Omnia Mutantur

It’s half-surprising that you can still find useful stuff on Slashdot before places like Reddit. The latest surprise find is an article describing how Microsoft is screwing the pooch on Iceland, which is of course the best thing to do for your business in a country with a dying economy.

The short version is that Microsoft Certified Partners buy software contracts from Microsoft, and then resell them to their clients. With the capital of Iceland now being 5 cents, a lot of companies who bought these contracts have gone bankrupt, and of course aren’t making their yearly payments to Microsoft anymore (kind of difficult when you’re dead). The MCPs who sold them the contracts are then on the hook for the money.

“Aha!” says the suit from Redmond. “You made a contract with us, and another with them. Their inability to uphold their end of the contract does not invalidate your commitment to us.”

This is what I’ve heard from pals in the industry. Pals who’re being screwed over right now. In short, the MCP’s have to pay the licensing fees for the bankrupted companies.

The sheer shock of having to do so is starting to hit the Icelandic economy, hard. Already battered by the collapse of almost all privately held financial institutions and the subsequent bust of nearly fifteen hundred companies, Iceland’s MCP’s are next.

And then,

But the backlash effect has been astounding. Several of Iceland’s largest MCP’s are now fighting for survival in a sea already at significant turmoil due to the economic depression. Shit had already hit the fan, but now they’re being skull-fucked by Microsoft to boot.

And what would you do? Well. My sources tell me a lot is afoot. Several MCP’s are bailing out, switching over to Free Software and restructuring their business model. Keep the revenue inside Iceland, sell better technical services for less money and yet double their revenue. “Why didn’t we do this earlier?”

Why indeed.

That’s just beautiful. I bet this is making all sorts of people eager to sign up as an MCP.

The original article is occasionally returning a 500, but Google has it cached. It’s very colorful.

Ricardo Science and Technology crisis, freesoftware, Microsoft, Science and Technology

You may have noticed that the number of posts related to freedom and privacy has decreased significantly. That’s because I’ve mostly given up on people caring about their own privacy, and it feels significantly like I’m preaching to the choir, with the eyes of the mostly apathetic congregation glazing over.

Still, what the fuck.

Free software is an issue I mostly stay away from, since a lot of the free software rhetoric comes from either a very commie point of view or simply misguided mantras like information wants to be free! (no, information doesn’t want anything), but this sort of Apple nonsense is an excellent example of what pushes people to the extreme of claiming that all software should be free. If I own a device, for which I paid with my own money, it is my property. I should be allowed to run whatever the hell I want in it. That doesn’t mean that I can necessarily redistribute Apple’s code, but come on, insisting on turning customers into criminals just because they want to use software other than that blessed by Apple on their devices is idiotic at best and corrupt at worst. They still haven’t learned that extremism on one side will engender extremism on the other.

Listen to Lessig, people. It’s a fight you can’t win, and you’ll only end up alienating those who so dearly wish to give you their money. ProTip: that’s not so smart a move in a recession.

Non-ranting information at the EFF link above, as well as the Free Your Phone site.

Ricardo Freedom, Science and Technology Apple, Freedom, iPhone

I’ve never been more grateful for how warm a Macbook Pro can get.

Ricardo Random funny stuff, Science and Technology mac

A disgruntled employee locks the city of San Francisco out of their network. There were so many fuck ups on the city’s part that the news article almost reads like a play-by-play on how not to handle this.

he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him

Tried to fire him? And what, missed and fired the wrong person? Even in this socialist country you can fire people pretty much at will, if you’re willing to pay them severance (I don’t think he would qualify for the single exception – you’re employer knowing that you are a pregnant woman).

OK, so there’s some law stopping you from firing him. Is there a law stopping you from revoking his network access and paying him to read the newspaper, from home, while you figure out how to get rid of him?

Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.

Authorities have searched Childs’ home and car for a device that could be used in such an attack, but so far no such evidence has been found.

Like.. a computer? Thank god they couldn’t find such a specialized tool anywhere.

Vinson said the extra money was apparently compensation for being on-call as a trouble-shooter.

Heh. So you not only keep him on board, but pay him extra because the stability of your system depends on this employee you don’t trust anymore.

Authorities say Childs began tampering with the computer system June 20. The damage is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars.

The most basic rule when firing people with access to your organization’s brain is that you fire them on the spot – even if you have to pay them extra to do so. Failing to fire someone and then keeping him with the exact same access rights is just plain stupid, and now San Francisco will pay through the nose for it.

As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said.

Of course. Such network sniffing tools are readily available, and are at their most usable when in the hands of a person with network-wide access. Like Mr. Childs here.

If the city employees had used something as simple as Skype or Pidgin with OTR, it would probably have been harder for him to track them, forcing him to install a key logger or using some more invasive methods that could have been detected earlier. But of course, only criminals could possibly see some use in encryption.

Ricardo Freedom, Science and Technology

The Spore Creature Creator has been released. Pretty. Me Want. However, the demo requires admin rights to install on my Mac, instead of simply allowing me to drop it on the Applications folder.

I’m very suspicious of EA’s track record – specifically, I smell robots. I’m not installing it.

Update: Yes, it’s got robots. It seems that the Mac version is a port of the Windows version using Cider, so the admin rights might also be to install the relevant libraries, but there’s definitely home-phoning DRM in there.

Ricardo Science and Technology, Uncategorized

The internet is full of assholes, there’s no denying that. It’s not as much a statistical anomaly – the whole world is full of assholes – but a combination of having said bastards on a medium that allows them easy reach to the whole wide world, with enough range that they don’t get punched in the nose. I guess it’s all John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory at work.

I’m a big proponent of anonymity, which is one of the components of Gabe’s evil brew – people just need to exercise better judgement when dealing with someone who they don’t know at all. On a case in the U.S., a woman signed up on MySpace under a fake name and harasses a girl, who then kills herself feeling she was being taunted by a boy she liked. Let’s leave aside the fact that the girl trusted this person she didn’t know, and then took such a rash decision based on their remarks. The woman who was taunting her was just convicted of charged with several felonies. She’s a immoral bastard for sure, but the problem is that the reasons they’re charging her with felonies amount to her breaking not the law, but MySpace’s terms of service.

There’s a pretty good analysis of the decision at SecurityFocus.

“Yet, legal experts argue that charging a person for violating computer-crime statutes because they broke the terms-of-service agreement of an online site could lead to the ability to charge nearly anyone with computer crime. Using residential broadband for business purposes? A violation of the terms of service and, thus, potentially a crime. Checking sports sites while at work? A violation of corporate policy and, thus, potentially a crime.”

While the discussion over at Technocrat sometimes veers off too much into someone oughta do something, Jim Hill asks a very good question:

The thing I can’t figure is why the ordinary homicide statutes don’t apply. “A person is presumed to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his voluntary act.” That’s why we can and do outlaw “Fire!” in a theater and fighting words in a bar: you’re presumed to have intended the consequences.

If elaborately befriending a depressed 13-year-old girl by pretending to be the boy of her dreams, spending weeks earning her trust and adoration, and then publicly humiliating her with the kiss-off line “the world would be better off without you” isn’t an indicator of intent, then neither is pulling the trigger knowing which way the bullet’s going to go.

Why indeed? Maybe the prosecutor thought he couldn’t just win a manslaughter case with the evidence. Or maybe there’s a cherry on top for someone if the case was decided this way. From the same SecurityFocus analysis:

Making a violation of such agreements a crime would allow prosecutors the ability to investigate nearly any Internet user, Scott Greenfield, a criminal defense attorney, stated in an online analysis.

“Violating a website’s ‘TOS’ is carte blanche to an imaginative prosecutor,” Greenfield said. “We are all felons if this flies.”

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology

Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days.

That’s from a Bruce Schneier article on The Guardian advising people on the invasions of privacy they will be subjected to while crossing customs, and what they can do about it.

He goes on to provide people suggestions on how to avoid their data being taken by random officers. You know that things are really bad when a very public mainstream figure like Schneier is advising people on how to avoid and deceive their “protectors”.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology

So Apple finally releases Java SE 6 for the Mac, with its huge speed improvements, and now I can’t edit any single input field on either of the Java applications I use (including Moneydance and IntelliJ IDEA) because the fields show up greyed-out and are read-only. No, rebooting did not help. Seems I have to stick with Java 5.

Brilliant.

Ricardo Programming, Science and Technology

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

So begins Clay Shirky’s article on how media is changing, and how some people just don’t get the reasons for the change. It’s not just your standard how-is-tv-like-booze piece – instead it goes deeper into not only how this cognitive surplus is being applied, but why it’s just an infinitesimal piece of what could be used, and where do people find the time.

There’s an anecdote near the end that I just hope is true.

Ricardo Science and Technology, The future

Speaking of which, I’m keeping a development blog at my company site. I’ll continue to publish the Grails plugins and any other code I create over there. Enjoy!

Ricardo Programming, Science and Technology