Google sued as source of porn — Newsday.com
This is yet another example of how uninformed, or misinformed individuals attempt to shutdown or destroy anything they don’t understand. This guy is like the moron who orders the full cable package and then sues the cable company when his kids find the playboy channel.
Wired News: Feds Go All Out to Kill Spy Suit
This is quite possibly one of the worst abuses of power I have seen from this administration. The case brought against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a privacy watchdog organization) accuses the company of collaborating with the federal government to illegally gather wholesale wiretaps of all telephone and data communications traversing some of the company’s network. This isn’t some wild accusation either. The EFF has documentation and firsthand accounts of the setup of the wiretapping equipment. The invokation of the state secrets privilege is the highest card the administration can play to stop the case. Their use of this common law precedent smacks of a facist regime bent on controlling information and directly undermines the judicial system. The only hope we have of learning the truth in this case is the slim chance the Judge will allow it to continue.
I have a couple of friends in the local developer community who are always griping about how widespread the iPod is and why they don’t like it or iTunes. Having just gone through what could have been a PITA on another system, I thought I’d write a little about why it wasn’t. I recently upgraded my old PATA hard drive to a SATA drive with a little more than double the space. Unfortunately for me, this meant a “no vote” from that device resulting in Windows needing to be reactivated. (something common to users of XP) Not a problem in-and-of itself, but this also had a side-effect of changing the GUID of my machine. iTunes maintains a list of authorized machines and uses this GUID to identify them. Lucky for me, I thought.. I still have my old HDD! However it was no problem. I authorized my updated computer and everything worked again. Not only that, I found out that I wouldn’t have to remove the old GUID until I hit the 5 auth’d machines limit. (at which point I could clear them all and re-add the ones I really want to keep) My description probably sounds a little complex, but it couldn’t have been simpler. With DRM I always expect the worst, and it seems every time I have to deal with it on Apple devices and software I’m pleasantly surprised at how little of a pain it is. What a breath of fresh air! Thanks to everyone at Apple who had a part in making this system as painless as possible.