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!
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!
Labels: Adobe, bad cop, corporate bastards, Paris
posted by Colin at
9:08 p.m.
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