I tend to thing that the intelligent people of the world often get caught up in trying to “out intelligent” the others. Hence the strange phenonmenon of blog shares, tecnorati, etc. It’s a measure for whose random ramblings are considered most interesting, intelligent, amusing, important, etc.

Humanity will not be judged by remnants of blogs. I doubt humanity will be judged by much of our digital media, mainly because most of it will just vanish. What would be an interesting story to write (and I may) is a sci fi tale about future alien archaeologists concluding that humanity suffered an extinction event around the time the last true book was published, because when they tried to read our surviving digital media (most likely just dvds and such) they found gibberish due to DRM.

Most of the people who record history these days are more interested in preventing “unauthorized” people from reading it than they are from getting it right.

Argh. Headache. It’s amazing that I can hold all these concepts in my head with out dropping into some mass depression. But I guess they just make me feel intelligent.

I am going to stop posting all my cool thoughts in comments here, and instead reply via my blog. It will raise your trackbacks, and it will make my blog more interesting. After all, they could be important. ;P

Ryan, you may find this of interest in regards to your story. Your comments on DRM reminded me of it.

I’m such a K W:DNN:)BE…

Hey, we chillin’ tonight Real Kenny(tm)? Me, you and Planet Head ? I hope so!

Later.

Actually Ken, that link over to mark was pretty interesting. I dunno though. I tend to think free software will survive, while cracked software won’t. Too many lawsuits.

Here’s the thing though – Mark is speaking about copy protection, which can be bypassed via cracks to make things run. I am talking about DRM. Encryption that literally won’t let the media be read without certain keys. Things like decss solve this problem (sans ugly splash screen, as that is counter to the concept) – but they are being driven into hiding by obsessive mega corps.

another interesting concept is this one from the latest issue of wired (a rather sickeing consumerist magazine, but with good content [subnote: the latest issue has over 30 pages of ads before the table of contents and iirc about 10 more before the actual content]) – The conversation on boingboing about that article starts by saying “put the blame on the thieves… content holders are just protecting themselves” – the response of course is “How is Region Coding designed to protect copyright holders from thieves?” – A valid question if i’ve ever heard one.

One issue that you didn’t mention about spam on windows, specifically with outlook is the html that is often embedded in it being … questionable. Not just in viewing content (personally, i leave images turned off in email … that way if its of an adult nature i’m not gonna get in trouble at work.), but, we’ve had an invlux of spyware be installed via these html emails as well.

Some of these actually change IE6.0 settings and prevent work from being accomplished (because 1 of the vendors websites we use require very specific settings to work properly). It took me weeks to track to problem back to spam, never woulda guessed that was causing it. I had gone as far as reporting the problem to my supervisor to discuss with the other users supervisor because i was convinced they were changing the settings on purpose. (caught it when another user started having the same problem, and i just happened by chance stop by while their email client had a spam message up).

On that note, spam assassin is a wonderful tool. It requires some setup (to make it as aggressive as you personally want it to be), but once that is done it just goes off and does its job nicely. I have it installed server side and am using it with procmail … while it has missed a couple pieces of spam here and there (causing me to fire up vi and edit my user_prefs), it has not yet had a false positive. Though, to be on the safe side It moves it to another mail folder on the server instead of deleting it.

I’d be interested in seeing what scores you define sometime (and i’ll share mine if you’d like). I’m still looking to perfect my user_prefs

Altp.