Since I really don’t have much to add to any of the current political discussion (Stern versus the FCC, Bush’s campaign advertising—hey, it’s 1992 all over again!), and I’m running out of time to meet my “one post per GMT day quota,” I figured I’d talk a little about my new laptop—inspired in part by Michael Jennings’ blogging about his.

From Martin Devon a few days ago: a New York Times article on how TiVo designed their signature “peanut” remote control. I agree with Martin—it’s by far the best remote control I’ve ever used, and the only reason (besides the cost) I haven’t ditched my array of remotes for a universal all-in-one solution.

The only problem I’ve seen: the little plastic thingy on the TiVo button comes off after several years’ use—so far, it’s happened to two of the three TiVo remotes I’ve had. Oh, yeah, and it eats batteries like no remote I’ve ever used—probably because it gets far more use than any remote I’ve ever had before.

In lieu of accomplishing anything worthwhile today (except more job applications), I replaced the server that Signifying Nothing runs on this morning. The previous server was a discontinued Compaq corporate desktop box (Pentium II 300 MHz) I picked up an eon ago for $400 from Buy.com with 160 MB of RAM and a noisy* 20 GB hard drive. The current server is a tower-case Pentium III, 450 MHz with 256 MB of RAM and a 60 GB hard drive that is basically the reconstituted version of a (then top-of-the-line) PC I paid good money for from Quantex about five years ago—the only newish components are two 10/100 Ethernet cards† and a spare CD burner I had lying around the house. I did a fresh Debian sarge install using the Beta-2 installer from CD-R (which went smoothly after I gave up trying to do a network install instead), then updated to unstable and a 2.6.3 kernel (the last part being the most painful step, since I had trouble with the initrd support until I finally gave up on that).

I was hoping the new box would be less noisy, but to no avail (fan noise has replaced drive whining)... I’ll probably have to clear some space and move the box under the desk to get some noise relief. Actually, what’s more likely is that I’ll get my replacement laptop in a few days then go back to rarely using the computer that is right underneath the SN box, so the noise won’t bother me any more.

Lily Malcolm visited her local Radio Shack and CompUSA stores today, and came back with this nugget of knowledge:

If the CompUSA people really knew much about computers, they wouldn’t be working at CompUSA.

In all seriousness, there are a number of solutions to the problem of getting data from one’s old computer to one’s new computer. If both computers have an Ethernet jack, the preferred option is to either (a) connect both computers to an Ethernet hub or switch using regular Ethernet cables or (b) get a “crossover Ethernet cable.” You can also get something flashy that will walk you through the procedure, like LapLink, but I’m pretty sure the basic software is built into recent versions of Windows… you may need to set up “Home Networking” to do it.

Me? I usually just pull the hard drive out of the old PC, slap it in the new one, and copy the files that way. It’s normally faster, but far more intimidating for the novice.

It seems the “enterprise web filter software” that Brock tested in September isn’t the only popular censorware product that blocks a large number of weblogs; Eric of Classical Values took SonicWALL’s web filter for a spin and, shall we say, was unimpressed. (Link via Tim Sandefur.)

Seen in my Apache log file just now:

172.200.37.120 – - [14/Feb/2004:01:07:25–0600] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1” 200 – “http://www.drudgereport.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004”
172.200.37.120 – - [14/Feb/2004:01:07:28–0600] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1” 200 – “http://www.drudgereport.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004”

Now it’s possible that someone is doing this to discredit Drudge; the IP resolves back to an AOL dynamic IP address, a Google search turns up several sites where anyone can download this tool, and Drudge has plenty of Google PageRank™ already; he doesn’t need to use a referral spammer to boost it.

In any event, I have reported this incident to AOL’s abuse system. Those with particularly devious minds may want to see if this robot will follow a HTTP redirect (301/302) to a bot honeypot or follow an infinite redirect loop.

Kate, who’s been a recent victim of some serious crapflooding, is probably shutting down Electric Venom, barring a miracle. EV’s always been one of my favorite blogs, and I’m sure Kate would appreciate whatever help she can get in finding a new hosting provider.

Update: Panic attack over (well, for me at least). Phew!

Will Baude has been inquiring about the DVD industry’s Content Scrambling System (CSS) and its associated region (or locale) coding system. Today he asks:

The question that then plagued me was why DVD-players went along with this system. It makes sense that DVD makers would like the ability to price discriminate in different markets, but wouldn’t Dell disk drives be worth more if they could play discs from all regions? Who gains from the limited switching?

DVD player manufacturers have to license the patents of the DVD Copy Control Association (as well as patents for other systems, like the Macrovision video copy protection scheme) in order for their players to legally play DVDs. The DVDCCA’s licensing provisions require manufacturers to implement the region locking scheme—thus, you can’t get a license to produce a DVD player if you don’t implement the scheme.

Now, some far-east manufacturers evade this requirement by conveniently “forgetting” to lock the DVD region settings of their players, or by leaving secret menus available to allow people to break the DVD region coding scheme. And, it is my understanding that unlicensed players based on the “DeCSS” code circumvent this region lock scheme completely, but I don’t own any DVDs from outside region 1 (USA/Canada), so I’ve never tested this for myself.*

Arguably, the whole system is illegal under WTO rules, which specifically prohibit schemes like region locking and rules against “reverse imports” that are designed to maintain regional price differentials. But given DVD manufacturers’ interests in maximizing their profits (particularly in often egregiously overpriced Region 2 markets like Great Britain) don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

Michael Jennings discusses the slow but steady progress of LEDs in replacing traditional incandescent lights. As he notes, they’ve become particularly common in traffic signals because they are brighter, last much longer, and have significantly lower power consumption than traditional lights.

One more thing to add to the list for when I become rich and famous (hah!).

James Joyner notes the existence of something called the “ClarkBot”, the author of which encourages Clark Dittoheads to engage in something called “rapid response.” No doubt Bush and Dean variants aren’t far behind…

I discovered Christmas Eve that the reason I thought that my mother’s new cell phone—my old cell phone—wasn’t working for the past week, since I added it to my account, is that I put the wrong phone number for her line in my new cell phone’s built-in phone book.

So, the moron scoring goes: Me 1, SprintPCS customer service 0. At least it made the day of the CSR who handled my call.

The following IP addresses will no longer have access to Signifying Nothing; they almost certainly host spam crawlers:

66.98.208.4
207.207.48.165

Thanks,

The Management

Blogospheric navel-gazing is always a pleasant diversion; today, Dan Drezner looks at the dispute over whether or not “portals” are the way to go for budding bloggers. Dan correctly points out that only a few bloggers can sustain the level of traffic needed to make the “portal” approach worthwhile—and this applies as much to the “techbloggers” as it does to the “warbloggers” that the Ecosystem statistics are biased towards.

I, like Dan, think Will Baude’s comment is worth repeating:

Tyler Cowen thinks that there are so many good blogs out there nowadays that the most widely-read blogs will be those that “cream-skim” (that is, taking the most useful posts from a wide variety of blogs).

Pardon, but an RSS feed can do that. The reason I don’tread Instapundit is that I don’t particularly agree with Glenn Reynolds about what’s wheat and what’s chaff. Look at my blogroll, which contains a number of fairly low-circulation blogs, and you could probably guess that.

I think the value of “portal blogs” will be somewhat reduced when people figure out how to do category-based aggregation (or topic-based aggregation) of RSS feeds—ironically, bringing weblogs closer to the early 1980s topic-based discussion format pioneered on Usenet before much of its value was destroyed by trolls, crapflooding, and spam. Where the portal blogs like Instapundit will still win, however, is in the area of editorial control—separating the wheat from the chaff, to borrow Will’s phrase—by not only saying “this post is on a topic you may be interested in” but also “this post is a good post on that topic.” To some extent you can add some of that control by filtering the aggregated RSS material against a trusted OPML list, but it’s still not quite the same thing as having a human editor.

In the end category-based aggregation (CBA) will not only help end-users, it will also make it easier for portal editors to pick and choose from a wider variety of blogs. I don’t know how many blogs Glenn Reynolds reads a day, and I suspect he gets most of his links to less-well-known blogs from reader submissions. A mere mortal can only read so many blogs, even with an RSS reader. CBA should make it easier for the portal editor (and for everyone else) to scour more of the breadth of the blogosphere for good material, which should be a win for everyone involved—more eyeballs for budding bloggers and higher quality material for the portals.

Joy approvingly points to a Wall Street Journal piece by Walter Mossberg that starts by saying:

Windows is riddled with security flaws, and new ones turn up regularly. It is increasingly susceptible to all kinds of viruses, malicious Trojan horse programs and spyware. As a result, Windows users have been forced to spend more of their time and money supporting their computers.

Almost every week, they are supposed to install patches to the already patchy operating system to plug these security holes. And every few months, it seems, Windows users must quake in fear as some horrible new virus is created by the international criminal class that constantly targets Windows.

But for consumers and small businesses, there’s a simple way out of this endless morass: Buy an Apple Macintosh computer. There are no viruses on the Macintosh’s excellent two-year-old operating system, called OS X. And the Mac is a terrific computer—as good as, or better than, Windows for the typical computing tasks important to mainstream users.

Now, Mossberg does correctly point out that OS X isn’t completely immune from virii, trojan horses, worms, and the like (sometimes collectively referred to as “malware,” although these days pretty much any “malware” will just be called a “virus” even if it isn’t one). But his argument still rests on a few problems:

1. The “security through obscurity” fallacy: “In addition, Macs constitute such a tiny share of the world’s computers that they just aren’t an attractive target for virus writers and hackers.” True enough; however, that never stopped people from writing malware for earlier versions of the Mac OS, nor did it stop malware on a plethora of relatively obscure platforms in the past (at its peak, the Amiga probably had more virii going around than PC operating systems of the day, despite a much smaller market share).
2. “OS X doesn’t enable users—or hackers who hijack user accounts—to alter certain core files and features of its Unix underpinnings.” True enough; however, as OS X users get used to typing their password to gain administrator access (as they are prompted to do with every Apple-sponsored update), social engineering hacks—like fake update prompts—will be easy enough for malware authors to incorporate into their tools.
3. OS X ships with a lot of software that traces its lineage back to the 1970s Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) of Unix; while some of it has been audited, most notably by the OpenBSD project, some of it has not been. Until the past decade, network security was just not a serious concern of Unix programmers, and there could easily be holes lurking in some of the software included, particularly in server-side applications (which, to Apple’s credit, are normally disabled by default).

OS X, and other Unix-based and Unix-like operating systems like Linux, are no panacea for bad security practices in general. As Microsoft improves the lackluster security of its offerings, it is likely that we will see more problems as the proverbial “honeypot” that is Windows becomes less appealing to hackers.

Speaking of OS X, Mark Pilgrim has a lengthy overview of what’s new in OS X 10.3 (aka Panther).

Tom at Crooked Timber has a good piece on Diebold’s shenanigans with its electronic voting machines. Partsanship aside, I inherently distrust any voting machine that doesn’t keep a paper trail—whether we’re talking about those big old lever-based things that Mayor Daley loved so much or modern touchscreens.

Joy has the scoop on plans by various government sponsors and the Internet2 project to try the first wide deployment of IPv6 (once called IPng) in the United States, expanding on efforts like the 6bone to see if IPv6 is ready for widespread use.

For now, tech-savvy users interested in experimenting with deploying IPv6 can obtain IPv6 service via Freenet6; you can even obtain your own public 2**48 address block if you’re so inclined—and, perhaps more importantly, if you’re prepared to deal with the security implications of having globally-routable addresses behind your home router. Freenet6 works by using a IPv6-in-v4 tunnel to get IPv6 traffic to the IPv6 backbone, then routing your packets normally.

As Joy notes, the IP address shortage is somewhat less critical in North America—largely because North American ISPs had huge allocations of IP addresses which they’ve been able to effectively subdivide and pass down using CIDR—but nonetheless we’ll need to make the transition eventually, if only so we can keep talking to the rest of the world.

Jeff Taylor at Hit and Run finds it odd that the Chinese astronaut didn’t see the Great Wall of China from space.

Via Calblog, I found this neat county-by-county map of the recall results; there’s all sorts of cool tables available here. It’d be nice if our state could put together something similar for this year’s gubernatorial race too.

It’s a good thing after all that I stopped back by work this evening, as OS X 10.2.8 has come back from the dead (after being pulled about ten days ago due to some networking problems). Not quite as smooth as typing apt-get upgrade, but then again, what is?

Christopher Genovese writes about his tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center today; it’s definitely worth a read—and not just because the people who pay my salary have experiments running out there.

Eugene Volokh criticizes a Slate proposal for compulsory licensing of music for sharing on the internet. A tax on recordable media (blank CDs, hard drives, MP3 players, etc.) would be paid to some organization like ASCAP and BMI, which would then distribute the money (minus administrative expenses, of course) to the artists, based on estimated share of downloads.

Eugene points out how easy it would be to game the system, by any organization able to marshall enough volunteers to download the song over and over. He imagines the NRA recording “Second Amendment Blues”. Loyal NRA members might download the song over and over again in order to increase the NRA’s share of the royalties, with the more technologically sophisticated writing scripts to facilitate this. Other interest groups get in on the game as well. The net result (no pun intended) would be a massive waste of bandwidth, with no real incentive to compose good music.

But as Eugene says, “In the radio context, it’s much harder to play this sort of game—ASCAP and BMI, the royalty collection and distribution bodies, rely on sources of data about sales that aren’t as easy to dramatically throw off.”

So why not use the same sources of data that ASCAP and BMI rely on for distribution of their royalties? As I understand it, ASCAP and BMI rely on the frequency of radio play to determine the share of royalties that an artist will receive, even for those royalties that come from live performance venues and the DAT tax. Why not use frequency of radio play to determine the share of royalties under this new proposed system?

Virginia Postrel is apparently going all Wi-Fi.

I’m not sure I have too many thoughts to add on the issue. My Wi-Fi (wireless Ethernet) travels have been somewhat crippled by a laptop that currently refuses to recognize any PCMCIA card that requires an interrupt when running under Linux (and is generally becoming downright hostile to Linux in its old, semi-broken age—but that’s a story for another day). More to the point, short of war-driving, to my knowledge there isn’t much of a way to know where you can go and grab something to munch on while you take care of business via Wi-Fi. A few coffee shops in Ann Arbor advertised free Wi-Fi in the window, and the downtown Borders advertised T-Mobile’s service, but I only know that because I was walking around on foot and saw the signs. Not to mention that the one day I tried to use Wi-Fi in one of these establishments, the Internet access was out due to the after-effects of the Northeast power failure (the hot chocolate was good, but I wouldn’t have paid three bucks for it if I wasn’t getting some Wi-Fi too).

I do like the idea of malls installing wireless access, although I suspect the operators of most declining malls are so generally clueless that they won’t take advantage of it. And perhaps there is something to having Wi-Fi in the “fast casual” restaurant sector—restaurants like Fazoli’s and Steak ‘n Shake. But for now, here in the technological boonies such innovations seem very remote.

Steven at PoliBlog mentioned the wireless order-taking technology this morning too; that seems like the most promising direct business use of Wi-Fi at the moment, although similar (but less advanced) technology is already in widespread use by big retailers for inventory management, and has been for some time.

Kevin Drum has a lengthy post about his nightmare updating his Windows XP home system to fix the vulnerability exploited by the Blaster worm. At the end of the post, he writes:

POSTSCRIPT: Feel free to do all the Microsoft bashing you want in comments, but please don’t turn it into yet another tiresome Windows vs. Mac thread. Most of us Windows users actually have excellent reasons for our choice of operating system, and hearing about the alleged superiority of Macs for the thousandth time won’t change that. So please please please: just don’t do it. OK?

POSTSCRIPT 2: That goes for Windows vs. Linux too.

This is exactly why Microsoft operating systems and applications have so many security problems. No matter how bad it gets, Kevin is not going to switch to a competitor. You can bitch and moan all you want, Kevin, but as long as you’re giving your money to MS, they have no financial incentive to improve their software.

Obligatory disclosure: I’m president of the Memphis Linux user group, GOLUM. And before I became a Linux geek, I was a Mac geek.

Want to know how bad SoBig.F is? Check out the mail statistics for our department’s web server (relativity)—if you can get through, that is. We’re averaging about one SoBig message every five minutes, on a system with around 30 active user accounts. By contrast, the campus email server (sunset) has about 10,000 user accounts—you do the math. The net result: a swamped commercial link.

Thankfully it looks like the university has managed to cut off the on-campus offenders, but off-campus is a whole other story…