20 Jun 2004
Antipiracy bill targets technology

Note the disguise: we've got to save the children!!! This is simply unbelieveble. I'm not sure that it stands an ice cubes chance in Hell of passing, but the mere fact that it's going to get introduced as legislation is scary enough.

A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate would, if passed, dramatically reshape copyright law by prohibiting file-trading networks and some consumer electronics devices on the grounds that they could be used for unlawful purposes.

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Beastie Boys' New Album Silently Installs DRM Code

This is like selling somebody cyanide while insisting they're buying a hot dog. If a company installs software on my machine without my knowledge, let alone my permission, then they have just committed an act of digital vandalism, and when my rabid dog trial lawyer get's through with them, I'll be rich.

But it does show the level of desperation that's reaching into the record companies: what puzzles me most is why they can't see that this has the exact opposite effect of what they desired. They want increased sales, but just hearing about this makes me very reluctant to purchase any music on CD (or faux CD, as Philips refuses to let any copy protected disk carry the label). Thank the gods for iTunes.

After more than five years, the Beastie Boys have released a new album. It seems that the retail disc is bundled with a copy protection autoinstaller which silently silently puts itself onto the listener's computer. Many listeners are up in arms and some are venting their frustrations on the band's website.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

More Blog SPAM (and a solution implemented)

And I thought the attack on May 26th was bad. Today the SPAM maggots infested my writeback files over 500 times, with everything from Viagra and casinos to government grants and hot lolitas. I was seriously pissed off, but at least it prompted some actions - after I temporarily took writebacks offline and cleaned up the mess.

I have been thinking about this problem for some time, and most of the poffered solutions seemed, well, a bit thin. I could filter by IP, but what good does that do in a world of DHCP servers? I could kill on keywords, but then I'd lose the ability to comment myself on some topics, which may have some humor or even news value in addition to being (or at least containing the same keywords as) common SPAM shit. I could implement some Bayesian filtering scheme and get more surrealist tripe.

I could always have folks email their comments - but I get more than enough mail as it is. Or I could put up one of those images like Google or Yahoo! do, forcing you to squint and read a mangled string and type it in a box as text.

The last actually sounded like a better approach than any of the others, except for the fact that I personally find such things incredibly difficult. Yeah, that's right: at 47 I'm into bifocals. And reading some of the images they spit out can force me to remove my glasses and press my face against the screen: and still guess wrong.

So I thought a bit, and figured I'd give my variation on this theme a whirl. Rather than having you figure out what number to enter graphically, I've written a rather obtuse paragraph describing the process in terms no human could miss, but no bot should be able to catch. And worse - if a bot does hit it with a wrong entry, the page gives no indication that anything actually happend: no "Thanks for the writeback" or "Sorry" messages at all. Just a reloaded form.

We'll see if this works. It may have disabled trackbacks, but Hel, I'm not sure they ever worked in the first place, as I really haven't much of a clue about them to begin with. I sure have learned alot of Perl in hacking away on Blosxom, though, and that's a good thing. Much more of this and I'll be dreaming in regexp.

But if this scheme fails and I have to go thru what I went thru today again, writebacks are gonna hafta go until some other solution is found. These bastards are doing their level best to wreck the Internet, and I'm not going to sit idly by while they turn my online world into a continual advertisement.

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link