Blackmoor Vituperative

As you may recall, e360 Insight wasn’t exactly pleased when Spamhaus labeled it a spammer last year; in fact, e360 Insight’s owner sued the UK-based company. Now, in an ironic taste-of-your-own-medicine twist, e360 Insight is being sued for (allegedly) spamming an individual in California.

(from WebProNews, e360 Pulls 180 On Spam?)

I covered the Spamhaus suit in this blog back when it happened. The short version is that notorious spammer David Lindhardt sued Spamhaus for adding Lindhardt’s company to their list of spammers, and a judge was incompetent enough to rule in the spammer’s favor even though Lindhardt was and is violating Federal and state law.

Well, now people are finally suing David Lindhardt. It’s about time. Spamming scumbag.

Don’t expect a reversal of the ruling against Spamhaus, though.

Incidentally, the article to which I am linking is misnamed. e360 has always been a source of spam. There’s no “180” involved in this. I think the author just thought it was clever to have “360” and “180” in the same title. I guess it didn’t bother him that it makes no sense.

This is an update on my evaluation of World Of Warcraft.

Well, I have used up my free trial period with World Of Warcraft. I really can’t see myself paying to continue. It’s just too much of a chore to target and attack things.

Star Wars Galaxies is even worse, at least by default. I have found a number of settings to ameliorate SWG’s worst problems, but it still requires several taps on a keyboard and a mouse click just to attack someone, and periodically the mouse will abruptly change “modes” or the attack will stop working and you have to hit Escape and then try again.

On the upside, SWG is smart enough to pivot the character when the target moves — WOW doesn’t. Instead, you get an idiotic “you must face your target” message.

You can’t see it, but I am shaking my head.

I swear, I wish the developers for these games would go play Guild Wars for ten minutes and see how a user interface ought to be designed.

Oh, well. I have some more free time with Star Wars Galaxies. Maybe something will come up that makes the game’s UI less freaking frustrating. I don’t have high hopes, but I haven’t given up yet. It’s Star Wars, for crying out loud.

This is an update on my evaluation of Star Wars Galaxies.

I have discovered some tricks to make the user interface for Star Wars Galaxies a little better. There is an auto-aim function that makes it less of a click-fest, you just have to enable it. Every. Time. You. Attack. Something. Yeah, well, at least it’s there.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/guides.vm?id=80115

There are also a whole lot of guides available, which is pretty cool.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/en_US/players/guides.vm
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=538

And there is a radar, it’s just not available during the entire first portion of the game. So from levels 1 to around 8 or so: no radar. That’s just stupid.

However, there is a crazy level of detail in this game, for everything from trading to smuggling to bounty hunting and god knows what else. There are so many slash commands, it’s almost like a MUD. I used to really like MUDs.

So I am still playing. It’s growing on me.

Well, I played Star Wars Galaxies for an hour or so this afternoon, and I have to say, the UI for Galaxies looks really dated. Like, mid-1990s dated. By default, there are no targeting hotkeys at all, and there is no radar/minimap, making it even worse in those respects than World Of Warcraft.

I am pretty baffled. How hard is it to look at how other games do things and implement them? I’m not talking about curing cancer, here.

Also, the animation is really crude. Very clunky. World Of Warcraft and Guild Wars are both much better.

Still, it’s Star Wars, so I am inclined to give it more of a chance than I gave Warcraft (and I still may try Warcraft again, especially after comparing it to Star Wars Galaxies). But my initial impression of the game is that if it were anything other than Star Wars, I’d be uninstalling it now.

A federal judge in Philadelphia yesterday ruled against a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for operators of Internet sites to let anyone under 17 have access to sexual material, rebuffing the government’s argument that software filters are ineffective and upholding earlier rulings that the law infringed on free-speech rights.

In a detailed decision, Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. found that the Child Online Protection Act would not be effective in protecting children from online pornography, and that parents could shield their children by using software filters and other, less restrictive means that do not curtail adults’ rights to free speech.

(from WashingtonPost.com, Judge Rejects Law Aimed at Internet Porn)

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later: a judge who has a clue about the Internet.

Check out this giant crystal cave in Mexico.

Almost two years ago, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) started work on the first update of the GNU GPL (General Public License) in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing.

The FSF announced at the May 2005 LinuxWorld Expo that the GPLv3 would be out soon . The project has taken a little longer than expected. At last report, the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License 3) was to be out by early 2007.

According to Peter Brown, the FSF’s executive director, “We continue to work on the details of the GPLv3 as it relates to the situation presented by the Novell and Microsoft deal. We are researching issues related to potential unintended consequences of the language we plan to adopt. As soon as we are satisfied with the results of our research we plan to bring forward the next draft.”

As written, the patent clauses in the Novell/Microsoft agreement do not violate the current terms of the GPLv2. The leader of the FSF and chief author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, explained at a GPL meeting in Tokyo in November 2006: “What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell’s customers alone.”

Stallman went on to say that “perhaps it’s a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it’s not too late and we’re going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals.”

Sources close to the creation of the new version of the GPL believed that correcting this language wouldn’t take long to craft. If so, the GPLv3 would still have appeared by its last scheduled delivery date of January 15, 2007. That did not prove to be the case.

It now appears that there may be one more draft of the GPLv3 before the final version is released. [Sources believe] that the next draft should appear on or immediately before its annual associate member and activist meeting March 27 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

(from eWeek, Where, Oh Where, Is the GPLv3?)

This is crazy. It’s like an arms race: companies like Microsoft keep trying to find new ways to screw people over, and the FSF keeps having to come up with new defenses against them. Well, I’m glad at least the FSF is in my corner.

Chile Hardware informs us that Intel has launched its Classmate PC in Chile:

Intel has just launched their educational portable computer, Classmate PC, in Chile. This is the first country that has available this sub-notebook which features a Celeron M at 900MHz, 256MB RAM, 2GB of NAND hard drive and runs either Linux or Windows. The retail price is something near 500 dollars and it can only be purchased by government offices. The distribution is in charge of Olidata, the regional partner of Uniwill, an ECS Elitegroup company.

Personally, I’m not sure why anyone would want this PC for $500. For just $100 more you can buy a notebook with significantly better specifications.

(DarkVision Hardware, Intel launches Classmate PC in Chile)

This is not a very good deal, in my opinion. I don’t know, though: maybe laptops cost a lot more in Chile than they do here in the USA.

77.4 percent of all email sent in February 2004 was spam. That is a 2 percent increase from January. (source: MessageLabs)

Personally, well over 90% of the email I get is spam.

In today’s Let’s Be A Little Overdramatic file, a newly released report from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggests that networked file and music sharing could harm children and threaten national security.

The November, 2006, report, entitled “Filesharing Programs and Technological Features to Induce Users to Share,” makes two main points across the span of its 80 pages:

• that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults, exposing those children to copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those who protect their copyrighted material appear antagonistic, and
• file-sharing software could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job

Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file-sharing activity, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge.

(from Shadow Monkey, File sharing a threat to children and to national security)

Well, now, we wouldn’t want RIAA and MPAA to appear antagonistic, would we? Why, that would be like making Wilhelm Marr look antisemitic. What a gross injustice that would be.

As for the danger to national security, anyone who has ever held a security clearance (me, for example) knows who is to blame for any such security breach: the nut behind the keyboard. Or, to put it another way, what we have here is a poor workman blaming his tools. I can’t even comprehend how anyone could put classified documents on a workstation connected to the Internet, and then install file-sharing software on that workstation, without being aware of the security ramifications. The very concept just baffles me. Were the InfoSec people asleep?

Anyway, here are links to the report. I wonder how much MPAA and RIAA spent to underwrite it?

PDF version
HTML version