoIP buff... but this document seems relevant to those who are:
How the FBI Surveils the Net-Official Use Only
[http://cryptome.org/fbi-cgvop.zip] (a ~400KB zipped PDF file)
It contains the document, "Electronic Surveillance Needs for Carrier-Grade Voice over Packet (CGVoP) Service"
(A version of this document where copying and pasting has been enabled by the why-war folks is here.)
I'm in no way qualified to analyze this document, although I'm sure some VoIP people out ther are... here's the last paragraph of the exec. sum.:
"To facilitate industry interaction, this document captures law enforcements needs regarding LAES [Lawfully authorized electronic surveillance] capabilities for CGVoP [Carrier-Grade Voice over Packet] Service. The document focuses mainly on communication identifying information associated with service-related events that are of interest to law enforcement. The document also addresses law enforcements needs regarding the content of CGVoP communications."
The Editor, Steve Gardner, of Clink asked for top ten lists from contributors. The following is very similar to what I submitted (no change in the order, just changes in the explanatory text to reflect the audience of N.Q.B.).
Let me qualify the following list: This represents a lot of what I've been listening to for the year of 2003... not all of the albums were released in 2003 (about seven were) but I was turned on to these albums in 2003... so for me, these are the albums I listened to most in 2003.
I'm fairly certain that none of my readership will know more than one or two of these artists... but I think you should... so I've made an effort to explain why. If you're not familiar with a term or an artist, submit a comment and I'll add footnotes.
Top Ten Albums of Joe's 2003 (This list goes to 11!)
(like any good non-conformist's list... this one goes to 11! Props to Spinal Tap.)
