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Did I land on my head?
Feb. 7th, 2007 11:47 pmMicrosoft releasing a plugin to allow saving in ODF open document format?
Apple keen to get rid of DRM?
Granted, Microsoft's move probably in response to various legal folderol from government bodies demanding (quite reasonably) that a person shouldn't have to pay any particular vendor for their software in order to read public documents.
And Apple's comments are really just a reaction to the increasingly obvious brokenness of DRM, an early tactical move to steal a hearts-and-minds march on Vista's pre-broken stranglebork, and a response to the Norwegian case which ruled that their DRM, Fairplay (ha!) to be illegal because it restricted what players you could use to their own ones.
Meanwhile the One Laptop Per Child project's security spec has been released. It makes me smile. I forever champion the need of lower-denominator users to have decent IT stuff, fighting that corner against my bosses' drive for C0mpl3x_pa$$w0rdZZ and other such forgettable and confounding nonsense. So this spec for a hundred-dollar machine is really neat. "No reading required: Security cannot depend upon the user's ability to read a message from the computer and act in an informed and sensible manner."
(It was on run number four, incidentally: a speed wobble led into a cartwheeling soft-and-boneless rag-doll dismount. There was an almighty BONK! as the back of my helmet struck the tarmac. When I work out how being launched sideways into a forward cartwheel can strike the back of my head, I'll post a reconstruction.)
Apple keen to get rid of DRM?
Granted, Microsoft's move probably in response to various legal folderol from government bodies demanding (quite reasonably) that a person shouldn't have to pay any particular vendor for their software in order to read public documents.
And Apple's comments are really just a reaction to the increasingly obvious brokenness of DRM, an early tactical move to steal a hearts-and-minds march on Vista's pre-broken stranglebork, and a response to the Norwegian case which ruled that their DRM, Fairplay (ha!) to be illegal because it restricted what players you could use to their own ones.
Meanwhile the One Laptop Per Child project's security spec has been released. It makes me smile. I forever champion the need of lower-denominator users to have decent IT stuff, fighting that corner against my bosses' drive for C0mpl3x_pa$$w0rdZZ and other such forgettable and confounding nonsense. So this spec for a hundred-dollar machine is really neat. "No reading required: Security cannot depend upon the user's ability to read a message from the computer and act in an informed and sensible manner."
(It was on run number four, incidentally: a speed wobble led into a cartwheeling soft-and-boneless rag-doll dismount. There was an almighty BONK! as the back of my helmet struck the tarmac. When I work out how being launched sideways into a forward cartwheel can strike the back of my head, I'll post a reconstruction.)
