Blackmoor Vituperative

The recording industry has spent (and continues to spend) millions of dollars on its litigation campaign against accused file-swappers, but if two lawyers have their way, the RIAA will have to pay all the money back. Not content simply to defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset in her high-profile retrial next week in Minnesota, lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer.

The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged “$100+ million” it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long.

(from Lawyers plan class-action to reclaim “$100M+” RIAA “stole”, ArsTechnica)

Give ’em hell, guys. It’s about time someone seriously took on the Digital Rights Mafia.

Google says that there are at least 18 Android devices on the way. Let’s hope that at least one of these has:

1. Everything the T-Mobile G1 has, including a physical keyboard,
2. a 4.5″ (measured diagonally) screen (but the same aspect ratio as the G1),
3. the Bluetooth DUN profile enabled (currently disabled on the G1, to my extreme annoyance).

Crossing my fingers…

It is not possible to prevent every possible security breach. However, some common sense measures will make such a breach significantly less likely to occur.

In a surprise move this year, Microsoft has decided to quietly install what amounts to a massive security vulnerability in Firefox without informing the user. […]

Microsoft pushed out its .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 update this February […] it installs the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant extension for Firefox, silently, without informing the user. If you had Firefox on your computer when this update was installed, you may be subject to some dire consequences. […]

Yes, that’s right — the long-time, well known security hole present in Internet Explorer that consists of essentially letting Websites install dangerous, untrusted code on your computer willy-nilly has now been shoehorned into your MS Windows install of Firefox without your knowledge or permission.

Worse yet, Microsoft isn’t satisfied with just giving you vulnerabilities without your permission or even your knowledge. It has also gone out of its way to ensure that you’ll have a difficult time removing the vulnerability from your system if you should happen to become aware of it. The Uninstall button for this extension in Firefox has been deactivated.

(from Microsoft may be Firefox’s worst vulnerability, TechRepublic)

To find out how to remove this security vulnerability, see Uninstalling the Clickonce Support for Firefox.

To my honorable Senators, Representatives, President, and sundry well-meaning but ultimately clueless bureaucrats:

Please stop spending my money on failed businesses. Let them fail. A business that can’t operate profitably is supposed to fail, and make room for competitors. By bailing out failed banks and failed manufacturers, you are hurting the ability of the USA to compete in the global marketplace, stifling the ability of start-up companies to replace those failed businesses, and wasting billions upon billions of dollars that do not belong to you.

Thank you.

I just woke up from a nightmare about getting my hair cut.

I was in someone’s room along with a friend of mine, several other friends of hers, and her roommate, and I was telling her about how I was letting my hair grow out, and she is talking about how I really should trim it to even it out, and she gets some scissors and just starts cutting!

And she cuts four inches off from a section. So now I have to let her finish. And so she keeps working on it, and takes forever.

She is laying on her bed along with one of her friends, and I am sitting on the bed and facing away from her, and her roommate is sitting facing away from me on the next bed, talking to one of her friends. Eventually the roommate gets pissed off because I keep reaching out and touching the other bed to keep my balance, and she leaves.

And I am burning up, and why the hell is this taking so long, and I am just too hot so I stand up to take off my shirt, and I wind up ripping it. And then I take off the t-shirt underneath, and then another t-shirt in a different color, and then a third, and a fourth, so no wonder I was so hot! Finally I am just wearing one t-shirt. And then for some reason I stumble and step on the hem of my slacks and I wind up tearing the crotch right out of them. So I am wearing the waistband and the zipper and the outer panels of my slacks, and everything else is just hanging down. And I stand there wondering how on earth this all got so out of control, when I didn’t even want a haircut, I was just here to say hi to a friend of a friend, and then I woke up.

Check this out this article from RoughlyDrafted Magazine: Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower.

I recently set up an old Dell Inspiron 2200 laptop to dual-boot Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 9. Neither distribution installed drivers for the Broadcom wireless-G card, but it was pretty straightforward. These instructions are for Fedora:


$ sudo yum install b43-fwcutter NetworkManager NetworkManager-glib NetworkManager-gnome
$ wget -c http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
$ bzip2 -d broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
$ tar -xvf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar
$ cd ./broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/
$ b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o


Then just select the wireless access point in Network Manager and enter the password, and you should be connected.

To think how much of a pain this was just a few years ago, it really is quite astonishing.

Here is a surprisingly cogent argument for the reform of copyright law. Check it out.

Philip Markoff is just like 85% of U.S. serial killers — young, white and male. When will we get that these guys are the rule, not the exception?

(from Why are we surprised when white preppy guys turn out to be serial killers?, AlterNet)