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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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As we edge ever-closer to having anti-hacking legislation that will supposedly
protect us from the activities gangs of pimply youths
bent on wreaking carnage in the cyberworld, I think it's time we
all read
this story.
It's a sobering thought -- that stumbling on what appears to be an
insecure site, verifying that vulnerability, and then doing a good deed by
reporting it could land you in so much hot water.
But it could never happen here right?
Yeah... that's right -- just like there could never be any dim-witted
website operators here in NZ who would fail to have patched there servers
to fix the multitude of holes in Microsoft IIS (cough, cough, splutter).
I know that I for one have encountered a number of local websites with
security holes so large you could drive a truck through them -- and in
every case I have quietly reported those holes to the operators so that
they could patch them before any real damage was done.
Will I be so benevolent in future? Maybe -- but I'll certainly think
long and hard about it first.
Would you report a security hole in someone else's system -- when it
becomes the equivalent of saying "I confess, I'm a hacker," even if
you simply noticed something strange and thought you'd check out the
possibility that the site operator had goofed?
More Recording Industry Dullardry
Isn't it about time that the recording industry realised that there's
no way they're going to be able to stop people from ripping music off
standard CDs?
In the past few months we've seen a raft of new anti-copy systems
which are supposed to prevent the copying or ripping of music from
CDs in digital format -- but there have been few (if any) reports
of PC users encountering such "protected" disks.
And now -- they've come up with yet another bright idea.
This time the industry acknowledges that people might want to be able
to "rip" (digitally extract) music from a CD for use on their portable
or desktop MP3 players so they've come up with an
anti-ripping scheme
Yes, even though you've paid good money for that CD, you might have to
pay extra if you want to listen to its contents on your MP3 player.
Isn't this the kind of money-grubbing greed that has caused such a huge
backlash in the first place?
It's about time the music industry wised-up and realised that if they were
just a little less greedy they might make a whole lot more money.
It's a philosophy that worked well for Borland back in the 1980's when they
launched a $29 Pascal compiler while everyone else (including Microsoft)
was selling the same thing for over ten times as much.
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
here.
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