Blackmoor Vituperative

Miscreants are using an unpatched security bug in Internet Explorer to install malicious software from rigged Web sites, experts warned Tuesday.

[…]

“Fully patched Internet Explorer browsers are vulnerable,” Ken Dunham, director of the rapid response team at VeriSign’s iDefense, said in an e-mailed statement. “This new zero-day attack is trivial to reproduce and has great potential for widespread Web-based attacks in the near future.”

(from ZDNet, Porn sites exploit new IE flaw)

On the one hand, I am curious why ZDNet specifically mentions porn. The exploit could just as easily be on a web site with photos of kittens. On the other hand, I am wondering why on the gods’ green earth anyone is still using Internet Explorer to begin with. Use Firefox, you knuckleheads!

Controversy has erupted over an initiative by the Open Source Development Labs, known as Open Source as Prior Art, which is designed to improve the quality of software patents and thereby reduce the number of patents that can be used to threaten open-source software developers and users.

The goal of OSAPA is to reduce the number of poor-quality patents that are issued by increasing accessibility to open-source software code and documentation that can be used as prior art during the patent examination process.

(from eWeek, OSDL Patent Project Under Attack)

At the root of it, Stallman objects to this because it implicitly legitimizes software patents and will probably undermine any effort to get rid of them entirely. I can’t say that I disagree with him, in principle, but in reality I think the elimination of software patents is as likely as the election of a libertarian President. Yes, it would be good for practically everyone, and a huge improvement over what we have now, but people are too greedy and short-sighted to ever let it happen. So I think OSDL’s project will do more good than harm.

But I still vote libertarian.

Write a Novel is a form of open courseware: Learning materials placed online for free use by anyone who wishes to do so. At this point, it is an experiment; if it succeeds, Capilano College may create more such guides, along the lines pioneered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The guide contains 18 items, PDF documents that give you some basic information on topics related to writing fiction in general and novels in particular. Each item includes one or more assignments based on the material you’ve read.

(from Write a Novel)

San Francisco resident Matthew Shinnick tried to sell a pair of mountain bikes on Craigslist late last year. He attracted a buyer, received a check in the mail — and ended up handcuffed by police in a downtown Bank of America branch and jailed for almost 12 hours.

[…]

In July, a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled that Shinnick was innocent by “findings of fact” — a decision that essentially erases all record of the case.

But by this time, Shinnick said, he’d spent about $14,000 clearing his name. He wanted that money back and he felt BofA should pay it.

BofA felt otherwise. Earlier this month, a bank vice president, William Minnes, wrote to Shinnick’s lawyer to say that “Bank of America can certainly understand that your client is angry at the bank.”

However, he said, BofA has no legal liability in the case because of the 2004 Supreme Court ruling. Minnes warned that “litigation would not prove financially beneficial” to Shinnick.

[…]

The Supreme Court case, Hagberg vs. California Federal Bank, was remarkably similar to Shinnick’s. It involved a woman who presented an unusually large check for deposit from her stockbroker.

A teller believed the check was phony and called the police. The check turned out to be real, but by then the police had arrived and had handcuffed the woman.

The woman subsequently sued for damages, but the court ruled that all reports to the police are absolutely privileged. In other words, no liability can be connected to telling police of a suspected crime, whether real or not.

“The court wants to protect people when reporting criminal activity,” said Paul Glusman, a Berkeley attorney who has written about the Hagberg case. “But this can be abused. At this point, there’s nothing that will protect ordinary citizens from a false police report.”

(from SFGate, Check from a scammer bounces victim into jail)

A while back Gaim started crashing for me when trying to connect a MSN account. Gaim 2.0.0beta3.1 has been released which fixes this and other bugs in beta3. You can download it from its SourceForge file release page.

Has the magic gone out of magic?

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered Wednesday that Spamhaus must pay $11,715,000 in damages to e360insight and its chief, David Linhardt, who sued the U.K.-based organization earlier this year over blacklisting.

The court also barred Spamhaus from causing any e-mail sent by e360insight or Linhardt to be “blocked, delayed, altered, or interrupted in anyway” and ordered Spamhaus to publish an apology stating that Linhardt and his company are not spammers, according to a copy of the order.

[…]

Spamhaus appears unfazed by the ruling. In a statement on its Web site, Spamhaus dismissed the judgment as invalid and charges that the court was “bamboozled by spammers.” Spamhaus didn’t mount a defense in the case; the ruling was a default judgment in absence of counterarguments.

“Default judgments obtained in U.S. county, state or federal courts have no validity in the U.K. and cannot be enforced under the British legal system,” Spamhaus said on its Web site. “As spamming is illegal in the U.K., an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place.”

Linhardt and his company are indeed spammers and remain on the Spamhaus blocklist, Spamhaus said. Posting a note that e360insignt was inaccurately labeled as a spammer would be a lie, Spamhaus said. If Linhardt wants a ruling that counts, he needs to refile his case in the U.K., according to Spamhaus.

The Spamhaus blocklist is a database of verified spam sources that is supplied at no cost to help e-mail administrators clean incoming e-mail streams. Spam accounts for about 75 percent of all e-mail, and the Spamhaus list is one of the most popular such blacklists to help cleanse e-mail.

(from ZDNet, Spam fighter hit with $11.7 million judgment)

Spammers are scum. I’d never advocate violence against anyone, of course, but it’s a shame that people like Linhardt can continue to prey on society and make a mockery of our legal system, without any repurcussions whatsoever.

PlaysForSure is essentially the brand name for Microsoft’s DRM and it’s supposed to be the cue. You can’t help but spot the contradiction between the name “PlaysForSure” and what Amazon has written on it’s Web site. On one hand, the phrase “plays for sure” is designed to breed confidence in end users that the content will play for sure. On the other, it doesn’t play on anything Apple makes and it’s not guaranteed to work by Amazon with content acquired through Amazon if the device is PlaysForSure-compliant but not listed on Amazon’s list of tested devices. Furthermore, going back to the statement about the Unbox player not being able to play video content downloaded from other vendors, if I’m to understand that correctly, Unbox can play PlaysForSure-compliant content from Amazon, but no one else (an example of why, just like the way I call Apple’s FairPlay DRM “UnFairPlay,” I call Microsoft’s DRM “PlaysForSuren’t”). Not to mention how, if every Amazon-like source of content decided to take that route, how overly bloated and complex our systems would be with redundant technology that all does the same thing.

All this because of DRM. Perhaps now you understand why I have a different name for DRM: C.R.A.P. (Cancellation, Restriction, And Punishment). Just look at the eggshells Amazon has to walk on when rolling out a potentially cool service and all the crap that customers have to put up with if they want a guarantee from Amazon that what they buy will actually work. Oh, and if it doesn’t work? Again, from the Amazon FAQ:

Can I return an Amazon Unbox video after I purchase it? No. Amazon Unbox products are not returnable once purchased.

But wait. It gets worse.

(from ZDNet, Amazon’s brand new UnBox video download service relies on (recently hacked) Microsoft DRM)

My position on media crippled with DRM aka CRAP is very simple: I do not buy it, and I urge others not to buy it either. Vote with your wallets, people. Don’t reward the media robber barons by giving them your money.

Normally you would like to let the musings of fellow media denizens stand on their own merits, but when the lead editorial of the Sunday edition of the New York Times says we all need to check our laptops because of terrorism threats, well that’s just asinine.

(from eWeek, Masked Intentions : The Times May Be Changing for the Worse)

It’s about damned time people start standing up and calling this anti-terrorism hysteria what it is: asinine. I’ll be taking a trip by airplane in December. It will probably be the last trip by plane I take. Being subjected to the humiliation of metal detectors and pat-downs was bad enough. Having high school dropouts rummage through my luggage was bad enough. Now I can’t even take a tube of toothpaste or a plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi on the plane!

Let me be perfectly clear about this: nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing, will prevent a human being from killing people if that’s what the human being intends to do. All of this faux-security at airports accomplishes absolutely nothing other than lulling the gullible into feeling safe and inconveniencing people travelling by airplane.

What the hell is the big deal, anyway? Yes, it’s tragic that people died when airplanes hit the World Trade Center buildings, but let’s be serious for a minute: a little less than 3,000 people died as a result of the World Trade Center airplane crashes five years ago. Let’s be generous and round it up, and say that averages to 600 people a year. Let’s compare that to the main causes of death in the USA, according to the CDC:

Number of deaths for leading causes of death

1. Heart disease: 654,092
2. Cancer: 550,270
3. Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 150,147
4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 123,884
5. Accidents (unintentional injuries): 108,694
6. Diabetes: 72,815
7. Alzheimer’s disease: 65,829
8. Influenza/Pneumonia: 61,472
9. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 42,762

In case you are curious, homicide came in at #15.

There you have it: heart disease kills ONE THOUSAND TIMES as many people per year as domestic terrorism. So where are the teams of ham-fisted guards patting down people in the meat and dairy aisles at the grocery store? Where are the weeping family members of heart attack victims calling for butter registration and mandatory refrigerator locks? Where are the venal politicians trying to use the tragedy of over a half-million deaths from heart disease as an excuse to go to war with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (together which account for more than 90 percent of the beef volume and value imported by the United States)?

This whole “increased security at airports” is a farce. In the short term, the only thing that these ridiculous “security” measures at airports accomplish is to discourage people from flying at all. In the long term, of course, it sets the stage for universal surveillance, which was probably the whole point of the exercise to begin with. No, I am not saying that the World Trade Center crashes were planned by people who want to spy on us and control — or at least monitor — our movements. What I am saying is that the official response to the crashes certainly looks like it has the facilitation of domestic spying as its primary goal. Terrorism may just be a maguffin to get the plot going.

I’m probably giving my fellow human beings too much credit. Maybe the whole thing is just the predictable result of human stupidity, and there’s no conspiracy at all. Frankly, I think I’d prefer the conspiracy. Conspiracies can uncovered and the guilty can be punished. Human stupidity, on the other hand…

Please, let it be a conspiracy.