Remember the predictions made by some people that enemies are needed to justify spending outrageous amounts of money on missile defense? Well, the shoe is dropping. Dubya broke the news to South Korea’s president that we’ll be abandoning arms reduction talks with North Korea. Pathetic.
Dan Hartung encouraged me to look a bit more deeply into the “encryption” Aimster plans on using to thwart the RIAA, and even sent along a helpful link. As it turns out, it’s not encryption at all, it’s encoding. And the encoding is even simpler than pig Latin. I figured they wouldn’t be doing anything complicated, but this system is obviously designed to exploit the comedic stupidity of the DMCA.
I certainly hope things aren’t as grave as this email makes them out to be … but I’m afraid they are.
Microsoft Office XP just went gold. At home I use Office 97, and at work, I use Office 2000. To be more specific, at home I use Word 97, and at work I use Word 2000 (occasionaly), and Outlook 2000, because IT makes me. I honestly can’t see myself upgrading Office, ever. Getting to use Office 2000 at my current job cemented this opinion. Word 2000 offers me nothing over Word 97, at least as far as I can tell. I wonder how many other people feel the same way? I’m usually a pretty faithful software upgrader, but as far as I can tell, office suites are finished. Maybe I’m wrong.
It’s scary when the crackers turn pro. A group of Eastern European hackers has leveraged some known Windows NT exploits to rewt over 40 Web sites and steal over a million credit card numbers. I wonder if this is going to turn out like one of those serial killer stories where the actual number of victims turns out to be a lot higher than the initial total. The important point here is that they simply tried out known exploits. Had the system administrators at those sites bothered to patch their systems, none of these attacks would have succeeded.