Who owns your computer?

Microsoft seems to think they do. I’ve heard the rumors flying around the internet, and now it’s been confirmed by a reliable (and Windows friendly) source. Microsoft has been making changes on everybody’s computers… not only without their consent, but against the expressed desire of the computer’s owner to NOT have automatic updates.

Tinfoil hats aside, let’s assume that this was done for a good reason, and with only the best intentions. I’d say it still qualifies as computer intrusion (a.k.a. hacking, a.k.a. cracking, a.k.a. federal felony), when a company changes files on your computer against your wishes. Of course, it’s unlikely anybody will press charges, because court is expensive and M$ has far more money than any of us, or even all of us, and most people just don’t care. But what if the company was malicious? Doesn’t it scare you that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, to any Windows computer in the world? To every Windows computer that’s online? Doesn’t it scare anybody that all it would take would be one disgruntled Microsoft employee to totally FUBAR millions of PCs at once? Now does it sound like something worth getting worked up over?

Hell, I don’t have Windows on my home PC, and it scares me. Something like this could be catastrophic to the economy.
Tinfoil hat back on: I understand China has an interest in a Chinese Linux distro, and they supposedly have an army of hackers…. who allegedly recently breached the Pentagon and the British government, and attempted a break-in on German government systems. Who’s to say they didn’t/can’t/won’t tamper with Microsoft automatic-even-if-you-say-NO updates?

Firefox extensions

I’ve seen a few of these around lately, so here’s my own list of necessary (or at least really groovy) Firefox extensions:

ScribeFire: what I’m making 99.9% of my blog posts with.
NoScript: Prevents possibly hostile scripts from running, and allows
you to permit them on a by-domain basis. So I can permit cnn.com while
still denying doubleclick. A must for a secure computer.
del.icio.us Bookmarks: Keeps my bookmarks on the web, so I can use them from any computer, and share with friends (who are on del.icio.us) easily.
AdBlockPlus: Prevents me having to see all the crap that IE users have to put up with.
Download Statusbar: makes the Firefox download manager reside in the status bar, for a much more pleasant experience.
Tabbrowser Preferences:Gives fantastic control over how tabbed browsing works.

There’s more, but these are the ones I can’t live without. For now.

…and ScribeFire is giving me fits right now on my home computer because of the theme I’m using… I themed my computer to be white printing on a dark background, (because I like it that way), and ScribeFrire is annoyingly insisting on using a white text box for the text entry (no, I can’t see what I’m typing right now), and also it insists on using black text for the sidebar, which has a black background. I find it very freaking annoying when a programmer is thoughtless enough to only give a user partial control over his color scheme. Either use all of my preferences, or none of them. Adopting my text color preference and then assuming I haven’t chosen white text is just rather silly. And extremely annoying when that is, in fact, what I’ve chosen.

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Going deeper

Google is becoming pervasive on the internet. Still, for all the alarmists questioning if/when Google has gone/will go evil and attempt to rule the world, I just can’t see much problem with it. I’m going deeper into this Borg collective by saying goodbye to Akregator and hello (again) to Google Reader. Google Reader has improved a lot since the last time I tried to use it, and I think I may actually like it better than Akregator now. Even if it’s not quite as good, it has one huge advantage: I can access all my feeds from any computer, without missing anything or having to mark anything as “read” more than once. Google also makes it easy to share feed items that you like. The Google Reader stats page is a little creepy (they keep track of what I read, when I read, and what percentage of items from a feed get read), but at the same time, I think it’s kinda cool. I’m also subscribed now to the feeds of my favorite webcomics (those that offer feeds, and even those that don’t with the help of RSSpect), so that I only have to pay attention to the comic when it actually updates, as opposed to “open all in tabs” from my del.icio.us tag every day, which wastes my time looking at even the strips that only update once a week. Google Reader also integrates beautifully with Firefox, allowing me to subscribe to a site’s feed with virtually zero effort. So go ahead and check it out if you haven’t already. Resistance is futile.

Who’s a rat?

I am a big, BIG proponent of freedom of speech, but this story makes me pause and rethink that. There’s a website devoted to “exposing the identities of witnesses cooperating with the government”, called Who’s a Rat. The Justice Department, obviously, is not happy. The intimidation factor for potential “rats” is plain to see. This really sounds like a high-tech mafia thug, particularly when it’s run by a guy named (or at least claiming to be named) Anthony Capone. Not that having the last name “Capone” should ruin a man, but in this context, there’s a definite shady implication.

The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover
agents, many of them from documents obtained from court files available
on the Internet.

So there you have it: All this info is publicly available anyhow. This site is just making it easier to find. And who are these “rats”, anyhow? Mostly they are criminals who have plea bargained for a lesser sentence in exchange for bearing witness against allegedly worse criminals. While it looks great in the movies or on TV, I have a problem with plea bargaining. It basically says, “tell us what we want to hear, and you won’t have to spend 10 years in prison”. Hell, I’d probably bear false witness against damn near anybody to avoid 10 years in prison. Just imagine what an even-less-scrupulous person would do. Buying testimony is like torturing a confession. You might wind up with the truth, but I wouldn’t bet on it. And suddenly, this website doesn’t sound all that bad.

Professor Bowman added that he was studying the deals prosecutors made
in the aftermath of the collapse of Enron, the energy company. “To do
that effectively,” he said, “I really need to know who flipped and the
nature of their plea agreements.”

And as much as the government portrays this as a witness safety issue, it’s really a witness illusion-of-safety issue. The witnesses never are actually safe. As I said, this website gets the information from publicly available sources. It just highlights the fact that this information is out there, which might reduce a thug’s willingness to plea bargain. Which is good for the thug and bad for the prosecutors.

So while the site leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I guess I have to argue that freedom of speech should still prevail.

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Snap Links

Here’s the coolest new extension/plug-in/add-on/watchamacallit for the Firefox web browser: Snap Links. When you want to open a lot of porn pics hyper links from a single page, Snap Links will let you click and drag a square around them all, and open them in individual tabs. It’s a cool timesaver. It’s semi-intelligent, too, as it will ignore things it thinks you aren’t interested in (like on a Google search result, it ignores the links for “Cached”, “Similar pages” and “Note this” while opening all the results you select. Check it out. Thanks, Lifehack.

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Internet radio’s execution has been postponed, briefly.

The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has given internet radio stations 2 more months to live, before crushingly high royalty rates are inflicted upon them. Bill H.R. 2060 (which, if passed, will nullify the CRB ruling) is currently sitting in two different committees. I don’t know what the odds are of getting it out of committee and signed into law before July 15th are, but if you ever listen to music on the internet, you need to contact your representative and tell him or her how important this is. If you happen to know your representative is on one of these committees (Judiciary or Energy and Commerce), then speaking up right now is very important.

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TV, stipped to the core

Sony is condensing old TV shows, like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch” down to just 5 minutes per episode. Inspired, no doubt, by the YouTube generation, which has virtually zero attention span and wants their content in bite-sized chunks. Of course, Sony isn’t a front runner on this. Bunnies have been condensing feature films down to 30 seconds for some time now.

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How did you find this blog?

This blog is less than 30 days old (16 to be specific), so I’m fairly fanatical about checking the stats daily, to see what my traffic looks like, where it comes from, where it goes to, and what factors may cause my readership to grow or not. I was pretty amused when I checked today and saw that one of the search terms that led to here was “cool things to see in Ethiopia“. I think it’s amusing that I’m on the front page (currently ranked #6, probably higher after the spiders find this post) of a Google search for these words. Are there that few cool things to see in Ethiopia, or is Google just getting bad at determining relevancy? I tried adding quotes around the search phrase, which usually returns better results, but got nothing. Not that I imagined Ethiopia to be a huge tourist attraction.

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Webscabs

Found an article on Techdirt talking about a blog replication of an e-mail from the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) vice-president, Howard V. Hendrix. The short of it is, Mr. Hendrix seems to think writers shouldn’t be allowed to publish what they want, where they want, and charge as little as they like. Because it upsets his union. Now once upon a time, unions came into existence to protect workers from unprincipled and downright ruthless employers. Because government, apparently, wouldn’t do that job. Times of course have changed. Mr. Hendrix here is attacking not a publishing house, but other writers, for the act of trying to get their stories read. He puts forth the idea that if you or I put a story online for free, it hurts him. I submit in return that it only hurts him if his stories aren’t worth paying for. The price of books, in case nobody has noticed, has grown huge in recent years to double (or so) what I paid when I was in school. That’s not the sign of an industry that’s hurting for consumers. These so-called webscabs are simply people who are trying to find an audience. It’s good for readers. It’s good for writers. It’s only bad for unions and publishers. (Although Baen books seems to think it works well for them!)

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Twitter and Jott are not secure!

I have never used Twitter before, although I heard about it on the TWiT podcast a couple weeks ago. I learned about Jott shortly thereafter on LifeHack, and I signed up for that service, and thought it was generally cool, although not so useful to me since WordPress does not allow me to e-mail my posts in. Now I have just learned from a very reliable source that both services are extremely insecure. Anybody who knows your phone number can make Twitter or Jott entries in your name. The article on O’Reilly goes into detail about how.

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