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February 5, 2003
Michael Jackson in a recent documentary denies having had any plastic surgery to his face except for two operations on his nose because “it helped me breathe better so I can hit higher notes.”
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Looks we’ll have to go to Hypothesis #2: There is a God and Michael Jackson has really, really pissed Him off.
Alice Marshall writes to point out that the new issue of TheOnion gives evidence that it is in fact still a humor rag. She (and I) particularly liked:
Department Of The Interior Sets Aside Two Million Acres For Car Commercials
WASHINGTON, DC—Seeking to “safeguard our precious wildlands for future generations of SUV ads,” the Department of the Interior set aside two million acres in Wyoming and Colorado for use in car commercials Monday. “If we do not protect this land,” Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton said,
Mark Dionne points us to an article in Slate about the economic models emerging at EverQuest, a massively multiplayer online game.
The article’s conclusion:
If EverQuest is any guide, the liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision of truly limited government.
February 4, 2003
An extended and reasonable reply from Umbertina E. Vezzani at AMI to the message I sent them:
It must be noted that AMI has not announced support for Microsoft’s Palladium. Palladium is an initiative by an OS entity that is slated for the future. To be honest, though we do know about it, AMI has not begun any development related to it. At this point we have not made any decisions on support either. TCPA is completely optional to our customers (OEMs, ODMs, CMs and other system builders). They may choose to make it available or not, depending on the needs of their market. We have had requests from a number of customers for this technology. Depending from the motherboard manufacturer, you will continue to find motherboards enabled by AMIBIOS that do not feature TCPA. I must also add that AMIBIOS is not the first to offer this feature – There are already PCs featuring this technology or other BIOS vendors enabling this technology or other hardware-based security options based on encrypted authentication.
TCPA does not equal Palladium. While certainly there is some future development overlap between the two, TCPA is being introduced by OEM’s as a security option to protect systems through hardware and firmware. The purpose of TCPA is to implement a subsystem to protect computer clients from software hackers, not DRM. It is poorly suited, even from a technical point of view, for DRM. DRM applications might use TCPA applications or not, and DRM can be introduced without TCPA. If you are against DRM, your concerns should be expressed to the organizations that promote it.
On misconceptions in circulating papers
Another common misconception is that TCPA would not allow people to run Linux. It actually does not limit the ability to run Linux (or any other open source solution). Linux device drivers for TCPA are available as well.
In addition to this, the TCPA FAQ document reports several protections for those users that are concerned with their privacy:
* The system owner has ultimate control and permissions over private information and must opt-in to utilize a TCPA subsystem.(…) A TCPA subsystem can be disabled permanently
* The specification allows the system owner to create multiple and/or anonymous identities to enhance personal security and remove avenues for identity cross-correlation
* Supports multiple certificate authorities to give user choice
* Code, applets or drivers used on a TCPA subsystem do not need to be signed, unless the Operating system used specifically requires it.
Please refer to: TCPA FAQ
As a smaller company itself, AMI has always supported innovation and creativity, as these have been our main tools in competing against much larger companies in our industry. We would not do anything that in our minds would damage our credibility or reputation for world class BIOS solutions and will carefully evaluate this type of feedback when it does come time to examine any future technologies. We would also like to recommend that anyone who is opposed to a Palladium-type solution in the future, please make that known to OEM’s and system builders. As they are our customers, we definitely listen to them in terms of what they (and hopefully their customers) will want in future BIOS.
Thank you again for your time in contacting us and we hope that this and some of the links below will shed some light on AMI’s plans.
LINKS
Original Articles on theinquirer.net
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7089
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7103Interview with Slashdot (“real, not laundered”)
I don’t feel insulted by this, which means it’s good boilerplate. Has he changed my mind? Not yet. I’m posting this before I’ve looked into all the links he provides. But since I want anonymity to remain the Net’s default and since I believe that the mere existence of an identity system will lead – because of the tilt in the market’s playing field – to abuses, I am unlikely to be brought to think that hardware-enabling such systems is a good idea. But my mind is still open. A bit.
I loved The Onion. I love The Onion’s book, “Our Dumb Century,” a colossal work of funniness. So can someone tell me what the hell is going on over there? Alternatively, can you find one funny line or comment in the current edition? Did it change or have I lost my sense of humor? Or both?
Ray Bid writes to alert us to the online diary of a backpacker, Marlowe Bidforth, who is trapped in Borneo and at this point must be assumed to be dead. I also assume that the site is a spoof.
Why aren’t we seeing more fictitious weblogs? I don’t mean RageBoy‘s postings about being a babe magnet, but a genuine form of narrative fiction: daily postings from a fictitious character.
I did a 3-4 minute interview for “Here and Now” that will today sometime between noon and one on the 45 NPR stations that carry it. They asked me about slashdot’s thread on the shuttle disaster which turned into a discussion of the nature of distributed expertise. (The segments usually air at around 12:20.)
February 3, 2003
Seth Johnson has sent around a message alerting us to a page where we can write and send messages to AMI and Transmeta protesting their recent decisions to build into their chips the capabilities required to work with Microsoft Palladium and other “trusted computing” and “digital rights management” systems. Here’s what I wrote to AMI:
Notably absent in your recent meetings to decide the fate of the digital marketplace of ideas were the voices of the customer. Had I, as an AMI customer, been allowed to speak, I would have said that I will not buy a computer that has been hardware-enabled for “DRM” since it gives the creators of content the right to control how I use that content, a right we have not allowed in any other medium.
I ask you to have the guts to announce that bullying customers is not what AMI is about. Back away from the one-sided agreement. I would like to be able to buy AMI-based computers in the future, but I will not if by so doing I am enabling Hollywood to hijack my computer.
Here’s Richard Stallman on Palladium and “Trusted Computing.” Where’s Linus Torvalds on the issue? (That’s a question, not a poke.) I can’t find anything in a quick googling, but since he works for Transmeta and since there’s been serious discussion of the effect of DRM on Open Source, I’m surprised links are not leaping off the results page.
I’m particularly annoyed by Joe Lieberman because (1) he’s sanctimonious and (2) I feel like he’s embarrassing us Jews. Chip has found a page that lampoons him. It’s a start.
John Adams writes to tell me that MaxSpeak beat me to this link.
Chip points us to The Quest for the Net’s Patron Saint.
Hmmm. Try ’em on for size:
“Hear my fervent plea, St. Berners-Lee”?
“Put our sins behind us, dear St. Linus”?
“The blessed St. Lessig”?
“Put my sins in a cage, boy, oh fearsome St. RageBoy”?
“Sound the heavenly bugle, lovely St. Google”?
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