The Zero Room

I've been using Firefox 3 for the past few weeks, and today it's officially released. I've found most of the new features to be unobtrusive and generally useful, so I'd recommend it to anyone. The folks at Spread Firefox are calling today "Download Day", and are attempting to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. You've got till 5:00pm UTC (2:00 am tomorrow morning our time), so get downloading!

Things that don't work are much more intriguing than things that do. At least, that's the premise of the Revealing Errors blog, a site devoted to those moments when a gust of wind disturbs the curtain and you catch a tantalising glimpse of a flustered little man frantically pulling levers.

This appears to be a technology demonstration (requires Adobe Flash), but the intended purpose of the technology is a mystery to me, as I can't read Japanese.

Poor Sony. It's as though they're deliberately setting out to upset as many people as possible.

The latest scandal is their generous offer to remove "bloatware" (or more properly, "craplets"), the software you never asked for, but which you get whenever you buy a new computer. Software vendors typically pay hardware vendors handsome sums to add partially functional "lite" or time-limited trial versions of their software to the systems they ship. The idea is that instead of being incensed by having to manually remove all this awful software, you will instead be so impressed with it that you'll want to pay money for the non-crippled versions.

Sony heard the cries of aggrieved customers over this practice, and very generously offered to charge it's customers $50 for the service of not delivering the software they never wanted in the first place. Predictably (to anybody not on the Sony payroll), this has gone down about as well as many of Sony's previous initiatives.

Sensing yet another customer backlash, Sony has acted swiftly to pour oil on this fire, by gamely admitting their mistake and offering to waive the fee for this "optimization", but it's still only available to customers who pay for the $100 Windows Vista Business Edition Upgrade. Can't you feel the love and respect for their home suckers... er customers?

In the lead-up to Document Freedom Day, a couple of interesting articles related to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format have surfaced.

OOXML is currently being proposed as a standard at the International Organisation for standardization (ISO), widely seen as push by Microsoft to dethrone the already-ISO-approved OpenDocument Format, and a decision on OOXML's status is expected from the ISO by the end of the month.

Tim Bray, the co-author of the XML specification has offered his thoughts on the pros and cons of Microsoft's proposed standard. As he is understandably anxious about being misrepresented or quoted out of context, i stongly recommend reading his piece in full, but here is my understanding (I stress my understanding) of what he's saying:

On it's own merits, OOXML is not a particularly good format, but neither is it as bad as it could be. The problem is that if it is approved by the ISO, Microsoft will use this as a propaganda weapon against the existing and technically superior standard. Microsoft has already made as many concessions to openness as they are likely to ever make just to get the format this close to standardisation, so there looks like is nothing to be gained from actually approving it, and no downside to rejecting it.

On a related note, one of the benefits said to have arisen from the standardisation process is the "Microsoft Open Specification Promise:", a covenant not to sue third parties for developing software that implements a number of Microsoft technologies, including OOXML, which may (or may not - software patent holders are notoriously cagey about specifics) be covered by patents held by Microsoft. The Software Freedom Law Centre has just published an analysis that suggests Microsoft's benevelolent gesture is indeed no more than a gesture, and third-party software developers who try to make software that interoperates with Microsoft's software are in practical terms not significantly safer from legal action than they ever were.

The Register reports that it's now ten years since people began ruining their hearing with portable MP3 players, rather than the portable cassette players we had to use for that purpose in my day.

Sometimes I wonder why I read the user comments on Slashdot. Then along comes a gem like this:

serviscope_minor:

...I still fail to see how Web 2.0 will make an operating system irrelevant. The browser has to run on something. The server has to run on something too. And with the talk about "local web 2.0 apps", they might even be the same machine. Then you'll really need a good OS to schedule and mediate the needless and vast layers of extra complexity.

jez9999:

No, it's web browsers all the way down.

For those who are scratching their heads, turtles are being alluded to.

Image from Boy on a Stick and Slither copyright Stephen L. Cloud. Reproduced with permission.

In the first part of this Article, I talked about the technical reasons commonly given for deploying web content filtering software, or "censorware". If content filtering software worked as reliably as claimed, and if it were not easy to circumvent, these technical concerns may, if we are prepared to put moral concerns to one side, be considered justification for censorship. As I have already argued, the software is not reliable or unbreakable, and will never be so, because what is expected of it is technically impossible. As a purely academic exercise, therefore, let's take a look at some of the other problems censorware claims to address, and why it would be morally wrong to deploy censorware, even if the software posessed all the magical powers people expect of it.

We'll also take a look at just a couple of the countless ways to circumvent censorware.

As before, the opinions expressed in this post are my own, and do not reflect the opinions of any other member of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club, or the club as a whole.

Five minutes into the last computer club meeting, I was in the process of showing somebody a website distributing some software for running a library, and found myself instead showing them a web page telling us that we weren't permitted to access this site because it was in the blocked category of "freeware/software downloads".

Max said that he'd earlier had a similar problem while trying to show somebody an auction site. I tested this out and sure enough eBay, et. al. were similarly inaccesible because they fall in the blocked category of "auction sites".

The club has installed web content filtering "censorware" on the gateway between it's local network and the outside world. As a club member, I'm appalled by this for a number of reasons:

• censorware doesn't work to significantly reduce IT security risks
• censorware is an attack on freedom of thought and expression, and is morally wrong, regardless of how well it does or doesn't work

Of course this makes running a computer club from within the club's network practically impossible. Or rather it would if circumventing the censorware hadn't been ten minutes work.

In principle however, it is outrageous that an organisation with a commmunity service mission should opt to control the behaviour of it's members and staff using techniques favoured by brutal dictatorships.

In the first part of this article, which I stress reflects my own personal opinions and not those of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club as a whole, I will go into detail about how and why censorware doesn't work as a solution to percieved IT security problems that arise from unrestricted access to the Web.

In future posts, I shall examine the ineffectiveness of censorship as a solution to low employee productivity, why it shouldn't be used even if it was effective, and outline a few of the multitude of trivially easy censorware circumvention techniques.

There's a nifty introduction to digitising your your records and tapes with Audacity over at Linux.com (the instructions will work unaltered with the Windows or Mac versions of Audacity). It's not certain that you won't be breaking the law by doing so, so if like me you have a lot of out of print music on vinyl, you will have to choose between keepng record companies happy or helping to preserve for posterity the work of the musicians they claim to represent.