Blackmoor Vituperative

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

Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones, whose work has centered around the Open XML document format, now says the “format war” with OASIS OpenDocument is officially over. The winner, he claims, is both.

Jones made the statement in a blog post over the weekend following the release by Novell of an Open XML translator for OpenOffice.

Personally, I think this reply in the blog’s comments sums it up nicely:

There never was a war between ODF and OOXML. To declare that the war is over is therefore disingenuous. ODF was designed to be a comprehensive standard for document interchange. To that end, it has been adopted as an ISO standard and mandated by a growing list of organizations and governments around the world.

OOXML, on the other hand, was designed to fit a particular niche. It does that reasonably well, although even a cursory reading of the spec will reveal its poor design and even poorer architecture. There is little likelihood that it will be adopted as an ISO standard.

(from MSDN Blogs, OpenOffice support for the OpenXML formats)

While the US courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft’s FAT patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany. According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a “common namespace for long and short filenames”. This was based on Microsoft’s U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are “not based on inventive activity”.

(from OSNews.com, Microsoft Fails to Patent FAT in Germany)

It gives me some small hope for the future when I learn of isolated pockets of good sense out there in the world. Way to go, Germany.

In a new setback to Microsoft’s public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker’s Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

Tech staffers at NIST, a part of the Department of Commerce charged with promulgating technology standards, are scheduled to meet on April 10 in Gaithersburg, Md., to discuss their concerns about the new operating system, which Microsoft released to consumers in January amid much fanfare and to businesses in December with lesser flair.

According to the formal agenda for the meeting, NIST technology workers will attend a session entitled “Windows Vista Security” to discuss “the current ban of this operating system on NIST networks.” NIST officials weren’t immediately available to comment.

Word of NIST’s Windows Vista ban comes a week after InformationWeek revealed that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have both imposed similar blackouts on the operating system, as well as on Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

(from InformationWeek, Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista)

If this keeps up, it’s going to restore my faith in the competence of government employees (which I lost when I was around 16). What’s next? Dry water? Chaste teenagers? Proof that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago by an omnipotent creature suffering from MPD?

So-called Daylight Saving Time doesn’t save anything. It costs the USA hundreds of millions, if not billions, in lost productivity and wasted man-hours as people fiddle with clocks, miss appointments, correct scheduling errors, and otherwise observe this completely fatuous ritual.

It most certainly does not save electricity. This isn’t the 1940s: and homes and businesses keep their lights and heat on throughout the day, regardless of the time displayed on the clock. It doesn’t save lives: studies have shown that it actually costs lives as people’s sleep schedules are disrupted for days, causing an increase in traffic accidents. It doesn’t help farmers: farmers rise with the sun. It doesn’t help children: is it better for them to be going back and forth to school in the dark in the afternoon, when people are wide awake, or in the morning, when people are still groggy from having their sleep disrupted by this foolish Daylight Saving Time? In the middle of winter, it’s dark in the morning and in the evening anyway! So what does so-called Daylight Saving Time “save”? Nothing! It costs, and it costs us dearly.

It is time to put an end to this ridiculous ritual. Write, call, and email your federal and state representatives (DST is a federal scheme, but states can opt out of it), and tell them to stop screwing around with America’s clocks!

The FSF today released a paper that details the ways that hardware manufacturers can help the Free Software Community, as well as themselves. It all sounds like common-sense to me.

Although nobody’s crystal ball is clear on the impact that the change in the daylight-saving time rules will have on enterprise IT systems and applications, the problems could be bigger than most people realize.

That’s because IT shops have had less notice in dealing with the time change than they did for Y2K, and because the issue doesn’t have visibility at the highest levels of an organization as it did for Y2K.

“We are likely to see more issues than we did with Y2K because there is no visibility at the board and the CEO level, yet it’s a similar risk to the business,” said Tim Howes, CTO at data center provisioning provider Opsware in Sunnyvale, CA.

“Only server administrators and application support teams know what could happen if time stamps get misaligned. A lot of these administrators are sweating bullets right now,” said Swapnil Shah, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at mValent, a configuration and change management provider in Burlington, Mass.

(from eWeek, Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?)

So-called “daylight-saving time” is a colossal waste of time and money. How many millions of man-hours are squandered on this madness? How much productivity is lost, not just due to the foolish exercise of re-setting everything with a clock in it, but from the missed appointments and conflicted schedules that invariably result? How many people die needlessly in car accidents because a driver got too little sleep due to damnable “daylight-saving time”?

In fact, our societal sleep debt is so great that simply losing one additional hour of sleep due to the spring shift to daylight savings time can increase traffic accident rates by 7% (Coren, 1996b) and death rates due to all accidents by 6.5% (Coren, 1996c).

(from Psychiatric Times, Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency)

People die as a result of this nonsense. They DIE. More importantly, it’s an inconvenience to me, personally. So it’s time to do something about it.

Write your senators and representatives about this. A simple letter or email from enough people will get their attention. Just tell them you want to STOP re-setting all of your clocks and disrupting your sleep patterns twice a year.

Here is how you can contact your congress people:

Contacting the Congress
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/
Congressional Email Directory

You might also refer them to http://www.standardtime.com/.

Here is something worth a chuckle, if you find oppressive government mis-management amusing: Jim Rapoza names the worst tech-related bills of all time.

“Boo-hoo-hoo, people have caught on to our scheme to hold the world’s documents hostage. Boo-hoo-hoo, people are finally waking up and realizing that paying for MS Office for suckers. Boo-hoo-hoo, our sacred cash cow may only bring in 95% of the king’s ransom we expected because a few people have been educated thanks to IBM. Boo-hoo-hoo.” — Microsoft

See: Microsoft Accuses IBM of Limiting Choice for Interop, Standards

And what the hell is “interop”? Are people so lazy that they can’t be bothered to type “interoperability”? This is the same kind of sloppiness that gave us “donut”, “nite”, “thru”, and “tranny”. Still, Simon Jenkins does have a worthwhile counterargument.

Microsoft’s goal of getting governments across the globe to embrace its so-called “Open” XML format has hit roadblocks in both the United States and abroad.

In the United States, legislation was introduced in Texas and Minnesota the week of Feb. 5 to mandate the adoption of open document formats that will essentially preserve all documents in an open, XML-based file format that is interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications.

The formats will also need to be fully published without restrictions, available royalty-free and implemented by multiple vendors. In addition, they will have to be controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.

These new legislative moves follow the decision by Massachusetts to switch to the Open Document Format for its official documents, with sources telling eWEEK that even more states are likely to follow suit if these bills pass.

In fact, the ODF Alliance reports that Bloomington, Ind., has already moved to the format, while government leaders from California and Wisconsin have spoken publicly on the value of open standards and/or ODF.

Adding to the bad news for Microsoft is the fact that 19 countries have submitted “contradictions” to the bid to get fast-track approval of the standard by the International Standards Organization.

(from eWeek, Microsoft’s Open XML Format Hits Roadblocks in U.S., Abroad)

Way to go, Texas and Minnesota! Time to step up to the plate, Virginia….