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Tuesday, May 13, 2003 |
'Banned' Xbox Hacking Book Selling Fast: Too hot for tech
publishers, Andrew Huang self- published his comprehensive guide to hacking
Microsoft's game console. Weeks before publication, he's already pre-sold
half of his initial print run. By Kevin Poulsen, BusinessWeek.
11:58:44 PM 
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Dave also worried about the issue when Smart Tags debuted, and I commented over at t'other blog back in 2001.
10:42:15 PM
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Dave:Late last night I posted a perspective on Microsoft and how they "work" with independent developers. Simon Fell, one of those indies, had posted a provocative item on his weblog, saying that interop in RSS will, of course, mean Works With Microsoft. And Dare Obasanjo, a Microsoft developer, agreed with him. This is something I've heard before, many times, in hallways in Redmond, but never in public, on the Web, quotable, visible for all to see.
This is exactly the worry, isn't it. Microsoft's direction is dictated by its culture and its corporate sense of what's rational for it to do. About the former, we have loads of evidence, going back well before the stuff that came out in the antitrust trial. The latter, we can reason out ourselves, as I did in Tailoring the Web for Profit in the summer of 1998, as the antitrust action was just underway. On both, correct a bit in understanding that MSFT is not monolithic, not just one thing, and allow for error bars, and it all appears fairly clearly. But, yes, as Dave notes, it's something else to read it posted publically. Hubris? Or real invincibility?
10:40:36 PM
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RIAA
Apologizes For Threatening Letter, by Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com.
Last Thursday, the RIAA sent a stiff copyright warning to Penn
State's department of astronomy and astrophysics. Department officials at
first were puzzled, because the notification invoked the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act and alleged that one of its FTP sites was unlawfully
distributing songs by the musician Usher. The letter demanded that the
department remove the site and delete the infringing sound files.
But no such files existed on the server, which is used by faculty and
graduate students to publish research and grant proposals. Matt Soccio, the
department's system administrator, said that he searched the FTP server
for files ending in mp3, wma, ogg, wav, mov, mpg, etc., and found
nothing that would precipitate this complaint.
Except, that is, when Soccio realized two things. The department has on its
faculty a professor emeritus named Peter Usher whose work on radio-selected
quasars the FTP site hosted. The site also had a copy of an a capella song
performed by astronomers about the Swift gamma ray satellite, which Penn
State helped to design.
The combination of the word "Usher" and the suffix ".mp3" had triggered the
RIAA's automated copyright crawlers.
4:56:28 PM
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Three from Wired News:
- AI Founder Blasts Modern Research. Artificial intelligence pioneers point to advances made in law, medicine and other arenas as proof of the vitality of their work. But Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the field, calls AI research 'brain-dead.' By Mark Baard.
- Finding Anorexia in the Genes. Long considered a 'social disease,' anorexia nervosa also may have genetic origins. Mounting evidence suggests genes as well as the environment play a role in one's propensity to develop the eating disorder. By Kristen Philipkoski.
- Fizzer Virus Uses Kazaa to Spread. Able to leap firewalls and disable anti-virus software, the new mass-mailing worm hit tens of thousands of PCs in Europe and Asia. Now the infection has spread to North America by way of Outlook and Kazaa. The RIAA has not said, 'I told ya so.'
6:11:44 AM
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