Day: May 9, 2002

Excellent Verisign Analogy

A post at Metafilter just nails the perfect analogy for Versign’s incompetent and borderline fradulent customer disservice,

Renew! Renew! Just like people entering the carousel in Logan’s Run, people who renew their domains with Verisign/Network Solutions aren’t getting what they think they’re getting.

Absolutely. Between the deceptive renewal notices they’ve been flooding me with via snail-mail and the crap they’ve pulled on other domain holders, I’ve been busy switching all of my domain names to a competitor that seems to take security and customer service seriously.

California Proposes Restricting Family Visits to Drug Offenders

Salon.Com has a disturbing article about a change in prison visitation rules being proposed by the California Department of Corrections. The change would forbid people convicted of drug-related crimes other than simple possession of having any direct contact with visitors for their first year of imprisonment.

The CDC wants to keep down the amount of drugs smuggled into its prisons and keep drug offenders off of drugs. But is this really the best approach?

Probably not. As writer Nell Bernstein reports, prison officials tend to think that most drugs come in through such visits, but there does not seem to be a lot of evidence for this claim. Florida recently completed a study of contraband incidents that according to Bernstein, found that “While 46 percent of corrections officers surveyed believed that most contraband came from visitors, only 2.5 percent of contraband incidents statwide in fiscal year 1997-1998 were actually attributable to visitors.”

Even California, CDC spokespoerson Russ Heimerich tells Bernstein that of 800 documented drug-related contrapand incidnets in its system last year, only 150 involved visitors (though those incidents did account for half of the total amount of drugs coming into the prisons).

Offset that with the fact that what the CDC is proposing is that the 43 percent of women in the correctional system due to drug-related offenses will not be able to so much as hold an infant or child on their lap for the first year of their prison term.

Even law-and-order types should be concerned about that since a 1972 study of California prisoners found that those inmates who had regular, ongoing visits with family members were six times less likely to reoffend during the first year after their release.

Source:

Punishment for the whole family. Nell Bernstein, Salon.Com, May 8, 2002.

The Revolution Will Be Copy Protected

Cory Doctorow has the goods on the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group’s upcoming proposals to neuter all future home entertainment technology in order to preserve analog-era business models in a digital age.

Never heard of the BPDG? Not surprising since it’s a semi-secretive collaboration of various studios, broadcasters and technology groups. It’s primary mission? To seek out new copy protection schemes to make sure your digital television set is in perpetual lockdown to entertainment companies.

The BPDG is horrified at the way people use entertainment devices. I worked with a couple people who were Buffy fanatics. One woman would videotape the show so if her coworker missed it, she could watch it on tape. Somtimes this same woman would bring in her tapes and watch them on a TV monitor during lunch.

That sort of thing will be a thing of the past if the BPDG has its way. Digital VCRs will have encoding mechanism so that a home-recorded tape on one machine will not play on any other machine (if they let you record it at all — that VCR will examine the datastream of the show and if it says no copying allowed, forget it).

And much like personal video recorders already have today, many of the features will be “revocable.” What happens if some kid on the Internet finds a way to modify a Digital VCR so that it can record such programs? No problem, Hollywood will be able to reprogram the VCR on the fly up to and including simply removing the recording capabilities (sound farfetched that they would do that? But isn’t that exactly what they’ve done by saying they won’t support existing HDTV’s at high resolution because of their weak copy protection schemes? Welcome to the future.)

As Doctorow points out, the real problem here is that unlike other thing such as the DMCA or the SSCA, these standards will be adopted or rejected not by Congress but by the FCC (still number two after the IRS on my list of government agencies that should have been abolished years ago).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a weblog covering this important issue.

Paul Wellstone on the Evils of Anti-Republican Ads

The debate on campaign finance reform is now out of the hands of politicians and will soon find its way into the courts, but let us pause to remember one Senator’s vision of the horrors that might befall then nation if the Supreme Court should eventually strike down the Senate’s bill.

Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) took to the floor of the Senate during debate over the bill to defend his proposed amendment which would bar advocacy groups that raise “soft money” from buying television ads close to election time. Wellstone and others want to prevent groups like the NAACP, the Christian Coalition, the Sierra Club and others from running ads mentioning specific candidates near election time.

In defending his amendment, Slate’s Mickey Kaus reported that Wellstone exclaimed the “loophole” allowing groups to run ads attacking candidates had to be closed. As Wellstone put it,

If you do not . . . you are going to have a proliferation of these organizations. Republicans for Clean Air, Democrats for Clean Air, People Who Do Not Like Any Party for Clean Air, Liberals for Clean Air, Conservatives for Clean Air, Citizens for Dirty Air — I don’t know what it will be. Another example is the Club for Growth. This was an outfit that ran attack ads against moderate Republican congressional candidates in the primary.

Yikes. Attack ads against moderate Republicans? Thank goodness Wellstone is there to protect the Union from such a travesty. As Kaus said of Wellstone’s fears of nonprofit advocacy groups, “Why is this scenario so scary to Wellstone and others? Sounds like a free country to me.”

Source:

Wellstone’s Folly. Mickey Kaus, Slate, April 4, 2002.

Endless Fun with Endless Bubble Gun

The other day I saw an ad for the Mr. Bubbles Endless Bubbles Gun in a toy magazine, which mean a trip to the toy store to pick up two of these (one for my daughter and one for me, of course).

These are most excellent bubble guns. Just two AA batteries and you can go through a 4 oz. bottle of bubble solution in no time. And the design is ultra-cool — I love the magazine-style look.

Emma used her gun to make massive piles of bubbles on the porch. Very cool (now i just have to teach her to say “lock and load” while she’s replacing the bubble bottles).