LookIt

Getting a bit of credit on IDNA

I've been BoingBoinged, and I didn't even have to deal with the web traffic. The comments are amusing: being in the hip and trendy BoingBoing readership doesn't prevent you from thinking that everyone should only have addresses that English speakers can type easily. Oh, well. Maybe in 2020, we'll have a bigger view of the world.

On Polanski

It was fairly distressing to see a bunch of Hollywood celebrities going on record deploring Roman Polanski's arrest for jumping bail during his trial for drugging and raping a 13-year-old. It seems that they forgot that he was unrepentant about the act, or about escaping justice.

It has been much more heartening to see more and more people support his recent arrest, and reaffirming that rape is rape. Three excellent pieces include ones from the Wall Street Journal, Boing Boing, and ill Doctrine. The latter is well worth watching for proof that video (even online video) can carry emotional messages better than typical blog entries.

How not to find Windows antimalware software

In short: don't use the sponsored links on a search engine. It's (probably) fine to use the search engine to find the software itself as long as you only choose links from within the actual search results, not from within the ads. Read the whole Windows Secrets article: it should scare anyone who finds the ads in search engines useful enough to click on them.

More 1980 in 2009

Mission of Burma is still playing, and they just played a free concert at MIT in the dorm right across from the dorm I lived in 30 years ago.

How artificially ingrained are political differences in the US?

Deeply.

Music 1980: "Urgh! A Music War"

I will happily break the pattern of only talking about recent-but-old music on an anniversary divisible by 10. Thanks to Jamie Zawinski for pointing this out, but the DVD version of "Urgh! A Music War" is now available. I never saw the movie during its short run, and never saw it on cable, but wore out both the first copy of the 2-LP soundtrack *and* the cassettes I made of the second copy.

The meme that most people think the greatest period for rock and roll is the four years they were in college definitely applies to me, and this was filmed just after I graduated. It is a sampling of much of the most popular second-tier bands of the time: the ones that could not fill coliseums and arenas, but could sell out the largest clubs in the US and England. It's mostly what was labelled "new wave", with splashes of punk and reggae thrown in because the fans overlapped.

If you weren't around yet, or weren't paying attention to the scene, the movie will open your eyes to a bunch of things. Many of the bands had a distinctive performance presence; you see Devo ("Uncontrollable Urge"), Oingo Boingo ("Ain't This The Life"), and Gary Numan ("Down in the Park") in their visual prime. Some of what was popular was pretty gritty: the Cramps ("Tear It Up") border on NSFW in the trashiest sort of way, and the Dead Kennedys ("Bleed for Me") thrash near the edge of civility. There were lots more women at the front (X do a classic "Beyond and Back"), and lots of bands whose bass player is also a lead singer. And then there's just plain weirdness: Athletico Spizz 80 ("Where’s Captain Kirk?"), Pere Ubu ("Birdies"), and Wall of Voodoo ("Back in Flesh") are too hard to categorize.

If you were around and enjoying the scene, this is two hours of fun. It's missing the Talking Heads, The Beat (although Sting is wearing their shirt), Patti Smith, and a bunch of others who would have fit right it, but it still covers a lot of "oh, yeah, that was great" music.

Switching to Microsoft Security Essentials

I'm somewhat of a security heretic when it comes to protecting Windows-based systems. I assume that you're probably screwed if you do a lot of work on Windows, and that it is probably only worth doing a bit of effort to avoid becoming part of a botnet. There are rapidly-diminishing returns for protecting yourself in a malware-infested world if you insist on running Windows.

Basically: use a free anti-malware program, keep it up to date, and assume that you will still could get infected. I say "free" here because it is not clear that the non-free anti-malware programs keep typical Windows users any safer than the free ones.

Until this week, I have been recommending AVG Free. It is really free, the not-subtle reminders that you can upgrade to AVG Internet Security are pretty easy to ignore, and it is pretty easy to keep up to date.

Now Microsoft has introduced Microsoft Security Essentials, their entry in the free anti-malware market. I have switched to it for the simple reason that it is probably about as good as the other free anti-malware systems but has the chance of being much better because Microsoft has more to lose if they screw up than any other anti-malware vendor. So far, it has been even less obtrusive than AVG Free, which is a very good sign.

As expected, Symantec made a big deal about how much better their non-free anti-malware was than Microsoft Security Essentials. As expected, Symantec did not mention how intrusive their software is, particularly if if comes pre-installed on PCs with a short-lived "free trial". I know of people who have sworn off of using anti-malware software because of their horrible experiences with Symantec products. To those people (and anyone else), I would suggest trying Microsoft Security Essentials and certainly paying attention if its scans indicate anything amiss.

Blaming the victim

David Beach, a non-smoker who had but survived lung cancer, has an excellent rant on how we treat lung cancer different than, say, breast cancer, when we should be equally focused on them all. It also points out an interesting color bias that has nothing to do with race. Well worth a read.

Labels for Windows 7

Having seen this article whose author humorously compares Windows Vista to "New Coke" (but then spoils it by admitting that she didn't hate New Coke as much as most people), I started to think about how we could market Windows 7. The best I could come up with was "Now twice as good as Windows NT 3.5!"

NIST on firewalls

Another of the NIST documents I have co-authored was just published: Guidelines on Firewalls and Firewall Policy. It is a revision of an old document that was really, really out of date and out of step with current practice. Our revision is not perfect (they never are), but we dragged the content kicking and screaming into present. Big thanks go to Joel Snyder at Opus One and David Newman at Network Test for doing thorough reviews of our first draft; they found dozens of places that needed more work, and the doc came out much better because of their reviews.