Yostivanich

“Try to remem­ber all the crazy direc­tions Microsoft has gone in over the past few years. Note the dizzy remarks by Chief Exec­u­tive Steve Ballmer, who recently insisted that online adver­tis­ing would soon account for the major­ity of Microsoft’s income. This is a soft­ware com­pany mak­ing these com­ments.” Per­son­ally I think Microsoft is a good and robust com­pany that needs new man­age­ment or some new ideas and it would be a great company.

“Zdziarski said it’s just as easy to access a user’s pri­vate infor­ma­tion on an iPhone 3GS as it was on the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion iPhone 3G or first gen­er­a­tion iPhone, both of which didn’t fea­ture encryp­tion. If a thief got his hands on an iPhone, a lit­tle bit of free soft­ware is all that’s needed to tap into all of the user’s con­tent. Live data can be extracted in as lit­tle as two min­utes, and an entire raw disk image can be made in about 45 min­utes, Zdziarski said.” Scary, yes.

“If you watched Sarah Palin’s res­ig­na­tion speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speech­writ­ers moved back to the Belt­way long ago. Just how poorly con­structed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address?” Van­ity Fair edits Palin’s res­ig­na­tion speech.

“Tak­ing a new hard line that news arti­cles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites with­out per­mis­sion, The Asso­ci­ated Press said Thurs­day that it would add soft­ware to each arti­cle that shows what lim­its apply to the rights to use it, and that noti­fies The A.P. about how the arti­cle is used. Tom Cur­ley, The A.P.’s pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive, said the company’s posi­tion was that even min­i­mal use of a news arti­cle online required a licens­ing agree­ment with the news orga­ni­za­tion that pro­duced it. In an inter­view, he specif­i­cally cited ref­er­ences that include a head­line and a link to an arti­cle, a stan­dard prac­tice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggre­ga­tors and blogs.” This is beyond stupid.

“This has been said before (mul­ti­ple times) but you don’t res­cue your busi­ness model by “pro­tect­ing” against what peo­ple want to do. You don’t res­cue your busi­ness model by wast­ing resources try­ing to hold back what peo­ple want to do. You res­cue your busi­ness by pro­vid­ing more value and fig­ur­ing out a way to mon­e­tize that value. Putting bogus DRM on news does none of that. It only has­tens fail­ure.” Techdirt’s ini­tial thoughts on the AP’s stu­pid plan.

“First of all, some­one should sit Cur­ley down and explain to him fair use — a con­cept of which he appears to be igno­rant. This whole exer­cise seems to be an attempt to pre­tend that you can take away fair use rights via meta­data. You can’t. But, more impor­tantly (from a busi­ness per­spec­tive) this shows a near total clue­less­ness on how Google works. Yes, Google built a multi-billion dol­lar busi­ness out of “key­words” but they did so not by forc­ing peo­ple to pay, but by adding value to peo­ple who did pay. That’s the oppo­site of what Curley’s try­ing to do. If you can’t under­stand the dif­fer­ence between pos­i­tive value and neg­a­tive value, you should not be the CEO of a major orga­ni­za­tion. Mean­while, Ryan Chit­tum, at the Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism Review says that peo­ple should chill out because the AP isn’t going after blog­gers, he seems to miss a few points. First, the AP might not be “going after blog­gers” now, but it cer­tainly has shown a will­ing­ness to do so in the past.” Techdirt = awesome.

“The Hon­duran armed forces issued a com­mu­niqué on Sat­ur­day indi­cat­ing that they would not stand in the way of an agree­ment to return Manuel Zelaya, the country’s ousted pres­i­dent, to power.” Good news.

“On the one hand, all of this is pretty ratio­nal — at any given moment, Specter was mak­ing moves that would seem to have max­i­mized his chances of sur­vival. On the other hand, it seems to have trig­gered plenty of fatigue with vot­ers, who just can’t be sure what they’ll get if they vote to re-elect him. Arlen Specter is either just about the best reflec­tion or the worst reflec­tion on the state of our Democ­racy — it’s just hard to say which one.” Inter­est­ing sta­t­ics on Arlen Specter’s vot­ing record.

“That’s Jupiter doing its cos­mic job, astronomers like to say. Bet­ter it than us. Part of what makes the Earth such a nice place to live, the story goes, is that Jupiter’s over­bear­ing grav­ity acts as a grav­i­ta­tional shield deflect­ing incom­ing space junk, mainly comets, away from the inner solar sys­tem where it could do for us what an aster­oid appar­ently did for the dinosaurs 65 mil­lion years ago. Indeed, astronomers look for sim­i­lar con­fig­u­ra­tions — a giant outer planet with room for smaller plan­ets in closer to the home stars — in other plan­e­tary sys­tems as an indi­ca­tion of their hos­pitable­ness to life.”

Happy Birth­day.

“The Obama admin­is­tra­tion is vastly expand­ing a fed­eral effort begun under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush to iden­tify and deport ille­gal immi­grants held in local jails. But here in the city where the effort got a trial start eight months ago, peo­ple on each side of the immi­gra­tion debate have found fault with it. Under the effort, known as Secure Com­mu­ni­ties, local offi­cials check every set of fin­ger­prints taken at jails against those of peo­ple who have had a brush with fed­eral immi­gra­tion author­i­ties; in the past, they could check only for a crim­i­nal his­tory in the F.B.I. data­base. If a per­son turns out to be an ille­gal immi­grant, the case is turned over to Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment for pos­si­ble depor­ta­tion pro­ceed­ings in addi­tion to the crim­i­nal charges.”

“A prison in Goma in east­ern Congo with 850 pris­on­ers crammed into a facil­ity built for 150 is the worst in Africa, a top United Nations human rights offi­cial said late Fri­day.” Yeah that’s pretty bad.

“Albi­nos are get­ting killed and muti­lated for their body parts. Witch doc­tors believe their organs “bring good luck in love, life and busi­ness.” One man in the video explains how his brother Daniel was mur­dered by another fam­ily mem­ber — Daniel’s arms and legs were chopped off. The body parts were later sold for $240. This is what can hap­pen when poverty and hope­less­ness meet super­sti­tion and mise­d­u­ca­tion.” Hor­ri­ble story.