Welcome to our new mail-list software. Like "Mailman" this too is open source software - called phpList from tincan limited in the UK. I've been using Mailman for quite a number of years and will continue to use it for what it was meant for - mail lists where members correspond with one another.
On the other hand, many of my customers need mail list software for sending out messages - marketing information, answers to questions, bulletins, support information, etc. where all the traffic is outgoing, and where the fact that someone has read a particular message and acted upon it (feedback) needs to be tracked somehow.

Oritinally posted to David Ingram's CEN-TAPEDE in October 2003 - it is reprinted here as a lead in to what is happening with the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty, currently being discussed by the G-8 and other countries. This subject is not going away - big business is lobying governments all over the world to get some sort of IP (intellectual property) filter established both at borders and by ISPs on internet traffic. We have been assured by various government representatives that the targets are the wholesale copiers of purses, shoes, watches, CDs, DVDs, and other hard goods are the intended targets of these treaties - but the wording is broad enough that the potential is there for it to affect any/all of us in our daily attempt to deal with technologies involved in listening to purchased electronic versions of music, books, videos, etc.

Update - July 29, 2008 - Wikileaks has released ACTA Negotiations paper

Canadian Bill C-61  (which I've written about previously) continues this attempt by big business - this time by injecting directly into Copyright law the concepts of Digital Rights Management and Technical Protection Measures - and their enshrined protection such that breaking them to copy otherwise legitimately purchased content can result in a $20,000 fine - just for moving your song from your iPod to your other MP3 player!

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This article was inspired by the Intellectual Property section of the proposed Treaty.

In my readings recently there has been quite a bit about the fight between "rights holders" and their potential customers, including "the general public." The problem is the "disruptive technologies" used today to store, transmit and reproduce creative works such as text, music, photos, etc.

Back in February 2007 I wrote about how Microsoft's Vista OS could "bit-rot" your files if you did something they (Microsoft) thought you should not do. http://blog.pacdat.net/article.php/20070204201516220

Well, here we have evidence that this is exactly what is happening - and it is even worse than I predicted!!!

The original article  was unfortunately not available when I first read this because the guy who posted it has "exceeded his CPU limit" at his ISP - something that won't happen on my site as I own the whole server :)

This http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/03/2339248 article from Slashdot points out that when the original author purchased a new HDMI monitor for his PC, the Netflix Digital Rights Management software (which uses Microsoft's DRM base in Vista) would have (if he'd allowed it to run) removed movies he'd purchased from Amazon's Unbox video facility - a completely unrelated product - just because they didn't conform to Microsoft's DRM scheme.

So in this case the files he had from Netflix would not play at all - even in downgraded resolution (they're less resolution than the new monitor could show) but the fix would have removed other content that he legally had paid for!!!

If you run Vista, you don't control the use you can put your machine to - Microsoft does - and that's just WRONG!

So if you received a new HDMI monitor for Christmas and are having problems with it hooked to your Windows Vista box this may be part of the problem.

If you purchase an new monitor in the future and things stop working until you "put in the correct fix" - make sure you read the messages that come up when you are about to install whatever the tech people tell you do - as the Gotcha's in it can be significant. In this case the guy did read the messages and didn't run the fix - but now he can't use Netflix and view those movies unless he "downgrades" to his older VGA (analog) monitor instead of using his new (and expensive) digital one.

Beware!!!

Update - July 25, 2008:

And now Yahoo! Music is "going dark" (being turned off) and with this comes the note that anyone who had purchased music from the store will no longer be able to move that music around or to a new computer because the DRM (Digital Rights Management) key server is being turned off.

Again, the DRM concept is simply music RENTAL - not purchase. You have NO RIGHTS under even the Copyright laws if you can't decode the music.

As many of you may know, I have a lot of computers in my home. I deal with huge amounts of data (mostly video but a lot of other stuff too) and just having it all online means I have more than 10 systems here.

But I have a core of 4 systems that I work with daily and that make up my primary set of working files: My old workstation (pacdat), my new workstation (video), my file server (NFS1) and my backup and domain name master (NETFS)

A few months ago I decided to move much of the data that still resided on my old workstation (P4 2.0GHz- called "pacdat") to a NFS file server (NFS1), including my home directory which is huge.

The old machine had several sets of mirrored drives of various sizes - usually the "sweet spot" size for whenever I purchased them - from 160 Gigs to 300 Gigs. My home directory has grown to outstrip each of these and in fact now has links to several such pairs of RAID 1 arrays. It was my intention to build a RAID 5 array of 320Gig drives that would do me for at least a year or so of growth at present rate - and host them on a single computer that I could mount from several of the systems in my home as needed.

All was going well - until Mother Nature stepped in a couple of weeks ago.

read on for the tail of woe

A recent study found that at least 45.2% of web users were not using the most secure version of their chosen browser, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or whatever. But it gets better... most of them (577 million out of 637 million in the survey) are using an old version of Internet Explorer. The rest include 38 million users of Firefox, 17 million users of Safari and about 5 million users of Opera.

You're not one of those with an old version - are you???

Back in December I wrote to my MP, Randy Kamp, about the rumored new copyright act amendments. The bill has now been presented to the House of Commons as Bill C-61(PDF). Its first reading was June 12, 2008.

I'm a bit late into the fray with this comment, but my lateness allows me to reference some of the comments from others whose opinions I value highly.

In a nutshell, this bill completely unbalances Copyright in favour of "big business" interests, most of which are headquartered in the US. It codifies the use (and abuse) of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies in ways that allow so called "rights holders" to completely bypass the balancing aspects of copyright such as Fair Dealing, and imposes draconian fines and criminal penalties for "circumventing" such DRM even if what is actually done with the media so "released" is otherwise within the scope of the "rights" of the public that are supposed to balance the act of copyright in the first place - things like format shifting and time shifting - which have been held to be reasonable and necessary - and LEGAL.

Read on for some specific instances of what you have to date been able to do - and what will be denied you if this bill passes...  

Update: You might also give a read to Ray Beckerman's article to the American Bar Association's "Judges Journal" detailing some of the travesties of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)'s huge number of civil suits against alleged "file sharers" for an insight into what we may end up with here in Canada if this bill passes.

I had the pleasure of having lunch today with my friend Gary Bannerman, with whom I've worked for a number of years now on all manner of business, web and internet projects. With Gary, and the reason for lunch, was artist Kerry Waghorn. Kerry's brand new web site has been created by my brother-in-law, Doug Cook, and has just recently been launched. We were together to discuss some of the marketing methods and for me to meet Kerry at long last after hearing of him over the past 4 years while Gary and Don Nixdorf created their Kerry Waghorn illustrated book, Squandering Billions, on the state of health care in Canada.

"Why does this fact rate a blog entry?" you might ask. Read on for the answer...

At dinner tonight the major topic of conversation turned to whether or not the Billion-$-plu$ budget for the twinning of the Port Mann bridge and widening of Highway 1 through to Vancouver was justified, or whether the money was better spent on some other means of transportation.

Now I personally think that not only is it justified, but that it is over twenty years too late and probably not enough expansion to adequately deal with the problems we have here in the Vancouver Lower Mainland with traffic and congestion. But I found myself having to justify my opinion in light of the recent radical rise in gasoline costs; and that got me thinking that maybe others might be interested in why, since I've actually given this quite a bit of thought over the past few years.

What it comes down to is that I believe that the personal automobile, at least here in North America, is not going to disappear, no matter how high the price of gasoline goes.

read on for why I think this way...

Several of my daily reading sources have pointed out new attacks on popular consumer firewall/router hardware including those of Linksys and D-link although not limited in any way to these ones.

The malware changes the DNS hosts to ones the bad-uglies control - and so instead of going where you think you are going when you browse the Internet, you go instead where the crooks want you to go with no obvious way of knowing you are in the wrong place.

The attack works because the malware tries to (and is successful) hack the router's web interface from one of the "protected" computers inside your Local Area Network (LAN). How the malware (DNSChanger Trojan) gets onto the inside computer is not specifically stated, probably because there are several ways currently being used:
1 - infected legitimate web sites that a user visits
2 - lots of e-mail methods including "phishing" and "social engineering" to get people to visit an infected site or download the malware directly.
3 - trying to view a video the system (itself compromised) tells you that you need a new video CODEC - and the codec is instead the trojan