Monthly Archives: December 2006

A Cost Analysis of Content Protection in Windows Vista

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via Pixy Mixa:

Peter Gutmann has a few words to say about the content protection in Bill Gates next epic O/S

“The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.”

For the record, ALL of my systems are still on Win2k, and I have no intention of upgrading further until Bill Gates personally beats me over the head with a few million dollars to make up for the grief his next O/S would cause.

Mr. Gutmann makes some very important points about the vulnerabilities of such an O/S, along with dire predictions of what might happen the first time someone slips a CD into a PC also used to view medical scans/imagery. I don’t know how common it is to make diagnoses on a Windows PC, but they’re sure trying to make it less common. Bill Gates better hope that a significant number of Fortune 500 companies never get so tired of the constant security problems and forced upgrades that they decide to get together and jointly declare that they plan to standardize around “Flavor X” of Linux…

Chump Change

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In what has to be the lamest excuse for a “penalty” ever, Sony BMG has been fined all of a whopping $1.5 million dollars for massively FUBARing at least hundreds of thousands of computer systems, and making them vulnerable to hackers.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment will pay $1.5 million and kick in thousands more in customer refunds to settle lawsuits brought by California and Texas over music CDs that installed a hidden anti-piracy program on consumers’ computers.

Not only did the program itself open up a security hole on computers but attempts to remove the software also damaged computers.

Announced Tuesday, the settlements cover lawsuits over CDs loaded with one of two types of copy-protection software — known as MediaMax or XCP.

Personally, I regard this as way too little punishment for what is no less that utterly callous disregard for the security of computer systems everywhere. Sometimes, people can listen to music CD’s at work. What if this piece of crap had made systems containing crucial private data vulnerable? Like, for instance, the computers at a medical or insurance company? Simply put, computer security isn’t going to become a top priority in many places until some companies are burned, and burned badly in civil court. Until then, all we can do is be as careful as possible with our personal data. It won’t stop abuse in the long run, but there’s no reason to make it ridiculously easy for the bad guys.

Just to note: the article is from the AP, and out of Los Angeles. You’d think that the “world class” Chronicle could at least try to localize it by getting some commentary from Richard Garfield, or something.

Is Cancer Next?

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OH MY F’ING GOD. Just found on Instapundit:

A CURE FOR DIABETES?

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.

Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Dr. Michael Salter, a pain expert at the Hospital for Sick Children and one of the scientists. “Mice with diabetes suddenly didn’t have diabetes any more.”

Don’t get too excited yet, but let’s hope this pans out. If it does, we’ll have to wonder what else we’ve been missing in diseases we thought we understood.

My father died from complications of diabetes, and I am borderline diabetic myself. Several of my co-workers are diabetic and had to take early retirement. All suffered from complications. This could be huge, even if it were only diabetes. The kicker? It’s not–although the treament doesn’t directly have anything to do with other diseases, it marks a radical change in how we think neuropathic diseases work.

They also conclude that there are far more similarities than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and that nerves likely play a role in other chronic inflammatory conditions, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease.

The “paradigm-changing” study opens “a novel, exciting door to address one of the diseases with large societal impact,” said Dr. Christian Stohler, a leading U.S. pain specialist and dean of dentistry at the University of Maryland, who has reviewed the work.

You see, all along, we’ve been thinking “the pancreas stops making insulin.” A while back it was discovered that it still makes insulin — it just isn’t releasing it because the tiny production “islets” are inflammed. By injecting a simple extract of chili peppers to kill the pain nerves in the pancreas, the inflamation went away, and the pancreas’ of the test mice started producing insulin again. Stranger still, insulin resistance (type 2 diabetes) dropped dramatically after the treatments.

Let’s hear it for lab mice. Next time someone says “animal testing is inhumane,” I suggest giving them a few chronic diseases.

The Right to “Exist”

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I’ve been cleaning out the e-mail box (something I’ve been atrociously lazy about) and in the process, I’ve come across a few gems. This link was sent by my first reader and Dallas resident, Dr. Heinous.

LOS ANGELES, April 14 — A federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday that arresting homeless people for sleeping, sitting or lying on sidewalks and other public property when other shelter is not available was cruel and unusual punishment. The 2-to-1 ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, essentially invalidated a 37-year-old ordinance that the police have used to clear homeless people off the streets. Legal experts said the case, which they believed to be the first involving the rights of homeless people in public spaces to reach the federal appellate level, would be closely followed by cities nationwide.

The Eighth Amendment, barring cruel and unusual punishment, prohibits Los Angeles “from punishing involuntary sitting, lying, or sleeping on public sidewalks that is an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless without shelter,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote. The Los Angeles police responded by releasing a statement that said: “The condition of being homeless in and of itself is not a crime and should not be treated as such. But the criminal element that preys upon the homeless and mentally ill will be targeted, arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

It would be nice if we could just target, arrest, and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law that criminal element preying upon the homed, mentally well-adjusted, taxpayers of our fair city. But you know how it is, some folks just have the right to exist wherever they want, the rest of us have the right to pay taxes for their protection.

Computerized Election Fraud

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“I for one, welcome our new programmer overlords.”

Via Instapundit and Slashdot, this news from the National Institute of Science and Technology:

“Paperless electronic voting machines ‘cannot be made secure’ [pdf] according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the most sweeping condemnation of voting machines issued by any federal agency, NIST echoes what critics have been saying all along, that due to the lack of verifiability, ‘a single programmer could rig a major election.’ Rather than adding printers, though, NIST endorses the hand-marked optical-scan system as the most reliable.”