Status-Q

A good friend of mine told me a nice story. The poet W.H.Auden once asked him, “Don’t you think Tolkien is a wonderful writer?” To which my friend replied that no, he didn’t really think so. “I respect you for saying that”, said Auden, “but I’ll never trust your opinion again.”

[Original Link] Ross Anderson has written a very good FAQ about the Intel/Microsoft plans for control/protection of digital content. I’m worried about this stuff, but I was worried about .NET and Passport/Hailstorm. Still, that was just Microsoft, and however big they were, you could choose to ignore them; enough people did, fortunately.

If the motherboard manufacturers adopt TCPA/Palladium, on the other hand, it may be rather harder. It has potentially worrying implications for Linux, Mac and other platforms. If somebody sends you a Word document in future, you might not only need a Microsoft software package to read it, you might also need an Intel motherboard. It’s a good thing there’s all this anti-monopoly legislation around, isn’t it?

(About a year ago, Microsoft even wanted me to change my name!)

[Original Link] The scourge of web design is the “javascript:” link. Agreed. Javascript, if used at all, should augment normal web activity, not replace it.