Toast442.org

The super-geniuses in the Congress have added an amendment to an energy bill that would extend daylight saving time another two months, ending in the final week of November. They claim that doing this will save 10,00 barrels of oil a day for each of the additional days it’s in effect. However, someone should let these jokers know that we’ll spend all that energy reprogramming the world’s computers so they know the new daylight saving time parameters. Not to mention the inevitable headaches that will result from continually updating the clocks on those machines that don’t recognize the new time. It will be a disaster. If they want to change it, make it year round. That’s at least easier to change existing computers to support.

Does anyone think about this crap before they go opening their mouths? Seriously, what a bunch of idiots.

Link to CNN article.

Check out the image at the bottom of this post. It’s a segment of the main Comp USA website for the new Sony PSP handheld gaming machine. This is the first thing that someone sees when looking for the PSP on their site. The part not shown goes on about the screen size, colors, graphical capabilities and networking as you’d expect. But then at the bottom, there’s this paragraph about how cool Sony’s new UMD discs are. It then veers off into describing the “robust copyright protection system” developed for this unit. You know, the stuff that makes it harder to move content from one format to another and just generally gets in the way.

Why they thought that this was important enough to warrant a prominent place on the main PSP page, I don’t know. Looks like some moron just copied an industry press release from Sony. I mean, who wants to read about how their $250 gaming machine is going to restrict what you can do with it? It like advertising a new DVD player that only works with movies from Blockbuster or something. Very very weird - and unfriendly.

It’s happened: The Governor of Utah has signed HB 260, which creates a huge bureaucracy to keep lists of sites not appropriate for children and forces ISPs to block those sites for those who request it. Also, anyone who creates or hosts any content in Utah for profit must now rate it, or face criminal (3rd degree felony) charges.

Now come the inevitable lawsuits, and tons of state and other money wasted defending a bill that nobody really wants and that most agree won’t survive a challenge in the courts. A similar law in Pennsylvania was struck down in the courts last year.

Thanks lawmakers. Now I know what you do with your time: waste money. And to Governor Huntsman: No more votes for you.

Link to previous entry about the bill.
Link to CNet article.

I’ve always loved keyboard shortcuts. Using the mouse for me is a last resort in most cases. To that end, I’ve used two “small” utilities that help me navigate the huge number of files and applications that I use on a daily basis. I started by using LaunchBar v3, a commercial application that you can call up with a HotKey (usually Command-Space) and enter an abbreviated name, hit Enter and launch or switch to an app, open a document, Finder folder, etc. Cost me $20, but it worked great.

Along comes the new kid on the block: Quicksilver. It has a lot going for it, including some great graphical stylings, a very nice plugin architecture, and best of all: it is free. It works pretty much like LaunchBar, except it includes some new tricks. Use an abbreviation to find a document, right arrow and select mail and it dumps it in as an attachment to your favorite mailer. Nice. It has tons of stuff like this built in. So I switched. And I used it for months. Slowly, however, I discovered it’s dark side: Slow and a memory pig.

I was getting irritated: My machine was running slower, I was swapping: I wanted to launch Activity Monitor to see what craptastic app was killing me. I hit Command-Space, and after a slight pause, up popped QuickSilver, and I started typing actm, my custom shortcut for the aforementioned Activity Monitor. Unfortunately, QS was responding so freaking slowly searching for what I wanted, the pause between the t and m resulted in yet another search for something starting with an “m”, which gave me some random Word document and a whole instance of MS Word running. This is the first of the two failings with QS: searching, even under ideal conditions (on a 1.67GHz PowerBook) is ridiculously slow. I found that I was adapting my typing speed to accommodate the poor performance of QS.

When I finally did get Activity Monitor running, I discovered the second of QS’s failings: It was using more memory than ANYTHING ELSE IN THE SYSTEM, INCLUDING PHOTOSHOP. It had over 160MB of resident RAM tied up. Not shared - this is specific to this app. That was 16% of my system RAM dedicated to slowly searching for documents. This pissed me off even more.

I went and downloaded the newest version of LaunchBar, 4.01. Installed it, and indexed everything. It searches instantly. When you type, it reacts. No lag, even under severe conditions. Yes, it doesn’t do everything that QS does - but who the fuck cares? After running for a whole day, memory usage was a reasonable resident 40MB. It still finds what I need right when I type, and I don’t have to screw around waiting for a “utility” to respond to my keystrokes. Yes - I paid the $9.95 upgrade fee.

The author of QS would do well to spend a little time optimizing the search functions of his app. Something is slowing it to a crawl (I even removed all the plugins to see if it helped) and get rid of the massive memory leaks. Spend time doing this instead of adding new incremental near-useless features. If I have to baby-sit a utility, it isn’t a utility.

It has happened again: more personal data on US citizens were stolen from those companies that collect and resell this stuff. This time, LexisNexis, usually the above-board proto-Google, discovered that 32,000 records containing social security numbers, names, addresses, etc., were all taken. The good news, they claim, was that no personal financial or credit data was exposed. Not that it matters. With all the info they did get, the credit reports and whatnot aren’t hard to get.

This is the second major breech of these data companies we’ve heard about in as many months. And are they going to be held responsible? Well, probably not. Unless you get in your own personal civil suit against these guys, nothing will happen to them except for their two minutes of shame and their stern new resolve to never let it happen again.

With all of the scams out there fishing for your data, what’s a person to do when these jerks spew your data to just about anyone and everyone? The previous “break in” at ChoicePoint was even worse. It wasn’t really even a break in. Just someone with some fake letterhead and a stolen credit card who purchased information on 140,000 consumers. If that’s all it takes, there is really no way to prevent someone from opening lines of credit and whatnot with your ID. It’s just you haven’t won the stolen ID lottery - yet. It’s probably just a matter of time. The fact that you can purchase this “private” information from these companies is crap. This shouldn’t *EVER* be allowed without your express permission. These companies are little better than some thief selling your ID on the street corner.

When are we going to get real privacy laws in this country with some teeth? These companies should be paying through the nose because this information was leaked. Instead, they’ll go on their merry ways, with some lip service paid toward “better” security.

The nannies that make up the majority of the Utah legislature have gone off the deep end and passed House Bill 260. This requires ISPs in Utah to filter pornographic and “material harmful to minors” upon request of their customers. And just who determines what material that they are to block? Well, the attorney general’s office. Yes, now we’ll have a group of interns who surf the net looking for porn subsidized by the government. This piece of junk bill is one signature away from law - that of the governor Jon Huntsman. He claims he still needs his staffers to go over the wording before making a decision. He has until March 22nd.

But that’s just the beginning. It also requires “Internet content providers that create or host data in Utah to properly rate the data.” Does that mean that I have to rate the content of this blog because I write it in Utah? What damn rating system? Everything that’s published online now has to have some sort of code appended to it to make sure it’s ok for the kiddies? What a bunch of crap. This is a great way to keep tech companies out of Utah. Why the hell would they come here and have to jump through hoops (by rating their content) just to put up a damn web site?

Plus the “Service Provider” is defined pretty loosely. It would include your standard run of the mill ISP as well as the coffee shop down the street that gives away WiFi. This would probably effectively kill any small wireless operators, and may kill even the T-Mobile HotSpots that are all over the place here. They’re going to implement this just for the small number of customer’s in Utah? Yeah, right. They’ll probably just drop service instead of comply with the ridiculous provisions of this plan.

And who is going to be blocked? Would Google be banned? They provide all sorts of cached content and whatnot that wouldn’t be suitable for the kids. How about Yahoo? Hell, eBay sports auctions that aren’t very kid friendly. Are all these sites going to be blocked? Amazon provides books on topics you probably don’t want your kids to read. So is the local library (who *GASP* has their card catalog and excerpts posted online!)

The really, really dumb part of this bill is that there are ISPs in Utah which already censor net content for the families that want that sort of thing. They advertise these services as a feature. They don’t cost any more than anything else. There is no reason to pass a LAW that creates a huge bureaucracy just to do something that private companies are already providing to those few who want it.

The real deal here is that this isn’t about the kids - it’s about groups with an agenda against things they find offensive, and we all end up paying for it. If you leave in Utah, send Governor Huntsman a note about this.

Link to CNET article about the bill.

I just recently bought a new PowerBook. One of the new features Apple stuck in these new beasts is what they are calling AMS - the Apple Motion Sensor. Basically it appears to be some sort of accelerometer that can measure sudden changes in movement and automagically park the hard drive heads before something bad happens (like hitting the floor.)

However, it appears that it can also measure the attitude of your machine. That is, it can tell how “tilted” a machine is in all three axes. It uses this to unpark the heads when the machine returns to being level. It also can be used to do some really cool stuff, as this web site demonstrates. On this page, Amit Singh gives us some programs that retrieve the sensor values and do some cool things.

One is a small window with an OpenGL-rendered PB that rotates in conjunction with you’re rotating the physical machine. Very, very cool stuff. Another is a bicycle wheel in a window. When the PB tilts, the window itself rotates to keep it level relative to your (physical) desktop. If you have one of these new PowerBooks, download the samples - there is some cool stuff there to show your friends.

According to this article from TechNewsWorld, T-Mobile sales of the Sidekick II have been boosted due to the recent hacking of Paris Hilton’s account. This seems perfectly strange to me - a phone that stores all it’s info on a central server open to hacking - then gets hacked - and private details posted to the web (including some nude photos!) - and this makes someone want to go out and buy one?

That is so hot.

According to this CNN article, unnamed execs at several music companies have started rumbling about moving up the prices for downloadable music. They claim that the 65 cents per song they are currently getting was set artificially low to stimulate demand. Strangely, they point to the ridiculous cost of ring-tone downloads as somehow justifying the a higher price.

What a bunch of bastards. Assuming that this is true (and the Financial Times is a pretty good source) you can see just how damn greedy these jerks are. They don’t have to manufacture any physical product. They don’t have to ship anything. There is no risk in merchandise being returned unsold, damaged, or stolen. They don’t even have to pay bandwidth costs. It’s practically pure profit, since they already made the album. For a typical album with 10 songs, this comes out to be about $6.50 the record companies are seeing. Not bad.

I know what they are realizing, though. I know why they want to raise the prices. Because they are no longer selling albums. People have finally got the choice to purchase individual songs, and they are taking advantage of it. Most albums suck - they contain one or two songs that I’d pay for and the rest is filler that I’ll probably listen to once or twice and then never again. So, people just get the one or two songs, and don’t even bother with the rest. So instead of their $6.50, they get get something like a $1.30.

That is the problem here - crap tunes and the record execs know it. Instead of making better music, they want to raise the price for the stuff that people will listen to. Typical response for an industry in the toilet, though. Don’t make your product better, just raise it’s price to keep the status quo. This rarely works for long.

Wired currently has an article that details what exactly was the fault of the T-Mobile system, at least for some of the crackers - a quite common application called WebLogic. In 2003, a vulnerability was found that would allow someone to read and write arbitrary files. A patch was immediately issued, but apparently no one at T-Mobile cared to actually apply it.

And so it goes. A cracker had access to complete customer records, SS numbers, the whole schmear, because someone didn’t pay attention to patches coming from their vendors. This is probably a good indicator of the pervasiveness of this problem however. If a large company with a (presumably) huge IT department running their systems can miss this, I wonder how many more open systems there are out there. With your data on it. Just waiting to be cracked.