Paris is poor, the police are (still) bastards, and Adobe breaks your firewall.

I don't often blog entertainment news, but this was too good to pass up. Paris Hilton has lost her inheritance. The current head of the Hilton empire, Barron Hilton (yes, that's his real name), say he'll give 97% of his fortune, about $4.4 billion, to a charitable foundation established by his father and run by one of his sons. Considering there are 22 other Hilton grandchildren, Paris' party budget just got a whole lot smaller. There's a word for the urge to cackle you're feeling, and its a German loan word - schadenfreude.

Returning to our regular programming, the Halifax Police have landed in hot water over their proposal to monitor security cameras at the Dome, a large nightclub, over the internet. Now, in fairness, the bar was the site of a brawl which resulted in 38 arrests not too long ago. The bar was able to get its liquor license back on conditions that it hire more bouncers and eliminate certain drink specials. You would think that would be enough, but being cops they hate parties and now have a great excuse to inch us ever closer to a surveillance state. If they are successful, it would be a first for Canada and other cities would likely follow suit. So file this one under maybe reasonable in this one case, but setting a very dangerous precedent.

In other invasions of privacy, users of Photoshop CS3 and some other Adobe products will want to set their firewalls to stop this little bastard: 192.168.122.2O7.net (note the 'O', not '0'). That's not a IP, folks, that's a URL and the domain is registered to Omniture, a company that Adobe pays to collect anonymous usage statistics. Okay, collecting statistics, so what? Everybody does that. What is so underhanded about this is that the URL is specifically crafted to get around your firewall and you have to manually block it rather than having a simple opt-out within Photoshop.

For you non-computer types, all the computers on your home network communicate to a router, which in turn talks to the internet. Every website, server, etc., has a numerical IP address which uniquely identifies it (the URL system was developed because IPs are too hard to remember). When you go on to the internet, only the router's IP is 'visible' (its assigned by your service provider). Behind that is your local network, in which each computer has a local IP and since only a few combinations are required, they usually all start with 192.168. (...) and most routers will let that whole block connect through onto the internet so that you can surf without your firewall or anti-virus flagging it. In this case Adobe and company have used this to get around any pesky software firewall, router, or anti-virus you might be running.

Anyway, that's enough paranoia for one day. Happy New Year, everybody!

Things I Wish I Could Get Rid Of

(1) The New England Patriots bandwagon: It's been going for a good 5-6 years now and with a 16-0 season under their belts, it may not be possible to stop this beast. But seriously, there is no need to gas on with the various forms of the Tom Brady is a god speech I have to sit through in every pre- and post-game show.

(2) The Denver Broncos inability to finish: Now moving to a team I am a fan of, the Broncos have just not been able to get it done where it counts the most: in the red zone and in the fourth quarter. I just finished sitting through the latest nail-biter, a 22-19 OT win after giving up a 19-3 lead in the fourth quarter. The Broncos' march to 7-9 was like watching marathon runners fall at times. The Broncos played 4 overtime games this season, and it was not until week 10 that they won a game by more than 3 points, a feat they only managed on three occasions.

(3) Year in Review Shows: I realize pretty much everyone is still on vacation, but no new content at all might be preferable to all these damn year in review lists. I've linked to a PCworld article, but CNet is an equally bad offender.

(4) Any show that includes the word Survivor and Idol. These shows had a very little whiff of novelty the first time around, but I've long since stopped watching or paying any attention to them and wish that CBS and FOX would stop running ads for them during every commercial break.

Its Xmas Eve!

Of course, as Futurama fans know, that means you might have a run-in with this guy.

All kidding aside, I got back last night from a very quick visit with my parents and will be spending the rest of my vacation at home. Having gotten the apartment in (semi) order, I decided to put my Sirius outdoor antenna out, which is always interesting because our building seems to swallow radio signals; what with its heavy brick, concrete, and steel construction. It probably doesn't help that the decks are concrete and we live on the ground floor, with 5 additional concrete decks above us. I think the antennae that comes with the home kit (in Canada anyway, in the US there seems to be much better selection of accessories) was designed to be screwed down to a roof or open wooden deck, i.e., for people lucky enough to have a house.

I have very little news to relate as most of the people who report it are on vacation, so I'll put in some subtle Christmas humour courtesy of Explosm.net:


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Welcome to Winter (Officially)

That's right, winter starts at 2:08 am AST tomorrow. Most people in Canada will tell you that winter started a month ago when the temperature fell into the sub-basement and it started snowing.

I'm also starting a much-needed vacation. And as the days slowly get longer from December 23rd and on, maybe there will come a day when I won't have to drive to work (7:10-7:55 am) and home (4:05 - 4:50 pm) in the dark. Grrr.

In corporate bastard news, a 17-year-old California girl has died while her insurance company did backflips about whether or not it would pay for a liver transplant that could have saved her. It shocks me that such life and death (literally) decisions are made by faceless corporations rather than the doctors on the scene. How about you save her life first and then worry about who's going to fork over the cash? Or almost as good, and better in the long run: call your congressmen and tell them that you'd prefer that some of that bloated military budget get redirected to creating a universal health care system.

Okay... think happy thoughts... go watch the Buzz report blooper reel over at CNet. Gets a smile even out of grumpy old bastards like myself.

Shop until trampled by an angry mob.

Another day, another tech journalist bemoaning his inability to get a Wii. Daniel Terdiman writes " By now, it had become abundantly clear that last Sunday was the last, best chance to get a Wii anywhere in the civilized world." Yeah, duh. An item that has been so hot as to be pretty much unavailable for the past several months is nowhere to be found on December 19th, with a mere 6 shopping days left until Christmas.

Terdiman does mention the possibility of getting the widely available PS3 to "ward off the anger of disappointed kids on Christmas Day." Oi vey! If your children are will sit an sulk all Christmas day because you didn't get them the exact present they were hoping for, they are so greedy, selfish, and spoiled, you should consider re-evaluating your parenting skills.

But since everyone is so hung up on having a Wii for a completely arbitrary date, maybe you should pick March 30th. Once the Christmas rush is over, demand should soften to the point were Nintendo can dig itself out of the hole, maybe combined with another production increase.

Because, yeah, it's cool, but like most such things, as we say on the east coast, it ain't the end of the world. A sign of the downfall of western civilization, yes, but we can argue about the effects of a decadent culture later.

In a totally unrelated story, the US Senate has given its stamp of approval to a bill amendment calling on the Food and Drug Administration to study the safety of meat and milk from cloned animals before allowing for commercial sale, reports the wags at Wired. I can pretty much predict the result of this study now. Since cloned animals are identical to the animals they were cloned from, the meat and milk will likewise be identical and perfectly safe. Unless there is some artifact from the cloning process, which does not result in obvious deformity (not that that is totally unheard of), eating what is essentially a copy of something is not likely to hurt you. You have a much better chance of getting food poisoning. While I can see the FDA wanting to perform its due diligence, the fact that this is coming out the the Senate smacks of the lobbying work of various activist groups that have for years been spreading fear of genetically modified foods. Which, if you ask me, is born from baseless speculation and general fear of the new.

Another Wired story doles out this year's Vaporware awards, (mostly) tech items that have been spinning around the rumor mill for a long time but have yet to get an official release date. The perennial winner, the game Duke Nukem Forever, is back after, what, 10 years in development? I would just like to note that the short name for the game is DNF, which in racing jargon means did not finish. I find a satisfying symmetry in that.

Old Man Winter Kicked My Ass

Much of New Brunswick got snowed in by a winter storm yesterday and last night, as did pretty much all of eastern Canada and New England. I did make an attempt to get to work, however my car was so badly stuck that I soon realized I wasn't going anywhere. Even when the sun had finally come up it ultimately took an hour and a half and two people pushing to get my car out. Turns out the snow had blown in underneath it and filled the ground clearance. I still have some heavy snow packed in around the front suspension which hopefully will fall off the next time I drive it.

This was a good day to stay home, all the schools were canceled in the Saint John area and I presume the whole province, since the storm was worst to the north. I was able to book the hotel for an upcoming trip to New York the last weekend in March.

And now for something completly different.

Yesterday, I ranted about a very intelligent piece from Ars Technica which was itself based on a very insightful statement. Today, we'll change pace a bit and fume about another Ars Technica report about how out of touch with the rest of the world the RIAA really is.

It is the considered opinion of this half-baked organization of hired thugs that a back-up of a CD stored on a computer, iPod, and the like is an illegal and unauthorized copy (i.e. stolen), even if that copy is of media you own, made for your own use, and never transmitted to anyone else. Except that that is the very definition of fair use, which is decidedly legal. Argh!

The RIAA head weasel, Jennifer Pariser, testified at a review of the (hated) Digital Millennium Copyright Act that:

"When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song...a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'."

What is this woman's problem?! When did individuals stop having any rights! We think she wasn't hugged enough as a child. Or maybe it was when th DCMA was enacted and copyright became all about propping up a number of useless, outdated, and impotent business models that the RIAA and MPAA's clients depend on to get rich and stay that way at all cost.

Moving right along to my next rant, Wired today reported on an item also mentioned on CNet a week or two ago. The US Military now has a pain beam.
After initially talking about the potential uses of the beam, which is based on 95 GHz microwaves, the writer apparently came to his senses and wrote about potential abuses of the technology. How about this: the beam has such a high frequency that it only penetrates the outermost few millimeters of a person's body. This is because radio signals above 13 GHz are more readily absorbed by water, which then releases the energy as heat. This is the physics that make microwave ovens work and also is why modern satellite TV (which tops out around 12.5 GHz) experiences rain fade.

In the case of the pain beam, it causes the victim to experience an intense burning sensation which is so painful that in tests no one stayed in the beam longer than 5 seconds. Because of the shallow penetration, the beam is non-lethal and leaves little or no physical damage. Which I suppose the security types out there think is wonderful because it makes it easy to keep someone out of an area or away from a person or vehicle equipped with the beam.

It also makes it the absolute most effective method of torture ever devised.

Think of it, a device that allows the user to put another human being in intense pain for practically any length of time without killing them or even leaving a mark. The potential for abuse boggles the mind.

For now, the technology is prohibitively expensive and involves mounting the multi-million dollar device on a Hummer. I sincerely hope this one gets killed in the development phase, but somehow I doubt the American military will be able to resist cranking out as many of these as possible.

I guess the connecting theme of these two rants is that we live in troubling times when we as individual citizens are increasingly under threat by organizations that don't give a fuck about us, only about that most addictive of all illusions, the illusion of control.

Consider Yourselves Schooled

When Doris Lessing took home this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, the 88-year-old author had this to say in her acceptance speech about the decline of printed books (as quoted in Ars Technica):

"And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc."

Wow. We just got schooled. As a blogger, but also someone who does read books in his spare time, I must say she has a point. Too many people never read anything more complex than a newspaper. Just so you know, most newspapers are written to a grade 8 reading level. I do wonder if thats the ultimate stage for many of us; a vocabulary considered by our educators to be that of a fourteen-year-old. Then I check what's on network TV, and my suspicions are, unfortunately, confirmed.

George Carlin once asked "where are all the bright young people of conscience, ready to step in and lead the way?" He then answers himself "... everyone's at the mall!"

Not to say that all the books out in your local big box bookstore are great either, perhaps the point is that we all need to be a bit more discriminating about what we read, regardless of the medium.

HDTV reveals conspiracy?

Conspiracy theorists, start typing. A documentary filmmaker covering a economic summit in Montebello, Quebec last summer say he's seen something odd in his footage after watching it on a HD monitor. He says the film shows what appears to be an undercover police officer walking through a group of protesters outside the summit to strike one of the riot police at a nearby barricade. If that's so, one could suggest that the police were trying to start a riot, thereby having every reason to get rid of the crowd. Beyond the original CBC report, this has yet to turn into any kind of scandal, but if true it paints a disturbing picture about the condition our respective countries are in.

Not that I'm totally happy to have activism for the sake of activism, because sometimes it leads to dumb stunts. On Tuesday, about 300 activists targeted Montreal hotels to, get this, raid the buffets and give the food to the needy. The plan was foiled and I'm sure more than a few of these idiots got beaten up by hotel security for their trouble. You could all save yourself time and trouble, not to mention trespassing convictions, simply by donating to your local food bank.

In nerd news, Dell has released a World of Warcraft themed laptop. All you have to do is throw down $4, 450 US, which may sound a bit steep even for a high-end system, but by the looks of this thing, it's not like you'll have a girlfriend or boyfriend to spend the money on.

Linux Hippies Rejoice!

I'm not sure quite when this happened, but at some point universities got drafted as copyright police. To that end, the MPAA recently released a network monitoring kit that would help universities find P2P users so that they could duly be sued for money they likely don't have, having spent it on tuition (oh, irony). Now why the copyright nazis insist on going after people in the lowest income brackets eludes me, it is not only bad policy but a bad way to make money. Bad policy aside, the MPAA is now in violation of the very rules it commonly uses to beat up on unsuspecting citizens. The toolkit was based on, of all things, the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wait, using open source software to police draconian copyright laws? Wait, it gets better. They failed to make available the source code for the toolkit, which is a violation of the general public license under which Ubuntu is distributed. Now, of course, the folks that oversee the Ubuntu project tried to get in touch with the MPAA and when the MPAA ignored them, the ISP that hosted the toolkit download site got slapped with... a DCMA take-down notice. BOOM! See that, we can abuse the legal system too! Read all about it on Ars Technica...

While you're there, read the story about Microsoft's "study" that proves that internet exploder is inherently safer than Firefox. I wonder, when did "study" come to mean "a biased, unfounded, unsupported opinion; a statement with no proven factual basis." Sigh.

The Physics of (Media) Spin

Okay, first I write about turkey hangovers and then I don't post for over a week, not having had any turkey. Brain farts are a common affliction.

Its snowing in most parts of Canada as a result of three weather systems, one on the west coast, one on the east coast, and one somewhere to the right of the middle. Which made the drive home today very interesting. It started snowing in earnest about 10:30 this morning and when the time to drive home rolled around conditions where sufficiently nasty that it took me fully 35 minutes longer than usual to get home. I don't expect the drive in tomorrow to be any better, best case scenario is I'll duck in behind a snow plow and follow it in.

The Globe and Mail really spun the weather today for all it was worth, perhaps trying to prove that weather stories can be exiting. The story was headlined "Wild weather hits coast to coast" and contained words like "blast", "treacherous", and "plunged." Plunged I say!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071203.wcanweath1203/BNStory/National/home

I found the language to be a bit much.

Another odd news item came my way via the CBC who reported on a potential solution to the Alberta housing crisis... shipping containers! Erm, yeah, as in the big corrugated metal boxes that are usually used for oceanic shipping but sometimes by train or truck. It seems all you have to do is put in some windows, a door, insulation, a phone jack and some power outlets and its ready to go. A company in Edmonton is taking orders right now, with the units themselves being made in China.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2007/12/03/container-housing.html

I don't really think I'd be happy living in what is essentially a tricked-out garbage can, but if the housing shortage in Alberta's cities is that bad I suppose everyone will just have to channel their inner Oscar the Grouch.

In some old news, I just have to put in my two cents regarding the Ars Technica story about the Senate going after "the internet" as a breeding ground for terrorists.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071128-congress-to-examine-the-internet-as-a-tool-for-homegrown-terrorism.html

This is about a bunch of rich, middle-age men waking up one morning and discovering that the general public has access to information (gasp!) not provided by their all-knowing government. And they aren't happy about it. Sure, I could go on the internet and learn to make a bomb. I could also look up a recipe for strawberry tarts. That doesn't mean that I'm going to do either of those things. Its called free speech, you old-money pricks, and you better get used to it. I can see the Senators then demanding that the country responsible for this darned internet be bombed only to find out that - wait - the technology underlying the internet is essentially an American invention! D'oh! They will then promptly bomb Iraq for lack of a better idea.

And that's the way I spin it.