apple flavored monopoly?

Apparently someone is suing Apple because they can't play their iTunes purchased songs on non iPod MP3 players.

Honestly, I think this is rather odd that they're suing Apple. If they were too worried about this, they could subscribe to another service like Microsoft's music store. It's not like Apple is the only company that sells music you can play on your MP3 players. Apple does sell music with copy protection built in, but this is mentioned to all users when they sign up for the service. My MP3 player can't play the Microsoft WMA format stuff, so screw them.

If this is a huge concern, try this: use iTunes to burn the crap to a CD, then rip the CD to MP3 files. You haven't broken any laws (except maybe copy protection evasion, but you're not doing it with criminal intent) in doing this, and now you have the files in MP3 format and also in the purchased AAC format.

I haven't heard whether Apple has released information on decoding their AAC copy protection, but I think it's up to the 3rd party MP3 player makers to support this format if they can.

Finally, it's not really a huge deal. You can still play the music for free once you've bought it. The iTunes software is free. Don't bitch. Although there might be a case about not being able to play the music without iTunes. It might be a problem that you can't export the songs if you reinstall iTunes, but I believe they've fixed those two problems.

I'm not a legal authority of any sort, but these are my two cents. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.

(Link - BBC)

costa rica travelogue

This is the first in a series of nine sequential journal entries written while I was in Costa Rica. I'll post one per day interleaved within my other posts (if I have any).

12/29/2004

Today we began our travels to Costa Rica. Arriving at the airport in San Jose was unique -- this was the point at which the Spanish letters became the ones on top, instead of the English ones.

The travel company who picked us up from the airport did an unfathomably good job of finding us: we didn't even have to think. Our driver (who took us on our first modest adventure) was eager to meet us.

"Welcome to my country!"

Our first destination was a cabin in the Monteverde cloud forest, and our driver said that it would take us maybe four and a half hours -- depending on traffic.

We pulled off the road about thirty minutes into the trip, and he said, "My friends, this is the best place to eat. You love it." And we did. They had awesome local 'tica' (Costa Rican) food at a great price (US$1.50 per meal).

We reached our lodge after just three hours of travel (traffic was good) although two of those hours were spent on rocky, potholed dirt roads. Our driver navigated these roads like a pro, even though most of the time there was barely room for one car, though it was not a one-way road. Along the way we saw some beautiful sunset views of a bay and mountains, making it hard to misunderstand the majesty of the Costa Rica countryside.

The lodge we stayed at has a restaurant and bar (limited in spirits, though with some local rums) and we ate a mediocre dinner of tough steak. I guess I should expect no less -- the steer they raise here have to graze on steep inclines -- the ones too steep for farmland.

Stay tuned for more!

snow encrusted holiday season

The holiday season is in full swing and I'm spending Christmas with RAM's family, dog, and sn*w. It's very festive here, but it's frigid outside and I'm glad I have nowhere to go.

Sheez, that kind of sounds like that song... "Let it Sn*w."

Anyhow, I will be going somewhere very warm soon, and I'll be blogging while I'm there ... but I'll be blogging on paper until I get back, so prepare for a big day of posts when I return.

finally done

I hate finals.

Not only do I hate finals, but I had an exceptionally stupid memorization-based final for a stupid class. We had this "book" of notes that had to be more than 200 pages long, and it was chock full of formulas. Anyhow, we were expected to recite some of the formulas on the exam. This is grad school! I have the book, can't I just use it to reference the rarely-used formulas?

Anyhow. It's over.

Now I'm finally getting some time to relax (read: do last minute xmas shopping). It's nice to have a little free time...

poor grad students

My thoughts go out to the poor CS grad students who won't have a job next semester.

Currently there are more than 60 people in our department who need teaching assistantship funding for next semester... and there are 45 or so slots. Because of the low enrollment, some people may get the shaft.

Of course it's not entirely the fault of the school (and their budget calculation "mistakes"): 80 of the grad students in our department haven't registered for next semester's classes yet. The deadline was two weeks ago. If the classes don't fill, the TA jobs don't get allocated. Makes sense, huh?

Pity.

Stone the Crows

Seriously, stone them.

Apparently the sudden cold has shocked the crows into a fighting frenzy to keep warm. Tonight they're gathering in the trees around my apartment and cawing ... and flying around at each other to keep warm.

It's snowing a very light flurry of crow feathers.

It's kind of eerie to hear the sound of wind and then realize it's just crows ... that many of them ... flying around outside my apartment.

I'd take a picture, but it's dark, and they're dark, and it's cold.

Not much sounds creepier at night than a huge flock of crying crows.

Spaf's grand challenges

Sitting in on a talk given today by Gene Spafford, I got a chance to hear a very good talk for a second time. Here are some of the things that stuck out at me:

80% of email is spam

Only about 50 PhDs in infosec are graduated each year, but more than 4000 lawyers are.

Spaf sez, "Security is not about circling the wagons, it's about getting over the mountain safely" Like brakes in a car (the analogy he uses frequently) computer security features shouldn't be considered a circle-up defense mechanism, rather it should be a feature that lets you "drive faster."

What about epidemics? Most of the security threats are epidemic in nature. Getting rid of them may be impossible, but minimizing the outbreaks would be a huge accomplishment.

At many times during the talk, there were network interference problems, and in fact the video system crashed and burned halfway through. Here's Sid's Grand challenge: interference free video conferencing.

Spaf sez about our armed services using Microsoft Windows, "We've gone from the world's greatest blue-water navy to the worlds greatest blue-screen navy"

Did you know there are over 110,000 different viruses for MS products? There are at most dozens for other platforms. This is so bad that on an unprotected connection, automated scans will usurp and zombify a computer running XP in an average of 4 minutes (shortest in a recent test was four seconds).

We need trustworthy record systems. Hospital workers often don't trust their systems, so they don't use them to their full potential.

We don't measure computers in terms of dependability, reliability. We need to in order to do risk management in IT! But how do you measure the security or privacy risk on computers? This is a severe business problem.


(Link to relevant slides) (Link to similar stream) (Link to related paper)

Selling My Number

Yesterday I got a number of phone calls from numbers I didn't recognize. The annoying part was that the first one came at 8:30 in the morning. Like the good graduate student I am, I was still snoozing away--it was kind of a rude awakening.

Nonetheless, the calls kept coming throughout the morning until I finally got a chance to answer one.

Me: Hello?
Voice: Wow... I'm surprised to get you!
Me: Really?
Voice: yeah. (long pause) I'm with Verizon -- we're trying to set this number up for a new customer.
Me: (amazed) Really.
Voice: Yeah, this number hasn't been assigned!
Me: Well, I've been using it with AT&T. I took it with me when I switched from you guys.
Voice: (amazed) Really.

Anyhow, they got it all worked out, but three of the strange calls that originated from an industrial plant in TH.

I'm glad to see that Verizon has the number switching system working perfectly. </sarcasm>