Khoji On Tech (and more)

This guy must have worked for months installing all these Christmas lights on his house and programming them to synchronize with the music. You might not want to have him as your direct neighbor but the result is truly awesome. Merry Christmas and congratulations!

On his blog, Nick Bradbury posts that many inexperienced users are afraid to install programs. Actually, it is not just inexperienced users who hesitate to install programs on Windows. Many experienced users do too, because they know from painful experience that installing a new application can easily make their system start malfunctioning in strange and creative ways. In addition to this, they also know that it may be impossible to really remove the application. This situation is partly the fault of Microsoft for making Windows the way it is and partly (possibly even more) the fault of the armies of lazy, slovenly programmers out there who think they can do anything they like on users’ computers.

What many Windows programmers do to their users’ computers is the digital equivalent of vandalism.

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On episode 70 of the Security Now podcast Steve Gibson repeats a statement that he has already made a number of times in the past: that there can be no freedom of speech without anonymity. Steve is not alone in this. The same statement is also repeated on the freenet project site (“Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech…”) and in many other places — it seems to be turning into a kind of modern-day axiom that nobody is really thinking about all that much.

Every time Steve makes this statement co-host Leo Laporte goes along with it as though it were a self-evident fact. This is a very odd statement coming from an American and a very odd statement for another American to agree with. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it from a Russian, a Chinese or a North Korean, but from an American this is nothing short of bizarre.

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A diamond is forever, right? Wrong. Diamonds are actually dirt cheap and your and the rest of the world’s romantic associations with them are a perfidious and carefully-orchestrated long-term creation of advertising agencies, sponsored by the South African De Beers diamond cartel.

Read this fascinating article from Atlantic Monthly (originally published in 1982) for a run-down on how an artificial market and a romantic tradition were created from nothing by advertisers — even in Japan, a country that previously had zero courtship traditions associated with diamonds. In fact, you will discover that even your reticence to ever sell your diamonds is not your own feeling but something that has been carefully implanted in you.

Welcome to the Matrix!

Germany’s Federal Court of Justice (BGH) recently ruled that hacking activities by the German police are illegal, according to a report published by the daily newspaper TAZ (die tageszeitung — it is not possible to link to the articles directly because TAZ requires registration for access).

It seems the German police have been using hacking tools to break into suspects’ computers via the Internet and examine their contents. It’s no big surprise that the court thinks that the police don’t have the right to do this. What is intriguing is that the police have apparently been doing this for some time, with the backing of official court orders. It makes you wonder what is going on in other countries.

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Windows Vista protects itself against illegal Registry writes with a “fake” virtual registry, to which the illegal writes can be made without doing any damage to the real registry. The company I work for produces a little free utility that writes some Registry values to solve some problems with certain file types on network drives. In the process of testing this utility for Vista we have discovered some interesting facts about the way this virtual Registry works. We’re not yet 100% sure about all the ramifications, but it looks as though this is going to have far-reaching consequences for many existing programs. Many will seem to work at first but will then fail, many will have to be rewritten.

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I’m still in bed with flu so today’s post is just another link. Michael Robertson, who was the man behind the mp3.com and is now responsible for Linspire, a Linux distribution designed for normal users, decided to do the math and work out whether going to university is a good investment. It turns out that it’s not, at least not in terms of money and if you have to pay for it yourself. Almost all prospective students would be better off taking all the money for their university tuition and investing it, and just working at any job they enjoyed.

Don’t believe it? Michael does the math here, read it for yourself.

Ever been too late handing in your exam paper? There’s no need to worry if you’re studying at a big university. Here’s how to solve the problem:

I’m in rant mode on the subject of doctors at the moment. For the last fifteen years I’ve been chronically ill, in effect I haven’t really been alive. Less than one month ago I finally discovered what the problem is myself. It’s incredibly simple: I have gluten intolerance. Switching to a gluten-free diet has totally transformed my life. It’s as though I’ve woken up from a coma.

The problem is, not one of the scores of doctors I visited in those fifteen years was able to make that simple diagnosis. Effectively, these incompetent morons stole fifteen years of my life, and they are not accountable for their actions.

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Nick Bradbury just put a great post on his blog titled Why do firewalls have to be such a PITA? Right, software firewalls are generally a serious pain, and so are “security suites”.

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