post 59

By anders pearson 07 Aug 2000

i generally keep java turned off in netscape because it makes it crash too much, but now there’s a really good reason to keep it off. as far as i know, this is the first real exploitable hole in the java security model; there have been lots of holes found before but they were always along the lines of “well, this part doesn’t work quite how it should although we can’t figure out how anyone would actually exploit it; we’ll fix it anyway though.” it should be interesting to see how sun reacts; hopefully they’ll come up with an intelligent fix rather copy microsoft’s “ignore it and it will go away” attitude towards security holes cough back orifice cough.

post 57

By anders pearson 04 Aug 2000

i haven’t even heard of the “Cow Parade” in new york, but apparently, David Lynch is just too weird to be allowed to participate. i just really like Lynch’s quote in the article: “Don’t you think when people tell you you’re allowed to do whatever you want as long as it’s not sexually X-rated that they should stand behind their word and show your cow?”

i’d also like to know why i wasn’t given a cow to decorate? oh well, i’m sure they wouldn’t have shown my cow either.

post 55

By anders pearson 03 Aug 2000

i remember tuck rambling on a while back about how the nin show made every other concert he’d been to pale in comparison and opened his eyes to how amazing a concert actually could be. at the time i thought “all right, he’s allowed to exaggerate a bit; poetic license and all”. then it happened to me last night.

saw einstürzende neubauten downtown with my good friend erinmichelle. it was the second of their two night stay in nyc so the venue wasn’t terribly packed.

most industrial bands use lots of loops and samples and electronics to make their music sound ‘mechanical’. EN uses almost no samples and only some occasional keyboards. instead, they just bring what looks like a cross between a machine-shop and a junkyard on stage. the primary drumkit consists of a bass drum, a large (2m x 1m x 4cm) piece of steel lying horizontally over the bass drum with several big metal cylinders on and over it. ‘cymbols’ made from large sharp looking sawblades. what i thought were just some of the largest floor toms i’d ever seen at first turned out to be a 50 gallon drum and some sort of water heater turned upside down. then there was ‘the wheel’. i’m not sure what it used to be; some kind of grinder or buffing wheel. at any rate, it was about a meter wide and 30cm in diameter with short metal tines sticking out all over the whole cylinder and a variable speed motor. it was miked and made some surprisingly pleasant noises when metal bars and brushes were brought into contact with the spinning tines. there were countless other items brought out at various times to serve as percussion (recycling bins, gas cans, large sections of pvc piping, etc) but the coolest was, without a doubt, blixa’s air compressor solo. there’s no way i could possibly describe it, but somehow, an air compressor, a microphone, and blixa’s mouth combined to produce the most amazing tonal range i’ve ever heard from a single instrument. of course, there was also a bass (which was played with a vibrator at one point) and a guitar (which barely ever made a noise that was even remotely guitar-like).

not wanting to let me down, they opened with ‘silence is sexy’, which consists mostly of blixa taking drags off a cigarette into the mic in between ‘verses’ of complete silence. they played mostly newer stuff off Silence is Sexy, Ende Neu, and Tabula Rasa but threw in a couple older songs here and there. the set flowed quite nicely despite the minor construction projects that had to go on between songs to prepare the instruments. they played pretty much everything that i wanted to hear with the exception of ‘Stella Maris’ (no surprise that they didn’t play that) and ‘Was Ist Ist’.

it was, without a doubt, the most powerful, beautiful music i’ve ever seen performed. they play incredibly complex rythmic music and never missed a single note or beat. everything sounded perfect. usually, when you see a band, you’re pretty happy if they sound as good live as they do on their albums. i’ve loved my EN albums, but after seeing them live, their recorded material sounds like absolute crap in comparison.

post 54

By jp 02 Aug 2000

this is interesting (tuck – thesis?)…

this from an nfo meant to accompany a ripped dreamcast game:

>Thanks goes out to the Tokyo Yakuza for the elite supply and Hello to >Eurasia.

For those of you that don’t know, the group Utopia is under some serious legal fire for making a boot CD that allows dreamcast owners to play bootleg games on normal CD-Rs. Sega’s own dumb fault for using something as wide open as WinCE for it’s console OS (bet it saves FTP passwords too anders). Curious? Go Here).

The real beef is that Sega claimed they were going full tilt after any and everyone involved with Dreamcast piracy. But Sega Vs. Yakuza… hope they know when to back down. Otherwise Sony may win the console war by lack of competition — Anders may find Yu Suzuki floating by in the East River.

post 53

By anders pearson 02 Aug 2000

… and another thing that bugs me about windows 2000…

it has this nice new integration of the file manager with an ftp client so you can more or less transparently drag and drop between your desktop and remote machines. of course there is no way to tell it if you want text or binary transfer (and it doesn’t even try to guess), so if you move text files back and forth from windows to a machine with an operating system that doesn’t distinguish between text and binary files (eg, unices), you get all those annoying ^M characters thrown in and breaking stuff. and it doesn’t really have any way of going up a directory on the remote machine so if your home directory is /home/users/staff/bob, and you want to get at files in /www/htdocs/, you have to type ‘ftp://ftpserver.com/../../../www/htdocs/’ into the location box. ick. so you have to go back to the regular commandline ftp client most of the time anyway.

but what really gets my goat is that by default, with no warnings, it remembers your ftp username and password. when you first log into a remote machine, a dialog box pops up for username and password (with the little ‘*‘s for your password so you think it’s being careful with it) and then it logs you in. then, next time you want connect to another ftp server, you start to type ‘ftp://’ in the location box and the little autocomplete stuff pops down. low and behold, there’s a line that has ‘ftp://anders:mypasswordinplaintext@ftpserver.com/’ right there for anyone to see. i don’t remember windows ever giving me any ‘WARNING: if you use this feature, i’m going to give your password out to anyone who happens to walk by’ messages. i’m sure there’s a way that you can tell it not to cache passwords but i haven’t found it yet and it strikes me as a tremendously stupid default setting.

so after i changed all my passwords on our servers, i went back to using the commandline client.

post 52

By anders pearson 02 Aug 2000

here’s the best article i’ve seen yet on the MPAA vs. 2600 case. it should be interesting to see how the case progresses since both sides intend to take it all the way to the supreme court if necessary. that means that either programmers will have a strong legal ground to code freely and the fair use parts of copyright law will be extended into the digital age, or we’ll all be really fucked.

i just get really nervous because the case is quite clear-cut and the implications of a ruling against 2600 are painfully obvious if you have a technical background and can understand how it all works. but most judges — supreme court or otherwise — just don’t have that background and so can be easily swayed by the MPAA’s cries of ‘piracy’ and ‘copyright violation’. the DOJ really lucked out with the microsoft trial by getting a judge who was willing to make a serious effort to understand the technical underpinnings of the case and not just take microsoft’s words at face value. let’s just hope that 2600 is that lucky.

post 51

By anders pearson 02 Aug 2000

there’s a decent article in the Christian Science Monitor or all places about the center where i work and even talks about the Lear project i did. it also mentions the project that we did this summer that involved handing out iBooks to 15 or so grad students and trying to teach them the technology. however, it doesn’t mention that of the 15 laptops we handed out, 4 were damaged within the month and a half program. the best was that on the very first night out, one of the students spilled beer in theirs. i think that waterproof indestructable laptops would really be a good business to get into.