Posts

Brendan I Koerner says TiVo is doomed because they were first to the market with DVRs. I’d have to say that Koerner’s analysis is pretty simplistic. Yeah, there are plenty of companies that were first to market that failed, but there are also plenty that were first to market that have done just fine in succeeding years. Furthermore, most first movers have made critical errors that cost them their business. Perhaps TiVo will make such an error, but that’s not really what his article says – his argument seems to be that because TiVo was first, it’s certain to be overtaken. We’ll see. ...

When did spammers start injecting spam into referrer logs? I was checking out the list of referrers for individual items on the site and noticed that for one obscure item, there are a ton of referrers from various porn and drug related sites, all in a row. I’m not sure what the expected return on such spam is, or why they’d bother with it, but I am somewhat intrigued. Rather than speculating idly, I turn to Google. There was an item published on 5/31/2001 at Kuro5hin about referrer log spam. Other than that piece, I don’t see too much of interest on the phenomenon. I’m certain this was some sort of spam blast, because there were 10 hits or so in a row for the same item, all with different (bizarre but vaguely related) URLs as the referrer. ...

First, let me say that I am a pitiful, lazy man. I promised reviews of three RSS aggregators and only provided two (for Aggie and FeedReader). The other aggregator I intended to review is AmphetaDesk, and I’m only getting around to publishing it now, even though it’s the first aggregator I ever used. There are other aggregators of note, but they don’t fall into my sweet spot, which is free aggregators that happen to run on Windows boxes. First, the basics. AmphetaDesk is an application written in Perl and is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. It works similarly to Aggie, in that the executable scans your list of RSS feeds and dumps out a list of articles to a Web page, and then launches a browser pointing to the page it generates. (I should actually say that Aggie is like AmphetaDesk, because AmphetaDesk is much older than Aggie.) The key difference between the two is that Aggie simply points the user to a static file stored on disk whereas AmphetaDesk has a built in HTTP server that it serves up the story list through. This is cool because it makes AmphetaDesk infinitely more hackable than the other tools. Want to add a feed using a hyperlink? It’s easy with AmphetaDesk. In that sense, AmphetaDesk is really the tool for the power user. Since it compares most closely with Aggie, there are two advantages of Aggie over AmphetaDesk. The first is that Aggie’s default skin is a bit nicer than the default AmphetaDesk skin, mainly because it can be set to only include items that were published since the last time you checked those feeds. The second is that Aggie is multithreaded so it checks all of your feeds very quickly. The return, though, with AmphetaDesk is that it’s infinitely more hackable. And you don’t have to download the 20 meg .NET runtime to use it. One of the other nice things about AD is that Morbus Iff is a very active maintainer, and there’s a significant community of people tweaking and skinning the application. In short, if you’re the sort of person who’s unsatisfied running an untweaked application, AmphetaDesk is the aggregator for you. It works fine untweaked, and indeed is trivial to set up for even the novice user, but I think it shines when you’re willing to put in time to get more out of it. ...

Today is the first anniversary of Movable Type. As everyone who reads this weblog knows, I wrote my own blogging tool (I “released” it back on 3/4/1999), but I’m still incredibly impressed by Movable Type. As a software developer, I can say that it’s a huge pain to create, maintain, enhance, and support a software package. The fact that they’ve put so much effort into improving it since it was released is amazing. I could have actually cleaned up my code any time over the past 3 1/2 years and put it out there, but I never got off my butt and did it. I don’t even add new features very often. So I congratulate them for not only having a vision, but actually fulfilling it by putting in the effort required to make it real. ...

For future reference, a link to President Bush’s speech from last night: President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat. I watched a pretty good chunk of it … what can I say, the guy’s a terrible speaker. A left-wing point by point rebuttal of the speech has already been posted by accuracy.org. Unfortunately, the rebuttal seems to rely a bit heavily on “if Iraq is bad, Israel is worse” arguments, which are tiresome to say the least. There are other more interesting bits that dispute Bush’s account of Saddam’s WMD programs. ...

I’ve decided I’m going to steal Anil Dash’s short form blog and start posting just links to interesting sites and articles I run across on this site as soon as I can. Honestly, though, I think that the scheme really dates back to Robot Wisdom, so I’m not going to feel too guilty about it. (Just to make things clear, this would be a supplemental feature for the site, not a replacement for the existing rc3.org blog, which is here for good.) ...

I now turn my attention to serious matters: Dahlia Lithwick’s speculation on why the LA district attorney’s office insists on throwing the book at Winona Ryder.

Word is that the administration is preparing a war crimes case against various Iraqi officials in the event that they are captured (presumably as the result of our invading Iraq). I’m not completely sold on the idea of an international court for war crimes, but I find it particularly odd that the current administration would press for war crimes charges against Iraq when we refuse to submit to international authority ourselves with regard to war crimes charges. Everybody knows that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, but we don’t have to go around putting it in people’s faces. In the year 1215, England’s King John signed the Magna Carta, which stated that even the king must obey the law. This laid the foundation for the fundamental idea of modern government. There’s a logical argument to be made that there’s not a place for an international war crimes court, but then that should preclude us from setting up ad hoc war crimes tribunals and using them to prosecute our defeated foes. To argue otherwise is to give way to the simple doctrine of might makes right, which seems to be where we’re headed. If we’re not going to reject the idea of war crimes and war crimes tribunals entirely, we probably ought to belly up to the bar and accept the official war crimes tribunal that most other countries in the world have authorized. By putting the United States above the law that we demand that other countries obey, we, as a nation, violate the very legal concept upon which this nation was founded. I think we can do better. ...

I was doing some tinkering this weekend and wound up with a Web server set up on my cable modem with a hostname provided by dyndns.org. I got things up and running and not two hours later I was paid a visit by somebody running a script that checks for several known Microsoft Internet Information Server exploits. I’m pretty amazed at how unsafe you really are from a security perspective. ...

Could the tide be turning against the DMCA? Rick Boucher (a Virginia Democrat who has been speaking out against the DMCA for over a year) and John Doolittle (a California Republican) have introduced a bill that would rescind some provisions of the DMCA. Declan McCullagh (who appears to have joined the staff of News.com) has the report). From the article, a list of the changes to the DMCA: An exemption would be created saying anyone who "is acting solely in furtherance of scientific research into technological protection measures" would be able to distribute his or her code. That would permit Felten and other researchers--such as a programmer being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a current lawsuit--to publish their work without the threat of lawsuits. Bypassing technological protections would be permissible if done for legitimate "fair-use" purposes. The bill says it would not be a violation of federal law to "circumvent a technological measure"--as long as it does not lead to "an infringement of the copyright in the work." Creating a utility like DeCSS.exe might become legal. The bill says it would be legal to "manufacture, distribute, or make noninfringing use of a hardware or software product capable of enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work."