Blackmoor Vituperative

More evidence of the absurdity of intellectual property law in the USA (specifically software patents, this time):

Microsoft loses appeal in Office patent spat

I’m all for the “little guy” standing up to Goliath. Nonetheless, software patents are an inherently bad idea. The sooner we rid ourselves of them, the better off all of us — including Microsoft — will be.

Google unveiled on Monday a new version of its Google Earth application, which features greater coverage and higher resolution, even showing people walking in some locations–detail you get with aerial photography and not usually satellites.

The downloadable Google Earth 4.0 runs on PCs, Macs and Linux-based machines and is available in localized versions in French, Italian, German and Spanish, according to Michael Jones, chief technology officer of Google Earth. Jones, speaking here at Google Geo Developer Day, said the improvements will eventually show up in the Web-based Google Maps site.

(from ZDNet, Google Earth zooms in)

While you are over there, check out Google Sketchup.

Fake crab meat. You know what I’m talking about: that sweet, white-with-red-stripes substance that you can get for about one-quarter the price of real crab meat. I love it. I can eat a pound of it at a time (preferably cold).

But I always wondered where this stuff came from. From a factory somewhere, certainly. But how is it made? Like sausage? Like lunch meat? Like soylent green?

Today I found out:

How products are made — imitation crab meat

Wow. I had no idea that the underlying technology that makes fake crab meat possible had been kicking around since the 16th century. That’s wild. I also would never have guessed that the sugar and sorbitol in fake crab meat served an essential manufacturing purpose. I always just figured it was there to make the product sweeter so that we fat-assed Americans would buy it.

The Internet really is amazing, you know. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

A major spammer who was accused of sending up to 25 million e-mails per day has settled a lawsuit with Microsoft and the state of Texas.

The settlement has cost Ryan Pitylak $1 million, as well as the seizure of many of the assets he accumulated during a short-lived career as one of the world’s worst spammers.

At the peak of his spamming activity, the 24-year-old Texas resident was listed as the world’s fourth most-prolific spammer by antispam group Spamhaus.

Now Pitylak is claiming something of an epiphany, saying he has seen the error of his ways and will dedicate his efforts to trying to rid the world of nuisance e-mail. He has even taken to referring to himself as an “antispam activist” in an apparent change of heart of epic proportions.

(from ZDNet, Spammer settles suit for $1 million)

Well of course he’s seen the error of his ways — his business has been shut down, and his only hope of recovering from this catastrophe is to switch gears and try to leverage his experience as a scumbag spammer into a consulting gig.

Maybe he really has learned his lesson. One million dollars is a lot of money to most individuals. But I’m still not sure that’s as good a deterrent as the alternative.

I currently work at Circuit City as a programmer/analyst. From time to time I make suggestions intended to bring my department into compliance with widely-known best practices concerning security, server administration, the development process, and so forth. Thus far, not a single one of these suggestions has been recognized as addressing a valid concern, much less implemented.

So it was with some interest that I read that Circuit City’s online forum was hacked to infect users with spam bots. To be fair to Circuit City, in this instance I do not believe they were any more irresponsible than most companies who run web sites — including my own. The patch for their forum software was released on 2006-05-17. Their forum was hacked on 2006-05-30. That’s less than two weeks.

Of greater concern to me is that the people who are the real victims of this hack, the visitors to Circuit City’s web site, would only have been affected if they were stupidly, inexplicably still using Internet Explorer as their web browser. What the hell is wrong with you people? For crying out loud, switch to Firefox already!

OpenOffice.org has released a statement concerning the so-called “macro virus” affecting OpenOffice. They say the same thing I said on Wednesday: it’s not a virus. It’s much ado about nothing.

Apparently there is a big hullaballoo in Europe over Microsoft wanting to add “Save as PDF…” as an option in the next version of Microsoft Office, with threats of lawsuits being tossed back and forth between Adobe and Microsoft.

To me, this is a big “so what?” Switch to OpenOffice (which has been able to “Save as PDF…” for years). Case closed.

Microsoft is starting a game of hide-and-seek with malicious code writers.

Windows Vista Beta 2, released last week, includes a new security feature designed to protect against buffer overrun exploits. Called Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), the feature loads key system files in different memory locations each time the PC starts, making it harder for malicious code to run, according to Microsoft.

“It is not a panacea, it is not a replacement for insecure code,” Michael Howard, a senior security program manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post announcing the feature. “But when used in conjunction with other technologies…it is a useful defense, because it makes Windows systems look ‘different’ to malware, making automated attacks harder.”

(from ZDNet, Vista plays hide-and-seek with hackers)

This has to be one of the dumbest things I have ever heard of. If today was April 1, or if I read about it on the Onion, I would know that this is a joke, but I think ZDNet and Microsoft are serious about this.

In other news, here are 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista. Take the article with a grain of salt, though: this pundit has been duped into believing the hype that Apple has a user-friendly user interface (which could not be further from the truth).

Quantum cryptography (QC) is still in a very early stage and there are very few commercial products available. But this doesn’t prevent researchers to look at new solutions. For example, physicists from the University of Wien, Austria, are testing qutrits instead of the more common qubits. These qutrits can simultaneously exist in three basic states — instead of two for the qubits. This means that QC systems based on qutrits will inherently be more secure. But if QC using qubits has been demonstrated over distances exceeding 100 kilometers, the experiments with qutrits are today confined within labs. For more information, read this abstract of a highly technical paper[…]

(from ZDNet, Quantum cryptography using qutrits)

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have spotted what they believe is the first virus for OpenOffice, the open-source rival to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite.

The virus, dubbed Stardust, is capable of infecting OpenOffice and StarOffice, which is sold by Sun Microsystems, a Kaspersky Lab researcher wrote on the Russian company’s Viruslist Web site on Tuesday.

“Stardust is a macro virus written for StarOffice, the first one I’ve seen,” the researcher wrote. “Macro viruses usually infect MS Office applications.”

The pest is written in Star Basic. It downloads an image file with adult content from the Internet and opens that file in a new document, according to Kaspersky’s posting.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)

So someone wrote a StarBasic macro that can download an image and display it in a new document.

Excuse me if this is an obvious question, but why, exactly, is this considered a virus? I suppose it could, theoretically, be a trojan, if you created a bunch of OpenOffice documents and gave them misleading names. But hell, you can do that with a text document. “Oh, no, that X-Men 3 script I downloaded is actually Catcher In The Rye! Gasp!”

It’s a macro that downloads an image. It is not a virus. It does not download a virus.

Does the macro execute a virus? Does it do any damage to the system? Install anything? Is it capable of infecting other documents or systems? Until it does at least one of these things, this is a total non-issue.

Not a virus, and not news.

I do like the way the article ends, though:

So far, Stardust is a proof-of-concept virus, which means that it was created to demonstrate that an OpenOffice virus is possible. The virus has not been sent out in the wild and is not actually attacking people’s systems.

The story is different for Microsoft Office applications: A yet-to-be-patched security hole in Word has been exploited in at least one recent cyberattack.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)