Blackmoor Vituperative

I just heard that Anna Nicole Smith is dead at age 39. So far, there’s no reason given.

I feel sad for her. It sounds like she hasn’t had a very nice life the last few years, with her son dying, the TrimSpa lawsuit, the paternity suit over her daughter, and the son of her dead husband being a spiteful, greedy, malicious prick (he died last year, thankfully).

I mentioned the Julie Amero case the other day — the substitute teacher being sent to prison because the computer in her classroom was infected with malware. Lest you think that small-town America is the only place this sort of thing happens, listen to the case of Russian teacher Alexandr Ponosov:

[…] the police in Russia have arrested a software pirate, prosecuted the malefactor to the full extent of the law and are preparing to send the miscreant to a Siberian prison camp.

[…] the Russian courts have convicted Alexander Ponosov, the principal of a middle school in a remote Ural Mountains village, for unwittingly buying PCs for his students that were loaded with unlicensed copies of Microsoft software.

(from eWeek, Sentenced to the Intellectual Property Gulag)

Just to clarify something here: what Ponosov is accused of is not “piracy”. It is not “theft”. There were no cutlass-wielding brigands or black-masked burglars. The crime of which Posonov has been convicted is copyright infringement: the same offense committed by the MPAA when they copied Kirby Dick’s documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated“. For this heinous offense, Ponosov faces a fine of 266,000 rubles, or $10,042, and up to five years in a Siberian prison camp. That’s not a metaphor — that is a literal statement. It is a prison camp in Siberia.

The media robber barons could, in theory, show some mercy to Mr. Ponosov and retract their complaint against him. But sending people like Mr. Ponosov to Siberia is exactly what they want. These are not simply businessmen and women trying to compete in a marketplace — they are monsters.

Mikhail Gorbachev published an open letter on the Web site of his charitable foundation, calling on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to intercede on Ponosov’s behalf on the grounds that the teacher wasn’t aware that PCs contained pirated software. The letter describes Ponosov as a teacher “who has devoted his life to educating children and who is getting for his work a meager salary that can in no way compare with the income that your company average executives are paid” at Microsoft.

“But under the circumstances, we are addressing you with a plea of leniency and withdrawal of claim against Alexandr Ponosov,” said Gorbachev’s letter.

Microsoft cares about children, right? Microsoft isn’t evil, right? Certainly they’d do something, right?

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Microsoft’s public relations agency in London released a statement that the company was “sure that the Russian courts will make a fair decision.” The statement also lauded the Russian government’s effort to prosecute software “piracy” cases, according to the Times report. “We do respect the Russian government’s position on the importance of protecting intellectual property rights,” the statement said.

I am sickened. You should be, too.

eWeek reports that the Digital Rights Mafia is still bitching and moaning about how digital music is slowly replacing CDs, even though people still buy 10 times as many CDs as they download. The media robber barons blame so-called “pirates” — which is to say, their customers. They ought to look closer to home.

As long as the Big Four music labels and the Digital Rights Mafia insist on infecting their products with DRM, people aren’t going to buy it. Even Steve Jobs has finally realized what many of us knew back when he was pushing DRM in 2003 — that DRM is a colossal waste of time and money.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

(from Apple.com, Thoughts On Music)

When the Digital Rights Mafia gives up on their jihad against their customers, maybe they’ll realize it, too. Then we’ll all win.

Don’t hold your breath.

Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities are increasingly so commonplace, the risk is lost with the message. On Feb. 2, Microsoft issued another security alert, this one for Excel, that largely went unnoticed.

In its security bulletin, Microsoft warned that “other Office applications are potentially vulnerable” to the zero-day flaw.

Zero-day refers to a flaw for which there is an exploit but no available fix. The Excel vulnerability is Microsoft’s fifth zero-day exploit since December, and part of an increasingly troubling trend.

(from eWeek, New Zero-Day Threat Excels)

Does a house have to fall on you? Anyone still using MS Office after all this time and all these security vulnerabilities probably shouldn’t be permitted to use a computer. Switch to OpenOffice, you blockheads.

An anonymous reader dropped us a link to this New York Times article about a ‘vast expansion’ of DNA sampling here in the US. A little-noticed rider to the January 2006 renewal of the ‘Violence Against Women Act’ allows government agencies to collect DNA samples from any individual arrested by federal authorities, and from every illegal immigrant held for any length of time by US agents. The goal is to make DNA collection as routine a part of detainment as fingerprinting and photography. Privacy experts and immigrant rights groups are decrying this initiative already. Many are also skeptical of lab throughput, as FBI analysts indicate this may increase intake by as much as a million samples per year. There is already a backlog of 150,000 samples waiting to be entered into the agency’s database.

(from Slashdot, US Set on Expansion of Security DNA Collection)

You need to see this movie. Buy it from Amazon or rent it from NetFlix. Don’t bother looking for it at Blockbuster or Wal-Mart — I do not care for seeing art bowdlerized by sniveling moral busybodies, whether its by some blue-vested crone at Wal-Mart or by some middle-aged former soccer-mom in a secret tribunal at MPAA headquarters.

By all means, label things accurately. If it has full frontal nudity, say so. If it has graphic decapitations, say so. But do not have the unmitigated arrogance to tell me what I as an adult may see or buy, or what I as a parent may allow my children to see.

Some will say that what the MPAA, Blockbuster, and Wal-Mart do is not censorship. To that, I say “bullshit”.

See this movie, and watch all of the special features. The deleted scenes are worth watching.

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut, was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison for the crime of using a classroom computer which had been infected by malware.

Oct. 19, 2004, while substituting for a seventh-grade language class at Kelly Middle School, Amero claimed she could not control the graphic images appearing in an endless cycle on her computer.

“The pop-ups never went away,” Amero testified. “They were continuous.”

The Web sites, which police proved were accessed while Amero was in the classroom, were seen by as many as 10 minor students. Several of the students testified during the three-day trial in Norwich Superior Court to seeing images of naked men and women.

Computer expert W. Herbert Horner, testifying in Amero’s defense, said he found spyware on the computer and an innocent hair styling Web site “that led to this pornographic loop that was out of control.”

“If you try to get out of it, you’re trapped,” Horner said.

[…]

The six-person jury […] convicted Amero, 40, of Windham of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. It took them less than two hours to decide the verdict. She faces a sentence of up to 40 years in prison.

(from Norwich Bulletin, Teacher guilty in Norwich porn case)

I have said before that most people are too stupid to be allowed near computers. This is not one of those cases: Ms. Amero didn’t own the computer, and it wasn’t her responsibility to maintain it. The fault here lies with the administration of Kelly Middle School. The computer in question should never have been connected to the Internet. Its operating system was out of date, its antivirus software had expired, and the machine itself was infected by numerous pieces of spyware. When she walked into that classroom, there was a ticking bomb on her desk, and it’s the Kelly Middle School administration that is to blame for it.

As for the jury, you can bet your retirement that any potential juror who had any knowledge of computers whatsoever was eliminated during voir dire by the prosecution. Jury ignorance has become the weapon of choice of judges and prosecutors who want to control the outcome of trials. But since the jury pool (prior to voir dire) is selected randomly, there were probably very few such individuals in the first place.

This is a grotesque miscarriage of justice. However, it would be a mistake to think that Ms. Amero’s case is unusual. Miscarriages of justice happen every day: you simply do not hear about most of them.

I’ve been working with Vista since its beta days, and I started using Linux in the mid-’90s. There may be other people who have worked with both more than I have, but there can’t be many of them. Along the way, I’ve formed a strong opinion: Linux is the better of the two.

(from eWeek, Leveling the Playing Field)

Interesting. Academic, since I have no intention of buying Vista at any price, but still, it’s interesting.

A story over at InformationWeek raised our hackles a bit with the headline “Copyright Protection A Boom Business” followed by the summary saying, “Cracking down on piracy contributed to 6.6% of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2006, according to an industry lobbying group.” Just sounds like more typically inflated and ridiculous claims about piracy that regularly stream out from the content industry, which then get presented to legislators as reasons why we need more laws to bolster their aging business models. Just one problem, though: the facts of the story don’t support the headline at all.

(from Techdirt, Copy Protection A ‘Boom Business’, Except When It Isn’t)

Just more lies from the Digital Rights Mafia.

A California court made it clear to Apple that if the company wanted to find out who leaked details of an in-development product to bloggers, they’d actually have to do it legally. That lesson cost the company almost $700,000 in legal fee reimbursement.

(from WebProNews, Apple Ordered To Pay Legal Fees For Bloggers)