I’ve heard the latest Security Now, regarding the debate between Dave Marsh and Peter Guttman on DRM in Windows Vista. While a few good points were made, the major one - in my opinion - was not.

DRM, in a practical sense, is deeply flawed: The idea is to give you your media - say, a WMA piece of music - and a program to play it with - say, Windows Media Player - but encrypt the media. Now, naturally, Media Player will need the decryption key for the media, and the idea is that Media Player will verify that you are allowed to listen to the song, and only then decrypt it - as it is played.

Well, penny knows. But I have proof she knows…

http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PUZZLES/waldo.html

Everyone knew this was going to be an interesting one to watch. Die-hard Microsoft fans were sure Vista would be the final nail in the Open Source coffin, die-hard Linux fans were sure that the release would be Microsoft’s demise. Myself - I’m sitting and enjoying the show.

It’s always very interesting to show Beryl to non-Linux users. They are almost always highly impressed, and are often completely in shock that Linux is a graphical system - many people still believe Linux is command-line only. But the funniest thing is that they always seem to care more about useless, spinning, transparent desktop cubes than, say, security. This holds for Vista’s flashy new graphics, as well - mainstream media seems to be focusing on Vista’s GUI a lot more than they are about its controversial new security features. Very interesting, keeping in mind that Windows has never been “not pretty enough” in consumer’s eyes, but rather too unstable or virus-prone.

This is absolutely antique (2000), but it’s good to hear an artist with a clue.

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

If you’re like me, and don’t use Gnome or KDE, then you probably use the pmount or pmount-hal applications to mount removable media. Here’s a neat thing to add to your .bash_aliases:

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function pmh {
    pmount-hal $1
    UDI=`hal-find-by-property --key block.device --string $1`
    cd "`hal-get-property --udi $UDI --key volume.mount_point`"
}

I do type mesmerizingly fast, though… :)

I am told these were scattered around Taub… I haven’t been there to day, but it feels good to be infamous.