wonkablog

Okay, so I’m a little late on my holiday post.  So what. :)  I got to fly out to Minneapolis for the holiday and spend time with my sisters and my nephews and niece.  It was great fun, and extremely exhausting (those little kids run me ragged).  I did have a field day at Toys R Us buying stuff for them though.  That was fun. :)  I also got to see National Treasures 2 (good popcorn movie), and I got a few cool gifts as well.

That’s about it.  I hope your holidays was fun.

I’ve always noticed a bit of an interesting trend when it comes to people wielding copyright laws, and that is the general assumption that just because something is copyrighted by someone, that it automatically implies that people have no rights to copy them.  That is not true.  Sadly, though, you hear the phrase “it’s copyrighted” as an excuse not to copy something.  Well, guess what, you’re going to be hard pressed to find something that *isn’t* copyrighted these days, especially since in the U.S. you don’t need to register them anymore with the government or even add a (c) to your work.  Everything is just automatically protected by copyright law.

The fact of the matter is, people give away the rights to copy all the time (free software, anyone?) without giving up the copyright.  So, to say something is “copyrighted” does not necessarily imply that the owner of the copyright will be offended if you make a copy.  What you really need to do is find out their feeling on the matter.

I’m really going to simplify here and say that there are three general degrees of distributing copy rights: licensing, permission and unrestrictive.

Licensing would be what the big companies want to do.  Sure you pay $18 for a small plastic disc, but you are licensing the content.  You don’t own it, and that’s why you can’t make copies.  You are generally agreeing to terms that say, “this is one copy, for you, and you alone.”  Licensing can have lots of forms, and basically gets into contracts after that.  Radio stations license the right to copy the music they play by rebroadcasting it.  Just like a movie theater, they get master copies, and license the right to make copies themselves, while the producers get a cut of the income.

The second one is generally “please ask permission before using this.”  You’ll see this a lot on things that aren’t necessarily hugely popular, but the owners don’t want people running naked in the streets with their works, either.  Generally speaking, it seems like the owners are always going to approve of the use if they approve with the application (chilling, I know, but still reasonable for most applications).

The third is what free software licenses use — nobody has to ask for permission because it’s already granted ahead of time.  I suppose there is a fourth method to copyright which is fair use, but that doesn’t really fall into the realm of sharing since in most cases you’re only sampling the work.

Don’t think for a second that just because large entertainment industries enforce their rights to copy on most everything they own, that their method is the status quo.  The word copyright implies making copies.  The question is, who has the rights?

I don’t think I could have said it any better … good ol’ Patrick hits it right on the head.

It’s Halloween! :D  Halloween and Christmas are the only two holidays that I really get into.  I love it.  I especially love Autumn as well.  Good times.  I went out last night and bought another $30 worth of candy to give out.  I always get the good stuff, too, like Snickers and Reese’s.  I remember what it was like being a kid and getting stiffed with yet another Tootsie Roll or sack of pennies.  I tell you what.

I also found this movie at the store last night, which I’ve never heard of.  It was made by Rankin-Bass, and I thought I already had all their stuff (though I quite honestly never checked), but it’s bound to be good since all their other stuff is great.

Aside from that, I’m gonna try and watch Something Wicked This Way Comes tonight.  Haven’t seen that one in a long time, either.  In fact, it’s still shrinkwrapped from when I bought it.

Anyway, have a happy Halloween everyone!  Give out some good candy, too.

I just watched the coolest documentary, Hacking Democracy, which tells the story nicely of Black Box Voting. It’s a great movie, and I highly recommend watching it. I thought that I was watching the news closely on the insanity of the computerized election voting drama, but I had no idea that the citizens group had done so much and found so much damning evidence.

It’s amazing all the stuff they find out, a lot of it through dumpster diving, and a large part through a very small few election officials where are actually willing to look into the situation. What’s really interesting is how much nobody wants to really look into the flaws. They are stonewalled at every turn in their investigations, and when they do find tampering, the county or state doesn’t pursue the matter diligently … or they do, with equally flimsy policy that can’t be scrutinized.

One thing I didn’t like much about the film is they didn’t dive into the technical aspects of it very much. From an experienced programmer’s point of view, my opinion is that the system is flawed from the start because of at least one very basic fact — Diebold’s software uses Microsoft Access to store the results. Anyone who has used any type of databases know that Access is designed for nothing more than hobby use, and should never be used in any kind of production environment where data integrity or security is in any amount necessary. That alone just blows me away.

There was a very cool test that they ran near the end of the film, and they covered the explanation quite well on how it worked. They found a hacker to modify the software on one of the electronic cards used to store the votes, to throw off the vote that was going to be tallied using that card. Then, the investigators and some election officials actually did a mock vote right there to test the system, and sure enough, by just hacking the card itself, the vote was completely skewed in a different direction.

The film asks a lot of great questions. Why is it that the vendors are deciding how the voting process should work? How are these things verified for accuracy? Why isn’t the entire process made more public, since it is a matter of public interest? And my favorite one addressed very early was, why is the software secret, so that not even election officials can know what is in there? At the beginning they showed the state of California’s technical advisor, who said that even he hadn’t been able to see the software.

As far as documentaries go, I thought this one was really well done.  It was clean, concise, and had a lot of evidence backing up what they were doing.  They didn’t have any wild crazy-eyed conspiracy theories, instead just providing facts and asking rhetorical questions.

There’s just a lot of great stuff in this movie, you have to see it for yourself. It’s unbelievable how screwed up the system is. There’s a lot more screenshots I’d like to throw up as well, but just watch it for yourself. Good stuff.

Gotta love Mutts.

I’ve really enjoyed reading Bruce Scheiner’s blog this week on airport security, as he talks with a TSA administrator.  Today was the final part, and I noticed something was missing from the question lineup — what about international flights?

Think about it — the TSA does all it can do to stop mean people and bad things happening on airplanes, but only if those flights originate from within the USA.

Now, I haven’t flown internationally in a good long while, in fact the last time was returning home from my mission in Argentina in 2001.  But I do remember (not knocking the country I love) that security wasn’t an issue there nearly as much as it is here, and yet we were flying straight into the U.S.  So, it seems to me that there’s a huge security gap when it comes to air security — just fly from somewhere that security isn’t tight.

Not to say that the entire airport security these days isn’t completely whacked anyway, but oh well.  I’d rather drive anyway.

This is the funniest lolcat I’ve seen yet …

If the joke is lost on you, check out this boing boing article.  Great stuff.

There’s nothing I don’t like more on my blog than posting notices that basically say, “I’m busy, and that’s why I haven’t done anything,” but I think this time probably deserves a chance, since I’m not sure when things are going to be back to normal.

I think I mentioned this in passing in other recent posts, but here’s the story.  About three weeks ago now, I woke up early one morning, went out to my living room and noticed my computer was turned off.  It seemed rather odd to me, considering I hardly ever turn it off, though sometimes I do and just forget.  I came back to it later, and realized that my power supply had died.  That in itself is really odd, since I paid a lot for one of those quiet ones, and I’d had it less than a year.

Anyway, instead of rushing out to replace or get it RMA’d, instead I decided to just live without a desktop for a while, and that’s what I’ve been doing.  Cutting myself off from that has been largely a positive experience.  I needed a break from working on Gentoo and computer projects, and it’s helped curb my idling quite a bit, and I’ve been getting a lot done in other areas of life.

As far as Gentoo goes, I don’t have access to anything right now since everything was on my desktop.  My SSH pubkey is on there, so I can’t work on any ebuilds.  I can check my email through webmail, but last time I looked I had over 2500 new messages, and it broke the webpage.  If you really need to contact me, I’m always on jabber during work hours (sdibb at jabber dot org).  I would point to my contact page, but I accidentally zapped that the other day while upgrading my blog.  Whoops.

In case you’re wondering, I am planning on “coming back” sometime, but for now I’m really enjoying the break.  I’m using my laptop at home to get online, but it has a bare minimum of my preferences setup, so I mostly just use it to check my gmail and that’s it.  As soon as I feel like I’m caught up with things again in life, I’ll get my computer fixed.  I’m going to try and take it easier this time though, as I have a tendency to take on too much and get burned out quickly.  I think maybe what I’ll do is instead of broadly approaching so many areas in the tree, I’ll focus on maintaining a few applications.  Who knows.  We’ll see.

In any event, have a great weekend.  I should be back online for good in another week or so.