Last week I “wrote about how software Sony/BMG installs on their customers PC to prevent copying”:http://www.geekfun.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=674 of, say, the CD you just bought onto your iPod. The software uses questionable techniques to hide itself which could be exploited by writers of viruses and other Malware.

Or rather, it IS being exploited by writers of Malware. This week brought the “first report of a trojan that takes advantage of the Sony installed backdoor”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/10/sony_drm_trojan/.

Mark Russinovich has an update on “Sony’s lame response to the whole situation”:http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/sony-you-dont-reeeeaaaally-want-to_09.html

The recent release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes reminds me that I’ve always meant to post about how much I hate all those stickers you see of Calvin on the windows and bumpers of people’s cars.

You know the ones, the ones where he is taking a leak on the logo of some automobile or product, or the ones where he is knealing before the cross.

I’ve never read every single edition of the comic strip, but I’ve read enough to know that both depictions are so far out of character. Calvin could be a devilish brat and a punk, but it was about being a little boy, not about being a shallow, selfish materialistic adult aping childishness to get what they want (a la Paris Hilton and her wannabees). And Calvin was far too questioning to ever be the unquestioning supplicant depicted in Calvin & the cross stickers.

It’s ironic that these wildly uncharacteristic images of Calvin have become his legacy because Bill Waterston, his creator, was very deliberate about not licensing any Calvin and Hobbes products. Unfortunately, that seems to have meant that there was no self-interested party with a legal war chest to go after trademark infringers.

thanks to “Slate for the tipoff”:http://www.slate.com/id/2129373/?nav=tap3 on the new collection.

Microsoft just “acquired Foldershare”:http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051103/sfth034.html?.v=35, which provides a service that helps you keep folders in sync between multiple machines on a LAN and across the Internet. I’ve used “Foldershare”:http://foldershare.com to share files with my brother, but my main use has been to keep files on my laptop automatically backed up onto my desktop machine. I’ve been pretty “happy with it”:http://www.geekfun.com/2004/10/14/a-new-twist-p2p-filesharing/ since I wrote about it a year ago, but I’m not really happy with this latest development.

For one thing, the “Mac client has disappeared”:http://gigaom.com/2005/11/03/microsoft-buys-foldershare-will-mac-client-be-roadkill/ from their website with some question as to its return. For another thing, this acquisition is part of Microsoft’s recently anounced “Live” services push, so I’m sure that the utility and value of foldershare as a simple and easy to use private file sharing and synchronization tool will be subsumed into Microsoft’s larger services strategy. Likely outcomes of this transformation:

* Product becomes Windows only
* Service becomes bundled with other offerings I’m not interested in and the price goes up at the same time.
* Security suffers because being a Microsoft offering instantly makes it a more desirable target.
* Client becomes more bloated to support other service offerings from Microsoft. It isn’t hard to imagine that they’d try and migrate Foldershare’s client base over to Groove, which they acquired earlier in the year.
* Google Desktop search support disappears. I won’t mind this one. Foldershare lets you aggregate google desktop search queries over multiple systems, something that has always bothered me a bit.

Not that any of this is unexpected. Small companies get bought by bigger companies. Often those acquisitions are part of a larger strategy and so the product focus shifts or dissolves into a larger offering. Sometimes, those products are simply milked for all they are worth by putting most of the ongoing investment into sales and marketing, and letting the core technology whither.

Update: Well, it looks like I’m wrong on a few key points. The whole service has been made free, and the Mac client is back.

Mark Russinovich has posted an article about the software Sony BMG and others record lables use to keep people from doing horrible things like listening the the CDs they buy on their iPods. The software “Sony uses automatically installs itself without the users knowledge or consent and cloaks its existence in a manner similar to the rootkits used by creators of viruses and other malware”:http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html.

What’s worse, its so poorly written that it can be easily exploited to hide other software.

So, to break it down: Pay for a CD from Sony and they’ll thank you for your purchase by preventing you from playing it on your iPod AND exposing your computer to viruses, spyware, worms, trojans and any other malicious software you can think of. Neat!

In a “recent interview, Business Week asked SBC CEO Edward Whitacre”:http://www.businessweek.com/@@n34h*IUQu7KtOwgA/magazine/content/05_45/b3958092.htm whether he was concerned about “internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?” Whitacre’s answer is rather odious:

How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

So, first off, SBC isn’t doing anyone any favors as it is now. Their customers are paying them $30-50/month for DSL service. Second, the only reason SBC and the other decendents of the RBOCs can collect that money at all for internet access is that everone, from Yahoo, Google, MSN, on down to little guys like me, are providing content and services over the net that people in SBC’s territory want. Hell, if it weren’t for that, more and more people in their territory wouldn’t be SBC customers at all. They’d let their land-lines go and use their mobile phones. If this were about fairness, SBC would be kicking me some revenue every time one of their customers read this blog.

Of course, this isn’t about fairness, its about power. SBC holds more power than all the little guys like me. They don’t necessarily hold more power than companies like Google or MSN, or Yahoo. At the very least, said companies have the resources to fight it out with SBC.

This is why Google is investing in rolling out WiFi networks, because it gives them a way to reach customers independant of SBC and their ilk. They don’t actually have to acheive SBCs level of covereage or service either. They just have to create a viable alternative for enough people that they deprive SBC of their pricing power.

This is why we need more alternatives for highspeed internet access than just the phone company and the cable company. It’s why we need WiMax, and broadband over powerlines, and community mesh wifi networks. It’s why the FCC needs to foster a competitive arena with more than two competitors.

SBC and their ilk have to be decisively routed. Anything less will strangle innovation on the Internet. Anything less, and the big guys will all work out their deal with eachother and the little guys, the people with the passion and the great ideas will be locked out.

Other points of view:

“EW Felten”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=918

Second, if somebody is going to pay somebody in this situation, it’s not clear who should be doing the paying. There is some set of customers who want to use SBC broadband service to access Google. Why should Google pay SBC for this? Why shouldn’t SBC pay Google instead?

“Mike on TechDirt”:http://techdirt.com/articles/20051031/0354228_F.shtml

the only reason this is possible now is because there’s less competition in the broadband space, not more. If there were real competition, SBC would never even dare to suggest that they might cut off a Google, Yahoo or Vonage

I don’t know much ’bout programmin’ ‘n stuff, but I do know that I’m really liking “Django”:http://djangoproject.com.

It’s made it easy to iteratively work out a data model for a web application I’m thinking about. Along the way, its given me, for next to no effort, the administrative screens to adding, updating and deleting data. I don’t have any templates to display the data yet, but that looks pretty easy to do too.

We’ll see how it goes, but so far it’s helping me over many of the hurdles that have always stymied my teach-myself-to-code projects:
# Easy to see results: Attempts to do things with Servlets/JSP never went far because it always took me too long to get anything more substantial than “Hello World” to work and other obligations and interests would end up winning out. I tried using frameworks to jump start my efforts, but they were too opaque for my little brain.
# Sense of time well spent: I’ve considered doing things in PHP figuring it would be easy to get something up and running quickly, but part of my mind always resists because of this sense that PHP is going cultivate bad habits on my part. Right or wrong, I have sense that Python encourages good habits. Plus, I feel like the Django examples, by virtue of linuistic pedigree, are good examples to follow.
# The django samples, including the code that runs their site, are relatively easy for me to understand as well. As a result I don’t feel like I’m blundering into the briars, or digging myself a deep hole like I often do when I’m trying to fix bugs or hack new functionality into a C# web application I have to deal with.

Basically, with Django, so far, I feel like the chances I’m taking are well hedged, and as I take them, I find I’m being rewarded at every step. Django is good because it makes me feel good.

We’ll see if the romance holds up as I get in deeper.