Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club

As Paul mentioned at our last meeting, the ABC has followed the BBC in crippling their programs with Digital Restrictions Management. The ABC, which has until recently been pretty good at digital distribution, is now selling us copies of programs we already paid for in a form which restricts how we can use these recordings.

Purchasing and viewing these videos requires the "integrated ABC Shop Media Player and its Downloads Manager", which only works on Windows and Internet Explorer. The videos cannot be played on any other software or device. The software is proprietary, so you have no way of knowing what it is actually doing, but among the features the manufacturer boasts of are:

• "Peer assisted content delivery technology". That is, P2P file-sharing technology like BitTorrent, only in this case the sharing is not under your control, and you can't opt out. The ABC Shop's customers are paying to receive this data, but they are not necessarily receiving the data from the ABC Shop; more likely from other ABC Shop customers. You are paying the ABC Shop for a service, even though you are just as much the provider of that service as they are.
• "PDF and Windows Media file control features." You don't have control over the files you pay for, the ABC Shop does. You may have paid for it, but they still own it.
• "A rich reporting and analytics tool that shows downloads as well as advanced metrics such as who has viewed which content, when, and for how long." Big Brother is watching you watching your videos.
  

DefectiveByDesign.org has the full story, and advice on what you can do about it.

Just to show I wasn't kidding at our last meeting when I said VirtualBox runs just about any operating system from within just about any operating system, here's a short video demonstration of VirtualBox running OpenSolaris and Windows on a Mac from the MacWorld video blog.

I've been using Firefox 3 for the past few weeks, and today it's officially released. I've found most of the new features to be unobtrusive and generally useful, so I'd recommend it to anyone. The folks at Spread Firefox are calling today "Download Day", and are attempting to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. You've got till 5:00pm UTC (2:00 am tomorrow morning our time), so get downloading!

Things that don't work are much more intriguing than things that do. At least, that's the premise of the Revealing Errors blog, a site devoted to those moments when a gust of wind disturbs the curtain and you catch a tantalising glimpse of a flustered little man frantically pulling levers.

Here a garbled shopping receipt will teach you about the concept of interpolation, a sideways error message will show you how to buy a long thin display screen when only short wide ones are readily available, and where in the world you might be if your mobile phone thinks you're in a town called "bucklame".

This appears to be a technology demonstration (requires Adobe Flash), but the intended purpose of the technology is a mystery to me, as I can't read Japanese. However it's also the most startling illustration I've seen in some time of the "uncanny valley" hypothesis, the idea that the more lifelike a simulated human is, the more cute or attractive it becomes, up to a point where it is realistic enough to suddenly become unnervingly creepy for reasons you can't quite put your finger on.

Poor Sony. It's as though they're deliberately setting out to upset as many people as possible.

The latest scandal is their generous offer to remove "bloatware" (or more properly, "craplets"), the software you never asked for, but which you get whenever you buy a new computer. Software vendors typically pay hardware vendors handsome sums to add partially functional "lite" or time-limited trial versions of their software to the systems they ship. The idea is that instead of being incensed by having to manually remove all this awful software, you will instead be so impressed with it that you'll want to pay money for the non-crippled versions.

Sony heard the cries of aggrieved customers over this practice, and very generously offered to charge it's customers $50 for the service of not delivering the software they never wanted in the first place. Predictably (to anybody not on the Sony payroll), this has gone down about as well as many of Sony's previous initiatives.

Sensing yet another customer backlash, Sony has acted swiftly to pour oil on this fire, by gamely admitting their mistake and offering to waive the fee for this "optimization", but it's still only available to customers who pay for the $100 Windows Vista Business Edition Upgrade. Can't you feel the love and respect for their home suckers... er customers?

In the lead-up to Document Freedom Day, a couple of interesting articles related to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format have surfaced.

OOXML is currently being proposed as a standard at the International Organisation for standardization (ISO), widely seen as push by Microsoft to dethrone the already-ISO-approved OpenDocument Format, and a decision on OOXML's status is expected from the ISO by the end of the month.

Tim Bray, the co-author of the XML specification has offered his thoughts on the pros and cons of Microsoft's proposed standard. As he is understandably anxious about being misrepresented or quoted out of context, i stongly recommend reading his piece in full, but here is my understanding (I stress my understanding) of what he's saying:

On it's own merits, OOXML is not a particularly good format, but neither is it as bad as it could be. The problem is that if it is approved by the ISO, Microsoft will use this as a propaganda weapon against the existing and technically superior standard. Microsoft has already made as many concessions to openness as they are likely to ever make just to get the format this close to standardisation, so there looks like is nothing to be gained from actually approving it, and no downside to rejecting it.

On a related note, one of the benefits said to have arisen from the standardisation process is the "Microsoft Open Specification Promise:", a covenant not to sue third parties for developing software that implements a number of Microsoft technologies, including OOXML, which may (or may not - software patent holders are notoriously cagey about specifics) be covered by patents held by Microsoft. The Software Freedom Law Centre has just published an analysis that suggests Microsoft's benevelolent gesture is indeed no more than a gesture, and third-party software developers who try to make software that interoperates with Microsoft's software are in practical terms not significantly safer from legal action than they ever were.

The Register reports that it's now ten years since people began ruining their hearing with portable MP3 players, rather than the portable cassette players we had to use for that purpose in my day. Predictably, the music industry, as part of it's unceasing campaign to prevent people from listening to music, went ballistic over it, but fortunately Apple came to the rescue with a music player that was deliberately broken in ways that kept the industry happy - or at least less petulantly aggrieved.

Sometimes I wonder why I read the user comments on Slashdot. Then along comes a gem like this:

serviscope_minor:

...I still fail to see how Web 2.0 will make an operating system irrelevant. The browser has to run on something. The server has to run on something too. And with the talk about "local web 2.0 apps", they might even be the same machine. Then you'll really need a good OS to schedule and mediate the needless and vast layers of extra complexity.

jez9999:

No, it's web browsers all the way down.

For those who are scratching their heads, turtles are being alluded to.

Image from Boy on a Stick and Slither copyright Stephen L. Cloud. Reproduced with permission.

In the first part of this Article, I talked about the technical reasons commonly given for deploying web content filtering software, or "censorware". If content filtering software worked as reliably as claimed, and if it were not easy to circumvent, these technical concerns may, if we are prepared to put moral concerns to one side, be considered justification for censorship. As I have already argued, the software is not reliable or unbreakable, and will never be so, because what is expected of it is technically impossible. As a purely academic exercise, therefore, let's take a look at some of the other problems censorware claims to address, and why it would be morally wrong to deploy censorware, even if the software posessed all the magical powers people expect of it.

We'll also take a look at just a couple of the countless ways to circumvent censorware.

As before, the opinions expressed in this post are my own, and do not reflect the opinions of any other member of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club, or the club as a whole.