Thanks to TLA for pointing out to me that the New York Times technology reviewers have an amazing sense of humour:
Count me among those who thought that RAM lost its contents reliably when it was unpowered. On this basis, I thought that a stolen computer with an encrypted swap file and encrypted home folders ought to be reasonably useless to data-thieves.
Except, it seems that it isn’t true. The gory details are here, courtousy of a group at Princeton University, who claim to be able to hack many forms of hard-disk encryption with little or no exotic technology.
The video is well worth watching, and the research paper itself remarkably readable.
The Register points out that life is about to get tough for ISPs.
What the Reg does not quite put its finger on is this: ISPs have been merrily selling customers ‘bandwidth’ that has been all but theoretical. Now they face the horrible prospect that people other than teens sharing illegal music are going to want to put that ADSL to full use. And unfortunately, they are renting the same bit of ‘pipe’ to hundreds of other people to.
Which is not to say that they are evil, bad or malicious, but just that it is a market where the prices have been low because of spare capacity in the network, and that someone had better start putting down more cable.
The Internet makes some wonderful things possible. Somewhere between art and prank is this five-minute event at NYC’s Grand Central Station. Not only well done, but well filmed.
The event was organised by ImprovEverywhere, according to the Going Underground blog.
In an interesting choice of words, John Edwards “suspends” his bid for the Democratic nomination, so that “History can blaze its path”.
That’s what history always does, of course, though it must hurt to just feel that one is in the way.
Also stepping aside is “They Mayor of America”, now no longer seeking the Republican nomination. Despite his leadership after 9/11, and his record as Mayor of New York, after reading pieces like this one in the N. Y. Times, I’m not surprised.
The remaining Republican candidates are much less complex figures in many ways, and stand a much better chance against a Clinton or Obama campaign, either of whom the Republicans will want to be able to paint as “divisive”. Giuliani, for all his strengths, simply isn’t what the Republican party needs for this election.
One can usually trust Jon Stewart for insightful comment not only about American politics, but the media coverage of it. Yesterdays segment is particularly good:
And if you enjoyed that, you’ll enjoy this follow-up segment well.
I just saw this in my RSS feed from Wired.com:
Israel is worried about Iran launching an all-out, “doomsday” barrage of rockets and missiles. So military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it “could take over completely” from flesh-and-blood operators. “It will be designed for … autonomous operations,” the commander of Israel’s air defense forces insists.
O Dr Strangelove, you live again.
So. Apple released a new Macbook this year, oddly called the Macbook Air. As names go, I think it has all the memorability of the Ford Focus. Still, as the Focus proved, you can produce a winning product with a bland name, and I think this is one.
As someone who travels a lot and hates large laptops, and with an other half who both has one of the world’s greatest aversions to checking in baggage as she zips through airports and has a history of choosing laptops on the basis of whether or not they will fit in an oversized handbag, I appreciate the new form factor.
As for the compromises they made to get there: well, the hard disk is small, but this is not a desktop-replacement machine, but a desktop-complimenting machine, even if Apple’s recent patent for something more exiting comes to nothing.
I was surprised to see that there is no ethernet port - ethernet joins modems in this brave new world in becoming a USB dongle (optional). Still, five minutes thought reassured me that this, too, was the right choice. In all the settings I am likely to use a laptop like this, connectivity either doesn’t exist or is provided almost exclusively by wireless. This will only increase to be the case in the future - wireless (whatever the limits or disadvantages of the technology) is much cheaper to deploy. If I am carrying an ethernet cable, the dongle is a minor addition. As for home use, well, it makes little odds whether I am plugging in a USB cable or a USB cable with modem.
Speaking of USB, the single USB port is a surprise, but again probably a compromise worth making for a laptop that will fit into an envelope but which still packs a full-size keyboard. In the setting where I want to plug in lots of devices (at home), a USB hub might quickly become a de-facto docking station. On the road, as it were, the single port is unlikely to be a real problem.
The lack of an optical drive is no real surprise (for 90% of the time my laptop’s one is dead weight), though watching Apple roll out their next OS upgrade to such users will be interesting. There are, still many large software packages that are not shipped in download-able form. Apple will sell a USB DVD drive to you at extra cost, of course, and have included software that well let you ’share’ the drive of another computer in what (from the videos) looks like a typically (for Apple) painless fashion.
I am less convinced, though, by the idea that we all want to give up our DVD collections in favour of ‘renting’ poorer quality content from Apple. Let’s be clear that it lacks a DVD drive because that is a compromise worth making in an ultra-portable machine, not because the DVD is even close to retirement - which brings me to discussing what this machine is not. This is not a desktop replacement, and sits poorly against even its junior sibling as a real replacement for anyone’s ‘main’ computer. In fact, unless you are going to buy an external DVD drive and probably some kind of external hard drive too, this machine is a parasite (though a benign one) on your more capable machines.
The processors are fast enough, but are still going to be sluggish running all the snazzier features of Leopard. More seriously, the Hard Disk, at a maximum of 80 gigs (or an expensive SSD 65 gigs) is plenty for word processing and work on the go, isn’t going to store your family photographs, your music collection, the podcasts you are creating, or the ever-growing collection of large files needed for work. Of course, on your home network, Jobs is ready with a partial solution, but nothing beats properly-sized internal hard drive.
Still, unless it has some unfortunate flaw, like a case that gets far too hot (and the aluminium does not inspire confidence given the Macbook Pro experience), this machine is a winner. It is for people who don’t pack the kitchen sink on the basis that they just might need it and are prepared to travel light. For them it is perfect - at least until they can get back home.
Oh, this is my first post in quite a while. Is anyone still out there?
There is a problem lurking right at the heart of much current computer software, and because it involves the law of so many countries, it is hard to see how it can be resolved.
Back when I was using computers for the first time, there were three basic models for software:
* Shrink-wrapped and very expensive, with onerous sounding End-User Licence Agreements
* Shareware on Magazine Disks - you could use a demo, but had to pay ($20 is the figure that seems to have stuck in my memory) to get a licence code and keep on using the program.
* Free programs, that came with a simple disclaimer and let you copy and share them with your friends. Probably also found on a floppy disk on a magazine.
What I didn’t know about at the time was that a ‘Copyleft’ movement was growing.
The Free Software Foundation are the foremost promoters of a model that says, as far as I understand it, “we want to let you do all the things that copyright law would usually prevent you from doing, we want to to copy, to modify, to distribute our software. But we want to control the way you do it.” Software created in the light of this philosophy runs much of the internet, and parts of the Mac OS operating system.
The FSF are the writers and promoters of a licence called the GPL. For very good reasons, the FSF want the GPL to be a contract. As a contract, it could be hard to enforce and open to challenge: under US law, to enforce it effectively, you would have to show that you have suffered economic damage as a result of a breach.
So the FSF would like Courts to interpret their software licences not as contracts, but as grants of licence. These can be more easily enforced, using the civil and criminal statutes on copyright law which, thanks to international treaties, are ever more standardised.
The problem is that Courts in the US seem not to wish to do this. The GPL - and similar licences - look to them more like a contract than a grant of licence.
And that could be a very big problem for the GPL, because it could render its most important features effectively unenforceable. Since the GPL makes it clear that software can be copied, modified and redistributed freely, courts may decide that there is little economic harm done by those who ignore the other conditions the licence tries to enforce.
Many people have an opinion on this, and the truth is that until there is more case law, especially in the US, who is right and who is wrong will simply not be known. Until then, however, there is a very serious risk that the whole concept of the GPL is holed below the waterline.
The FSF could, of course, re-write the GPL with its status as a contract in mind, but this would make enforceability hard, would mean that the contract law of different jurisdictions would have to be taken into account and - perhaps the biggest hurdle of all - would mean they would have to give up some of their most cherished legal-philosophical positions.
The moral is: be careful about saying that information wants to be free—you may get more than you bargained for.
Here’s something intriguing: Lieutenant Walter Haut, the public relations officer at the time of a famous crash of a UFO or weather balloon (depending on whether you are a ‘true believer’ or whatever non-conspiracy-theorists are), has released a posthumous affidavit offering aid and comfort to the UFO hunters.
A wicked sense of humour, a whistle-blower, or just a PR man who was left out of the loop? On the net, you get to decide.