Jen and Jon Johnson

On Nov. 9, 1989 East Berlin opens up the Berlin Wall and allows travel across for the first time since the wall was built in 1962. The next day the people of Berlin begin to tear down the wall.

BBC NEWS has an article today from Bill Thompson which responds to Mac users who believe he is crazy for thinking that OSX is vulnerable. This is ridiculous. Of course OSX is vulnerable and the Apple credo that nothing can touch a Mac is one day going to get them in serious trouble. By telling people that their Mac is safe straight out of the box, and that no steps need to be taken to ensure security apple is setting their users up for a serious problem.

Let me be the one to break this news to you. Your Mac is vulnerable. Most especially it is vulnerable because YOU are running it. Without taking care you could install malware that will compromise your security, steal your passwords, and wipe out your computer. This is possible because, as a Mac user, you have the power to put in your Administrator Password and do something really nasty.

So take care. Your paranoia is the only thing standing between your Mac and certain destruction.

If you are worried now, you should check out SecureMac.com there are some great tools and tips there.

Here is a great point about getting linux into schools early. I know that I was originally very wary of switching to Linux because I had grown intimately familiar with Windows and Mac during my high school and early college computing. The first real key for me was actually using a Mac with OSX on it. I became entranced with the power of unix tools like rsync and quickly attempted my first linux install on an unused computer. It failed miserably, mainly because I didn’t have any use for a server, and I was perfectly happy with my Powerbook.It wasn’t until alter when I started experimenting with Mythtv and then had to give up my powerbook and return full time to my desktop computer that I took a fresh look at linux.

It is no secret to mainstream marketers that the key to successful product marketing usually lies somewhere in junior high. If you get kids hooked on the Penguin before they are 15 then they will be hooked for life.

The end of the internet
I’m not being dramatic the internet will be dead in 5 years if the telcoms are allowed to create this kind of structure. For a decade now the WWW has thrived on the backbone of the internet. This has been possible because of the end to end structure of the internet which allows individuals to publish and small companies to thrive. This proposal by At&t would kill the internet as we know it. By regulating the content that can travel over their infrastructure the telco would be in control of the internet. This is unacceptable. Call your congress person and demand that the internet remain free.

You should really read this article. It quite clearly shows what can happen to a student in a school without an impartial judicial process. This is a dental student, probably 20-25 years old who is being suspended from school for one year because of a few posts in his non school supported personal blog. In today’s p2p free sharing world many people have begun posting everything that comes to mind. I heard from my sister the other day that people at Dominican University often use Live Journal as a way to hash out difficulties and repair friendships in a low risk environment. This kind of free sharing lays at the foundation of what the internet has become. The web is no longer a strictly academic environment, but has become instead a place where ideas (bad and good) can be shared with an audience with virtually no stage fright.
This over reaction by the administration at Marquette is comparable requiring women to wear skirts or banning rock music, and should not be tolerated by the student body.

Search for the most prolific inventors is a patent struggle: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
This popped up on slashdot tonight. What a great story! This is the problem with the modern patent and the Intellectual Property Struggle. There is no control over the process. One guy has 1000 flowerpot patents, and others have hundreds or thousands of closely related electronics patents. It is no longer possible to patent the light bulb because that is to broad so instead companies have to specifically patent every detail in every new design. On the other side of the coin there are broad software patents held for things so general as to be ridiculous like this one which is owned by Microsoft and registered in Europe. It covers “Scoring based upon goals achieved and subjective elements” in other words if you create a video game you are supposed to pay Microsoft their due for inventing “scoring” I’m assuming that you don’t need to pay them if you just play pool, or enter a Gymnastics Competition, but maybe, like Al Gore, they will claim they invented those too.

Their Patents or Your Life — In These Times
This is a great quick story about ways in which Intellectual Property (IP) is really showing its age. In a Global Economy creators need to find a better way to profit form their creations. This article is about fair access to medicine; however it is just as important to allow fair access to information and technology. If you still think that open source people are crazy then imagine what would happen if you couldn’t buy drugs anymore unless you got them from a few “approved” pharmacies.

I just got off the phone with someone who works on the same campus I do. I had forwarded her an email which outlook sent as an attachment. She informed me in no uncertain terms that she did not open attachments. Now I know, obviously, that you shouldn’t open attachment from people that you do not trust. However, in this case, I feel like she is taking this too far. We work for the same institution, she was able to reach me on the phone, and I confirmed that I sent the email. By still refusing to open the attachment she has made a decision to give up on an important method of communication in order to feel safer. She clearly has no faith in her own virus defenses, nor in the enterprise level efforts to keep email safe.

When people give up on something like email attachments it is a sign that we have reached a very dangerous point where efforts to fight malware and spam must not only be improved, but user perceptions need to be changed. I know that efforts are being made university wide to protect users, but clearly the users do not. Once thse non-technical users loose faith it will be very difficult to get them back…. just think about how hard it was to get some folks on email the first time around.