Another victory for DRM...

According to an item at boingboing,

People who bought music from the MSN music store have been royally hosed by Microsoft: as of today, if you buy a new computer, or refresh your hard-drive, you have to kiss all your music goodbye. Microsoft has shut down its DRM "license server" and left people who bought music - instead of downloading it from a P2P site - out in the cold.

The shutdown will actually occur later this year, but the essence of the piece remains clear: once the servers are shut down, music bought from made available by MSN will only play for as long as you keep your old computer (and operating system).

Indeed, according to the article, the email sent out by MSN speaks about "songs you purchased from MSN Music." If only there were a way to DRM the money used to pay for such "purchased" wares, so that it would cease to be valid legal tender if the merchandise "bought" were to stop working.

A pox on them all.

Cheers...

Another paving stone (or two)...

Threat Level at the Wired Blog Network reports that the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the digital contents of your computers, PDAs, and cell phones are fair game when you're crossing the border. Basically, the court said the "border exception" to the 4th Amendment (the one generally prohibiting unreasonable searches) applies to electronic content as well as traditional physical objects.

Apropos of which, it turns out that authorities may not only search through your data, but may hold onto your hardware for weeks or months, according to the article.

It would appear the court was swayed by the government's argument that the country could not be kept safe, nor could laws be enforced if a reasonable and articulable suspicion of a crime was required before searching, say, a traveler's laptop. Expect to hear more of this kind of reasoning as time goes on, no matter what the results of the November election. The People In Charge™ appear to increasingly view the 4th Amendment, and pretty much all of its brethren, as obstacles to good government.

In (possibly) related news, another piece at boingboing refers to an article in the Seattle Times, about how the Border Patrol is apparently questioning citizens traveling within the country.

You don't have to be a genius to put two and two together...

Anyway, in making its ruling, the court reversed a lower court's ruling that digital devices were "an extension of our own memory" and therefore, too personal to allow to be searched without cause. They also didn't feel that the concerns of business travelers - who might not be happy to let third parties, no matter who they are, cast their eyes on potentially sensitive company documents - carried much weight.

"Defending" against such a search, in the sense of not losing important information, is not very difficult, barring a concerted effort to restrict the flow of data across national boundaries. How to thwart abuses of such searches, in the sense of, for example, raising a flag for the use of file encryption (which has already been used by prosecutors as an indication of guilt), or for something as innocuous as having erased one's browser cookies and history (just wait), is much more problematic.

Enjoy the ride.

Cheers...

Manhattan...

Everything went pretty much according to plan today, especially the part where we left the house at about 5:50 am and drove down to the LIE and then toward town, getting off at Junction Boulevard and parking not far from the #7 elevated. We eventually got to where we needed to be a few minutes before the designated time, whereupon I went off on foot for a little walkabout of midtown.

I walked "randomly," though explicitly avoiding backtracking or walking down the same block twice. My walk took me from (roughly) the NY Public Library down to Herald Square, then meanderingly up to 58th Street to the Apple Store, then over to Lexington, followed by a right turn back to 39th Street.

I am happy to report that the number of Starbucks coffee shops is stable, averaging about one shop every 50 feet, or so it seems. The lines inside were sufficient to deter me repeatedly. These shops must mint money for the corporation.

I stopped by a Barnes & Noble to pick up The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch. I read some of it on the subway ride back out to Queens and was repeatedly struck by the thought that my tribulations don't amount to spit as compared to those of some people. My eyes also welled up a few times during the first several chapters.

The liveried doorman at the St. Regis greeted me with a hearty "Good morning, sir!" as I moseyed past, despite the fact I was not passing through his doors, nor was I particularly well attired. I therefore conclude that either (a) my magnetic personality and overall demeanor did the trick, or (b) the guy's just a natural born optimist and all-around nice guy, despite the green suit. Take your pick.

The Apple Store was not the easiest place to find unless you know what to look for. I finally tumbled to the location when I noticed the silver logo hanging inside what amounts to a large Plexiglas cube parked outside of FAO Schwartz, and which otherwise overly resembles the entrance to a subway station. (I mean, there were enough people going in and out to support that illusion.)

Once inside, I took a look at the iTouch iPod and the iPhone. The former impressed me; the latter, not so much, though I would not, to twist the expression around, refuse one as a gift (which is not a hint, for those inclined to look for any such). The new Shuffle is cute, but I have no use for it.

I also took a look at the Macbook Air, which is certainly lightweight, but that's how it also felt for the few minutes during which I fired up Word and typed a few lines: the feeling I was dealing with something of great fragility was foremost in my mind as I depressed the keys.

We got back around 2 pm, and I napped until 4 pm, despite the banging and sawing in the kitchen, where the old linoleum floor had been removed (along with the plywood underneath) and hardwood was being installed.

Cheers...

The ice man cometh...

There has, for some time, been evidence to suggest that terrestrial temperatures are correlated to the number of sunspots appearing on the face of the Sun. Said number varies from year to year, but basically rises and falls in a cycle that averages about 11 years. The most recent minimum occurred last March, and the new cycle is late, which worries Phil Chapman, a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco.

According to Chapman, writing for The Australian, a delay in the start of the "next" sunspot cycle may be a harbinger of what happened in 1790, during something called the Dalton Minimum, when temperatures were especially cold.

Adds Chapman:

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature [...] report that it cooled by about 0.7°C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

In distinction from media flacks and others who rarely fail to point to, say, a record high temperature as further evidence of global warming, Chapman acknowledges that "it is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year."

Cheers...