Apparently everyone is wrong. The internet is not a series of tubes. It is a series of windows. Copying a file illegally is apparently identical to breaking a window and stealing physical property. According to US Vice President Joe Biden.

Hey, it least he didn’t call proponents of copyright reform radical extremists, then blatantly lie about it, as Canada’s heritage minister did (and oh yes, he did call them radical extremists, as the end of the linked article points out, it’s on tape).

No no, our VP simply chose to blatantly lie about the damage and impact of file sharing, trying to make it sound like something dangerous and violent–evil, really, when in fact it’s something that is mostly harmless (“Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”) and largely blown out of proportion–the actions of both sides, file sharers and the RIAA, are more misguided than anything else.

Perhaps more on this later, I’ve got a rant brewing, but whether it gets posted or not only time will tell.

Till then,

Lark

Does anybody remember my post on Batman Arkham Asylum? About it’s DRM? About it’s requirement to have a ‘Games for Windows Live’ account in order to save games? Well I still haven’t played it. I’m instead playing Bioshock until I stop being mad at Eidos/Rocksteady for making me install bloatware and register with Microsoft before allowing me to save my progress in the game.

Part of the reason I’ve been playing Bioshock is so I can be finish it in time to play the sequel, Bioshock 2 when it comes out in February.

Then I saw this.

The tech specs for Bioshock 2 are out…To save the game or play online, you need to be logged into Games for Window Live. This still applies on Steam – so SecuRom and Games For Windows Live are needed in addition to the Steam client. Hmm.

“Marriage,” is a term that historically has belonged in the social and legal realms. Now many people are pretending like it’s a religious term. Hey, marriage ceremonies happen in churches, administered by religious leaders, right?

Is one required to get married in a church? No, you don’t need a church or a religious leader to get married, you just need a license from city hall. Do you have to be a member of a certain religion to get a marriage license? Of course not. Some people are all of the sudden pretending that marriage is a religious term, probably because homosexuality gives them unease and they’re not yet ready to accept it as legitimate. Don’t be fooled though, people know that you get a marriage license at a city building, not a church.

I’m someone who considers himself Libertarian leaning. I subscribe to Reason.com’s RSS feeds, along with a few other Libertarian blogs. Of course, I also subscribe to many Republican blogs, and Democrat blogs, and tech blogs, and entertainment blogs, etc. I don’t read Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish regularly anymore (it’s updated way too fast for me to keep up), but I followed it very closely coming up on the 2008 presidential election. I will admit Sullivan seemed to have it out for Sarah Palin, probably because, as a lot of people saw it, she was nominated from out of nowhere and stayed out of the press’ reach for most of her candidacy.

In addition to maintaining a running list of all the verifiable lies she told (which I can’t fault him for), Sullivan also frequently revisited one suspected lie that couldn’t be verified without Palin’s consent (by releasing her medical records)–Sullivan suspected that Palin’s son Trig was not her child, but in fact he child of her (at the time) 17-year-old daughter Bristol Palin.

Today I saw (via my feed reader) that Reason editor Nick Gillespie reviewed two books about Sarah Palin in the Washington Post. I was reading Reason’s excerpt of the review and was a little surprised to read this:

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, a self-identified conservative who calls his Daily Dish “the most popular one-man political blog site in the world,” persistently claimed that Trig Palin, the governor’s then-4-month-old baby with Down syndrome, was not Sarah’s biological child and requested the full release of her obstetrical records, stopping just short of demanding he be sent the placenta for genetic testing. (If President Obama is hounded by a small group of reality-challenged “birthers,” who doubt he was born in Hawaii, Palin is certainly the only politician to have given rise to what might be called “after-birthers,” who doubt that she delivered her own children.)

Am I reading too much into that, or is he especially harsh toward Andrew Sullivan? As someone who likes Sullivan, and as someone who read his blog regularly as he was making the aforementioned claims, I’m a little disappointed by how that paragraph treated him. I have to wonder if Gillespie even read what Sullivan wrote about the matter, or if he’s just been influenced by the way it was covered by others. First, let’s address the actual argument, which I think Sullivan best laid out here.

This and this.

A bank mis-typed an email address, sending a complete stranger a file with tons of personal information:

The attachment contained confidential information on 1,325 individual and business customers that included their names, addresses, tax identification or Social Security numbers and loan information.

They then sent a second email to this stranger telling him or her to delete the previous email and contact them immediately. They heard no response, went to court, and the court ordered Gmail to close the account. I have to completely agree with this statement, from the second of the above links: (emphasis mine)

“It’s outrageous that the bank asked for this, and it’s outrageous that the court granted it,” says John Morris, general counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “What right does the bank have and go suspend the email account of a completely innocent person?”

I get emails sent to my phone, so I tend to see every email within hours of it being sent. My dad uses email for work, so he checks his regularly. My sister, however, can go weeks without checking her email. It’s very possible that the person who was sent this email hasn’t even checked his or her account yet, and now it’s shut down. I have Google Voice, Reader, and Calendar tied to one Gmail address. How would this court order affect all of those services?

I have to say that it’s very possible both emails were read, but the attachment wasn’t opened. If you got those two emails isn’t there a huge chance you’d just assume they were a phishing scheme and ignore them? That makes me wonder why the court chose to start with the undiplomatic brute force method. Why not order Google to first see if the data has even been viewed yet? Why not have Google attempt to contact the person–then it might become apparent that these emails aren’t in fact a scam.

And finally, the question of the day, why the hell wasn’t that personal information encrypted? What kind of bank sends an attachment with the private information of 1,325 customers and doesn’t encrypt it? Truecrypt is free, banks. This bank should be buried in fines, branded as a high security risk and left as an example to others.

Lark

Steam is a program/network started by game developer Valve, wherein PC gamers can buy PC games, downloading them instead of getting a disk. It’s not just limited to Valve games. The greatest thing about Steam is that you can download any of the games you own to any of your computers, or even to a friends computer, if say you’re visiting for a few weeks. The games are tied to your login name and password, if you’re not logged in on the computer, those games can’t be played. It’s a straight forward DRM–you can only be logged in on one computer at one time, so instead of limiting the total number of computers you can install on, they let you install these games as many times as desired.

I’m a big fan of Steam, to the point where, if a game isn’t available on it, I may not buy it. In fact, I’m shying away from consoles for the most part. I’d rather spend money on games I can take with me and play on my laptop. Not like I’m playing games in restaurants or anything, but it’s nice for long trips and vacations.

There are some problems with Steam. I’ve written previously that my internet is slow, so downloading 8GB per game takes time. That’s a problem for downloading to install in the first place, and also a problem for when I want to play the game, and it automatically checks to see if the game needs to be updated, then starts updating. No, stupid! I want to play the game, not install updates! Why not download updates and install them once I’m done? Why not constantly check for updates, or set up a schedule, check for and install updates between 2am-8am? There are also issues with automatic updating in general. What if an update breaks something? Can I undo it? Probably not. Although I haven’t had that problem yet, it’s possible.

Once I switch to a much faster broadband carrier, it’ll be better, but even if it downloads lightening fast, I still have to wait for the updates to install. It is a good service, but I’m curious to see how it’ll improve or depreciate over time. And I’m also curious to see if the whole Kindle 1984 scandal will cause people to start looking at services like Steam and Zune Pass with a lot more skepticism.

Lark

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Google and the services they provide. I don’t even mind that they use my information serve me better ads–I’ve actually started coming across more and more ads that help me find things I’ve been looking for. However, there are lines that need to be drawn. The more and more services Google provides, the more important it is that we ensure that Google protects our privacy.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has an interesting article about this, with a form you should fill out to let Google know how they need to handle your private information. The EFF writes:

You shouldn’t be forced to pay for digital books with your privacy. Tell Google it needs to develop a robust privacy policy that gives you at least as much privacy in books online as you have in your neighborhood library or bookstore.

Security used to mean keeping your important personal documents in a safe. Now all our personal information is sent through emails, internet voice services, or to online backup utilities. All this redundancy is great–if you’re careful, a fire doesn’t mean you lose copies of documents, or photos, or music. And it’s a lot easier to search files on a computer than files in a cabinet. However, digital information is exponentially harder to keep track of. As more of our information becomes digital, it becomes increasingly important that we have more effective privacy policies.

Google is collecting such information. We need to make sure this information is safe. Go to the website. Fill out the form.

Lark

It’s been brought to my attention that Skype offers a lot of features similar to Google Voice’s. Skype also allows Skype-to-Skype sending of files, even from a mobile phone. That’s cool. The problem is, if I go with either Google or Skype, I get one number I’m supposed to have all of my current contacts use. What if I want to switch services? Do I have to start over with a completely new number?

Another child of the French Revolution is decimal time. Once again, this is the kind of stuff I love diving into. It’s fascinating and it gives me a new perspective on our own system, somethinig that’s hard to achieve when most of the world is on standard time.

Decimal time was used in conjunction with the French Republic Calendar. It had 10 hours with 100 minutes, each minute being 100 seconds. By this system, midnight is 10, noon is 5. Weird, huh? A second in decimal time is still called a second (by Wikipedia, anyways), but it is completely different. Standard time has 86,400 seconds in one day, decimal time has 100,000, so their seconds must be a bit shorter.

Here are some conversions via Wikipediaa to put it in perspective:

I have to say, for me, sometimes the most fascinating aspects of history aren’t the people or the great conflicts, but the different ways people choose to do things when starting with a clean slate.

Take revolutionary France. Once the revolutionaries took control of the country, they started what’s now called the “Dechristianisation of France,” one aspect of which was the proposal of an entirely new calendar to replace the current Pope-ordianed Gregorian calendar (which we use in the US). Reading about it, a new system would make sense.