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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: August 2001 (page 1 of 10)

Coming soon to an airbase near you — the space bomber.

In other EverQuest news, another youth decided to make his wishes come true without Verant’s help — by breaking into their corporate computer systems, and the home computer of Brad McQuaid, the original producer of the game.

Lots of DMCA news this week. First, Salon has the reactions of various parties to the release of the U.S. Copyright Offi ce’s release of a report to Congress on the DMCA. Disappointingly, they hewed to the industry line on this bought and paid for legislation. NPR ran a story yesterday on the demise of radio stations streaming over the Internet. Part of the report focused on some pernicious provisions of the DMCA, such as a ban on telling what songs you’ll play in advance, and playing songs from the same artist back-to-back. Since many radio stations can legally do both of these things over the airwaves, it makes them difficult to webcast.

Verant teams with the Make A Wish foundation to make a child’s dream come true

I am still getting lots of Code Red requests — I got 36 yesterday. Reuven Lerner has written an article explaining how to write a mod_perl program that listens for Code Red requests and automatically submits the infected site to Security Focus so that the admin can be notified. The program is called Apache::CodeRed. (This is similar to the other program I pointed to a few weeks ago.)

RIP, Michael Dertouzos.

The cross-site scripting vulnerability is rearing its ugly head again. Be warned.

Andrew Leonard gives Breaking Windows, David Bank’s book on Microsoft, a mixed review. The book falls prey to the problems that plague many of this “history as it happens” business books — the events in the book are still unfolding, so the analysis is discredited by the time the ink dries. Still, I may actually read this one.

Scot Hacker’s column on Microsoft’s OEM license agreements and how they prevented the BeOS from succeeding has some interesting details, as long as you can get past his laments about the undeserved death of the BeOS and his backseat driving in the DOJ’s prosecution of the antitrust case against Microsoft. You can’t really blame him for being bitter, though. If I’d built my writing career around a niche operating system that suddenly became defunct, I’d be bitter too.

I’m kind of obsessive about food safety, and that obsessiveness was only magnified after I read Fast Food Nation. One of the most disturbing current agricultural practices is the use of antibiotics in animal feed. This isn’t one of those things that you can ignore if you’re a vegetarian, either (I’m not a vegetarian anyway), since it’s creating resistant strains of all sorts of nasty bacteria. Anyway, the latest group to denouce this use of antibiotics is the American Medical Association, which joins such other radical leftist groups as the World Health Organization and the American Public Health Association.

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