also widely blogged and also in salon is this great article on the extra goodies that you may be getting when your kids install games from mattel:
“”If [DSSAgent] is enabled, it communicates with our servers to let them know that a particular product has been installed and retrieves JPEG images for that product if any exist,” explains Galdin. “This allows us to provide our customers with additional content for the products they have purchased, communicate product fixes, etc. To this end, it connects to the server and sends the product SKU number, last time a connection was made and if any downloads are in progress. Based on that information the server decides whether to send a JPEG image or not.””
although it appears that mattel has removed DSSAgent from future products, i guess this is one more kick in the pants for me to download optout to spy on any spyware that i may be unaware of.
from the ‘widely-blogged-but-i’m-still-posting-it-so-it-makes-it-into-my-annotated-bookmarks’ department; courtney love talking sense about piracy and music:
“I want to work with people who believe in music and art and passion. And I’m just the tip of the iceberg. I’m leaving the major label system and there are hundreds of artists who are going to follow me. There’s an unbelievable opportunity for new companies that dare to get it right.
How can anyone defend the current system when it fails to deliver music to so many potential fans? That only expects of itself a “5 percent success rate” a year? The status quo gives us a boring culture. In a society of over 300 million people, only 30 new artists a year sell a million records. By any measure, that’s a huge failure.”
“Since I’ve basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I’m not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made album sounds great. And I don’t care what anyone says about digital recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do.”
“The new survey, by market research firm Yankelovich Partners, says 66% of all consumers said that listening to a song online has at least once prompted them to later buy a CD or cassette featuring the song. The survey included 16,903 people age 13 through 39 who buy and listen to some music. ”
egads! wouldn’t you know it would take sunworld to do the hard hard muckraking on the lovebug and it’s broader implications:
“A journalist friend recently emailed a startling revelation. “I was looking for some deeper meaning in the last two major virus assaults,” he wrote. “Each one has seven letters and three vowels, and if you rearrange the letters, MELISSA and LOVE BUG spell: BIG VOLUME SALES.”
“I would like to be able to say with confidence that we’ve all learned a number of lessons and that the next virus will be barely a blip on the computer security radar. It would be nice to see more email clients
and operating systems come up with more protection for the end user. Despite Melissa and the Love Bug tearing through the Internet and showing us twice that we have some lessons to learn, we’re still
vulnerable in the two areas that the Love Bug used to propogate itself: shoddy, insecure software and human nature.”
here’s something to chew on from tim o’reilly’s java one speach:
“There are enormous implications in this shift for the open source and free software community. For example, I’ve tried to get Richard Stallman to realize that the GPL loses its teeth in a world where developers no longer need to distribute software in order for users to make use of it. A hosted web application could be built entirely with GPL’d software, and yet have no requirement that the source code be released, since the application itself is never distributed, and distribution is what triggers the GPL’s source code availability clause.”
i dare you to guess what the heck the following people are rambling on about:
“And in nearly every focus group, a top choice to be part of that board was Gates, the Microsoft Corp. chairman.
Although most groups said the United Nations should be involved, few wanted any other government representation. But many of the older women thought the church or a theologian should be involved, “someone with morals.”
“I think we should put Oprah on there,” said one middle-aged woman in Omaha. “She has a lot of pull. She’d be pulling for all of us. She has a loud voice with good morals. She’s always for the underdog.””
i always wondered when somebody would start using simple messaging service to check prices in stores versus the internet. i bet the time lag sucks, though. this will work much better when instant messaging becomes more popular – and when your cell phone will broker with the store automatically on your behalf when it finds a better deal at you-know-where.