THE ART OF SUCKING

As evidenced by the computer crackfest of the past few weeks, Microsoft has raised the bar for software suckitude in a defiant challenge to brain-injured developers everywhere. What's that? The users bear some responsibility for failing to install security patches? Perhaps. But consider this: when is Microsoft going to download a patch to teach it that people are too dadburned stupid to patch their computers? Seriously: how many times do the the big corporate intranets of the world have to cry "I've fallen and I can't get up!" before the dogs of Redmond start thinking differently? Apparently Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post agrees with me; his latest diatribe, entitled Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design, lambasts the megacorp (in untechnical, fairly vague language) for creating an operating system which "in its default setup...amounts to a car parked in a bad part of town, with the doors unlocked, the key in the ignition and a Post-It note on the dashboard saying, 'Please don't steal this.'" Some recent worms have allegedly been scouting for spam relays, an activity which you would imagine would be platform agnostic, yet Macs and Linux PCs have remained immune. From the article:

Windows XP, by default, provides unrestricted, "administrator" access to a computer. This sounds like a good thing but is not, because any program, worms and viruses included, also has unrestricted access...Yet administrator mode is the only realistic choice: XP Home's "limited account," the only other option, doesn't even let you adjust a PC's clock.

FREER THAN THOU

In an article entitled Blame Canada, Tech Central Station's Jay Currie has noticed that Canadians aren't forced to suffer the same indignities at the hands of the RIAA's rabid beagle department as their Yankee counterparts, a fact apparently lost on the self-defeating ethnocentric thinkers at the big labels. Currie predicts that if the RIAA puts the screws down too hard on American sharing, major P2P nodes may simply migrate north. From the article:

RIAA spokesperson Amanda Collins seemed unaware of the situation in Canada. "Our goal is deterrence. We are focused on...filing lawsuits against individuals making files available in the US." Which will be a colossal waste of time because in Canada it is expressly legal to share music. If the RIAA were to somehow succeed in shutting down every "supernode" in America all this would do is transfer the traffic to the millions of file sharers in Canada. And, as 50% of Canadians on the net have broadband (as compared to 20% of Americans) Canadian file sharers are likely to be able to meet the demand.

THOU SHALT NOT *

Proving once again that Europeans won't be outdone by the American copyright lobbys' New Order and the associated zero tolerance for thought crimes, the old world's most urbane and sophisticated beagles have coughed up a doozy piece of proposed legislation designed to protect defenseless multinational corporations from the merciless threat of a public conscience unhindered by proper respect for intellectual property. ZDNet UK's Rupert Goodwins weighs in with this commentary. From the article:

You want to change the tyres on your 2006 model Ford Prefect? Anything other than genuine Ford tyres -- with the genuine Ford ID chip -- will disable your car...By effectively conflating counterfeiting and piracy and criminalising large rafts of IP abuse, the proposal creates legal weaponry of extraordinary power and range while making targets of us all.

STANDING ON GUARD FOR SOVIET CANUCKISTAN

Logoless culture-pundit Naomi Klein has penned a brief and soft-edged diatribe about Canada's newfound status as a Hippie Nation, describing recent events in terms of Prime Minister Jean Chretien's career arc across the past decade, from NAFTA to decriminalised weed and buggery. From the article:

When he was elected in 1993, Chrétien pledged to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement and negotiate a better deal for Canada. He immediately broke the promise. Now, months away from the end of Chrétien's decade in office, Canadians are keenly aware of how much independence we have lost under the agreement... This dramatic ceding of power to the United States is Jean Chrétien's true legacy, which is why, in his final months in office, he's racing to be remembered as a principled man.