Blackmoor Vituperative

Apple Computer has reported that a small number of its popular video iPods were infected with a virus that targets Windows PCs before they were sold to consumers.

According to a statement issued by the hardware maker on Oct. 17, roughly 1 percent of the iPod Video devices it has shipped since Sept. 12 were loaded with the RavMonE.exe Windows Trojan during manufacturing.

(from eWeek, Apple Shipped iPods Carrying Windows Virus)

I don’t have a comment. I just think it’s funny.

The Department of Homeland Security redesigned its website over the weekend, and now all of the existing links to DHS documknts across the entire WWW are broken.

404 : Page can not be found
We recently redesigned our site and most pages have moved.

Here is a clue for would-be web designers out there. Never break hyperlinks.

I have watched three or four episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica. Although I enjoyed the pilot/miniseries, I find the actual series to be pretty dreary. The cylons we usually see are just run-of-the-mill human religious fanatics (which is both boring and annoying), there’s very little of what I would call science fiction in it, and the real cylons (the ones who LOOK LIKE CYLONS) and cylon raiders rarely occupy the screen for more than a few seconds in each episode. That is true of the episodes I have seen, anyway.

Aside from that, the whole show is dreary. There’s no sense of fun, no sense of adventure, no sense of hope. All of the episodes I have seen have been an hour of dreary grey people leading dreary grey lives, miserable and with no hope of ever not being miserable. I would rather watch a reality show about Russian peasants. At least they dance once in a while.

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Talesand Amazing Stories, “where…they ought to have been left.”[1] Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult— there is no other word—that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

Since then, though, for a writer who depended entirely on the meager sustenance of the pulps and whose brief career brought him sometimes to the brink of actual starvation, whose work did not appear in book form during his lifetime (apart from two slender volumes, each of a single story, published by fans) and did not attract the attention of serious critics before his death in 1937, Lovecraft has had quite an afterlife. His influence has been far-reaching and, in the last thirty or forty years, continually on the increase, if often in extraliterary ways. Board games, computer games, and role-playing games have been inspired by his work; the archive at hplovecraft.com includes an apparently endless list of pop songs—not all of them death metal —that quote or refer to his tales; and there have been around fifty film and television adaptations, although hardly any of these have been more than superficially related to their sources.

(from The New York Review of Books, The Heroic Nerd)

Go read the whole article.

IBM’s global procurement headquarters is moving from Somers, NY, north of New York City, to Shenzhen, China. This will be the first time the headquarters of an IBM corporate-wide organization has been located outside the U.S.

According to the company, the move illustrates a shift underway at IBM from a multinational corporation to a new model — a globally integrated enterprise. “In a multinational model, many functions of a corporation were replicated around the world — but each addressing only its local market,” said Chief Procurement Officer John Paterson, who is relocating to China. “In a globally integrated enterprise, for the first time, a company’s worldwide capability can be located wherever in the world it makes the most sense, based on the imperatives of economics, expertise and open environments.

(from IBM News, IBM moves procurement HQ to China)

The world isn’t cyberpunk yet, but it’s getting there.

As the Buggles told us, new technology kills old technology. Thanks to the DMCA and the media robber barons — aka the Digital Rights Mafia — DRM is killing innovation. In the latest death to functionality, the TiVo To Go is no more. TiVo Series 3 HD is Defective By Design.

If you want to help fight the Digital Rights Mafia, please also tell Congress to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which limits unlocking DRM even to make legitimate uses, like moving recorded content to your portable video player.

You know you’re visiting a different kind of trade show when the signs for the new GUI on a product refer to an automatic weapon. You get a better idea when you find yourself standing beneath the main gun of the new Stryker mobile weapons system. But it really hits home when you visit the usually benign world of iRobot and find not Roombas, but instead autonomous killing machines.

(from eWeek, War Robots Invade Washington)

I want one. 🙂

Massachusetts has a problem. The Commonwealth can’t keep its CIO or pass an IT budget. Louis Gutierrez, the of CIO Massachusetts’s Information Technology Division, resigned earlier this week. Does this mean the end of the state’s pioneering ODF (Open Document Format) rollout?

First let’s look at why Gutierrez is leaving.

As he said in his resignation letter, it’s because, “IT innovation in Massachusetts state government ran out of steam in August, when the legislature closed its formal session without action on the IT and facilities bond. I am presiding over the dismantling of an IT investment program — over a decade in the evolution — that the legislative leadership appears unwilling to salvage at this time.”

This is widely seen as a blow to open-standards. In particular, this won’t do the planned rollout of the ODF for state use in January 2007 any good.

The use of ODF has been a controversial subject in Massachusetts for over a year now. Peter Quinn, Gutierrez’s predecessor as CIO, resigned on January 9th because of personal attacks based in part on his support for ODF.

While Massachusetts is theoretically still switching to ODF for its official documents, without a budget to implement the change, it’s hard to see it happening.

(from Linux Watch, Massachusetts CIO change worries ODF supporters)

Hopefully, the troops who do the actual work are still pushing the ODF train uphill, and the musical chairs for CIO is just a bump in the road.

“It really is a nightmare. User education is a complete waste of time. It is about as much use as nailing jelly to a wall,” Overton said. “There is no good trying to teach them what phishing is, what rootkits are, what malware is, etc. They are not interested; they just want to do their job.”

[…]

Jill Sitherwood, an information security consultant at a large financial institution, has seen education both fail and succeed. “I have to believe it works,” she said. “When we give our awareness presentations, what signs to look for, I have seen a spike in the number of incidents reported by our internal users.”

But online consumers are a tougher crowd to get through to.

“We have a special page on our Web site to report security incidents. We had to shut the e-mail box because customers didn’t read (the page) and submitted general customer service queries,” Sitherwood said.

(from ZDNet, Security expert: User education is pointless)

I have been saying for years that most people are too stupid to be safely allowed near a computer, and for years I have been getting criticized for saying so. When computers can be made as safe to use — safe for the user, safe for the machine, and safe for the rest of the world — as a VCR, then and only then should they be placed in the hands of an average person. And even then, there will still be a significant number of people for whom the time will always blink 12:00.

Join us for Monster Fest! Saturday 2006-10-14

All day Monster Fest horror convention plus all-night Fantasmo Horrorthon! Doctor Madblood will be taping a TV show there in the afternoon. 1:00 p.m. Horror Host Summit with Madblood, The Bowman Body, Count Gore DeVol, Penny Dreadful the 13th and More! Don’t miss it!

Chesapeake Central Library
298 Cedar Road
Chesapeake, VA 23322
(757) 382-6591
http://www.chesapeake.lib.va.us/Fantasmo/FlyerInformation.htm