John Gruber points out something that should just be stupid obvious, but wasn’t to me. But that’s not what the music industry wants. Yes, there exist legal download stores that sell music in MP3 format (e.g. eMusic.com) — but they don’t have content from the major record labels, because the major record labels refuse to [...]
If you’re like me, you probably use the same password for many different accounts. You probably realize that it is not a great security model, because once an attacker gets the password for one of your accounts he has access to all of your accounts. But who can blame us? Just about every useful application [...]
December 22, 2005 – 3:25 pm
Just about every month I get an HTML formatted email from PayPal. Every month, I go into my PayPal profile notification preferences and discover that I already have it set to only send email notifications when a transaction takes place. Well, this month I’ve had it. If I can’t trust them to honor something as [...]
November 29, 2005 – 2:31 pm
This one affects ten times as many Sony audio CDs than the XPC rootkit. Like XCP, recent versions of MediaMax engage in spyware-style behavior. They install software without meaningful consent or notification, they include either no means of uninstalling the software or an uninstaller that claims to remove the entire program but doesn’t, and they [...]
November 17, 2005 – 9:07 pm
If I were a Windows user, I think this story would have been the last straw. On Oct. 31, Mark Russinovich broke the story in his blog: Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. This software tool is run without your knowledge or consent [...]
November 9, 2005 – 10:15 pm
This is my usage of Google for the month of October. There wasn’t a single day where I didn’t do at least one Google search. That’s kinda scary.
September 22, 2005 – 10:56 am
The Authors Guild is suing Google over Google Print, an ambitious project to scan and make thousands of books publicly searchable. The Authors Guild, a society of published writers representing over 8,000 U.S. authors, charges that Google has not sought the approval of authors to include their works in the program. Google does allow copyright [...]
March 22, 2005 – 11:43 pm
And that’s why I stopped being an Apple zealot. I still use and love Macs, but I no longer defend Apple at all costs. They’re a big company, they can fend for themselves. For the last day or so, I have been attempting to fight the pro-DRM Apple zealots over at the MacRumors forums. In [...]
October 5, 2004 – 12:51 pm
I have Qwest DSL, and an Actiontec GT701-WG wireless router and DSL gateway. Annoyingly, when it gets disconnected from the WAN it stops attempting to reconnect, after some number of tries (perhaps even 0). Twice this has happened on a Friday night or early Saturday morning when I’ve left for the weekend, leaving me without [...]
August 25, 2004 – 10:08 pm
The distance to my workplace from my apartment is a bit over 4 miles. The distance between Tucson, where I am, and my parent’s house, is over 3,000 miles. So why is the average RTT of a network packet from my apartment to my parent’s computer 136 milliseconds, but 140 milliseconds to my work computer? [...]