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November 21, 2005 /

HEY BALLERS. There will exist, this week, an unprecedented Wednesday Night Basketball because that’s when Ian will be here. There will be games and pizza. There will be shouting. Tuesday Night Basketball will not happen, because we will need the evening to fortify the apartment against you barbarians, but if Scott and Yale and Kilz0r are available we should try to do the thing with the stuff, that night. Right?

PS If you have pledged money toward the Bring Ian Home Fund and want to give it to us so you get to sign the card, the next few days would be ideal for that–we’ll be handing it over Wednesday night. (If you have already paid but can’t be there, we will forge your signature.) Thanks very, very much to everyone who has helped with this!

The second time I’ve ever linked Slashdot. Via Downhill Battle.

November 17, 2005 /

Okay, so DC beat me to posting about Sony’s big fat recall, but now I’m scooping him: the rootkit contained GPLed de-DRMS code by DVD Jon! I know that makes no sense. Give me a second.

“DVD” Jon Johansen is a Norwegian hacker who likes to take things like DVD encryption and Apple’s iTunes digital rights management (DRM) software and meet them in a steel cage (and win). He releases the software he writes under an open-source license called the GPL, a legally binding agreement that says “hey, you can freely look at and reuse this source code, but only if you release code derived from it under the same license.” Like the Creative Commons license I use, the GPL is just working within existing copyright law.

Now, the XCP software that’s causing such a fuss–because it installs itself on your computer without your consent when you pop in a Sony music CD, is very difficult to find or remove, deprives you of your fair use rights and makes you vulnerable to a whole new brand of virus–needs a way to interact with the CD-ripping functionality of Apple’s iTunes. iTunes creates AAC files when it rips a CD, which are locked to specific authorized computers (although some of those restrictions may be lifted for ripping–I’m not sure, as I haven’t used it to rip CDs myself). XCP doesn’t want you to authorize any other computers to use the copies you make, though. It doesn’t want those copies to leave the ripping computer ever, at all. So the people who wrote it used DVD Jon’s open-source code for messing with iTunes DRM to make that happen.

In doing so, they created derivative software and kept it closed-source. They did not release it under GPL, violating the terms of the license under which they obtained the code. And they sold it millions of times over.

Here’s the point: this is a massive act of copyright infringement and piracy, on the same scale as the giant duplication rings of Southeast Asia that record labels and movie studios have been trying to stomp out for decades. First4Internet Software, which developed the technology to “stop piracy,” is one of the single biggest software pirates on the planet. Sony BMG paid them millions to be so, and distributed the results.

The Slashdot post I linked above says this comes from the “when-will-it-end dept.” This story is amazing. If we had plotted a fantasy scenario to bring down a record label, we probably couldn’t have come up with anything this good.

I fully expect you to correct this, interweb

November 17, 2005 /

I’ve tried and tried, but I cannot find a way to be cynical about the $100 laptop initiative.

Update 1348 hrs: But the interweb can, in “Problems with the $100 laptop” and the reaction from MetaFilter (both via Henry McEuen).

The arguments in the Fonly paper don’t change my stance, though. High saturation would lead to a pretty pathetic gray market, especially when you can eBay an old Compaq laptop (but not a million) for twelve bucks. And no, the requirements haven’t been met yet, and we don’t know what the consequences will be. Of course we don’t know what the consequences will be. That’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences. But we know what the consequences of broadening gaps in education and communication will be, and in this case I’m eager to let the proverbial street find its own uses.

I associate exclusively with overachievers

November 16, 2005 /
  • As my mother reports, my sister will be interviewed for an appointment to continue studying at Oxford. My predictions are on target so far! Yay Caitlan!
  • I have been thinking lately of what a little expletive I was from, oh, about ages nine through nineteen; my hyper, piping self-absorption stands in sharp contrast to Sumana’s high school martyr complex, but I still identify strongly with the behavior she describes. I wish my motivation had been as progressive as hers, and I wish I regularly could come up with the kind of beautiful phrasing she uses at the end of the column. (But read the whole thing first, dammit.)

November 16, 2005 /

Cool constrained-writing idea: Two Lines, Two Stories, One Day, where two guys trade first sentences and then have to write the rest of a short story. Some of the sentences are great! The stories themselves tend to lean a little hard on sting endings, but they’re still fun.

November 12, 2005 /

Arrested Development has been cancelled, which is also sad. Every year or two people are angry and vocal about the fact that Fox will air one brilliant show, and then, as soon as it’s been running for nine episodes, kill it off. It’s kind of amazing that Arrested Development lasted as long as it did. The simple fact is that network executives like audiences that watch many of their programs–the people who will watch not just the primetime hit, but the lead-in and the follow-up. Even if a show has decent ratings and a psychotic interweb following, it won’t last if its audience only watches it. Sic AD, sic Wonderfalls, sic Firefly.

Personally, I think TV Land, which gave the show a Future Classic award, should put its money where its mouth is. Arrested Development’s budget can’t cost that much more than the syndication rights to M*A*S*H or whatever. I mean, what are you paying for? Four sets and Ron Howard’s roboharem?

November 12, 2005 /

Sumana asked the other night whether there was any depth to which I wouldn’t sink for a story idea. I have discovered that there is. I just can’t try to pawn this off as fiction.

C O R Y

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PALO ALTO, CA — Researchers at Stanford University have announced that the hole in Earth’s ozone layer is rapidly being filled by another stratum of the atmosphere.

“We’ve done spectroscopic analysis,” said Doctor Cory Wonkette-Searls on Thursday, “and Dooce Gaiman at Washington State has obtained confirming results. The replacement gas is coming from the blogosphere.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in Antarctica right now,” he added. “Wheeoo.”

The ozone layer absorbs ultraviolet radiation, and has been depleted by chlorofluorocarbon pollution. The blogosphere, composed of superheated air and self-absorbed methane, is separated from life on Earth by several orders of magnitude.

November 10, 2005 /

On Halloween, I had the privilege of yelling at children during Lisa’s family’s Haunted Yard. It was awesome! They’ve been doing it for years, differently every time, and they claim that this one was their last–Lisa’s parents are selling that house. Fortunately, her sister-in-law Mary Beth captured the Haunted Yard experience on digitized video!

Night Vision Cam Power Activate! (32Mb)

Watch the upper right of the screen toward the end, when they’re getting their candy–the man chasing the children until they cry is the legendary Ken Moore. It’s not often Ken has the chance to show off that particular talent. The Haunted Yard was to Ken as World War II to Churchill.