“In our system, each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial.”
President George W. Bush, speaking about Lewis Libby, the White House official indicted over the Plame affair.
Er, could this be the same President Bush who has no compunction about locking people up indefinitely in Guantanamo without trial?
Fascinating technical analysis by Mark Russinovich of what happened to his PC when he inserted a copy-protected Sony music disc into his machine. Basically, it installs a ‘rootkit’ — the kind of covert software used by malware authors (aka ‘hackers’ to the mainstream media) to compromise computers they have penetrated. Ed Felten has posted several thoughtful updates and comments on this unsavoury discovery. And Andrew Brandt of PC World is absolutely incandescent about it. Here’s what he has to say (en passant):
The bigger question people have got to ask is, does Sony not respect the integrity of the computers of its customers? This cavalier act of sneaking software onto PCs not only violates our own Prime Directive — it’s our PC, dammit — but threatens the entire music industry.
After all, if you suspect that a commercial CD will install software secretly, which you won’t be able to remove and which, itself, may increase the already-great security problems of your Windows PC, would you continue to buy CDs?
I’ll tell you right now, I won’t. I’d much rather buy an unrestricted copy of a song electronically, using iTunes, or Rhapsody, or one of the other music services that offer this feature, than take a chance that some music disc will stick some hidden files in my Windows folder, which I can’t see or remove.
Sony has dealt itself a serious blow, and the best thing it — and the rest of the music publishers — can do right now is condemn this practice, apologize to the customers that were affected, provide a method to get this junk off affected PCs, and make declarations that they will never, ever do this again.
I don’t think they will. And if they don’t, I simply won’t buy CDs anymore. Period. From any publisher. And I recommend that you don’t, either. As a fan of music who respects the need for artists to make a living, and a security-savvy PC user, I’m incensed that Sony — any company — would think it’s OK to do this. It’s not. But the only way (I can see) to send that message effectively to Sony BMG executives is to vote against CDs with my wallet.
Sobering OpenDemocracy piece by Paul Rogers about the escalating conflict between Iran and the US. Excerpt:
This fundamental clash of perceptions between Washington and Tehran shows no sign of diminishing. Indeed, the current Iranian rhetoric simply makes it easier for the United States (or Israel) to consider the use of force if diplomacy fails to fix the nuclear issue. The problem for these prospective assailants is that any such action might entail serious and unexpected escalation.
Iran would have several options in the event of a US or Israeli attack: direct Revolutionary Guard involvement across the border in Iraq, making the predicament of US forces almost impossible; encouraging Hizbollah to open a “Lebanon front” with Israel; even the temporary closure of the Straits of Hormuz to create an oil-market panic. The stakes are therefore very high and it will take some extraordinary efforts by diplomats, mediators and others – including the Russians – to encourage the Washington and Tehran administrations to acquire a realistic sense of each other’s point of view…
Is online. Distinctly underwhelming, so far. But it’s early days. And there are all those pesky lawsuits from publishers to be sorted out before anything much happens.
Yep, according to ZDNet UK News. Yippee!
David Pogue of the New York Times asked Blake Ross, the teenager who co-authored Firefox, to describe the program. He replied: “Firefox is a Web browser. Kind of a competitor for Internet Explorer, but made for the average person. Made for people who don’t want to spend all day cursing at the computer. We want you to surf the Web without worrying about spyware, viruses, or pop-up ads.”. Spot on.
… in 1976, Jimmy Carter, a Peanut farmer from Georgia, defeated Gerald Ford in the US Presidential election.
Wonderful column by Ted Wragg in today’s Education Guardian on the new Education Bill. Excerpt:
Let me work out the logic. There will be a verbal IQ test, on the basis of which final-year primary school pupils will be assigned to one of nine ability bands. Then equal numbers from each band, about 11% a time, will go to each school. Ah, so children will actually be assigned to a secondary school. Fine.
No, wait a minute. Parental choice is paramount. Parents will choose which of 10 types of specialist school they would like their child to attend. So it’s all about choice then. Except that the government wants schools to opt out from local authority control and decide their own admissions policy. I’ve got it, at last. Schools will decide.
Hang on. Parents can even start up their own school. They will really be in the driving seat in schools. Yes, yes, I see now. It is parent power, after all. Yet if your children are outside the quota for their band, then a fleet of buses will ferry them across town, presumably to a school they didn’t want to go to.
Er, I’m confused again. I think I’ll just brush up my Spanish and get my “linguist” scout badge instead.
Kenneth Baker, sorry, Tony Blair, is very keen on grant-maintained schools, oops, silly me, trust schools, and wants to set up city technology colleges galore, er, I mean, city academies.
He goes on…
To call these proposals “a dog’s breakfast” would be to insult Britain’s pet owners, who take care to feed Bowser a balanced diet. They are the ultimate disaster from the No 10 wheeze factory. Leave Tony Zoffis free all summer to dream up a barrel of monumental bollocks, and this is what ensues.
Amazing news. Early next year Microsoft plans to launch a new Web site called “Office Live” in an attempt to create a new platform that will liberate some of its applications from user’s hard drives. (Translation: to head off Google’s plans to make the PC platform irrelevant.) Office Live, Microsoft said, will be targeted at the 28 million small businesses worldwide. It will have “elements that enhance regular Office applications” while others will work independently of the software suite.
(Reality check: where did that number of 28 million come from? There must be 28 million small businesses in the US alone.)
Some of the tools promised for the site will allegedly help small businesses build an online presence as well as offer applications to automate tasks such as project management, expense reports and billing, among others.
“With Office Live services, we make complex technology affordable and easy to use for small businesses, empowering them to reach their business goals,” said Rajesh Jha, general manager of Information Worker Services at Microsoft. (Don’t you just love that cant about “empowering”!) Meanwhile, Chairman Bill was rolled out to put the best spin he could muster on the development. “It’s a revolution in how we think about software,” he told reporters and industry analysts. “This is a big change for…every part of the ecosystem.”
You bet. Especially the Microsoft ecosystem.
Here’s Good Morning, Silicon Valley‘s take on the development…
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie today outlined the first steps in a critical change in the company’s business — a move into providing software and services over the Net, prodded by the specter of being disintermediated on the desktop by Google and Yahoo and in the business market by companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite. But this venture, which Ross Mayfield describes as nothing less than the “third coming of Microsoft,” comes with a whole new set of challenges for the company. For one, eventually it would put Microsoft in competition with itself as services vie with packaged software (though Steve Gillmor thinks Gates is ready to bite that bullet). The other problem is that it seems to take Microsoft about three tries to get something new close to right. In the past, that meant users were pretty much forced to suffer through a couple hinky iterations, there often being no viable alternatives. Hardly the case this time. Microsoft will be trying to move into a territory with some significant and experienced occupants — a territory in which, as Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble notes, the company is already regarded with distrust and dislike.
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the increasingly popular Web-application development framework Rails, sees it this way: “Microsoft is now entirely optional. No part of the stack needs Microsoft. Not on the client, not on the server. And I think that’s a pretty tough challenge for a company that used to be a necessity. … To be frank, I don’t ever see the good times coming back for them. Microsoft will have to move to higher grounds. Get out of the infrastructure race. Like Apple did. There is no dominant future for the Microsoft tool chain for Web development in sight. But I doubt the company will acknowledge that before it’s game over.”
Extraordinary essay by a serving CIA officer about the importance of publicly-available information relative to the stuff obtained by the cloak-and-dagger crowd. Abstract:
We need to rethink the distinction between open sources and secrets. Too many policymakers and intelligence officers mistake secrecy for intelligence and assume that information covertly acquired is superior to that obtained openly. Yet, the distinction between overt and covert sources is less clear than such thinking suggests. Open sources often equal or surpass classified information in monitoring and analyzing such pressing problems as terrorism, proliferation, and counterintelligence. Slighting open source intelligence (OSINT) for secrets, obtained at far greater expense when available at all, is no way to run an intelligence community. Also, we must put to rest the notion that the private sector is the preferred OSINT agent. In the end, I would contend, the Intelligence Community (IC) needs to assign greater resources to open sources.
Link via Arts and Letters Daily
This morning’s Observer column…
Q: What’s a record company?
A: An organisation whose survival depends on suing those who are potentially its best customers.
I exaggerate – but only slightly. Scarcely a week goes by without some salivating music industry executive detailing the latest batch of lawsuits launched against file-sharing teenagers. In an interesting variation on this litigious theme, Candy Chan, an American parent of one of these errant youngsters, refused to settle on behalf of her 13-year-old-daughter, Brittany. When she announced this plan of action, however, the record companies decided to go after the kid directly.But in order to do this they had to find a way of neutralising mummy. So they petitioned the court to push Mrs Chan aside and appoint a legal guardian in her place.
Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. The whole saga of music downloading is set to become a business school case study on the lengths to which an industry will go to defend a business model that technology has rendered obsolete…
Update: It looks as though sophisticated use of the Internet by bands is much more extensive than my reference to Arctic Monkeys implied. Here’ for example, is an intriguing Wired article about Myspace.com.