fast summer

so it's been a few months since my last post. after school finished for the year, i began work again in sunny cupertino. and wouldn't you know it, this summer went by just as fast as last year's. this year i lived with josh, nathan, and zack. work has been good, and by having a car, i've been able to explore the bay area more. so as a whole, it's been a great summer.

big evil brother

apparently microsoft is considering adding to its software the equivalent of a black box in its software for bug tracking. what isn't like the average bug tracking software, though, is the fact that this will send to microsoft a much more comprehensive report of what's going on, in terms of all applications that are running on the system at the time of the crash, as well as the contents of the documents being created. to be fair, they will allow users to specify how much information is sent. but one might first ask, what is the default choice? microsoft is notorious for having poor judgement in terms of default options. also, how many regular mom and pop users will know that they have an option to change this? finally, the fact that the infrastructure exists for grabbing this much data is scary to me, because it will be far too easy to abuse the feature.

nikon redux, noaa ban?

since my last post, nikon's encryption has been broken twice. engadget reports that both bibble labs and programmer dan coffin have reverse engineered the encryption, with coffin publishing the decryption code on his website. we'll see how this plays out, especially with how adobe uses/doesn't use the decryption workaround.

adding to my disdain of lobbyists and how easy it seems to buy a politician, slashdot reports that for-pay weather sites (i.e. accuweather) have lobbied senator rick santorum to introduce a bill that would prevent noaa from publishing its weather data for free on its website. who knew that having a government entity providing a free service to the public could be a bad thing. politicians for sale, anyone?