Status-Q

Here's a fact that's reasonably well-known among anybody who's been tinkering with Windows for a few years: If you don't want your machine to run the software on a CD automatically when you insert it into your machine, hold down 'shift'.

In what must be one of the silliest of the recent "Let's sue a student" cases, SunComm are planning to sue John Halderman for pointing this out. Why? Because the 'autorun' feature was used by their CD copy-protection software, and by pressing shift you can bypass it.

The company claims to have lost $10 million of its value as a result of Halderman pointing this out. Which makes me wonder what they think such blatantly useless technology is actually worth? It doesn't need a PhD student to deduce how to break this - it's the first thing most 12-year-olds would look at as well.

[Original Link] One day SCO is going to annoy too many people. Well, they've already annoyed a very large number, but they made the mistake of accusing SGI, who started to do some serious analysis of their claims. Moral: if you don't have much of a leg to stand on, be careful whom you kick.

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[Geeks only!] Here's a very nice tip from MacOSXHints.

I've used SSH tunnels back to home before to allow me to send Mail via my home SMTP server even when travelling. But the idea of starting and stopping the connection under the control of inetd is very cute.

"It may not be focussed on me. If I'm blurry, it's because it's still focussed on the Buddha."

And this morning I'm back in Cambridge. Autumn has started in the two weeks I've been away, and I'm rather enjoying the change in temperature.

I like this place.

Last night I sat in an Irish pub, listening to U2 and The Corrs coming from the loudspeakers, and drinking a pint of Kilkenny. Nothing too unusual about that. The strange part was that I was in Taipei, surrounded by mildly inebriated ex-pats who were telling me about the best places to buy property in Beijing.

I'm over here for various business meetings and to visit Computex - the Taiwanese equivalent of Comdex. Huge numbers of booths in three halls - I only saw a small fraction of them. Though some belong to people like Microsoft, the majority are small organisations trying to find people who will re-badge or re-sell their particular gadgets. Some are as dull as front panels for CDROM drives. Others are more interesting; the massage ball powered from the USB port, for example, is something no self-respecting geek should be without.

There are huge numbers of USB flash drives in every colour and shape you can imagine, as jewellery, as key-rings, or with built-in MP3 players. Buying small numbers here is hard. Arranging to import them in large numbers into Europe with your branding on them is easy.

It can be hard to know who actually makes what. I would admire some device at a booth, and ask whether the company made the electronics inside it, or just the case. Sometimes it would turn out that they only made the label on the front.

[Original Link] "OpenOffice.org Writer isn't a replacement for anything; it's simply a better piece of software." I agree with Bruce Byfield on this - many of the OpenOffice components are superior to their Microsoft counterparts. The only real thing they lack is familiarity. Looking forward to when it runs natively on my Mac (ie. without needing X-windows).

[Original Link] The holes live on...

[Original Link] Discussions about micropayments from John Naughton's weblog:

...now comes a terrific essay by Clay Shirky, one of the most thoughtful commentators on the Net, arguing that the cent-a-day scenario is untenable, and explaining why.

[Original Link] John Naughton discusses the significance of the Hutton enquiry web site.