THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR View 168 August 27 - September 2, 2001 |
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This week: | Monday
August 27, 2001
A day, a long day, devoured by locusts although one of the locusts is a movie producer who wants to pitch one of my works as a TV series. We will see. If this works out it was certainly a lucrative day. But Hollywood money is Fairy Gold... Otherwise it is bits and pieces and snippets and plumbers and car mechanics and... Oh Well. One of those days. Lots of interesting mail.
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This week: | Tuesday, August
28, 2001
Yesterday I built a reports page out of an email I was sent on submarine warfare and the Kursk affair and subsequent developments. I know little about that subject and have no time to do research, but it did seem to me an interesting story that came through a sometimes reliable filter. Today there is a lot of mail mostly skeptical and I have put that into the report. I am in correspondence with the Outlook product managers concerning whether it's possible to get a Trojan or virus or worm (oh my!) from the preview window of Outlook. And Niven is here and it's time for a hike. On the "Alt" images scene. Microsoft tells me that (1) in FrontPage 98 there was a feature that automatically generated an alt tag; the default was the file name and the file size. Users (not me) said they didn't want that feature so it was removed in FrontPage 2000. Right click on the picture in FrontPage editor and select properties and you can insert any tag you like. I've done that on some things on this page. The problem is that without that default I have to do it every time I use a line or a symbol or anything else and life just isn't long enough. I wish it had the old default back; at least that told something about what was going on.
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This week: |
Wednesday, August
29, 2001
Roberta is off to the beach house and to play with The Grandchild. I had a great day with Larry yesterday, then the computers and car companies ate the rest of the day, and I want to work. So I have stayed: in about 10 minutes I am going up to the Monk's Cell to blitz books. And I intend to do 4 hours a day there through the weekend. The papers say the government indicted Sklyarov for about 25 years to life worth of stuff. This for a crime committed in a country where what he did is not a crime, with trivial economic consequences: only "a handful" of copies of the program to break Adobe's miserably ineffective copy protection scheme have been sold. Prediction: it will not be long before everyone has a free copy of the program that will break Adobe's scheme. Prediction: people will continue to boycott Adobe. And reviewers will stop reviewing their stuff unless the find holes in it. Adobe will regret starting this. A lot. Prediction: hacking Adobe encryption schemes will be a rite of passage for new hackers: you won't be a real hacker until you have busted an Adobe program. Query: does anyone know who made the donations that made it possible to pay Sklyarov's way to the US? Sklaryov's wife is afraid to come to the US. Do you think this may be a good time to travel abroad now that we have asserted that activities not criminal the one's own country can be prosecuted as heavy duty felonies if the US can lure you to within its borders? I can't think of a sillier precedent to get on the books. We will all regret this. I thought that when an adult in the Department of Justice saw this idiocy it would be settled. Apparently there aren't any adults in DOJ. There are lots of issues to protection of intellectual property. Some will require use of the criminal law. This case, involving a programmer who in another country where it was perfectly legal wrote the algorithm for a program that cannot be used except by an actual purchaser of a legitimate copy of an ebook -- the program will only decrypt books on the original computer they were downloaded to and only if you have the password -- and which cannot be shown EVER to have resulted in theft of intellectual property -- is not the proper test case. Adobe ought to pay for his defense at the very least. And hire him to show them how to improve their miserably ineffective protection scheme. I doubt they will.
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This week: |
Thursday,
August 30, 2001 Got up late. Yesterday afternoon I had to walk about 7 miles in an hour and a half (well I had an hour and a half to go get my wife's car, she was off to San Diego, and I didn't realize it was a full 7 miles; and since I took the dog I couldn't get a bus...) and for some odd reason I overslept. Ah well. There is considerable and excellent mail which I will try to clean up this afternoon after I go write. I am trying to be on a writing regime, working about 3 hours every day before I am caught up in the real world including computers and journalism. Rod Montgomery tells us: Subj: Microsoft e-book encryption broken http://www.techreview.com/web/roush/roush083001.asp Apparently the perpetrator has the good sense to remain anonymous. I suspect this will not be the last of these matters. Any encryption scheme has to end up with words on a screen. Whether that is a bit map or something else, we will thus have both the encryption and the clear text. One way or another, whether through full decryption or running the text through an OCR, a machine readable version can be generated. I see no escape from this. Protection of intellectual property is important, but jailing those who write decryption algorithms is not going to work. And shame on Adobe. Shame. And from Roland: Michael Dertouzos, RIP http://www.msnbc.com/news/621580.asp?0si=- And Bob Thompson sends this, in which The Register announces a new worm distributed by hackers pretending to be Microsoft. It is written in a humorous way, and so far I have seen no other references to it, so it may be a joke: but beware. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/21376.html And Roland sends this with the note "caught in a hailstorm..." http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-7008285.html
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This week: |
Friday,
August 31, 2001 Got the bills paid, did some good writing yesterday, hope to do some more today. Not to catch up on posting the mail... Now that's done. And I found this from a happier time. I'll get some of the pictures from the last month or so up. Real Soon Now. But for the moment it's very late. Several people have sent subscriptions using paper checks generated by different accounts. This is fine, but if the email address is not on that check, and I don't have an email from you telling me what you did, I'm pretty well stuck! So if you subscribed by check and haven't got any acknowledgment, I need email telling me what check service you used and when--and what email address to enter. And you must, simply must, look at this: <http://www.mrichter.com/cdr/winrg.swf> But don't be drinking coffee when you do. You have been warned. WARNING: Over in MAIL I posted a link to a site that is supposed to be a criticism of high tech journalism. It is in fact a leader to a sex site (I didn't see any such when I went to it because of my internet settings, so I had no warning) and it will also subscribe you to a bunch of sex sites. My apologies. My mailbox is full of garbage now. Roland points to what I knew would be inevitable: Russian Programmers warned about visiting the US. Shame, Adobe. Shame. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010831/tc/tech_russia_usa_dc_1.html
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This week: | Saturday,
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This week: | Sunday,
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