Category: Interesting Reads

Tennessee House responds to V. Tech shootings

From the local newspaper:

NASHVILLE – In a surprise move, a House panel voted Wednesday to repeal a state law that forbids the carrying of handguns on property and buildings owned by state, county and city governments — including parks and playgrounds.

“I think the recent Virginia disaster … has woken up a lot of people to the need for having funs available to paw-abiding citizens,” said Rep. Frank Niceley, R-Strawberry Plains. “I hope that is what this vote reflects.”

So good news for those who appreciate the legal right to self-defense.

[tags]Tennessee repeals state/county/city government property firearms restrictions[/tags]

Sony keeps showing hatred for customers

I’ll admit that I sometimes wonder how one company can hate potential customers so much that they would make their products non-functional and then tell customers to buy new hardware or wait for an update that is probably never coming. If you choose to invest your money in products from a company like this, might I suggest you have your head examined?

At this point, I honestly believe the smart thing to do is to download illegal copies of the movies or music that you want and then just send Sony a check for the amount of the product you would have purchased had it not been created in a manner as to make use difficult or impossible for customers who acquired it legally. That way Sony will still have your money and you’ll have a product that works.

YES ! It appears that Sony have done it again. In their zeal to make their DVD movies copyproof (yeah right) they have in fact made their latest releases unplayable on some DVD players, including my Sony DVP-CX995V DVD player. I recently rented “Stranger than Fiction” (2 copies) and “The Holiday” ( please no comments on my choice of movies) both by Sony Pictures. Both load up to the splash title screen and then load no further, then after about 60 secs the player turns itself off!

ALL my other DVD’s and new releases from other movie companies play perfectly

I called Sony Electronics help line and they said to call Sony Pictures 1-800-860-2878 which I did.

The following is a compression of our discussion:

Sony Tech: We know about this problem. Its our new copy protection that’s making these discs unplayable in some players including our own, we do not intend to change the copy protection. The only correction to this problem is a firmware update to your player. The electronics division know about this and should have given you this information.

If you hit Google and search for whatever movie or music CD you want followed by the word Torrent you should have no trouble finding what you are after. If that doesn’t pan out, try The Pirate Bay and enter the movie or CD name in the search box there. After downloading, use Google again and search for instructions on burning your movie or music to a disc if you don’t already know how to do that. At this point, you’ll have a functioning copy of the product without the restrictions that make it fail like the legal product does. Now you can send your check to Sony along with a nice letter thanking them for the wonderful movie/music you’ve downloaded. Plus, you’ll have a backup ready in case your original gets destroyed.

If all that doesn’t convince you, at least look at what Amazon customers are saying about problems and lack of help from Sony. (via slashdot)

[tags]Sony hates customers more than before, Sony shows the hatred of consumers, Sony encourages downloading of pirated material[/tags]

20 most annoying tech products

PC World has their write-up of the 20 most annoying tech products of all time. We’ll just knock out some suspense here – AOL CDs made number one. The rest of the list has some good ones, too, though. There’s also a picture guide to 10 of the worst, but honestly, it’s not worth the viewing time. Just read the full list and you’ll see the same things as hitting the photo guide.

Unlike PC World’s 25 Worst Products of All Time, irksome products aren’t necessarily bad, buggy, or dangerous. But they all have one or two traits that make you want to wrap them in 200 pounds of steel cable and toss them off the side of a boat. From stupid features and rude behavior to brain-dead design and poor corporate policies, these 20 products have truly annoyed us over the years, and some continue to do so.

Here are a couple of the annoying tech products from the list that really bug me, just to give you a sampling.

Adobe (Macromedia) Flash (1996 to present)

Adobe’s animation tool, introduced by Macromedia in 1996, has arguably done more than any other product to liven up our Web browsers. But it’s also the dominant technology behind those running, jumping, spinning, swirling, flashing, dancing, popping, peeling, and just generally irritating rich-media Web ads. We like Flash, but we wish Web designers would use its power for good and not evil.

. . .

Apple iTunes, Microsoft Windows Media Player, Microsoft Zune, Napster (2003 to present)

The media players themselves are mostly fine, but their incompatible digital rights management (DRM) schemes drive us nuts. Despite Apple’s recent decision to sell some DRM-free songs, most iTunes tunes still play only on iPods, a couple of Motorola phones, or a computer with iTunes software on it. (And the DRM-free songs cost 30 cents more.)

Windows Media files are worse–now, two different, totally incompatible DRM file formats use the .wma file extension. So if you buy a WMA file from a service that uses Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM (most notably Napster), it won’t work with the Zune (which uses Microsoft’s Zune DRM). Can’t we all just get along?

Microsoft has said it will “soon” sell DRM-free music for the Zune. We’ll see.

Yup. I hates me some DRM. But if you don’t know that by now, you either don’t visit here often or don’t know what DRM is, since I write against it quite often. Hit the end of the article for the list of 14 ways to be sure to annoy your customers. It’s a little treasure trove of sarcasm, too.

[tags]PC World’s 20 most annoying tech products[/tags]

The economic impact of same-sex marriage on the US economy

Now this is just damn ducky. A couple of years ago, the Congressional Business Office (CBO) released a report on the impact on the US economy of legalizing same-gender marriages. This wasn’t a question of morality, fair treatment of citizens, biblical imperative, or anything like that. The report is pretty much a straight-up study of how the US economy would be helped or hurt by allowing same-gender marriages (also available in PDF format if you prefer.

The federal government does not recognize “marriages” of same-sex couples either for receipt of federal benefits or for tax purposes. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (Public Law 104-199) provides that the federal government will honor only marriages between one man and one woman. It also stipulates that no state, territory, or possession of the United States or Indian tribe can be required to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in any other jurisdiction.

The potential effects on the federal budget of recognizing same-sex marriages are numerous. Marriage can affect a person’s eligibility for federal benefits such as Social Security. Married couples may incur higher or lower federal tax liabilities than they would as single individuals. In all, the General Accounting Office has counted 1,138 statutory provisions–ranging from the obvious cases just mentioned to the obscure (landowners’ eligibility to negotiate a surface-mine lease with the Secretary of Labor)–in which marital status is a factor in determining or receiving “benefits, rights, and privileges.”(1) In some cases, recognizing same-sex marriages would increase outlays and revenues; in other cases, it would have the opposite effect. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that on net, those impacts would improve the budget’s bottom line to a small extent: by less than $1 billion in each of the next 10 years (CBO’s usual estimating period). That result assumes that same-sex marriages are legalized in all 50 states and recognized by the federal government.

Continue reading “The economic impact of same-sex marriage on the US economy”

Google working on open source OCR software

I periodically read about Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and keep thinking how cool it would be if someone in the open source community came up with a good OCR package. While prices are far better than they were about 10 years ago when I first looked in to OCR software, it can still be expensive to get going with OCR. Now, Google has announced work on an open source OCR system. There is a technology preview available, with a 3rd quarter alpha release targetted. The code page points out that no real training of the character recognition engine has taken place yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see a sister project get going to use distributed tools for training, letting thousands of open source fans get involved on the project if they aren’t capable of contributing on the code side.

The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90’s and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods.

OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts. We expect that it will also be an excellent OCR system for many other applications.

I’ll watch this project. It could be another highly significant open source tool in the near future.

[tags]Google working on open source OCR software, Open source Optical Character Recognition package from Google[/tags]

Calls out for Don Imus’ resignation

I posted the following article on Sunday via my remote posting setup. I didn’t realize until last night that the article didn’t go up on the site on Sunday. I almost skipped it, but since everyone seems to be talking about Imus more now than when I posted, I figured I could still get away with it. Following is the original post I made Sunday afternoon, unedited. I put it here just so I can look in a week or two and see if Al Sharpton is still expressing his outrage or not. Then I can point back and say “See, I told you so.” or “Guess I was wrong” when we know what he’ll do.

Continue reading “Calls out for Don Imus’ resignation”

Happy Birthday Telnet, may you rest in peace

Well, today is the 35th birthday of telnet. It’s also a day to commemorate the passing away of telnet, in a way.

Although original development on telnet took place back in 1969, the protocol was not formalized until RFC 318, released April 3rd, 1972. The passing away of telnet is being called out as a result of Microsoft leaving telnet out of Vista. Of course, if you have to have telnet, you can install it manually if you’d like.

Thanks to Wired security blog 27B Stroke 6 for the telnet birthday reminder.

[tags]Happy birthday telnet, RIP telnet[/tags]

Australian game reviewers get offered special perks for positive reviews

If I ever saw a dream job, this story about the offerings for game reviewers in Australia certainly seems to be the one I’d try to get.

Former editor of Official Australian PlayStation 2 Magazine Richie Young got his weekly editorial off to a very controversial start by suggesting that corruption is rife in the Australian gaming press.

Young’s accusations include reviewers being offered sex and money to change review scores, backroom deals in exchange for “exclusive” stories, elaborate gifts like overseas trips, and advertising support influencing review scores.

Time to start looking for a job down, I suppose, so I can pay the bills until I get the dream job.

[tags]Australian game reviewer offered sex for exclusive stories and better review scores[/tags]

Latest zero day attack in the wild

If you surf the web using Internet Explorer, here’s another reminder that you should consider switching browsers:

If you’re reading this with Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, don’t. The Windows animated cursor zero-day attack that was coming through on IE 6 and 7 running on fully patched Windows XP SP2 is now also hitting Windows 2000, Server 2003 and Vista. As F-Secure advises, better to use some other combination.

Proof-of-concept code for the attack was released after business hours on Friday, according to SANS.

Blocking .ani files won’t help. SANS has picked up reports of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild with .ani files renamed as JPEGs.

Microsoft today posted security advisory 935423 about the exploit. Here’s the full list of vulnerable systems:

Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
Microsoft Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003 (Itanium)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with SP1 for Itanium-based Systems
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition
Microsoft Windows Vista

The company still hasn’t provided a patch. The vulnerability is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) list, having been assigned the label CVE-2007-0038 (previously also CVE-2007-1765).Although there currently is no official patch, a SANS handler has posted instructions on detecting and filtering out .ani file exploitation attempts. eEye provided a temporary patch, although the company recommends updating to Microsoft’s patch when it’s out.

That’s a pretty significant vulnerability, and there’s just not a way to deal with it in a manner that would leave me comfortable.  I highly recommend Mozilla or Opera for the Windows-bound, although you have to remember that no matter what browser you use, there will be vulnerabilities at times.  In this case, it’s a matter of reducing your exposure.

[tags]Zero-day Windows exploit via animated cursors, Time to switch browsers[/tags]

A look forward at soon-to-be-released stamps

After posting about the Star Wars stamps recently, I was exploring the US Postal Service web site when I saw the link to the 2007 commemorative stamp program preview. What I found so cool about the preview section was the link to a media kit, which includes downloadable images of the upcoming stamps from the USPS. The only real restrictions on using the images look to be unaltered full color reproduction (with the required exception to block out the stamp denomination for roughly-actual-size images) and inclusion of the USPS copyright symbol. Totally reasonable requirements. So reasonable, I’m counting myself as media and reprinting just a couple of the stamps that I think are really cool.

WASHINGTON – Marvel Comics, the art of Disney, Ella Fitzgerald, the settlement of Jamestown, Jimmy Stewart, Mendez v. Westminster, vintage mahogany speedboats, lighthouses and those stunning polar lights are just a sampling of diverse icons in the U.S. Postal Service’s 2007 commemorative stamp program lineup.

“Once again, the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee has delivered a powerful stamp program that reflects the American experience and highlights our values, heroes, history, achievements and natural wonders in an artistic collection of colorful postage stamps,” said Postmaster General John E. Potter.

Continue reading “A look forward at soon-to-be-released stamps”

Apple goes “Duh!” – gives users useful discount

Really, this is the kind of thing that is so obvious it seems some digital music provider would have already done this. I’ve complained about the lack of this feature before, and skipped purchasing online music in some cases because I didn’t see a store offer it. What the hell am I babbling about now? Why, Apple’s new complete my album purchasing option, naturally.

Apple(r) today announced Complete My Album(r), a groundbreaking new iTunes service that allows customers to turn their individual tracks into a complete album at a reduced price by giving them a full 99 cent credit for every track they have previously purchased from that album.

“Music fans can now round out their music collections by upgrading their singles into complete albums with just one click, and get full credit for those songs they have previously purchased from iTunes,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “Complete My Album is a wonderful new way that iTunes helps customers grow and enjoy their music collections.”

. . .

Complete My Album offers customers up to 180 days after first purchasing individual songs from any qualifying album to purchase the rest of that album at a reduced price. When users buy any song on iTunes the corresponding album will immediately appear on their personalized Complete My Album page with the reduced price listed. For example, a user who’s already purchased three 99 cent singles and decides to buy the corresponding $9.99 album would be able to download the remaining songs to complete the album for just $7.02, without having to buy the singles again.

See? It’s a “Duh!” feature for people who like to legally acquire music for our portable media devices. (via CrunchGear)

[tags]Apple offering new “complete my album” purchase option online[/tags]