I think the problem with this is that kids, at least if you get to them early enough, are too innocent... And therefore too good at logic... To really fall for this.
You tell a kid that copying a song is stealing, I don't think it'd be too difficult for them to come back with "How can it be stealing when the person I got it from still has their copy, exactly the same as if I hadn't touched it?"
And it's only a short leap from that to the realization that, if you're lucky enough to work a job where the product of your labor is something that can easily be copied in an inexpensive and mechanical fashion by the end consumers, it can definitely be copied in a manner that's at least as inexpensive and mechanical (if not much moreso) by the producers.
So its price shouldn't be very high.
But it generally is very high. Even when you're dealing with things like online music stores, where the cost of producing an extra copy is very close to literally being nothing for the producers.
Aaaaand I think more or less any slightly inquisitive child is going to have no problem seeing this almost immediately.
Soooo... Call me a hopeless optimist... But, unless both the parents and those schools are doing absolutely nothing outside of brain washing those kids... I don't think the brain washing will have too much of an effect.
And, IMHO, this comes down to the same thing that I hear said over and over again... That ultimately, if the record companies want to survive, what they have to do is come up with products that are sufficiently interesting and/or entertaining to warrant whatever prices they choose to charge for them.
The pricing of a record should have to do with the amount of talent and innovation that actually went into making it, not with how good the artist in question looks in a schoolgirl outfit.:P
I can't tell if this is geeky or not -- someone help me out...
But last year, after a friend of mine introduced me to the BBC produced sci-fi comedy show Red Dwarf (I'm an American living in Southern California), I just had to find out what this "curry" and "vindaloo" stuff that the main character, Dave Lister, seemed so obsessed with was.
After a few visits to local Indian restaurants got me addicted to the stuff, I found myself trying numerous recipes from Death by Curry and having a ball.
Is this a common thing to happen to Dwarf fans? Almost all my (admittedly American) friends quite simply refuse to accept the notion that I enjoy curries... Especially once they've seen and smelled them in person. But I love em' personally.
Gah, replying to my own post... Talk about a ramble.
But this one's actually more on-topic than the parent, I think.
It occurs to me that another way to think of this, my having called goth kids "scary" is as follows...
The role of music in today's society seems to be closely involved with the concept of individuality. As I said, in many ways I am a hippy... And even though I wasn't alive when the "actual" hippies were around, it seems to me that they made the choice to be "scary" and different because the sense of camaraderie and brotherhood offered to them by the hippy culture was a lot more appealing than polite interaction with "the man" was.
I feel understand and comprehend this.
And I'm also capable of making the leap (hopefully a correct leap) that goth kids feel a similar sense of camaraderie with each other.
But I'm not one of them and do not feel this camaraderie with them. And, just as the hippies understood that the "normal world" probably won't accept them, goth kids must understand that much of the world won't accept them...
But from the music store's perspective... They're selling individuality. They want misunderstood people, because they want people who feel misunderstood and who rely on music to help them articulate this feeling and understand themselves better, to come in and shop there.
But the problem is that misunderstood people feel misunderstood for a bunch of different reasons. So whichever group of misunderstood people you pick to represent your store... Anyone from any other group will still feel a bit uncomfortable.
Not so with online stores, though. Online stores can custom tailor what you see to your personality, based on your previous purchases, the items you've recently looked at, etc... Amazon style. And can present you with a storefront that makes you feel optimally comfortable.
So... I guess I'm suggesting that maybe brick-and-mortar stores, if they wish to survive, need to give up on this notion of making outcasts feel less like outcasts by having outcasts as employees... And instead just try to be comfortable towards everyone almost equally.
Kindda like the "reasonably priced restaurant" version of a record store. A Denny's style record store. No one really likes it too much, but if it's 3am and you're really hungry and everything else is closed, you're gunna go there anyway.
Now someone's going to reply and tell me about how much they really like Denny's and I'm horrible for criticising it. I can just feel it.
Nice try, but 30 years ago I wasn't alive, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I turned 27 less than a month ago. 20 years ago I was in second grade and mostly concerned with the Garbage Pile Kids, had very few complaints. 10 years ago I was a high school geek and was mostly concerned with spending a lot of time playing with Turbo Pascal and drawing as little attention as possible to myself.
I've also only lived in the United States for about 16 years now, so 20 years ago I wasn't actually aware that real people actually had spiked hair. It was just something you saw on imported American television.
And today my hair actually is quite long, 2-3 inches past my shoulders. In many ways, I am something of a hippy.
Way to make a bunch of false assumptions in a message in which you're criticizing me for being too presumptuous.
As for goth kids and my finding them scary... I can honestly say I've never behaved rudely towards any of them in any way. I've never stared, I've never made comments, nothing of the sort. They do make me feel unpleasant in a general way, though, and it's very likely that if they weren't there (or weren't made up in a scary way), I'd walk into the store much more often.
Let me assure you -- there are a number of aspects to my own personality that would probably make most people feel uncomfortable or possibly even scared if I chose to display them openly to anyone who happened to walk past me. But I choose not to do so. It gives me more pleasure to have people smile at me and speak to me politely than it would to have everyone know every detail of my perverse personality immediately.
The people I'm referring to as "scary goth kids" have made a different choice on the same issue. This is their right. But in making that choice, unless they're complete idiots, which I'd prefer not to assume any group of people are as a whole, they must realize that they will be making people feel uncomfortable, and that some of these people will be openly rude as a result... While others, like me, may have less obvious adverse reactions. And that only a relatively small portion of the population will consider their style of dress to be a plus.
No, I'm that odd looking fellow in the ThinkGeek T-shirt who spent a lot of time skulking around in the blues, jazz and folk sections, then spent about half an hour looking at Jim Morrison posters and left without buying anything or forming eye contact with anyone.
Personally, I've definitely been buying a heck of a lot more music in the last few years, since P2P became a big part of my life. I'm exposed to a lot more music now, so the amount of music that I end up deciding I really love is much greater, and if I really love something I want to own it. (Let's skip the list of reasons behind this, it's an argument I'm sure most of you are pretty darn familiar with.)
But it's also quite true that I've been buying stuff at record stores much less often. In fact, I remember on occasion when I was at a Tower Records and suddenly heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar song on the store's PA... Walked over to the section of the store that included that artist's music and found out she had a new album out... And immediately drove home to download it.
Then a few months later bought it, but not at Tower Records, at Microcenter, a computer store that also has a small section of CD's.
Why? Because Tower Records wanted almost $20 for the CD, but Microcenter wanted about $13. And because Tower Records had a scary goth kid with far too many piercings working the cash register.
Stores like Tower Records apparently base their business model on getting teenage kids with subpaar intelligence and rich parents to cough up a nice amount of daddy's money in order to get products that they could be getting for much cheaper at a regular store. Unfortunately for them, it's those same teenage kids who are also most likely to download a bunch of tracks off of KaZaA and not even notice, let alone care, that they've got a ton of skips, that they were downsampled to 32 KHz and encoded at 96 kbits/sec, that they've apparently been re-encoded several times and now have a ton of artifacts and that it's been ages since they've heard an actual album in its entirety.
It's a simple principle, really. These kids don't think and don't care, and in the past that's meant that they didn't see how the record stores were putting one over on them... But now it means that they also don't see the added value that record stores add over KaZaA downloads.
And it appears that, like the RIAA itself, these record stores would prefer to close down and blame others than to try to rethink their business model.
I used to love Tower Records. Tower and the Virgin Megastore. Because I thought of them as the two record stores that are most likely to have the sort of weirder, more eccentric music I listen to. There was a "Tower Alternative" store in a neighboring city that I used to go to a lot, which was a Tower store that specialized in weirder music.
Now that's pointless, though... Even the weirder stuff can be found online easily, and I can shop around for the best prices on it easily. If record stores want my continued business, they need to:
Offer competitive prices to online stores
Make me feel like I'm welcome despite the fact that I don't listen to Britney, Limp Bizkit, BT, Pink, or any other top-40 "artist"
Offer a big enough selection of records for me to feel like there's a good chance I'll find what I am looking for if I visit
Play up the fact that I'll get to take my purchases home immediately, rather than wait a week for them to be shipped to me.
But there isn't a chance in hell they'd be willing to make such changes, I gather. It'd be far too logical and well thought out.
You know, just to keep things in perspective, it's my understanding that to date, a lot more organizations have had their business disrupted when Microsoft decided to do a license review on them than have had their business disrupted by SCO trying to wage legal action.
And yet no one seems too concerned about the possibility of Windows' market share being too severely affected by this.
So I'd think it's only logical that there wouldn't be too much concern about Linux' future either.
I have an SMTP server running on my computer. I set it up a few years ago mainly to try to see how good a handle I had on how SMTP works, and I've continued to make use of it mainly so I can create my own Email aliases and help curb the amount of spam I get and keep track of its "real" origins... But setting it up was very little trouble for me. I grabbed a copy of sendmail, compiled it, spent a few hours figuring out how to configure it, registered an MX record with DHS International and that's it... It's running. DHS was a free service the first few years I was with them -- now they charge me $5 per year.
For a brief period my ISP was filtering access to the SMTP port on my residential address, which meant I couldn't receive messages using my SMTP server... But I was still using it to send them out with no trouble! But at some point I contacted them and told them that I only want to have it running for my own usage, just to help curb the amount of spam I get, that I won't be giving anyone else accounts on it and that I understand how relaying works and have correctly restricted it... And a week or two later my SMTP port became accessible again. (Hopefully they actually reviewed my usage logs and tried to relay something through me before they did this... I'd hate to think they weren't careful.)
Sooooo... If I had no trouble setting up my own SMTP server, isn't it reasonable to assume that any halfway intelligent spamming organization would do the same -- set up their own server, then use that server to send out their spam, and avoid giving their ISP the chance to easily monitor their messages' content?
So isn't this really a more or less completely pointless violation of almost always legitimate Email users' privacy?
I've always felt that the problem with Internet advertising is that it isn't sufficiently interactive.
I mean, the truth is, all of us have money to spend, and all of us like getting new things to play with... Whether they be upgrades for our computers, upgrade for our cars, new clothes, books, whatever... We live in a consumer culture -- everyone has something they'd like to buy.
And once we're on the net, we've got the infrastructure and the processing power to really tailor advertising in a very personalized way. But no one seems to be doing that! No one's seems to be really taking advantage of the communicative abilities being offered by this new medium.
With all the cookies being left in my browsers for years now... You'd think by now every single banner ad I see would be for something I'm actually interested in. That any software ads I'd see would be for Linux or Mac software, and not Windows. That instead of banner ads for Jack Black's latest movie, I'd be seeing ads encouraging me to go see Lost in Translation a third time.
And what about services that try to actually organize data about available products? Generally, whenever I go to buy something, I start out by making a list of features I'd like it to have, then try to find something that has all those features and is as affordable as possible. A few months ago my computer's keyboard died and I faced the horrible problem of trying to find a search engine that would understand I want an "ergonomic (i.e. split) USB keyboard, with additional USB ports on the back, with plenty of multimedia keys and made by someone other than Microsoft." Eventually got tired of looking and settled for one that wasn't ergonomic.
And I'm now having a similar experience trying to find a digital camera with the features I want.
eBay seems to be the easiest to use when it comes to this sort of "searching for specific features" idea. And indeed the largest portion of my online purchasing money in the last year or so has been spent through eBay.
I think the main effect of the Internet is that it creates better informed consumers... I think consumers in general nowadays have a better idea of what they want when they go to make a purchase, and don't feel comfortable spending their money on whatever the flashiest banner happens to be next to.
I think these companies currently trying to make their money by serving up banner ads would be better off creating search engines that actually let consumers search for products based on any conceivable criterion.
I should be able to search for a new stereo deck for my car that plays MP3/CD's and CDRW's, has a 1/8" stereo phone line-in jack on the front, can read ID3 tags and has a display that can comfortably display up to 32 characters. I should be able to search for a digital camera that has at least 1.2MP, uses SmartMedia, has a built-in LCD and flash, uses USB and works with MacOS X. Etc etc etc...
Advertising shouldn't be about getting people to buy stuff they don't need. It should be about matching people up with the stuff they already want to buy. Some of these companies should also, perhaps, set up forums where people could describe things they'd like to own that don't even exist yet, in case someone's interested in trying to make them.
I don't see why anyone should have a problem with my blocking out (with the FireBird adblock extension) banners that I'm never in a million years going to click on. The truth is, even before I started using the adblock extension, on those occasions when a banner looked like it's related to something I'm interested in and I clicked on it, it's always turned out to be a complete red herring. So I very quickly stopped following them and figured if there's something I want to buy, I can seek it out myself.
If advertisers want to make money off of me, they should try to actually help me out in the task of finding things I want.
The oldest hardware that I still use regularly (I have some that's probably even older but that I only use on rare occasions) is a Mustek MFS-8000SP full page SCSI-2 scanner.
This scanner was given to me a few years ago at no charge because, as it turned out, there are no drivers available for it for Windows 2000, Windows XP, MacOS 9 or MacOS X.
It is supported by SANE -- but apparently SANE doesn't like the SCSI layer in OS X, so even though my Beige G3 Minitower does have a SCSI-2 port, I can't use it with THAT. (The latest MacOS drivers are for OS 8 and didn't work when I tried them on 9.)
It's a very large and very high-res scanner that produces very crisp images, and although I don't really have much use for a scanner I still get a kick out of the idea that I got it for free. The guy who gave it to me was a hardcore Windows fanatic and was basically ready to throw it away if I didn't take it.
At this point, the scanner's actually hooked up to a computer I have set up by my treadmill to watch videos on. It ended up there because the only working drivers I know of are the SANE drivers running on Linux, and the only SCSI-2 card I have is an ISA card -- so when I upgraded my main Linux machine to an Athlon XP 1800+ recently, with a new motherboard that doesn't have an ISA card, the scanner had to go where the old motherboard (500 MHz P3) went... Which was by the treadmill.
View the source code? Heck, if you're going to go that far, I don't see why you shouldn't just let us have the source code, as long as we promise not to redistribute it or make use of any of it in new products...
I've had plenty of occasions to make small changes to applications running on my Linux box.
For example, earlier this year I installed GnomeMeeting, which is a Linux audio/video conferencing program that will talk to NetMeeting clients. I very quickly discovered that when GnomeMeeting starts up, it automatically selects the microphone input on my sound card as the "recording" input. Which isn't what I want -- my microphone is actually connected to a mixing board (along with a synthesizer and an electric drum kit) which runs into my sound card's line in jack.
I Emailed the author to suggest that he make this option configurable... Got a very detailed and completely polite response from him less than an hour later, saying that he's very sorry, but since he's trying to compete with NetMeeting, simplicity and ease of use are of the utmost importance to him, and he feels making this an option would confuse too many people...
So I looked through the source code, found the piece of code that selected the microphone input, and just commented it out.
Another example: I have a friend who reads Yahoo's News section on a regular basis, and whenever she finds something she thinks is interesting, she sends me the URL to it over ICQ... But since Yahoo disallows deep linking, I never end up at the page she thought she sent me to. And if she goes back to her ICQ history and clicks on the URL, it pops up fine for her -- because the URL currently loaded in her browser was still one from Yahoo's servers. So naturally, she blames me for the failures.
I haven't actually tried doing this, but I keep thinking I should add something into Firebird that'll make it so that whenever the "real" Referer URL is on a different domain than the URL being requested, the top page of the domain being requested gets sent as Referer instead. I'd think it wouldn't break too many things if it doesn't effect the behavior when going between two pages on the same site.
'course, if this became common practice, the/. effect would become a much more fearsome thing.
But really, the best argument for this suggestion is much closer to what you were originally saying. It's quite possible that programs are doing "something funny." While having the right to view the source code would make it much easier to detect if this is the case... Actually having the entire source code in a readily compilable form would enable you to easily disable the "funny" behavior.
In other words, it would assure you that you'd still get the functionality you were promised when you paid for the program, even if there's some functionality in it that you find objectionable and would like to disable. It would give you a much larger level of control over what your system does and what it doesn't do.
But heck, we all know that's not going to happen... Because if we give users control, the companies lose control.
What actually happens is the exact opposite. Case in point... Earlier this year, with iTunes 4, Apple introduced the ability to MacOS X computers to automatically stream their MP3 libraries to other Macs over the Internet. A large amount of software very quickly showed up to let you download and save MP3 files over this protocol, instead of just listen to the streamed versions.
But, lucky for Apple, they soon discovered that there was some sort of bug in iTunes 4 that caused MP3 files to sound horrible if you had your computer's volume set very nearly to the top. (I'm not exactly clear on the precise nature of the bug -- I rarely have my volume set anywhere near the top. Most of the music I listen to is fairly quiet.)
1) The main reason the registry "sucks" is because it's one big file that contains all the settings for the entire system. I honestly can't count the number of times when some poorly written driver ended up corrupting my registry and I ended up having to re-detect all my devices... Or how about when your Windows installation somehow gets corrupted, and after reinstalling your OS, you also have to reinstall any application that had major portions of its settings in the registry? (Like Microsoft Office?)
One of the basic rules of security (remember, we are talking about security here) is "don't put all your eggs in one basket." Don't put your DNS servers on the same uplink as your web servers. If possible, put all your DNS servers and all your web servers in completely different places, actually... Same goes for system settings. Don't put em' all in one big file.
.INI files make a lot more sense. Each application's configuration is kept together with that application. You remove the application... You very easily remove the related configuration files as well.
2) But one of the big points of Limited/Administrator (user/root) separation is that you don't want user accounts installing new applications. If my user can install applications, regardless of where they end up going... Then that user's web browsing sessions and Outlook sessions are running with sufficient privileges for viruses and trojans to install themselves. So the suggestion you're making would negate the whole point of having a limited account.
3) Now that's an administrative nightmare. User X calls up the help desk to complain about a misconfigured setting in his favorite application... And instead of just bringing up the.INI file from his user folder in Notepad and fixing it, I have to go through this entire union mount thing?
What if there's some essential change that I want to make to all users'.INI files? With my suggestion, I could write a quick script to make the modification to all of them in no time at all. Yours sounds a lot more complicated.
And what if I mess up and forget which user's union mount I currently have active?
Seriously... It's called the Documents and Settings folder... I don't see why we shouldn't have the operating system force limited accounts to store all their settings there!
Except for the fact that it'd need additional code built into the API's implementation... It's pretty much the way it's done on every OS except Windows, and it's been known to work for years now.
1) First of all, if you'll read my original post a bit more carefully, my suggestion did include the provision that the extra code would only run when the application executing it is running on a Limited account. (i.e. that it would include a check for this condition.) So administrator accounts would be completely unaffected.
2) As for any app that stores their configuration files in filenames not ending in.INI... They wouldn't be any more broken than they were without my suggestion... And there's no reason why those extensions shouldn't be covered by my suggestion as well.
3) I was actually thinking that the new filename should be derived by just taking the actual filename being requested (i.e. everything after the last '\' in the string) and sticking it right in C:\Documents and Settings\myUserName\Local Settings\... Maybe actually look at the name of the calling executable (Windows still have argv[0]?) and put it in a subfolder with that same name. So that any path passed in would be completely ignored.
But alternatively... We could only apply this fix for file opens that do not SUPPLY a path. (i.e. filename ends with.INI and does not include any '\'s) fairly easily...
Or we could run our security check function after we've determined if we've done any rewriting.
4) Microsoft's already introduced at least one extremely similar cheap hack. About a month ago I stuck a Hauppage WinTV card into my Windows 2000 Server machine. The machine auto-detected the card and asked me to insert the driver disc. I inserted the driver disc. The machine ran the installation program and asked me to reboot. I told it go ahead. It rebooted, detected the new card and asked me to insert a driver disc... I inserted the driver disc. The machine ran the driver install program and asked me to reboot...
I did this 5 or 6 times before I thought I'd check what was going on. It turned out essential portions of the driver were being installed under C:\Documents and Settings instead of under C:\WinNT, and because of this the driver wasn't loading properly and Windows was asking me to install it again and again and again.
The solution for this was to hit "No, I'll install drivers later" when Windows asked for the driver disk, then go into the Add Programs function in the control panel and install from THERE... But it took a few reboots before I paid enough attention to realize this was necessary, and that the prompts on the screen were tricking me.
And despite this... I have a real hard time thinking about a similar situation caused by code that will cause applications... Only when running on a Limited account... To save their INI's to the user's Documents and Settings folder, and to look for them there first, before falling back to look for a system default in the program's requested path.
In fact, if I think about it... Since this code will only activate in Limited User mode... Even if the path rewriting code were to have a buffer overflow mode in it, it shouldn't be able to damage any programs or files outside the user's personal Documents and Settings folder. And it shouldn't be able to install any new programs, including viruses or trojans of any sort. So really you're introducing next to no additional security risks, but adding a lot of new functionality.
Actually, I agree with you, Microsoft shouldn't have to create cheap hacks in order to deal with poorly written applications. They should, however, have to introduce some sort of hack to deal with poorly written operating systems. *NIX operating systems existed long before Windows came about. The value of user/root separation was well known when the code for Windows was being written. Microsoft chose to ignore this in their design, thinking that their system will only ever be used by home users, that Windows computers will never connect to any sort of large
That's what I ended up doing for Quicken, making the whole directory writeable for the Limited User account.
But if you really think about it... It wouldn't be too difficult to add a few lines to the standard MFC file stream that make it so that whenever a Limited account tries to open a file whose name ends with.INI, the following occurs:
If the file is being opened for writing, its path is rewritten so that it's actually somewhere in the Documents and Settings folder.
If the file is being opened for reading, Windows will first try to open it in the Documents and Settings folder... If this fails, it will then check and see if it exists in the location the program is actually looking for it in -- and if it does, copy it to the appropriate spot under Documents and Settings and open the copy.
This behavior shouldn't take more than 10 lines of code or so to implement right into the file stream object itself, and would solve this problem for more or less all applications. And it's effectively the same behavior that most OS X applications have -- when they're first executed, they copy their settings file from/Library to/Users/Some current user/Library and then go from there.
And I think it would have a tremendous positive effect on Windows security in general.
You know... If MS was really going out of their way to try to make systems running Windows be secure...
They'd figure out some way to make it possible to run your Windows XP Pro system with a Limited (i.e. non-root) account without rendering it totally useless.
The few programs I've actually managed to get running on a Limited account still don't seem to have the access they need to SAVE THEIR SETTINGS... So they need to be reconfigured every time they load up.
And the only way I've figured out for dealing with that is to temporarily add the Limited Account to the administrators group, pull the network cable, log in with it like that, make the changes, log back out, remove it from the administrators group, reconnect network cable and run Ad-Aware and pray nothing went horribly wrong.
I honestly wasn't trying to troll. I was expressing an opinion -- an opinion that I feel is well based in a fairly large amount of experience.
Microsoft's done this sort of thing before -- plenty of times. Maybe you aren't clear on this, but this is exactly the sort of thing they meant when Microsoft was accused of monopolistic business practices.
I still remember getting annoyed regularly at how the HTML exporter in Microsoft Office created pages that were more or less completely unviewable in Netscape 4. And naturally, this was blamed on Netscape, and everyone went over to IE. And there was a long period of time where I was forced to admit that IE quite simply was the most usable web browser out there, and that I was rather upset there wasn't a Linux version of it. (I now feel more or less the exact same way about Safari...)
Even though pages created with almost any other program looked fine in both IE and Netscape. Including pages created by the HTML exporter in StarDivision StarOffice (that's right, even before it was bought by Sun.)
The argument about Microsoft being worried about losing banner ad revenues is completely ridiculous. It wouldn't be too hard for them to add in text ads to the bottom of the IM's, just like both Hotmail and Yahoo do to the bottom of regular Emails.
Actually, I think the whole suggestion that Microsoft makes a sizable amount of money out of banner ads is fairly silly... I think the main reason for the existence of MSN IM's is that MSN is a chief competitor of AOL's and AOL has an IM client. MSN IM exists in order to promote MSN in competition with AOL.
AOL started AIM because their subscribers wanted to exchange instant messages with people who aren't AOL subscribers using the same instant messaging system that's built into the regular AOL software... So AOL made this possible -- by having non-subscribers install AIM.
Microsoft tried to top them by creating an IM client that would let you talk to both MSN and AOL subscribers. But AOL wouldn't let them muscle in on their IM network, so they ended up making their own.
But the original point still stands -- MSN IM exists in order to promote the MSN brand name. If you use MSN IM, you're aware of the existence of MSN as an ISP. It's quite likely to be one of the first ISP's to pop into your head if you need to find a new ISP in a hurry. It's fairly likely that, if you use MSN IM, you first got into it because you or someone you know actually uses MSN as their ISP.
I don't think the exact software you use to send and receive MSN IM's effects your awareness of the MSN ISP's existence.
The argument that this is a security concern is also quite daft. There's plenty of well known, open encryption algorithms out there that they could use to encrypt transmissions to their IM service without blocking access to third party clients.
On the subject of IM security... A few months ago I noticed that when I sent files through AIM, the transfers went considerably slower than they do on ICQ... I ran some network sniffers, and it appears that AIM file transfers actually go through a server *at* AOL that then relays the data to the other user... This allows transfers to happen even when both users are behind a NAT (as long as they don't have ZoneAlarm or something like that blocking the transfer)... And it also increases security by making it possible for the file transfer to take place without either user knowing the other's IP!
How's that for security? Why is it that when Microsoft mentions security, there's never anything that makes that much sense involved?
The argument that they shouldn't want third party clients accessing their network is also quite silly. As I said above, it'd be very easy for them to insert text ads into MSN IM's... And by allowing third party clients, they could have those ads reach users of those clients! So I could be using GAIM on my Linux box
Here's why I think this is bad... Because, once the dust settles, once everyone agrees that there isn't any legal ground to stop MSN from doing this, MSN will try to spin this as if it AIN'T THEIR FAULT.
So when your old buddy or your sister or whomever gets a brand spankin' new Windows PC, and naturally installs MSN on it just because he knows MSN is Microsoft and he uses Microsoft so that must be the one that's most compatible, and finds out that despite the fact that you claim to use some fancy program called GAIM that'll talk to "practically every other IM program there IS!" in fact you aren't able to talk to him, he'll probably laugh at you and tell you that obviously all that supposed computer knowledge you have is completely bunk and that you should dump that silly Linux or BSD system of yours and switch to good ol' dependable Windows.
And I say this based on actual experience. A year or two ago, when Trillian first started to get popular, suddenly all my friends were telling me that every time I IM'ed them (from LICQ) they were getting a warning message telling them that I used an old and buggy version of the ICQ client and that they should ask me to upgrade to the latest. And of course I was using the latest LICQ. So I went through LICQ's help forums, trying to find out why this was going on... Turns out it was because Trillian's authors had been lazy and only implemented the most recent ICQ protocol -- whereas LICQ's authors had implemented every ICQ protocol ever used... But hadn't quite finished development of the very latest one. (This was fixed after a few months, when LICQ's authors did finish a working implementation of the latest ICQ protocol.)
But Trillian's authors had no problem putting code in their clients to encourage their users to regularly harass the users of other IM programs.
I still cringe every time I hear the word "Trillian" because of that. I tried to re-watch the Hitchhiker's Guide BBC miniseries the other day -- couldn't do it! Kept thinking about the IM debacle! NO LONGER ENJOYABLE!!!
And if Trillian doesn't have a problem with doing stuff like that... Does anyone really think Microsoft would?
This is a ploy. This is intended to get your friends, family members, coworkers... Your boss... to tell you that if you're choosing to use any IM outside of MSN... (And yes, you guessed it, MSN will only be available for Windows based computers)... You're effectively making yourself less available for communication. Which makes you things like "Unfriendly" "Uncooperative" "Mean" and even "Not a Team Player"... And of course, it puts serious doubt on your technical skill, if you seem to think you can talk to "practically every IM program out there!" but you can't talk to the one that most "normal" people use.
What about the SSL support in LICQ, which is a Linux ICQ client? I'm yet to actually find someone else who has it compiled in to try it with, but I'm still hoping.
Oh great... Like it's not annoying enough when I'm trying to have dinner with a friend and his stupid girlfriend calls him to nag him for 20 minutes in the middle of it... Now he'll actually get totally engaged in the experience of humoring her and completely forget I'm there.
Isn't technology wonderful?
I'm not sure how close this is to what you have in mind, but what about Lego Mindstorms? Makes it very easy to build all sorts of computer controlled robots. And I'm fairly sure there's several packages available to control them from Linux.
I was actually really really happy when RealOne player came out, because it was the first RealVideo player for Linux that had the ability to go full screen. Before it came out, I'd have to change the monitor's resolution and then try to scroll the screen around until most of it was covered by the video I was watching.
Of course I very quickly discovered that RealOne player's fullscreen mode messes up pretty badly when you're running Xinerama. Now if I click the fullscreen option, it tries to display the video centered across my entire Xinerama display, and for some reason the part that's supposed to show up on the right monitor doesn't show up at all. So what I get is the left half of the video displayed on the right half of my left monitor and the right monitor is effectively rendered useless.
And I guess expecting them to add LIRC support so I can control it with my remote control is *utterly* ridiculous.
You should try out the BannerBlind extension available for Mozilla. It lets you block images by their dimensions. Works fine for me in Netscape 7.01 as well.
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James Cameron actually specifically refused to work on Terminator 3... It was directed by Jonathan Mostow instead.
You tell a kid that copying a song is stealing, I don't think it'd be too difficult for them to come back with "How can it be stealing when the person I got it from still has their copy, exactly the same as if I hadn't touched it?"
And it's only a short leap from that to the realization that, if you're lucky enough to work a job where the product of your labor is something that can easily be copied in an inexpensive and mechanical fashion by the end consumers, it can definitely be copied in a manner that's at least as inexpensive and mechanical (if not much moreso) by the producers.
So its price shouldn't be very high.
But it generally is very high. Even when you're dealing with things like online music stores, where the cost of producing an extra copy is very close to literally being nothing for the producers.
Aaaaand I think more or less any slightly inquisitive child is going to have no problem seeing this almost immediately.
Soooo... Call me a hopeless optimist... But, unless both the parents and those schools are doing absolutely nothing outside of brain washing those kids... I don't think the brain washing will have too much of an effect.
And, IMHO, this comes down to the same thing that I hear said over and over again... That ultimately, if the record companies want to survive, what they have to do is come up with products that are sufficiently interesting and/or entertaining to warrant whatever prices they choose to charge for them.
The pricing of a record should have to do with the amount of talent and innovation that actually went into making it, not with how good the artist in question looks in a schoolgirl outfit. :P
But last year, after a friend of mine introduced me to the BBC produced sci-fi comedy show Red Dwarf (I'm an American living in Southern California), I just had to find out what this "curry" and "vindaloo" stuff that the main character, Dave Lister, seemed so obsessed with was.
After a few visits to local Indian restaurants got me addicted to the stuff, I found myself trying numerous recipes from Death by Curry and having a ball.
Is this a common thing to happen to Dwarf fans? Almost all my (admittedly American) friends quite simply refuse to accept the notion that I enjoy curries... Especially once they've seen and smelled them in person. But I love em' personally.
But this one's actually more on-topic than the parent, I think.
It occurs to me that another way to think of this, my having called goth kids "scary" is as follows...
The role of music in today's society seems to be closely involved with the concept of individuality. As I said, in many ways I am a hippy... And even though I wasn't alive when the "actual" hippies were around, it seems to me that they made the choice to be "scary" and different because the sense of camaraderie and brotherhood offered to them by the hippy culture was a lot more appealing than polite interaction with "the man" was.
I feel understand and comprehend this.
And I'm also capable of making the leap (hopefully a correct leap) that goth kids feel a similar sense of camaraderie with each other.
But I'm not one of them and do not feel this camaraderie with them. And, just as the hippies understood that the "normal world" probably won't accept them, goth kids must understand that much of the world won't accept them...
But from the music store's perspective... They're selling individuality. They want misunderstood people, because they want people who feel misunderstood and who rely on music to help them articulate this feeling and understand themselves better, to come in and shop there.
But the problem is that misunderstood people feel misunderstood for a bunch of different reasons. So whichever group of misunderstood people you pick to represent your store... Anyone from any other group will still feel a bit uncomfortable.
Not so with online stores, though. Online stores can custom tailor what you see to your personality, based on your previous purchases, the items you've recently looked at, etc... Amazon style. And can present you with a storefront that makes you feel optimally comfortable.
So... I guess I'm suggesting that maybe brick-and-mortar stores, if they wish to survive, need to give up on this notion of making outcasts feel less like outcasts by having outcasts as employees... And instead just try to be comfortable towards everyone almost equally.
Kindda like the "reasonably priced restaurant" version of a record store. A Denny's style record store. No one really likes it too much, but if it's 3am and you're really hungry and everything else is closed, you're gunna go there anyway.
Now someone's going to reply and tell me about how much they really like Denny's and I'm horrible for criticising it. I can just feel it.
I've also only lived in the United States for about 16 years now, so 20 years ago I wasn't actually aware that real people actually had spiked hair. It was just something you saw on imported American television.
And today my hair actually is quite long, 2-3 inches past my shoulders. In many ways, I am something of a hippy.
Way to make a bunch of false assumptions in a message in which you're criticizing me for being too presumptuous.
As for goth kids and my finding them scary... I can honestly say I've never behaved rudely towards any of them in any way. I've never stared, I've never made comments, nothing of the sort. They do make me feel unpleasant in a general way, though, and it's very likely that if they weren't there (or weren't made up in a scary way), I'd walk into the store much more often.
Let me assure you -- there are a number of aspects to my own personality that would probably make most people feel uncomfortable or possibly even scared if I chose to display them openly to anyone who happened to walk past me. But I choose not to do so. It gives me more pleasure to have people smile at me and speak to me politely than it would to have everyone know every detail of my perverse personality immediately.
The people I'm referring to as "scary goth kids" have made a different choice on the same issue. This is their right. But in making that choice, unless they're complete idiots, which I'd prefer not to assume any group of people are as a whole, they must realize that they will be making people feel uncomfortable, and that some of these people will be openly rude as a result... While others, like me, may have less obvious adverse reactions. And that only a relatively small portion of the population will consider their style of dress to be a plus.
No, I'm that odd looking fellow in the ThinkGeek T-shirt who spent a lot of time skulking around in the blues, jazz and folk sections, then spent about half an hour looking at Jim Morrison posters and left without buying anything or forming eye contact with anyone.
Personally, I've definitely been buying a heck of a lot more music in the last few years, since P2P became a big part of my life. I'm exposed to a lot more music now, so the amount of music that I end up deciding I really love is much greater, and if I really love something I want to own it. (Let's skip the list of reasons behind this, it's an argument I'm sure most of you are pretty darn familiar with.)
But it's also quite true that I've been buying stuff at record stores much less often. In fact, I remember on occasion when I was at a Tower Records and suddenly heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar song on the store's PA... Walked over to the section of the store that included that artist's music and found out she had a new album out... And immediately drove home to download it.
Then a few months later bought it, but not at Tower Records, at Microcenter, a computer store that also has a small section of CD's.
Why? Because Tower Records wanted almost $20 for the CD, but Microcenter wanted about $13. And because Tower Records had a scary goth kid with far too many piercings working the cash register.
Stores like Tower Records apparently base their business model on getting teenage kids with subpaar intelligence and rich parents to cough up a nice amount of daddy's money in order to get products that they could be getting for much cheaper at a regular store. Unfortunately for them, it's those same teenage kids who are also most likely to download a bunch of tracks off of KaZaA and not even notice, let alone care, that they've got a ton of skips, that they were downsampled to 32 KHz and encoded at 96 kbits/sec, that they've apparently been re-encoded several times and now have a ton of artifacts and that it's been ages since they've heard an actual album in its entirety.
It's a simple principle, really. These kids don't think and don't care, and in the past that's meant that they didn't see how the record stores were putting one over on them... But now it means that they also don't see the added value that record stores add over KaZaA downloads.
And it appears that, like the RIAA itself, these record stores would prefer to close down and blame others than to try to rethink their business model.
I used to love Tower Records. Tower and the Virgin Megastore. Because I thought of them as the two record stores that are most likely to have the sort of weirder, more eccentric music I listen to. There was a "Tower Alternative" store in a neighboring city that I used to go to a lot, which was a Tower store that specialized in weirder music.
Now that's pointless, though... Even the weirder stuff can be found online easily, and I can shop around for the best prices on it easily. If record stores want my continued business, they need to:
But there isn't a chance in hell they'd be willing to make such changes, I gather. It'd be far too logical and well thought out.
But hey, I'll get to play him eventually anyway.
Ya bunch of hapless twits.
Who's gunna be Wonko the Sane? He's my other favorite Hitchhiker's character from the later books.
And yet no one seems too concerned about the possibility of Windows' market share being too severely affected by this.
So I'd think it's only logical that there wouldn't be too much concern about Linux' future either.
I have an SMTP server running on my computer. I set it up a few years ago mainly to try to see how good a handle I had on how SMTP works, and I've continued to make use of it mainly so I can create my own Email aliases and help curb the amount of spam I get and keep track of its "real" origins... But setting it up was very little trouble for me. I grabbed a copy of sendmail, compiled it, spent a few hours figuring out how to configure it, registered an MX record with DHS International and that's it... It's running. DHS was a free service the first few years I was with them -- now they charge me $5 per year.
For a brief period my ISP was filtering access to the SMTP port on my residential address, which meant I couldn't receive messages using my SMTP server... But I was still using it to send them out with no trouble! But at some point I contacted them and told them that I only want to have it running for my own usage, just to help curb the amount of spam I get, that I won't be giving anyone else accounts on it and that I understand how relaying works and have correctly restricted it... And a week or two later my SMTP port became accessible again. (Hopefully they actually reviewed my usage logs and tried to relay something through me before they did this... I'd hate to think they weren't careful.)
Sooooo... If I had no trouble setting up my own SMTP server, isn't it reasonable to assume that any halfway intelligent spamming organization would do the same -- set up their own server, then use that server to send out their spam, and avoid giving their ISP the chance to easily monitor their messages' content?
So isn't this really a more or less completely pointless violation of almost always legitimate Email users' privacy?
I mean, the truth is, all of us have money to spend, and all of us like getting new things to play with... Whether they be upgrades for our computers, upgrade for our cars, new clothes, books, whatever... We live in a consumer culture -- everyone has something they'd like to buy.
And once we're on the net, we've got the infrastructure and the processing power to really tailor advertising in a very personalized way. But no one seems to be doing that! No one's seems to be really taking advantage of the communicative abilities being offered by this new medium.
With all the cookies being left in my browsers for years now... You'd think by now every single banner ad I see would be for something I'm actually interested in. That any software ads I'd see would be for Linux or Mac software, and not Windows. That instead of banner ads for Jack Black's latest movie, I'd be seeing ads encouraging me to go see Lost in Translation a third time.
And what about services that try to actually organize data about available products? Generally, whenever I go to buy something, I start out by making a list of features I'd like it to have, then try to find something that has all those features and is as affordable as possible. A few months ago my computer's keyboard died and I faced the horrible problem of trying to find a search engine that would understand I want an "ergonomic (i.e. split) USB keyboard, with additional USB ports on the back, with plenty of multimedia keys and made by someone other than Microsoft." Eventually got tired of looking and settled for one that wasn't ergonomic.
And I'm now having a similar experience trying to find a digital camera with the features I want.
eBay seems to be the easiest to use when it comes to this sort of "searching for specific features" idea. And indeed the largest portion of my online purchasing money in the last year or so has been spent through eBay.
I think the main effect of the Internet is that it creates better informed consumers... I think consumers in general nowadays have a better idea of what they want when they go to make a purchase, and don't feel comfortable spending their money on whatever the flashiest banner happens to be next to.
I think these companies currently trying to make their money by serving up banner ads would be better off creating search engines that actually let consumers search for products based on any conceivable criterion.
I should be able to search for a new stereo deck for my car that plays MP3/CD's and CDRW's, has a 1/8" stereo phone line-in jack on the front, can read ID3 tags and has a display that can comfortably display up to 32 characters. I should be able to search for a digital camera that has at least 1.2MP, uses SmartMedia, has a built-in LCD and flash, uses USB and works with MacOS X. Etc etc etc...
Advertising shouldn't be about getting people to buy stuff they don't need. It should be about matching people up with the stuff they already want to buy. Some of these companies should also, perhaps, set up forums where people could describe things they'd like to own that don't even exist yet, in case someone's interested in trying to make them.
I don't see why anyone should have a problem with my blocking out (with the FireBird adblock extension) banners that I'm never in a million years going to click on. The truth is, even before I started using the adblock extension, on those occasions when a banner looked like it's related to something I'm interested in and I clicked on it, it's always turned out to be a complete red herring. So I very quickly stopped following them and figured if there's something I want to buy, I can seek it out myself.
If advertisers want to make money off of me, they should try to actually help me out in the task of finding things I want.
This scanner was given to me a few years ago at no charge because, as it turned out, there are no drivers available for it for Windows 2000, Windows XP, MacOS 9 or MacOS X.
It is supported by SANE -- but apparently SANE doesn't like the SCSI layer in OS X, so even though my Beige G3 Minitower does have a SCSI-2 port, I can't use it with THAT. (The latest MacOS drivers are for OS 8 and didn't work when I tried them on 9.)
It's a very large and very high-res scanner that produces very crisp images, and although I don't really have much use for a scanner I still get a kick out of the idea that I got it for free. The guy who gave it to me was a hardcore Windows fanatic and was basically ready to throw it away if I didn't take it.
At this point, the scanner's actually hooked up to a computer I have set up by my treadmill to watch videos on. It ended up there because the only working drivers I know of are the SANE drivers running on Linux, and the only SCSI-2 card I have is an ISA card -- so when I upgraded my main Linux machine to an Athlon XP 1800+ recently, with a new motherboard that doesn't have an ISA card, the scanner had to go where the old motherboard (500 MHz P3) went... Which was by the treadmill.
I've had plenty of occasions to make small changes to applications running on my Linux box.
For example, earlier this year I installed GnomeMeeting, which is a Linux audio/video conferencing program that will talk to NetMeeting clients. I very quickly discovered that when GnomeMeeting starts up, it automatically selects the microphone input on my sound card as the "recording" input. Which isn't what I want -- my microphone is actually connected to a mixing board (along with a synthesizer and an electric drum kit) which runs into my sound card's line in jack.
I Emailed the author to suggest that he make this option configurable... Got a very detailed and completely polite response from him less than an hour later, saying that he's very sorry, but since he's trying to compete with NetMeeting, simplicity and ease of use are of the utmost importance to him, and he feels making this an option would confuse too many people...
So I looked through the source code, found the piece of code that selected the microphone input, and just commented it out.
Another example: I have a friend who reads Yahoo's News section on a regular basis, and whenever she finds something she thinks is interesting, she sends me the URL to it over ICQ... But since Yahoo disallows deep linking, I never end up at the page she thought she sent me to. And if she goes back to her ICQ history and clicks on the URL, it pops up fine for her -- because the URL currently loaded in her browser was still one from Yahoo's servers. So naturally, she blames me for the failures.
I haven't actually tried doing this, but I keep thinking I should add something into Firebird that'll make it so that whenever the "real" Referer URL is on a different domain than the URL being requested, the top page of the domain being requested gets sent as Referer instead. I'd think it wouldn't break too many things if it doesn't effect the behavior when going between two pages on the same site.
'course, if this became common practice, the /. effect would become a much more fearsome thing.
But really, the best argument for this suggestion is much closer to what you were originally saying. It's quite possible that programs are doing "something funny." While having the right to view the source code would make it much easier to detect if this is the case... Actually having the entire source code in a readily compilable form would enable you to easily disable the "funny" behavior.
In other words, it would assure you that you'd still get the functionality you were promised when you paid for the program, even if there's some functionality in it that you find objectionable and would like to disable. It would give you a much larger level of control over what your system does and what it doesn't do.
But heck, we all know that's not going to happen... Because if we give users control, the companies lose control.
What actually happens is the exact opposite. Case in point... Earlier this year, with iTunes 4, Apple introduced the ability to MacOS X computers to automatically stream their MP3 libraries to other Macs over the Internet. A large amount of software very quickly showed up to let you download and save MP3 files over this protocol, instead of just listen to the streamed versions.
But, lucky for Apple, they soon discovered that there was some sort of bug in iTunes 4 that caused MP3 files to sound horrible if you had your computer's volume set very nearly to the top. (I'm not exactly clear on the precise nature of the bug -- I rarely have my volume set anywhere near the top. Most of the music I listen to is fairly quiet.)
And, naturally, the same update (iT
One of the basic rules of security (remember, we are talking about security here) is "don't put all your eggs in one basket." Don't put your DNS servers on the same uplink as your web servers. If possible, put all your DNS servers and all your web servers in completely different places, actually... Same goes for system settings. Don't put em' all in one big file.
2) But one of the big points of Limited/Administrator (user/root) separation is that you don't want user accounts installing new applications. If my user can install applications, regardless of where they end up going... Then that user's web browsing sessions and Outlook sessions are running with sufficient privileges for viruses and trojans to install themselves. So the suggestion you're making would negate the whole point of having a limited account.
3) Now that's an administrative nightmare. User X calls up the help desk to complain about a misconfigured setting in his favorite application... And instead of just bringing up the .INI file from his user folder in Notepad and fixing it, I have to go through this entire union mount thing?
What if there's some essential change that I want to make to all users' .INI files? With my suggestion, I could write a quick script to make the modification to all of them in no time at all. Yours sounds a lot more complicated.
And what if I mess up and forget which user's union mount I currently have active?
Seriously... It's called the Documents and Settings folder... I don't see why we shouldn't have the operating system force limited accounts to store all their settings there!
Except for the fact that it'd need additional code built into the API's implementation... It's pretty much the way it's done on every OS except Windows, and it's been known to work for years now.
1) First of all, if you'll read my original post a bit more carefully, my suggestion did include the provision that the extra code would only run when the application executing it is running on a Limited account. (i.e. that it would include a check for this condition.) So administrator accounts would be completely unaffected.
2) As for any app that stores their configuration files in filenames not ending in .INI... They wouldn't be any more broken than they were without my suggestion... And there's no reason why those extensions shouldn't be covered by my suggestion as well.
3) I was actually thinking that the new filename should be derived by just taking the actual filename being requested (i.e. everything after the last '\' in the string) and sticking it right in C:\Documents and Settings\myUserName\Local Settings\... Maybe actually look at the name of the calling executable (Windows still have argv[0]?) and put it in a subfolder with that same name. So that any path passed in would be completely ignored.
But alternatively... We could only apply this fix for file opens that do not SUPPLY a path. (i.e. filename ends with .INI and does not include any '\'s) fairly easily...
Or we could run our security check function after we've determined if we've done any rewriting.
4) Microsoft's already introduced at least one extremely similar cheap hack. About a month ago I stuck a Hauppage WinTV card into my Windows 2000 Server machine. The machine auto-detected the card and asked me to insert the driver disc. I inserted the driver disc. The machine ran the installation program and asked me to reboot. I told it go ahead. It rebooted, detected the new card and asked me to insert a driver disc... I inserted the driver disc. The machine ran the driver install program and asked me to reboot...
I did this 5 or 6 times before I thought I'd check what was going on. It turned out essential portions of the driver were being installed under C:\Documents and Settings instead of under C:\WinNT, and because of this the driver wasn't loading properly and Windows was asking me to install it again and again and again.
The solution for this was to hit "No, I'll install drivers later" when Windows asked for the driver disk, then go into the Add Programs function in the control panel and install from THERE... But it took a few reboots before I paid enough attention to realize this was necessary, and that the prompts on the screen were tricking me.
And despite this... I have a real hard time thinking about a similar situation caused by code that will cause applications... Only when running on a Limited account... To save their INI's to the user's Documents and Settings folder, and to look for them there first, before falling back to look for a system default in the program's requested path.
In fact, if I think about it... Since this code will only activate in Limited User mode... Even if the path rewriting code were to have a buffer overflow mode in it, it shouldn't be able to damage any programs or files outside the user's personal Documents and Settings folder. And it shouldn't be able to install any new programs, including viruses or trojans of any sort. So really you're introducing next to no additional security risks, but adding a lot of new functionality.
Actually, I agree with you, Microsoft shouldn't have to create cheap hacks in order to deal with poorly written applications. They should, however, have to introduce some sort of hack to deal with poorly written operating systems. *NIX operating systems existed long before Windows came about. The value of user/root separation was well known when the code for Windows was being written. Microsoft chose to ignore this in their design, thinking that their system will only ever be used by home users, that Windows computers will never connect to any sort of large
But if you really think about it... It wouldn't be too difficult to add a few lines to the standard MFC file stream that make it so that whenever a Limited account tries to open a file whose name ends with .INI, the following occurs:
This behavior shouldn't take more than 10 lines of code or so to implement right into the file stream object itself, and would solve this problem for more or less all applications. And it's effectively the same behavior that most OS X applications have -- when they're first executed, they copy their settings file from /Library to /Users/Some current user/Library and then go from there.
And I think it would have a tremendous positive effect on Windows security in general.
They'd figure out some way to make it possible to run your Windows XP Pro system with a Limited (i.e. non-root) account without rendering it totally useless.
The few programs I've actually managed to get running on a Limited account still don't seem to have the access they need to SAVE THEIR SETTINGS... So they need to be reconfigured every time they load up.
And the only way I've figured out for dealing with that is to temporarily add the Limited Account to the administrators group, pull the network cable, log in with it like that, make the changes, log back out, remove it from the administrators group, reconnect network cable and run Ad-Aware and pray nothing went horribly wrong.
Which is a bit of a hassle.
Microsoft's done this sort of thing before -- plenty of times. Maybe you aren't clear on this, but this is exactly the sort of thing they meant when Microsoft was accused of monopolistic business practices.
I still remember getting annoyed regularly at how the HTML exporter in Microsoft Office created pages that were more or less completely unviewable in Netscape 4. And naturally, this was blamed on Netscape, and everyone went over to IE. And there was a long period of time where I was forced to admit that IE quite simply was the most usable web browser out there, and that I was rather upset there wasn't a Linux version of it. (I now feel more or less the exact same way about Safari...)
Even though pages created with almost any other program looked fine in both IE and Netscape. Including pages created by the HTML exporter in StarDivision StarOffice (that's right, even before it was bought by Sun.)
The argument about Microsoft being worried about losing banner ad revenues is completely ridiculous. It wouldn't be too hard for them to add in text ads to the bottom of the IM's, just like both Hotmail and Yahoo do to the bottom of regular Emails.
Actually, I think the whole suggestion that Microsoft makes a sizable amount of money out of banner ads is fairly silly... I think the main reason for the existence of MSN IM's is that MSN is a chief competitor of AOL's and AOL has an IM client. MSN IM exists in order to promote MSN in competition with AOL.
AOL started AIM because their subscribers wanted to exchange instant messages with people who aren't AOL subscribers using the same instant messaging system that's built into the regular AOL software... So AOL made this possible -- by having non-subscribers install AIM.
Microsoft tried to top them by creating an IM client that would let you talk to both MSN and AOL subscribers. But AOL wouldn't let them muscle in on their IM network, so they ended up making their own.
But the original point still stands -- MSN IM exists in order to promote the MSN brand name. If you use MSN IM, you're aware of the existence of MSN as an ISP. It's quite likely to be one of the first ISP's to pop into your head if you need to find a new ISP in a hurry. It's fairly likely that, if you use MSN IM, you first got into it because you or someone you know actually uses MSN as their ISP.
I don't think the exact software you use to send and receive MSN IM's effects your awareness of the MSN ISP's existence.
The argument that this is a security concern is also quite daft. There's plenty of well known, open encryption algorithms out there that they could use to encrypt transmissions to their IM service without blocking access to third party clients.
On the subject of IM security... A few months ago I noticed that when I sent files through AIM, the transfers went considerably slower than they do on ICQ... I ran some network sniffers, and it appears that AIM file transfers actually go through a server *at* AOL that then relays the data to the other user... This allows transfers to happen even when both users are behind a NAT (as long as they don't have ZoneAlarm or something like that blocking the transfer)... And it also increases security by making it possible for the file transfer to take place without either user knowing the other's IP!
How's that for security? Why is it that when Microsoft mentions security, there's never anything that makes that much sense involved?
The argument that they shouldn't want third party clients accessing their network is also quite silly. As I said above, it'd be very easy for them to insert text ads into MSN IM's... And by allowing third party clients, they could have those ads reach users of those clients! So I could be using GAIM on my Linux box
So when your old buddy or your sister or whomever gets a brand spankin' new Windows PC, and naturally installs MSN on it just because he knows MSN is Microsoft and he uses Microsoft so that must be the one that's most compatible, and finds out that despite the fact that you claim to use some fancy program called GAIM that'll talk to "practically every other IM program there IS!" in fact you aren't able to talk to him, he'll probably laugh at you and tell you that obviously all that supposed computer knowledge you have is completely bunk and that you should dump that silly Linux or BSD system of yours and switch to good ol' dependable Windows.
And I say this based on actual experience. A year or two ago, when Trillian first started to get popular, suddenly all my friends were telling me that every time I IM'ed them (from LICQ) they were getting a warning message telling them that I used an old and buggy version of the ICQ client and that they should ask me to upgrade to the latest. And of course I was using the latest LICQ. So I went through LICQ's help forums, trying to find out why this was going on... Turns out it was because Trillian's authors had been lazy and only implemented the most recent ICQ protocol -- whereas LICQ's authors had implemented every ICQ protocol ever used... But hadn't quite finished development of the very latest one. (This was fixed after a few months, when LICQ's authors did finish a working implementation of the latest ICQ protocol.)
But Trillian's authors had no problem putting code in their clients to encourage their users to regularly harass the users of other IM programs.
I still cringe every time I hear the word "Trillian" because of that. I tried to re-watch the Hitchhiker's Guide BBC miniseries the other day -- couldn't do it! Kept thinking about the IM debacle! NO LONGER ENJOYABLE!!!
And if Trillian doesn't have a problem with doing stuff like that... Does anyone really think Microsoft would?
This is a ploy. This is intended to get your friends, family members, coworkers... Your boss... to tell you that if you're choosing to use any IM outside of MSN... (And yes, you guessed it, MSN will only be available for Windows based computers)... You're effectively making yourself less available for communication. Which makes you things like "Unfriendly" "Uncooperative" "Mean" and even "Not a Team Player"... And of course, it puts serious doubt on your technical skill, if you seem to think you can talk to "practically every IM program out there!" but you can't talk to the one that most "normal" people use.
That's what I think.
What about the SSL support in LICQ, which is a Linux ICQ client? I'm yet to actually find someone else who has it compiled in to try it with, but I'm still hoping.
The friend I'm thinking of is quite straight, though.
Oh great... Like it's not annoying enough when I'm trying to have dinner with a friend and his stupid girlfriend calls him to nag him for 20 minutes in the middle of it... Now he'll actually get totally engaged in the experience of humoring her and completely forget I'm there. Isn't technology wonderful?
I'm not sure how close this is to what you have in mind, but what about Lego Mindstorms? Makes it very easy to build all sorts of computer controlled robots. And I'm fairly sure there's several packages available to control them from Linux.
Of course I very quickly discovered that RealOne player's fullscreen mode messes up pretty badly when you're running Xinerama. Now if I click the fullscreen option, it tries to display the video centered across my entire Xinerama display, and for some reason the part that's supposed to show up on the right monitor doesn't show up at all. So what I get is the left half of the video displayed on the right half of my left monitor and the right monitor is effectively rendered useless.
And I guess expecting them to add LIRC support so I can control it with my remote control is *utterly* ridiculous.
You should try out the BannerBlind extension available for Mozilla. It lets you block images by their dimensions. Works fine for me in Netscape 7.01 as well.