Wow. A “hacking” (in the Joe Sixpack vernacular) related piece of legislation that isn’t offensively stupid and at face value does more good than harm.

Feinstein’s bill would require companies or government agencies to notify customers “without unreasonable delay” if they discover hackers stole unencrypted lists of account information stored on their computers, unless police order them not to disclose it.

Companies or agencies could send written letters or e-mails to their consumers. If the hacking affects more than 500,000 customers or would cost a company more than $250,000 to notify customers, victim companies could report details about it with a “conspicuous posting” on their Web site or notify major media organizations.

It does look like it’s a bit weaker than the California law that requires the above mentioned major media notification and conspicuous posting. It seems like private notification (at least via email) of those affected should be a matter of common sense anyway.

Here’s the text of the cease and desist I got from RedHat:

Dear Sir/Madam:

I am writing on behalf of Red Hat, Inc. with respect to its trademark matters.

Red Hat, Inc. is the owner of several trademark registrations in the United States and in foreign countries for the mark RED HAT. In addition, Red Hat, Inc. has made extensive use of its trademarks in interstate and international commerce in connection with the advertising, promotion, and sale of its Internet and computer-related goods and services. The RED HAT mark has become very famous and many consumers recognize this mark as a distinctive symbol of our goodwill. We would like to direct you to a link which provides details of our trademark guidelines for your reference:

http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/trademark

It has come to our attention that you are offering for sale computer software under the RED HAT trademark on your commercial website located at www.teammurder.com. Although you describe it as “Not Red Hat,” you are still using our trademarks in an unauthorized manner.

Red Hat, Inc. is concerned that your unauthorized commercial use of its trademarks is likely to create confusion, mistake and/or deception among consumers with respect to the source, origin, sponsorship or approval of the products sold in your auctions. In addition, your commercial use of RED HAT dilutes the distinctive qualities of the RED HAT mark.

While it is completely legal to copy and redistribute the Linux software under the GNU General Public License, it is not legal to name the software “RED HAT” or any similar name thereof. The GNU General Public License deals specifically with the underlying copyrights of the software; not the trademarks owned by Red Hat, Inc. You are free to call the software by any name of your choosing provided that it does not infringe on the trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or any third party.

Consequently, we request that you immediately cease and desist from making current or future use of any of Red Hat’s trademarks. Thus, we ask that you change your website to comply with Red Hat’s trademark guidelines by removing all references to the RED HAT mark (or any similar name or abbreviation).

Please provide us with a response by July 3, 2003. We look forward to working with you toward an amicable resolution to this matter. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Very truly yours,

Jennifer A. Ennis
Trademark Administrator
Red Hat, Inc.
jennis@redhat.com

Surprise, surprise, surprise… Bush is doing some anti-terrorism moral clockpunching in Africa. Diplomacy has apparently faltered to the point where U.S politicians demand that other world leaders step down. Ironically the huge text gouging ad is for Ready.gov. Ready for another television war? Ready for another term of suspicious slurping sounds from beneath CEO desks? Ready for the apocalypse to sound like a relief from all the poverty and war? Really?

Strom Thurmond is dead and sodomy is legal. If only the two stories could be combined into one hilarious story wherein Strom is sodomized to death. Wait. I didn’t say that and I apologize sincerely for the barrage of horrific images that suggestion might have spawned. Oh, in case you forgot, user: teammurder and password: teammurder is your cruise director.

Salon has a long and somewhat weird article about public discontent with Google. Parts of it are sensible with the notable exception of handing yet more publicity to the Search King scam artist still boohooing over his loss of easy income for the sake of improving search results. What bugs me about this article the most is the paranoia about advertising revenue tainting the quality of Google. Duh. Other search engines have destroyed themselves trying the same thing.

Yahoo was marginally useful until it decided to capitalize on the feeding you advertising as search results effect and people simply stopped caring. They became irrelevant in the worst sense of the word and slid back down the evolutionary shitslide to become yet another lame portal. I think (and this is entirely wet finger in the wind opinion here) that Google has invested far too much time and inventive technology into improving search capability to lose sight of that as their primary draw. Your results suck or are polluted with paid positioning and all but the AOLers (which are spawned from a portal-like construct of their own) are going to go somewhere else. If you need to deviate and dilute what you do best in order to pay the rent then you’re probably in the wrong business.

Coderlog is apparently gone. I’ve given it over a week to reappear before being heartbroken. Damn it. Starnix has also been serving up 500 errors and nothing but 500 errors for quite a while. Sigh. Such a good start.

Some clear headed and pragmatic refutation of that flamebait Slate article that all the Mac folks are working up an Aqua lather about. I appreciate this kind of objectivity from someone with a lot invested in that platform without the worn out interface consistency tirade and high fiving over shiny buttons and widgets. It’s a good read and addresses a few points that hadn’t occurred to me. Thanks.

I mentioned that I recieved a cease and desist letter from RedHat this morning which makes total sense since I am indeed selling copies of their software under a barely altered name but it’s funny that Linux ISO got the same letter and they don’t sell anything. There’s a pretty active discussion going on in their forums. Several people are dropping their use of RedHat altogether as a result of bad and misdirected lawyering. If you’re going to send out the lawyers in these completely touchy times you should be careful. With any luck the copyright/trademark folks will review the site, see that it’s obviously non-commercial, and say “Whoops.”

Anyone else a cease and desist letter today?

RedHat sends the most polite cease and desist letters I’ve ever seen. Luckily this was easy to fix and a reasonable request since I was indeed in infringement. See what happens if you say please?

Just a few more things to note before I pass out for the evening and these are as much for my benefit as yours. Take that with as many grains of salt as necessary.

Word Soup is the best blog I’ve stumbled onto lately. It’s abrasive, opinionated, and really fucking funny. Oddly enough, it has almost nothing to do with technology at least not the obsessive fanboying over technology that I’m so often guilty of committing. His post about the RIAA is scathing and completely right on target. I seldom find myself nodding my head as I’m reading something. Impressively cranky and apparently only a month old. Damn.

I really am having trouble reading much weblogage lately. That terrible right-ring-veering-like-screaming -children-on-a-roller-coaster post-WTC really hasn’t slowed down. The sound of formerly reasonable and critical people slapping their carrier pigeons to the cover photo on the new Ann Coulter epic of fallacies is deafening. I understand the weird attractions to the obviously insane in say high school but it’s a little late for that sort of excuse making isn’t it? Maybe it’s just my wishy washy relativist far left perspective talking but I do not understand you people and I’m not sure that I ever will on this side of an icepick under the eyelid and a lot of wiggling.

OK. I lied. This is all at least until file handles in Python start making some fucking sense. I swear that the append switch worked the other day when I had more sleep and less coffee.

Welcome to another tedious summary of the stories extolling and detracting from the oh-so-totally precious PR machine of the… Yeah, I’m feeling like that today. Pretending to be an objective party on any subject right now would be dishonest and caring is another story entirely. I spoke with some more financial aid types today who greeted me with sympathetic shoulder shrugs and vague mumblings about the absolute lack of funds available to public colleges right now. Apparently if you’re with a bible-thumping faux institution the sky’s the limit.

J. Kinyeta lost a job for being honest. I suggest surrounding your cubicle with the stake mounted head of every shiny, happy HR motherfucker you can lay hands on. I guess that’s why I’m a “does not work well with others especially when they’re smug motherfuckers cultivating a reality distortion field” type. “Stabbed to death with dip switch setter” would make a lovely epitaph, no?

RMS had a opinion piece about the SCO lawsuit or so you would think from the title but it’s really yet another restatement of the FAQs available from FSF. I think RMS is one of the ten most important people in the history of computing but the reiteration of the same old stuff in every public forum every chance you get is going to wear even the most respectful of us out. The usual crowd of forum heshers has plenty to say in the attached comments.

We’ve all heard about Microsoft’s MSNBOT and slapped on our tinfoil hats. I’ve disallowed that user agent since the moment after I heard about it. Despite the fact that my site matters less than zero to the bots at MS I can’t participate in the construction of yet another bogus “standard” built to benefit MS’s bottom line and basically no one else. Although I’ve heard a few folks get bent out of shape about (especially since the bot seems to be exhibiting polite behavior) purposeful exclusion of information from MS users I’m having a difficult time getting upset about it. I never intended this site to be content repackaged by anyone at my expense. Sorry. Use the real search engines or fuck off.

Idle Words has set up a boycott page. If you’re blocking the MSNBOT go add yourself to the list.

Shit. I haven’t been reading the usual news sites today and I didn’t realize that Supreme Court upheld the CIPA webfiltering fiasco and now we’re all fucked. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What this means to me (and the rest of you pottymouth folk that weblog) is that Team Murder will be unavailable from places employing web filters and listed as a sexually oriented site or something even funnier. Since WebSense and their ilk are largely automated and depend on the usual array of rules to determine the nature of a given URL you can guess what happens next. Another glorious example of your tax dollars at work against you and librarians and pretty much anything but slackfaced, Born Again book burners making another puerile attempt at keeping news and relevant information under the same moldy mattress as the fake lesbian porn they repent to whenever convenient.

Little of the geek/tech-obsessed type stuff going on today and I’m not feeling as curious as usual either. For the first time since I started this current round of college I am giving serious consideration to dropping out. I’m dependent on financial aid because I have no wealthy relatives to prey on and it’s difficult to work full time off campus while going to school full time.

My crappy job is full time but I’m basically a ward of the state and therefore undeserving of a living wage. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that but the recent gutting of financial aid on the federal and state level has really left me wanting. For the next academic year I have exactly zero dollars in grant money. Again, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that but what makes it intolerable is that my basic cost of living guesstimation for all of next year (including the summer months) according to the state of Colorado is $7,000. Did I mention that this includes work study money? I’m going to work full time while going to school full time and not have any money left over. I’ll almost need to find a second job just to buy books next semester. Since my school has no housing this $7,000 is supposed to cover everything. I just can’t do it.

To make the situation worse, all of the summer grants have been pulled which I didn’t find out about until today. So, this entire summer sememester I’ve been operating under the assumption that at least a little chunk of my tuition costs are being absorbed by Colorado Student Grant money. It isn’t so I begin the full Fall semester not only at a deficit by the lack of available money (no, not even Stafford) but with a debt from the classes I took this summer. I’m not sure where exactly the poverty line (and obviously this is relative and not absolute poverty evidenced by the fact that I’m typing this up on a computer and posting it over a broadband Internet connection) falls now but I imagine that I’m a goodly deal under it. I know, it sounds like I’m another student whining about not being able to get my hands on the living I’m owed. I wouldn’t resent this so much excepting that I’ve been employed full time since my sixteenth or so year meaning that I have at least fifteen years of solid tax paying invested in diabolical systems like these.

Another interesting aside: this year has been one of my lowest earning years ever and strangely enough I paid more taxes this year than any other. I’m really glad that the entire government is being dismantled to help millionaires evade taxation. I’m all for a return to the tax rates of the Eisenhower administration – with the bulk of the tax burden (25% then and 7% now) instead of people who marginally keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. I’m not saying this is me necessarily but I’m continually trying to calculate the reverse trickle down in my head — what is the actual burden on the working poor going to add up to and at what point will people start to care? It’s sickening how the right to survive in your environment has become commodity and available only to those who have more in huge magnitudes than they’ll ever need. End commie rant.

At times I am so astonished by the tackiness of things to offer further commentary. In these situations I offer an URL and back slowly away from the keyboard. I need one of those magical forgetting devices from MiB. Really.

I had a pretty interesting conversation with a visiting lecturer at work earlier this week. During the usual tech support monkey to user non-conversation he mentioned that he worked with the Texas branch of the legendary Xerox PARC lab doing hardware design for the moust and some keyboards. I guess most former PARC folks are pretty amazed when someone outside the organization is all excited about the work they did on, well, pretty much the way that people have interfaced with computers for the past twenty years. Anyway, there’s a point to this story other than my unearthing of old engineers, I promise.

What interested me the most about how he actually had his computer set up (your garden variety Windows 2000 workstation) was his mouse configuration. It’s a pretty standard PS/2 mouse (I actually asked if he wanted an optical mouse and he didn’t) set up for a left handed user. The funny part is that he’s right handed and I’d noticed that before I even sat down at his workstation. After the cognitive dissonance of wondering why every right click I attempted launched context menus and the like I figured it out and then asked him why. It turns out that one of the people responsible for the early design of the mouse actually has carpal tunnel syndrome pretty badly and found it more ergonomic to switch the button configuration to the left hand setting.

At first I thought he’d accidentally drank of the ergonomics koolaid but then I tried it out a little. When you rest your hand across the mouse with your index finger hovering over the right side mouse button it actually feels at rest. There seems to be a natural tendency to form the mouse claw with your hand when it’s setup in the standard configuration and when configured backwards that tendency seems to go away. Since most Windows users are right clickers this is probably the sixty four million dollar idea and the fella I was talking to is actually doing some research on it. Seems like a brilliant idea, right? It will probably never happen because most users don’t already have CTS and won’t do anything to prevent repetitive strain until they’ve injured something. It’s like the first time you show a user who’s only used IE Mozilla and point out the pop-up blocking and tabs and all the other nifty doo-dads. They usually shrug, tell you they don’t want to learn about a new application, and go merrily back to using IE. I’ve actually had conversations about why PNG graphics won’t render correctly in IE that ended with the user shouting at me about how I should just make it work. Hmmmm. Maybe I don’t give a shit about this after all.

If you’re a Windows user you might try this configuration out. You become accustomed to it in a matter of minutes and I could feel all the tension released from my arm and wrist when I switched on the Windows box in my cubical. Try it out