Author: Dan Wallach
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Software in dangerous places
Software increasingly manages the world around us, in subtle ways that are often hard to see. Software helps fly our airplanes (in some cases, particularly military fighter aircraft, software is the only thing keeping them in the air). Software manages our cars (fuel/air mixture, among other things). Software manages our electrical grid. And, closer to…
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Will they ever learn? Hollywood still pursuing DRM
In today’s New York Times, we read that Hollywood is working on a grand unified video DRM scheme intended to allow for video portability, such as, for example, when you visit a hotel room, you’d like to have your videos with you. What’s sad, of course, is that you can have all of this today…
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Advice on stepping up to a better digital camera
This is a bit off from the usual Freedom to Tinker post, but with tomorrow being “Black Friday” and retailers offering some steep discounts on consumer electronics, many Tinker readers will be out there buying gear or will be offering buying advice to their friends. Over the past several months, several friends of mine have…
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DRM by any other name: The latest from Hollywood
Sunday’s New York Times had an article, Studios’ Quest for Life After DVDs. To nobody’s surprise, consumers want to have convenient access to “their” media, wherever they happen to be, without all the annoying restrictions that come into play when you add DRM to the picture. To many people’s surprise, sales of DVDs (much less…
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Antisocial networking
I just got my invitation to Google Wave. The prototype that’s now public doesn’t have all of the amazing features in the original video demos. At this point, it’s pretty much just a way of collecting IM-style conversations all in one place. But several of my friends are already there, and I’ve had a few…
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When spammers try to go legitimate
I hate to sound like a broken record, complaining about professional mail distribution / spam-houses that are entirely unwilling to require their customers to follow a strict opt-in discipline. But I’m going to complain again and I’m going to name names. Today, I got a spam touting a Citrix product (“Free virtualization training for you…
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Twittering for the Marines
The Marines recently issued an order banning social network sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.). The Pentagon is reviewing this sort of thing across all services. This follows on the heels of a restrictive NFL policy along the same lines. Slashdot has a nice thread, where among other things, we learn that some military personnel will…
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Assorted targeted spam
You can run, but you can’t hide. Here are a few of the latest things I’ve seen, in no particular order. On a PHPBB-style chat board which I sometimes frequent, there was a thread about do-it-yourself television repair, dormant for over a year. Recently, there was a seemingly robotic post, from a brand new user,…
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On China's new, mandatory censorship software
The New York Times reports that China will start requiring censorship software on PCs. One interesting quote stands out: Zhang Chenming, general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, a company that helped create Green Dam, said worries that the software could be used to censor a broad range of content or monitor Internet use were…
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Photo censorship vs. digital photography
On the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square events (protests? uprising? insurrection? massacre?), the New York Times’ Lens Blog put up a great piece about the four different photographers who photographed the iconic “Tank Man”. Inevitably, half of the story concerns the technical details of being in the right place and having the right equipment…