Posts

I was listening to NPR this morning and they were talking about genetically modified food. I don’t know much about the issue, but at the same time, I think it’s pretty important. Many people, especially Americans, don’t really give much thought to what they’re putting in their mouth. We eat plenty of food that’s created with a formula rather than a recipe, and we’re not too demanding about what people spray on the plants we eat, either. I think that’s a shame. The only thing I know for sure about GM foods is that Monsanto is one of the big companies behind them, and I’m pretty sure that anything Monsanto is for, I’m against. Here are some resources I found: ...

Today I learned that not only is Emacs available for Windows, but XEmacs is as well. Naturally, I’ve downloaded it to conduct a comparison test. Believe it or not, there are actually some undervalued dot coms. These companies actually have a lower market capitalization than cash on hand, and could theoretically buy back all of their stock and have money to spare. What an interesting warped business strategy. IPO and take in a bunch of cash. Conduct your business in such a way that your stock price falls below the IPO price (many companies have done this without trying at all). Buy back all of your stock, close down the company, and walk away with the difference. Sounds like a better business plan than many I’ve encountered. Seriously, though, it must be depressing to go to work every day at a place where the market has valued your company’s business at less than zero dollars. Ouch. ...

Salon has the story on the disappearance of the Usenet archives at deja.com. This company can’t fail soon enough for me. Geeks will appreciate this Emacs story. OK, this whole link patent thing is stupid. I think that it will serve to illustrate the idiocy of the current laws protecting the rights of inventors, which will be a good thing. Here’s hoping that some a nice collection of prior art is collected that will make this all go away quickly. ...

The city council of the District of Columbia is going to vote on changing the motto on the city’s license plates to “taxation without representation.” The district is subject to Congressional oversight, but the House member for the district isn’t actually allowed to vote on anything in Congress. Unfortunately, because Congress has the final word on everything that happens in the district, they’re going to refuse to allow the change to the license plates. ...

The Justice Project has a report on error rates in capital cases from 1973-1995. The report makes a very convincing argument that people who are sentenced to death often don’t get a fair trial at all when they’re initially convicted. Kind of makes you wonder about all of the other criminal trials that don’t get so much attention. SANS has a list of the top ten security holes on the Web. Anyone whose systems are exploited through one of these holes should have their wrist slapped, because they’re all very well known. Some of them (running an exploitable version of sendmail) are easier to fix than others (badly written CGI programs). ...

O’Reilly has an article posted explaining why you should learn Java. I think it really oversells the language. Yes, Java is popular, but it’s hardly the lingua franca of computing today, as the author claims. Of course, the article’s author is also the co-author of the O’Reilly published Learning Java , so what do you expect? By the way, have I told you that you should learn CGI programming and SQL as soon as possible? ...

The feds arrested 120 people yesterday in a huge securities fraud bust. The mafia was buying shares of thinly traded companies, and then using stock brokers they controlled to push shares of those companies onto their clients to drive up the share prices, which the mafia members would then liquidate for big profits. Didn’t I see this on the Sopranos? Simson Garfinkel has an article in Salon about a monitoring program installed on his computer along with some children’s software. Spyware is becoming an increasingly significant problem, and I think that it’s going to take legislation to solve. Most people aren’t attentive enough to figure out whether such software is running on their system, and software makers are not beholden to disclose that their software is sending reports back to the mother ship when you run it. ...

My big project of late has been learning Java for work. (Well, that’s one of my big projects anyway.) Since my programming life has revolved around scripting languages (like Perl) for the past few years, getting up to speed in the world of Java has been a real pain for me. I don’t really think that Java itself sucks, but learning Java sucks for me right now. Just for fun, here’s a link to jwz’s Java sucks page, which lists several specific reasons why Java sucks. When I understand why all the problems with Java that he lists are problems, I’ll probably be a pretty good Java programmer. ...

Not long after Odigo added functionality to its instant messaging software to enable its users to communicate with AIM users, AOL shut them out. That’s not surprising, given that AOL has done that to everyone who’s tried to tap into the AIM network. The fact that AOL controls a huge percentage of the instant messaging market is a big, big problem, because they have no desire to interoperate with anyone else. Standards are desperately needed in this area, and nobody seems to be working to make those standards fall into place. AOL is clearly trying to protect its market, and while Yahoo and MSN have both made noise about pushing for standards, neither of them have published the documentation for their IM standards. There’s an open source IM effort called Jabber, but I haven’t been tracking their progress. ...

Scott Rosenberg argues today that what ultimately lost the trial for Microsoft is their smarmy attitude and reckless disregard for the truth. Ironically, Microsoft has the same problem as Braves’ pitcher John Rocker. Their steadfast refusal to recognize or admit their wrongdoing is incredibly frustrating to people who would otherwise be inclined to give them a chance. There’s an AP wire story on the new trojan horse discovered by NETSEC (a computer security firm). This trojan is apparently embedded in a video clip, and has been found on over 2000 computers. Unfortunately, the story is nearly worthless. It doesn’t explain how the video clip got onto the computers (I assume the users downloaded it), or how NETSEC discovered which computers were infiltrated. Fortunateley, NETSEC’s advisory contains more details. As usual, the trojan is being distributed as an executable email attachment. One interesting note: NETSEC discovered the trojan because one of their own workstations was infected and they noticed unusual outbound traffic from it. ...