An Electronic Arts "Spore" forum moderator threatens to disable the entire game for a user's simply having asked about SecuROM in EA's forums. This would seem to confirm that Spore does in fact have a kill switch built in, which is something that the EA apologists have continually dismissed.

"SecuROM as [sic] been discussed and discussed so much and it causes arguments in threads. If you want to talk about DRM SecuROM then please use another fansite forum. If there is any change you will be able to read it on the official Spore site.

Please do not continue to post theses [sic] thread or you [sic] account may be at risk of banning which in some cases would mean you would need to buy a new copy to play Spore."(emphasis mine)

The admission of the existence of some type of "Kill Switch" is very interesting. EA seems to say that you must conform your speech to only what they want you to say ... or else.

Quite a revelation!

I'd love to see them do it actually, as it would place an exclamation point onto the Spore class action suit that we talked about recently. Not only mislabeling, deceitful practices and hidden malware, but threats, intimidation and possibly a total loss of the use of the game if you say something that may irritate EA.

Over at the Spore forum, it seems like anything even remotely speaking ill of the game is now immediately locked, not just discussion of DRM. Look here and here and here and here.

Anything negative about the game is being locked and/or tossed.

Wow ... way to stay classy EA!

Update: It looks like some of those locked threads have now been flushed down the memory hole entirely!

Talk about not learning from one's mistakes...

The Windows 7 Team

Theres a lot to building an org structure for a large team, but the most important part is planning the work of the team. This planning is integral to realizing our goal of improving the overall consistency and togetherness for Windows 7. So rather than think of one big org, or two teams, we say that the Windows 7 engineering team is made up of about 25 different feature teams.

In general a feature team encompasses ownership of combination of architectural components and scenarios across Windows. Feature is always a tricky word since some folks think of feature as one element in the user-interface and others think of the feature as a traditional architectural component (say TCP/IP). Our approach is to balance across scenarios and architecture such that we have the right level of end-to-end coverage and the right parts of the architecture. One thing we do try to avoid is separating the plumbing from the user interface so that teams do have end-to-end ownership of work (as an example of that, Find and Organize builds both the indexer and the user interface for search). Some of the main feature teams for Windows 7 include (alphabetically):

Applets and Gadgets
Assistance and Support Technologies
Core User Experience
Customer Engineering and Telemetry
Deployment and Component Platform
Desktop Graphics
Devices and Media
Devices and Storage
Documents and Printing
Engineering System and Tools
File System
Find and Organize
Fundamentals
Internet Explorer (including IE 8 down-level)
International
Kernel & VM
Media Center
Networking - Core
Networking - Enterprise
Networking - Wireless
Security
User Interface Platform
Windows App Platform

Though its fascinating to watch Microsoft alienate IT professionals by using such terms as "Plumbing" when describing operating system functionality, and yet still expect to be taken seriously, it's really just a shame.

Microsoft's Marketing people can keep assuming that IT folks are idiots who will buy into such nonsense and the IT folks will just keep using Windows XP for their current Desktop OS needs, all the while slowly migrating users to purely Linux, BSD or Apple Desktop environments (though the migration will go faster and faster as application developers catch on to the changing market). The IT folks will also likely keep pressuring the companies that they work with to follow their lead ... just as when those same IT folks were alienated by, and migrated away from the Notes, Novell, and IBM-OS2 guys. Good luck with that Microsoft!

For those of you interested in a well performing version of Windows, take a good look at Tiny XP. It's fast, it works, it's bare minimum, and when you need a feature you can add it from your license copy of XP Pro. How is it that only the Windows user community can significantly "Improve" Microsoft's OS?

Will Microsoft wait until Open Source OS's have captured 20 percent of the market before actually engineering something new ?

Windows must embrace true 64 bit, Multithreading, and need only run legacy applications in a Virtualized environment (Thinstall and VMWare are proof that this can be done, and done well).

MS needs to make optional such things as Internet Explorer, Media Player, and rid the OS entirely of all of the useless hidden DRM subsystems that eat away at Vista's system performance (These hidden DRM processes do not serve Microsoft's customers ... you know, the people and organizations who actually PAY Microsoft's bills).

Windows desperately needs "root" style user account and permission management (No! UAC security "theater" is not enough security).

I could go on all day, but it looks like running a copy of Windows Server 2008 is going to get you 90 percent of the way to "Windows 7", and that all that this team seems intent on doing is re-adding the missing bloat.

Funny thing when reading the comments on the Team Blog, the MS team are currently being "gamed" into believing that perfecting Vista's bloat is what the user community actually wants. These comments are obviously written by astroturfing stealth Apple and Linux commentors.

It's quite amusing really.

You know, somehow, "We told you so" just doesn't quite say it...

Yahoo! Music Store taking DRM servers offline, freezing out customers

In a move which at best could be described as unsurprising, Yahoo! has announced that it's taking its Music Store DRM license key servers offline come September 30th... and freezing customers from ever registering their music with another computer. Ever.

TechDirt asks:

Did Yahoo Not Pay Attention To What Happened When Microsoft Pulled The Plug On Its DRM Server?

Yahoo! sent out an email to users noting that its DRM server will be shut down, preventing the "buyers" from moving the songs to new computers. This seems doubly ironic, given that Yahoo's last two music bosses, David Goldberg and Ian Rogers had spoken out against DRM. While neither is still with the company, it's rather amusing that Yahoo is now helping to prove the point.

Even the L.A. Times has some Opinion about this move:

Yahoo pulls an MSN Music (only faster)

This afternoon, Yahoo alerted customers of its erstwhile downloadable music store that it would no longer provide support after Sept. 30 (download the cheerful e-mail here).

Update: Yahoo tells Information Week it will reimburse users on a "case-by-case" basis, (so you may have to grovel, plead and beg them a little to continue to exercise your usage rights ... but that's ok, because youre not really a Yahoo! customer anymore, you're just another dried up revenue stream)

Yahoo! may possibly offer reimbursements or MP3 versions ... or not depending on Yahoo!'s latest whim (and whomever you happen deal with if and when you contact them). The FAQ is here.

If you were foolish enough to buy into DRM encumbered media, Yahoo!s screwing you out of your music is really your own fault. DRM is simply bad juju all around that only hurts Paying customers.

Even though you may lose a track or two because of Yahoo!'s DRM we really should all be happy that Yahoo!'s music is finally being sold DRM-free on Rhapsody. (Hint: If you dont want to grovel and beg Yahoo to keep that which you already paid for, rip your Yahoo! DRM encumbered media onto CD and then convert the CD to flak or a high bit-rate lossy format)

Update 2:

Yahoo! has announced what you can expect when you grovel, plead and beg them to continue to exercise your music usage rights...

Yahoo offers coupons for music that stops working

Yahoo Inc. is offering coupons or refunds to users who find songs they bought inaccessible after Sept. 30, when the company shuts its music-download service.

The company said Wednesday it is offering coupons on request for people to buy songs again through Yahoo's new partner, RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody. Those songs will be in the MP3 format, free of copy protection. Refunds are available for users who "have serious problems with this arrangement," Yahoo said.

Yahoo opted to shut down its system to avoid "delaying the inevitable."

You can get to your music, but only if you do a few tricks first..............I do that to my dog.

First I show him a doggy treat. Then I tell him to "Sit". Then I place the doggy treat on top of his nose ... then I wait ... and wait ... until I see he starts to drool, then I let him actually eat the treat.

"Good dog!"

Great Fun!

Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid state drive makers. "As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk," he said.

This is due to Vista's design. "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls," he said.

"Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year," Harari said.

Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. "We have very good internal controller technology, as you know...That said, I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment," he added.

Read the whole story on C|Net

Microsoft To Mainstream Containerized Data Centers With C-Blox

Microsoft has developed its own specifications that include, for example, configuration for electrical components and the layout of physical servers, for its containers. Those specs make Microsoft's containers different from anything on the market today, and a potential opportunity for future Microsoft products. The containers, which Microsoft calls C-blox, are largely self-contained and will require very little hands-on maintenance.

"The doors are closed, and because of the level of automation in our systems, we can run it and accept a certain amount of failure over time," Manos said. Manos argues that it is more cost effective to build redundancy and automation into Microsoft's data center applications and allow some hardware to fail than it would be to physically manage such a large data center. The hands-off approach also means design can be tweaked to allow for maximum cooling and energy efficiency without worrying about how accessible the systems are to human hands. Of course, Microsoft also builds backbones that link power, cooling, and bandwidth among the containers.

In the C-blox world, a truck drops off a data center container and then picks it up again in a few years when Microsoft is ready to switch over to new hardware. Administrators will only enter the physical C-blox in the rarest of occasions. "In that sense, your IT workers look more like truckers and longshoremen than traditional IT workers," Manos said. It will also allow Microsoft to run the entire Northlake facility with a continuous staff of little more than 20 or 30 employees.

So are we now to believe that a "truckers and longshoremen" skills shortage shows need for an increase of the 85,000 H-1B visas already available? A related question; is Microsoft's Michael Manos merely arrogant or is he simply stupid?

I was around for the conversion to color, saw the "Over the air broadcast Pay TV" business model try and fail in the market ("ONTV" anyone?), and witnessed the rollout of cable tv, and enjoyed their monopolization attempts.

Now, (if I were to subscribe) I can have access to over one hundred channels on Cable, and hundred more on satellite, 20 or so channels over the new "improved" digital HDTV broadcast spectrum and yet ... we watch less television now than when (as a kid) we had only five channels. The TV was all but abandoned in my house.

At least this was the case until I got a High Definition LCD TV, and connected my gaming computer to it. Now I find that although we watch almost zero television "programming" on it, the device itself gets much more usage than the tube TV it replaced.

Once you attach a computer to your big screen LCD and watch a movie or play a game, why would you bother to watch any "programming" at all, let alone programming with commercial interruptions?

Movies on demand? Simple! Click a link on TPB or NNTP and have a movie in about an hour (maybe several hrs for 1080p content). Music? Same thing. Games? Same thing. News? Better! I can check the weather, read headlines, watch news clips, and best of all I can even comment on it or rank it!

Why would I pay for cable's Low Res TV programming? Why would I put up with the weak signal, blocky, choppy, unwatchable mess that they have made of broadcast digital TV? Why would I pay for the bother of Game Consoles that overheat, die and when replaced find myself cheated out of using my purchased DRMed downloadable games, or possibly fall victim to some failed BluRay key update?

Is Optical media dead? Not as long as the baby-boom generation keeps buying "wax" disks.

Optical media is as good as dead for many post-boomers. Heck, I dont even own a standalone CD or DVD player! I Rip and store media on disk, and consume it when it's convenient for me .

For me disk based media is far too obsolete to use, (as designed - in disk players) even if the content providers were to give it away. I never buy optical media unless its the only way I can obtain it. Once obtained, the content is transferred to Hard-disk where it can be of some use.

The funny thing is that Im more than willing to pay for all of my media. I pay for all of my games, which I download. The reason I pay is because the publisher add value like game servers, ranking and records, updates, and free stuff like wallpaper and screensavers.

I want to buy music, I want to buy video content but there is no added value for me if I pay, and currently I actually lose value by paying because the only time I am restricted in my usage is when I hit a DRM wall.

No one seems to want my money badly enough to actually work for it.

Windows XP outshines Vista in benchmarking test New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1. Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.

This is the best part of the article:

Microsoft admits that the launch has not gone as well as the company would have liked. "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista," corporate vice president Mike Sievert said in a recent interview at Microsoft's partner conference in Denver.

He reminds me of this Apple ad: Podium

Amusing!

The "Zhelatin gang"--named after the trojan it installed--was responsible for what started out as the "storm worm." First spotted earlier this year, the spread of the "storm worm" started via e-mails purporting to provide information on some dangerous storms in Europe at the close of January.

But the Zhelatin is no longer your typical worm beastie ... The worm has now been modified to use an infected users own Blog to spread itself.

It's not just blogspam we're talking about here, the little sucker actually writes a blog post to the victim's blog all by it's own bad little self, in order to lure your unsuspecting readers to an infection site. More from ARS Technica:

...the worm has now switched its focus to blogs. Unlike the typical "comment spam" that many of us have grown used to on our personal blogs, the worm is actually getting into people's Blogspot accounts and creating new blog posts with links to the trojan.

This worm has been reported to find it's way through multiple hardware email filters and breeze passed almost every AV engine at one time or another in it's various iterations only to be finally stopped by the firewall (which you should have already set up on workstations and which theoretically should be the last resort). Decent firewall software packages are usually able to stop the actual infected file from performing it's processing.

The funny part about workstation firewalls catching the worm's rogue processing is when users inevitably click "Yes" to allow the process and also check the "Do Not Ask Again" check box.

ARS Technica estimates that there could be as many as 10 million Zhelatin gang bots out there:

Just how many computers are part of the botnet is anyone's guess, but estimates from some security firms are reaching as high as 10 million. Just last June the FBI warned that it had discovered more than a million PCs in a botnet. This looks to be just the tip of the iceberg.

IMHO This is one of the most serious threats to the IT community in a number of years. 10 million bots can do a lot of damage in a lot of ways ... in a hurry.

Check out this video of 24 hours monitoring the infection: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH8cS1AkqiI

(yea I know there is one of those "Flash Annoyance" things, just click passed it)

Over the Aug. 24 weekend, a new Vista beta has appeared on the BitTorrent sites.

The first beta SP1 appeared on hacker sites in early August as a 3.2 GB DVD ISO. This version could only be used to install a full version of Windows Vista. As such, it was not so much an SP as a testing platform for some proposed patches. The just-leaked version, however, expands from a compressed file of about 200 MB in size, depending on the system architecture, into an installation program that totals approximately 684 MB. With it, an adventuresome Vista user could use it to update his or her's Vista-powered system to a beta SP1.

A closer look reveals that, regardless of platform, the beta is named: "Build: 6.0.6001.16633 (longhorn.070803-1655)." When installed, at least one patched version of Vista Ultimate states that the system is running Vista Ultimate, Service Patch 1, v.165.

You can find the upgrade for Vista SP1 here: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3786032/Vista_SP1_Update-windows6.0-kb936330-x86_Standalone_installer Thank you Sweeden!

As many IT folks are currently working on (struggling with?) Prototyping Vista in the enterprise, do we really have much of a choice but to be "adventuresome"?

I'll be giving it a test drive over the holiday weekend, how about you?

iPhone bill is surprisingly Xbox HUGE (lol) http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070811-iphone-bill-is-surprisingly-xbox-huge-lol.html

(Err..That really is the headline - Poli) "AT&T's iPhone bills are quite impressive in their own right. We're starting to get bills for the iPhone here at Ars, and while many of us have had smartphones for some time, we've never seen a bill like this.

One of our bills is a whopping 52 pages long http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/Iphone%20bill2.jpg, and my own bill is 34 pages long. They're printed on both sides, too. What gives?

The AT&T bill itemizes your data usage whenever you surf the Internet via EDGE, even if you're signed up for the unlimited data plan. AT&T also goes into an incredible amount of detail to tell you; well, almost nothing. For instance, I know that on July 27 at 3:21 p.m. I had some data use that, under the To/From heading, AT&T has helpfully listed as "Data Transfer." The Type of file? "Data." My total charge? $0.00.

This mind-numbing detail goes on for 52 double-sided pages (for 104 printed pages!) with absolutely no variance except the size of the files.

You would think that a data company would have a more efficient billing process. I guess the iPhone is more like a Cingular or Blackberry than Apple would like to admit. I have it on good authority (not really! Just reading various comments on the inter-tubes) that Cingular and Blackberry billing is similar in "Quality". Funny none the less!

California City to Transform Red Light Cameras Into Spy Cameras http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/18/1886.asp

Oakland, California to lobby legislature to allow 24-hour video surveillance with red light camera system.

Privacy advocates have long viewed red light cameras with the suspicion that the devices were the first step down a path of increased surveillance.

Those fears may come true as the city of Oakland, California has revealed that it is working with the state legislature to secure a change in the law that will allow red light cameras to become full-scale surveillance cameras.

In a memo from the Oakland Police Department dated June 26, Police Chief Wayne G. Tucker recommended that the city's lobbyist be ordered to advocate a new law in Sacramento.

"The legislation would also allow the use of those (red light camera) images for evidentiary purposes other than the enforcement of red light violations, such as reckless driving, assaults, public nuisance activity, drug dealing, etc."

The camel's nose is now far enough under the privacy tent that soon we will be in bed with the whole 1984-ish video surveillance camel.

Update:

Heh ... days later this topic gets the green light...

Surveillance Camera Network Coming To New York?http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/04/075203/

I'm just that good! and you should really pay more attention when I post to my Journal. (It's not bragging if its true!)

Google suspects users are not human

Prove you're not a virus, or be terminated!

In Philip K Dick's famous novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' 'bounty' hunters track down, identify and kill human-like androids, this time, ironically the situation is reversed ... it wasn't a human looking for rogue machines, but a machine (the GoogleMind) testing to see if it was a human actually performing the search.

Lucky for us humans that the GoogleMind isn't armed with anything more dangerous than pixels and text! ... yet.

Link has screen-shot goodness.

Steep fines are nice, but one of the best weapons against spyware purveyors is locking them up, a federal regulator told senators on Tuesday.

At a morning Senate Commerce Committee hearing here, Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic said most wrongdoers in the spyware arena "can only be described as vicious organized criminals."

"Many of most serious wrongdoers we observed in this area, I believe, are only going to be deterred if their freedom is withdrawn," so it's important for the FTC to collaborate on its cases with criminal law enforcement authorities, Kovacic said.

Kovacic's remarks came in response to a question from Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who was presiding over Tuesday morning's hearing, about whether the FTC is sufficiently equipped to combat the scourge of software planted surreptitiously on a user's computer.

"It's a real source of frustration for my constituents, my family, my office...basically anyone who has a computer," Pryor said.

Pryor said a mouthful there ... Just ask Julie Amero.

UPDATE: Dausha points out that Mark Pryor is the junior senator from Arkansas. The FTC official is William Kovacic. I fixed it ... My Bad!

I know this is old, but I just wanted to point out that the moderator did a good job of realizing I had a typo. The moderator presented the article in such a way that I could correct it, thus maintaining some semblance of credibility. So thank you Zonk!

D-Wave qubits in the era of Quantum Computing

D-Wave showed three examples of Orion in action, marking the first such demonstration of a quantum computer. The most impressive display came during a drug molecule matching exercise, while two less impressive efforts had Orion crunch through a party table seating arrangement that paired like-minded guests and then go on to solve a SudoQ puzzle.

But there's only so much you can do with 16 qubits. So, D-Wave plans to produce a 32 qubit chip by the fourth quarter, a 512 qubit chip in the first quarter of 2008 and then a 1,024 qubit chip in the third quarter of 2008. D-Wave next year will also allow customers to send calculations to the Orion system via the internet and then have calculations returned to the customer and then later in 2008 ship actual systems.

The cost for such boxes will likely be comparable to large, high performance computing clusters.

Of course, these grand plans might fail to occur.

"It could turn out that these systems are not protected (from interference) the way we thought that they are," Rose said. "If so, this system could dead-end after 16 qubits.

"If you combine too many of these devices together and you are not good enough at filtering out the noises, then you will end up with a hunk of a (trashed) computer."

Start-ups rarely admit to such disastrous possibilities, as you all know too well.

Read it all here...

I'll be on the lookout for reports by attendees. But no matter how you slice it, this is an exciting development and this demonstration will help to drive competing QC models to more rapid development.

I'm sure that my video encoding projects could benefit!

Here is Steve Jurvetsons Flickr blog where you can find some great pictures of the Quantum Computer equipment.

Endgadget's take ... funny.

Some technical papers for interested folks!

ARS Technica has more news here.

The D-Wave blog (rose blog)

Here is some more good "Quantum" reading from ARS Technica: Quantum Deathmatch: PvNP

I just hope that the new parallel universe we just switched to is the one where I hit the lottery!

U.S. cyber counterattack: Bomb 'em one way or the other

National Cyber Response Coordination Group establishing proper response to cyberattacks

If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nations critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source.

It's almost funny ... except for the fact that such an overreaction is so possible.

Source: U.S. cyber counterattack: Bomb 'em one way or the other