Category: Technology

The next BloggerCon is gonna be free. Big thumbs up. I’m pretty sure I’ll attend that.

Vernor Vinge was right. Again.

There is a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 5 that can be triggered by loading a bitmap image. No Javascript, no ActiveX, nothing fancy. You load the bitmap, and arbitrary code runs on your system. Or you load a page with the bitmap embedded in it. And it’s not a particular bitmap, it’s a general technique.

If you are currently browsing the Internet with Internet Explorer 5, you can be owned at any moment.

Reminder to self: code is data is code is bits. It’s all binary at the bottom.

• Super-nifty color chooser (that works under Safari)
• Forms without tables (coming soon: Malazan Empire wiki)

That is all.

It would be great if Ecto was actually working, instead of getting caught in some messed up state where it can’t remember my accounts. And losing data.

Seriously: it seems like the worst thing you can do when transitioning from shareware to commercial product is to make the commercial product less stable than the old version. I’m looking forward to Zempt for the Mac.

Anyone happen to remember seeing a recent Dave Winer post linking to this recap of Disney’s comments at ETCon? I could have sworn I saw him link, but now I don’t see it.

I fought the law, and the law won. The new Pepsi commercial, featuring illegal downloaders. The kid with the speaking role can’t act, but I like it anyhow.

A while back I said I thought it would be cool to set up a Harvard Square wireless weblog. It still would be cool — come to think of it, I should talk to the guys over at NewburyOpen.net. They have a little wireless bubble down at South Station, which doesn’t connect to the open Internet but which does have a little isolated bulletin board; they might be interested in the blog idea.

But I am woefully off track. What I wanted to say was “Hey, look at the cool apartment building blog!” Same concept, a little different in implementation. It’ll be a way cool tool if there’s sufficient interest.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Note on the below —

“NetNewsWire”: already produces OPML that tags feeds as type “rss”. Reverse compatibility nearly requires others to follow suit; I’m sure NetNewsWire is not the only application that does this.

However, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea to distinguish between multiple feed types. I would like to know if a feed is Atom or RSS before I grab it. Saves time, saves CPU on both ends of the transaction, saves network, and so forth.

So yes: type should accurately identify the type of feed, whether that be RSS, Atom, or something else entirely. NNTP, say.

Obscure technical quibble of the day follows. Warning: technogeeking ahead.

Dave Winer’s OPML sharing guidelines are a little wonky. Point 1 says:

If an element is pointing to a feed, set its type to “rss”. Do this even if it’s not an RSS feed.

Nope. Set the type to “rss” if it’s an RSS feed. Set it to “atom” if it’s an Atom feed. If you want a generic type name for a feed, I’d suggest “feed”.

Coming this fall: TiVo to computer functionality. It’s not what I’d like, since you don’t get full functionality — it’s some encrypted video format. Mind you, DRM is generally broken… but in any case, it’s more than we had before. I would very much like to be able to easily copy programs from my TiVo to a DVD.

Cory Doctorow, bless him, is up in arms. However, I think his analogies suck. While TiVo is a disruptive technology business, it is not much like steam engines. It’s a different delivery mechanism rather than a new media form.

And as such, right now, it’s dependent on the content providers who TiVo is attempting to pacify. TiVo, as a company, gets absolutely nothing from the legions of amateur moviemakers out there. It doesn’t have a business model without the networks. TiVo has little choice about pacifying the networks. It sucks, but it’s true.

And when Cory says “There is no market demand for TiVo’s DRM,” he’s right. But there is going to be market demand for what TiVo is offering, even if there’d be more market demand for the same thing sans DRM. TiVo has to decide if they’ll make more money by removing DRM after figuring in the cost of lawsuits.

I’m inclined to cut TiVo some slack. They’ve introduced the disruptive technology to the mainstream. Someone had to take that risk, and it wasn’t going to be the open source community. MythTV is great but it’s not the innovator; that’s TiVo. I appreciate what they’ve done.

And now I hope that someone does pre-package MythTV as a commercial offering without DRM. That’d be great. I’m just not going to savage TiVO for not going as far as I’d like.