hacking as business tactic

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Corporate saboteurs find hacking powerful weapon

Millions of Europeans were buying counterfeit Canal Plus smart cards on the black market and inserting them into their set-top boxes, giving them free access to premium channels that carry soccer games and adult movies. In Italy, there were as many as three freeloaders for every legitimate customer.

[ . . . ] Behind the hack, Canal Plus says it was shocked to find NDS Group, a rival smart-card developer largely owned by Rupert Murdoch’s global entertainment conglomerate, News Corp.

The logical extension of this suit would be for the copyright holders of all the stolen programming to crush News Corp and Murdoch. But I doubt it will happen.

topography

the topography of where I live

I went cycling the other day, out for 10 miles and came home having done 20 , including a hill I had thus far postponed. I was looking around for information on how steep it really is, other than vertical as it feels when you’re climbing it, and came across this site, provided by the City of Seattle.

It seems to be about a 200+foot climb in less than half a mile, taking me to between 275 and 300 feet above sea level, and I then have to crest one more hill at 350 feet before I’m home (I live at around 250 feet). I know REI provides this kind of thing as well, so I may have to get one there next visit.

visuals to remember

Went to Discovery Park this afternoon, and walked along the shore, inspecting the driftwood. I was struck by how similar to bones the driftwood is, with its organic shapes and curves, the bleached and figured whiteness, even the sockets and mortises, both man-made and natural.

It seemed like a boneyard for some fantastically large and ungainly species, the deeply textured bones and disassembled joints, ropes and kelp strands for sinews and ligaments.

so much for freedom of speech

The U.S. Government has asserted that it is illegal for citizens to participate in the Inauguration if those persons express viewpoints critical of the President or advocate policies different from the Administration’s.

It’s possible this is just counter-bluster (the use of the word “asserts” suggests that we’re playing constitutional chicken here), but it’s disappointing to see the need for such language.

This document is a useful HOWTO on conducting protests in DC, but I have to wonder why it’s necessary to write one at all.

RedHat == Redmond?

Red Hat: Next Redmond?

Red Hat’s dominance is worrisome to some industry players, who say the Raleigh, N.C., company needs effective competition to prevent it from becoming a Microsoft Corp. among Linux vendors and to ensure the operating system continues to develop in an open way.

And who wouldn’t want to have MSFT’s influence over their market? Can you fault RedHat for that?

But the openness of the source itself and the fact there are competing distributions — RedHat vs SuSE is not like Macintosh vs Windows, after all — doesn’t really convince me that RedHat is a monopoly. I hope never to run RedHat again: the pain of dealing with RPM is still fresh in my mind. If I couldn’t get what I needed from FreeBSD’s Linux emulation, I’d go with Debian or SuSE.

think different, and keep your options open

Apple Keeps x86 Torch Lit with ‘Marklar’

Sources said more than a dozen software engineers are tasked to Marklar, and the company’s mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86. Build numbers keep pace with those of their pre-release PowerPC counterparts; for example, Apple is internally running a complete, x86-compatible version of Jaguar, a k a Mac OS X 10.2, which shipped last week.

Wade spotted this one.

keeping them honest

Looks like water usage here in my grove of sunflowers and tomatoes is closer to 100 gallons/day (pretty nearly exactly 100). So I’ll note it for a few more days and then all the City and ask them to make the necessary adjustments to my bill.

if there was ever a device was meant to be wireless

Driver Labo./Newton/WaveLAN

An 802.11b driver for the Newton has been completed and seems to work with a number of cards. Might be time to blow the dust off it and see how this works. Much as I love the thing, it’s hard to integrate something into you life when it needs to be wired up. If only Steve didn’t see the Newton as a reminder of John Sculley (or was there another reason for getting rid of it?), imagine where the technology could be now?

After some email correspondence with the driver’s author, it looks like the WaveLAN (Agere chipset) cards are the way to go: not enough people have provided feedback for Noguchi to flesh out any kind of matrix. If you use the driver and haven’t told him how it works for you, do it now.
Continue reading “if there was ever a device was meant to be wireless”

interesting event with MovableType

The filesystem where this ‘blog is stored came close to filling, perhaps even did fill for a moment, while I was adding an entry. As a result, the index.html page was zeroed out. Hmm . . . .

After freeing up some space, I asked MT to rebuild all files and that seems to have fixed it. Love those database-backed publishing systems . . . .

saving the family farm

Rate Information

Some facts you might find useful:

* A ccf is100 cubic feet of water. There are 748 gallons in a ccf.
* Typical water usage for a household is 7 ccf per month
* Typical sewer usage for a household is 6 ccf per month

The City of Seattle claims I used 300 gallons a day for the most recent period, or 26 ccf (almost 4 times their cited typical usage). The treasurer has been mumbling about profligate water use in the agricultural efforts here, but this news is much worse than I had suspected.

Of course, the city doesn’t actually *read* the meter, instead relying on estimates and SWAGs1. So I took the liberty of making a note of the number this afternoon and will see how much it actually moves. 300 gallons a day seems excessive to me, but if it’s true, perhaps I need a well.

1 SWAG: scientific wild-ass guess