Vista’s DRM Blocks Popular Shows: More Reasons to Hate Vista

As if Vista was not already notorious for its driver issues, application problems and slow performance. Now, the DRM riddled into Vista’s system that the famous computer scientist Peter Guttman warned us of when it was first released has reared its ugly head.

CNET and Ars Technica are reporting that Vista’s DRM has inexplicably blocked its users from recording NBC shows. The problem is still not resolved, so those trying to record such shows will continue to miss shows until Microsoft and the content providers deign to lift their fingers to fix it.

Two things:

1. When you use DRM, you are totally at the mercy of the content providers and software makers. At any time, a software glitch can get you. Or the company may go out of business, or terminate that particular branch of business, and leave you high and dry. And these things have already happened.
2. Vista is a bitch. It’s newest features over XP, and thus claim to fame, are DRM, driver problems, slow performance and application compatibility problems.

Filed in Outraged, Entertainment, Windows.

The Disgusting State of Health Care and Hospitals

I read this post about someone whose father was hospitalized for heart trouble and his experience with one of the premier hospitals in the country. It’s disgusting. The post was appropriately titled Hospitals are No Place for Sick People. The callousness, carelessness, lack of training, and so on in health care is frankly horrifying, especially when the person hospitalized is so helpless to do anything about it.

Filed in Outraged.

Microsoft Disses Paying MSDN Subscribers over Windows XP Service Pack 3, Again

Microsoft has not learned its lesson from the outcry when it released Vista SP 1. It has announced that Windows XP Service Pack 3 will be available to the general public on April 29. But it will not be available to the MSDN and Technet subscribers, who have paid big bucks for their subscription, until the following month. Yup. Once you pay them money, they’re no longer interested in you.

Reaction to this has already started in the MSDN/Technet forum in a separate thread — the original thread was locked after 3 or so posts, so users opened a new thread. As someone on Slashdot mentioned, “Why do MSDN and VL customers get this later than Windows Update? What exactly are we paying for?”

Filed in Windows, Outraged.

Seagate Fights Its Downhill Slide with Litigation

Another company that is slowly going downhill has decided to deal with it by litigation, rather than by improving its products and diversifying.

I’ve long used Seagate’s hard disks, among others, both as portables as well as internal drives. However, the newer portable hard disks are definitely of poorer quality than the ones I bought a long time ago. On the old portables, when they were plugged in, the drive was always available. On the new ones, if I use an application to access the drive after a long hiatus, the drive, which was on and spinning, will suddenly switch off, spin down, and then re-switch on again. All by itself. It’s very irritating, and adds two or three noticeable seconds to the initial time needed to access the drive.

With solid state drives on the ascendant, Seagate probably also sees the writing on the wall for its hard drives. Instead of innovating and perhaps buying into the technology, it has decided to use its patent arsenal as weapons against others manufacturing solid state drives. Their first target is the very small STEC, an SSD manufacturer.

I guess this spells the beginning of the end of another company. When companies try to fight the future in this way, instead of embracing it, it can’t be good.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Monster Cables vs Blue Jeans Cables

Monster Cables, a company supposedly delighting in sending litigation letters to competitors, sent one to Blue Jeans Cables, only to find that Blue Jeans was no pushover. Its president was a former lawyer, who quickly saw through what he saw as spurious claims designed to get companies who didn’t know better to quickly settle. According to the president’s letter, none of the Monster Cables patents even applied to Blue Jeans’ stuff - and some of the patents they cited were mutually incompatible with each other so that a cable violating all these patents at the same time was impossible to make. The claims made were also very vague - they didn’t even specify which of the cables violated which patent, and so on.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

RIAA Lets Its Lap Dog MediaSentry Break the Law

MediaSentry continues to flout the law, operating illegally, despite a cease and desist order from a court. This is no surprise to me, since RIAA and MediaSentry have garnered reputations of being the hoodlums of the Internet. The news has been around for a while, and the latest site to report it is Ars Technica, but I only just got fed up enough to post my opinion of it.

I think I said it before. If you want others to respect your rights, you have to respect their rights too. Otherwise what makes you different than a thug?

Filed in Outraged, Entertainment, Opinion.

Network Solutions Hijacks Your Sub-Domains Too

Not content with stealing domain names from people who search, and being sued for it no less, Network Solutions has now been found to hijack their customers’ sub-domains as well. TechCrunch revealed that if you’re using Network Solution’s web hosting or DNS, Network Solutions will direct visitors to any unassigned sub-domains to a page loaded with their advertisements.

Why does anyone even use Network Solutions? Together with eNom and GoDaddy, they are probably the worst registrars in the world.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Creative on the Defensive Over X-Fi/Audigy Drivers Fiasco

After Creative took down a third party for fixing their broken Vista Audigy and X-Fi drivers, a huge public outcry resulted. Since then, Creative has hurriedly deleted their initial post and replaced it with a defensive note. You can still see the original post in this archive.

Anyway, Daniel K has responded in a Wired interview. I don’t know if it’s real, since it was posted on April Fool’s day, but it looks real. The update is that Creative has relented and allowed him to release the modified X-Fi and Audigy drivers minus some bits which allowed the drivers to be used on any sound card. As a result, he has posted the drivers to http://hosted.filefront.com/braziliantech/

Filed in News, Outraged, Software.

Sony Sued for Software Piracy: Hypocrisy Again

Remember when there was some scandal involving one of Warner’s top management where it was found that the guy’s daughter pirates music at home? Well, now we have another hypocrite, and this time it’s Sony, the one that tried to plant a root kit onto your computer, making it open to all manner of viruses and spyware, just to protect their own music. The latest news is that Sony BMG is now being sued for software piracy, and its assets have been seized.

Maybe BSA should make a raid on all of the recording studios and movie production offices. You know, to find out if this is just the tip of the iceberg. RIAA and MPAA should also raid BSA offices too - who knows what sort of music and movies that may be pirated there? After all, these people are talking and thinking about piracy all the time. That’s pretty suspicious isn’t it? The rest of us ordinary folk don’t even think about such things until either the RIAA, MPAA or BSA bring it up.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Humor.

Creative Takes Down Third Party for Fixing their Broken Vista Audigy Drivers

Creative probably made a major tactical error. Apparently the drivers for their sound cards do not work well under Vista, with many features crippled. A developer named Daniel K created fixed drivers that allowed Audigy and X-Fi (?) users to use their cards on Vista the way they could on XP. Now Creative has issued a notice to the modder to take down his drivers. This has led to a major hue and cry in all the major forums, including Creative’s own, as well as many tech news sites.

I have a feeling that Creative is disallowing the fixes because they want users to buy a new sound card for Vista, as well as pay for some add-on software pack called Alchemy so that their sound card will work in Vista as advertised.

There are probably at least 2 parties at fault here:

• Microsoft - for releasing a Vista that has disabled so many things that came with XP and causing so many driver problems. The Vista developers obviously don’t believe in backward-compatiblity.
• Creative - too money grubbing about the whole matter. Good grief, customers have already paid for your card. And you didn’t even have to fix the software, someone did it for you. You destroy your goodwill when you take him down without providing your own fixes.

Update: see the latest news on this, as well as the URL where you can get the modded drivers in Creative on the Defensive over X-Fi/Audigy Drivers Fiasco.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Windows.

It’s Not Safe to Install Safari After All: Major Security Vulnerabilities

After wondering whether to trust Apple enough to install Safari for Windows, I’ve come across a security advisory describing two serious holes in Safari that will allow a malicious site to compromise your machine and execute malicious code on it. So I guess I got my answer as to whether or not to install Safari.

Besides, it seems like Apple’s release of Safari for Windows is a bit of a fiasco.

• They put it as a default update to Itunes. Yup, Safari is considered an update to Itunes. And the installation of Safari is checked by default in the Apple Updater. After my experience with the obnoxious QuickTime for Windows, this behavior alone has made me hesitate about installing Safari.
• Because it is an update to Itunes, some sites are making fun of Apple’s EULA. The updater says that the software is governed by the EULA of the software it’s updating. Unfortunately, that EULA says that you can only install the software on Apple PCs, not the sort of PCs that are used by the majority of people running Windows. I’m sure this is just a silly mistake, but it’s pretty funny. Sneaking in a Safari install and giving a EULA that forbids the running of Safari on Windows machines!

Filed in Software, Outraged.

The Champion of Horrible Domain Registrars Strikes Again: GoDaddy Takes Down RateMyCop.com

GoDaddy, long-time champion of taking down domains of websites it doesn’t like, has struck again. This time it has taken down a police watchdog site, RateMyCop.com. As is its usual policy, there is no warning, and the owner wasn’t even informed. The domain is simply redirected to a page on GoDaddy.

GoDaddy is notorious for taking down sites whenever it receives the slightest complaint against it, and has a a long history of acting in this way. Maybe it was jealous that eNom was hogging all the bad publicity and wanted to return to the limelight slimelight.

If your domain is with GoDaddy, or you’re hosted there, better start thinking of alternatives. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to find a good registrar anywhere. But GoDaddy has proven itself to be the bottom of the barrel, with eNom competing to win that distinction as well.

Filed in Outraged, News, Web Hosting, Opinion.

New Wikileaks Exposé: eNom’s Domain Privacy Protection is a Sham

Wikileaks has revealed that eNom’s domain Privacy Protection “is a sham”. eNom’s lawyer was quoted as saying:

When complaints are received, we have a very low threshold for turning over the underlying information of the party. Basically anybody mentioning the word copyright or trademark or bought or anything can be sent the underlying contact information…

It gets worse than that - “Wikileaks has discovered a previously unreported eNom proposal from last year to bulk-release customer records to government agencies”. The quote below comes from Wikileaks:

eNom’s idea is to encrypt registrant’s confidential information and attach it to every public “whois” record. This would allow law enforcement, or anyone else with a decryption key, to obtain all confidential records automatically.

Readers of this blog may remember that eNom is the registrar that voluntarily killed a foreign company’s domain for doing something that was legal in their country and many parts of the world, without even a court order.

Wikileaks is calling for a boycott of this domain registrar. The registrar has also recently killed the wikileaks.info domain.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Return of the Undead: SCO Still Lives to be the Scourge of the Earth

Now that SCO has had $100 million injected into it by a new sucker, it’s raring to strike back again at IBM and Novell. It will appeal the decision made by the court against it. It had tried to claim that Linux infringed on its copyright but was unable to show the court which lines of code in Linux corresponded with those from its Unix source. Later on, when it tried to take on Novell as well, Novell proved that SCO didn’t even own the copyright to Unix in the first place.

In the end, instead of winning a billion dollars from the lawsuit for their claim that IBM did not respect their intellectual property, it was found that they owed millions of dollars to Novell for not respecting Novell’s intellectual property.

SCO returns to the scene without its Head Vampire CEO Darl McBride, but I’m sure substitutes of such (low) caliber are not difficult to find in the underworld company. As they and their latest victim investor work together, I am sure they can manage to lose a few more million dollars.

Filed in Outraged, News.

Foreign Company’s Domain Disabled for Allowing Foreigners Legal Access to Cuba

The domain name registrar eNom has apparently disabled access to Steve Marshall’s travel agency website at the US Treasury Dept’s behest. Marshall is an English travel agent catering to European travelers. The US Treasury didn’t like that he allowed travelers access to Cuba, so they requested eNom to shut down his website by taking his domain off the map. Which they did.

This move reminds me of the attempt of the Julius Baer Bank (of the money laundering scandal and censorship notoriety) to censor Wikileaks by taking the domain off the map. In this case, I fail to see how the US Treasury can have the authority to take out the domain name of a foreign company doing what is legal in his country. And they didn’t even go through a court and eNom just caved in.

Is it even legal for a domain registrar to do something like that? Isn’t this is breach of contract or something? Can anyone trust domain registrars situated in US anymore if any Tom, Dick or Harry can simply waltz in and disable a domain even if it’s of a foreign company doing legal things?

I’m disgusted at the registrar. But I don’t think the other registrars are any better. They cave in at the first sign of trouble. No, that’s not right - they cave in if you even look at them funny.

Anyway, according to NY Times, some of his sites are still accessible, such as cuba-guantanamo.com.

Filed in Outraged, News, Opinion.