Archive for the ‘Rants’ tag
Is it Wrong to Love Microsoft… blindly?
This is my constructive response to the column at CoolTechZone on the 5th of August titled Is it Wrong to Love Microsoft? To give you a little perspective, I have a WindowsXP desktop dual booted with Fedora Core 4 Linux, Windows XP Professional laptop, and Mac Powerbook at home and so have sufficient experience with all of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Firefox Support
Let me give you a lesson in the small part you can play in fighting the battles you believe need to be fought. I am a member of a website called GoZing Surveys which pays petty cash to participate in surveys. Yes, I know some people may find this intrusive but I like having enough free money for an ice cream in exchange for telling people whether I prefer Johnson & Johnson Q-tips to store brand. Read the rest of this entry »
To Break Copy Protection, Ask Politely.
A few days ago, I had written about a flawed copy protection scheme on the new Dave Matthews Band CD which, if you have autorun enabled, installs itself on your computer and prevents copying. Key phrase is if you have autorun enabled. Also, it works fine on a Mac – so maybe that’s the computer you should use :). I know I do.
Well, there’s an update to that story; apparently with a new technology (believe-it-or-not, it’s called First4Internet!), you can’t transfer the songs on to an iPod either UNLESS you email Sony BMG and complain in which case you will get a nice email explaining how to circumvent the copy protection. Great- flawed technology for an unnecessary purpose built by people who tell you how to break it if asked politely.
Oooh MD5
C-net’s News.com has an article about how Microsoft apparently had a conference where they invited ‘hackers’ to help them discover security flaws. My first and humongous beef with the article is the usage of the term ‘hacker’; but that’s a whole ‘nother issue for a whole other day. Read the rest of this entry »
