SpyWare? What?

alternateorg on September 30, 2002

People often ask me why I hate PCs and Microsoft so much. Here’s a good reason:

Last week, I started seeing a whole new kind of spam on my PC. System messages like this one started showing up on my screen at strange times. They look like Windows systems messages, but they were always advertising something.

I ran the version of Ad Aware that I had installed on my machine, but it didn’t find anything. So I uninstalled AIM, thinking maybe that was the root of the problem. (And besides: why use AIM when there’s Trillian around?). But that didn’t clear up the issue. Over the past couple days, I started getting the messages more frequently…at least once a day.

Then I realized that it had been six months since I installed Ad Aware, and that there were probably new updates. Which there were. When I ran Ad Aware this morning (after being greeted almost immediately after booting up by a spamming system message), it found 14 different spyware programs on my beloved PC. Most of them were Brilliant Digital’s handiwork, which you can read about here. I had installed (and then uninstalled) KaZaa two months ago, but I guess Brilliant Digital is a “sleeper” program that “detonates” weeks after being installed. And I guess uninstalling KaZaa doesn’t uninstall Brilliant Digital’s programs. Lovely.

Pro for Windows: Has programs like Kazaa/etc available natively.
Con for Windows: Such useful programs often install awful applications like the one described above.

And as a sidenote: can any Mac user out there even fathom of NOT knowing which apps have been installed on your own damn machine? Shudder.

Why manage two separate MP3 collections? Just stream it.

alternateorg on August 11, 2002

Andromedia is a new way to stream your digital media – to yourself.

Content-streaming conglomerates have a new enemy, and his name is Scott.

Scott Matthews’ Andromeda is streaming software that’s secure, works on OS X, Microsoft and Unix platforms and lets you browse your media library using any web browser, sans advertisements. It’s dead simple to install and the free version is robust. And unlike other home broadcast technologies such as ShoutCAST, Andromeda is pull-based: You choose the songs or videos you want to hear or see.

It’s basically a PHP/ASP app that runs on your internet-connected, web-server-installed home computer. If you’re on OSX, fire up Apache/PHP, and Windows can use the built-in ASP support under PWS. Just when I was about to transfer a hard-drive’s worth of MP3s by doing just that – transporting the hard drive, I found a new solution to help keep me from having to manage 2 sets of MP3 collections. Of course as soon as I buy Tai’s iPod, this will all be relatively moot.

Browser bores

alternateorg on May 31, 2002

Five years ago, America Online chose Microsoft’s browser over the formerly independent Netscape Navigator, in part because Microsoft allowed computer makers to include AOL’s software on the desktop of new Windows computers…

I’m not sure, but didn’t Netscape 4 sucking dog balls have anything to do with it? Just a thought. I am interested in a multi-browser world made up of browsers we can take seriously.

Suckers

alternateorg on May 22, 2002

Agents Collier and Neely have infiltrated E3 once again. We are tired. We would have liked to see more booth babes. Alas, not enough thongs. Oh well.

Zelda is great. I eat my words. Oh well. Amazing graphics, but its a looong ways off. Mario is…well, its Mario a la N64. Fun, but not groundbreaking. Very pretty though. Metroid has loose controls, but is coming along very nicely, and it is reminiscient of the old NES classic in every way. Nintendo has the most fun at its booth, thusly it is the busiest, and I find myself staying away from it more than I’d like.

Grand Theft Auto 3 is having a sequel in Vice City. More of a semi-sequel, it’s set in Miami in the 80s. Very few games make gamers excited with the phrase “set in the 80s,” but if you know GTA, then you know that this is a great idea. Tomorrow I may press my media crendentials and get a private Vice City screening at the Rockstar booth. We’ll see. It’s not on the floor, so private screenings are the only way to go.

What else, uh…Microsoft seems to be just like last year: not bad, but really kinda dull. Nothing to really grab you. Tony Hawk 4 is has a demo on every system, even Game Boy Advance. One of its levels is very reminiscient of UCBerkeley, and in the Zoo level, you can dodge monkey poo.

This little press room has about 70 computer stations, and they’re all Macs. Thought you guys would appreciate that. I feel incredibly hardcore posting from the media center. It’s amazing that I’m here again. Kevin has skills that we should both fear and respect.

If anyone has anything specific they’d like me to check out tomorrow, lemme know. Agent Collier out.

MSN is not Mac compatible, NOT.

alternateorg on May 18, 2002

So, I live in Qwest land, and in Qwest land you are basically going to sign a contract, pay out the ass, pay for installation, and get a shitty ISP if you want DSL on the Macintosh. So, being the frickin’ cheap skate nerd I am, I ordered MSN for Windows with no installation fee, a free month, no contract, a USB modem/router, and no Mac compatibility. Now, this sounds stupid so far (especially considering I have 3 macs that I want to put online), but I figured, shit, it’s DSL, it’s TCP/IP, I’m cheap, I can share this through a PC and figure this out… So I dust off my last remaining PC, delete linux, find a pirated version of windows, install it, boot it up and run the MSN installer and it fails horribly. I think, hmmmm, maybe I can just plug my Airport into this USB modem that just happens to have a fucking ethernet port (liars) as well and guess what, it just fucking works. Gotta love pure standards based TCP/IP networking. Gotta hate Microsoft and there bullshit marketing of compatibility requirements to keep us Mac users feeling left out when in reality they are lying to us as usual. FUCKERS.

One down side to my new wireless DSL access is that I have to bay those bitches every month, I have been assimilated, I am now part of the problem.



On the upside, the PC is going back into the dusty old closet and the connections dont have to be shared through some shitty wintel box.

Apple breakup

alternateorg on November 16, 2001

via Grant: JUSTICE TO BREAK UP APPLE
FOR TURNING MICROSOFT INTO MONOPOLY


“We had already won the case, so we were thinking in terms of penalties, and when you do that, it is imperative that you punish those most responsible,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney General Charles James. “Well, we couldn’t ignore that since its inception, Apple had numerous opportunities to dominate the operating system market, but instead, management incompetence and arrogance resulted in decisions that gave us the Microsoft we know today.”

How very funny and sad. And pretty true.

At least in my household

alternateorg on November 15, 2001

I swear, Shigero Miyamoto must be a household name by now, I’ve seen it so many times recently.

And here’s a link is about the xBox, as Salon calls it, “The Internet Explorer of Gaming Consoles.” (Via Camworld)


Which is not to say it’s bad, but something worse: a Me Too production financed by a company with the resources to accomplish and afford so much more. But where Internet Explorer captured the browser market by being, well, free, the chances in this game-box war aren’t so solid for Microsoft, competing on a truly level playing field for the first time in over 15 years

Because that's what my desktop has on it

alternateorg on November 1, 2001

Apparently, Microsoft has discovered something revolutionary: the traditional Windows Desktop sucks. I’m not talking about the Windows metaphor or any other such nonsense; I’m talking about the actual ‘desktop’ for Windows 2000 and below. What they’ve found is that the bulk of their users (beginners) don’t understand that desktop and are afraid of it, but only use 3-4 applications in a single session, making for frustration and ‘failure’ because theoretically the desktop should be the place they use to hold links to those applications. And I can only think that this has come about because they totally copied the Mac desktop metaphor, only wrong. Instead of actual icons representing actual things that actual actions can be taken upon, they instead decided to use the desktop as a space for shortcuts to documents, applications and ‘My Computer.’ Have you ever tried to make an alias to a directory and put THAT on the Windows desktop? You can’t do it, at least not in Windows 98. It was Microsoft’s choice to ignore Apple’s desktop ideas and come up with their own… like the idea of using a seperate application from the ‘desktop’ to access your hard drive and filesystem. So they’ve now found that their idea didn’t work. Duh.