Terminally Incoherent

I told you this will start happening sooner or later! Patent office seems to have major issues with hiring, retention and employee morale. Jason Shultz from EFF nailed it:

The incredible surge of patent applications, especially in the software and Internet business method arena, is just crushing them, and the management problems are rising to the surface with greater visibility for those reasons

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. The current patent system will either plunge us into a technological dark age, or will collapse on itself. And it seems that we might actually see a reform before USPTO kills innovation in the software industry.

The article also sheds some line on why software patents suck so badly. It seems that most examiners are swamped with work, and poorly prepared to work with technology and software patents. Yet they are expected to meet the work quota that were developed in an era when you could not patent mouse clicking…

The amount of prior art that has to be searched has gotten greater. The number of pages of specifications that somebody has to read is greater. The number of claims that an employee has to consider is much larger than it used to be. Those things all make it take more time. What has really happened is that people have been forced to do the job faster, and as a consequence, they’ve been forced to cut corners.

And this is where the problem lies. There is no proper prior art research anymore, because the examiners are so swamped, they’d rather blindly grant the patent, than read another 100 pages of mostly-made-up high-bullshit-grade techno babble.

This system is not working. It haven’t been working for a while now. Something must be changed. Of course the simplest change would be to ban software patents altogether. This would solve many problems USPTO is facing now, and make our lives so much easier. But that’s not going to happen yet - because it would piss off patent hoarding corporations.

But one thing is sure - something will happen sooner or later because USPTO already starts folding under the weight of silly patent claims.

For several weeks now, our school login server has been down. Since most of my projects, my webpage and allot of backup stuff is located somewhere in the confusing NFS file system of the MSU CS dept setup, I was lost. What’s worse - pegasus was also the login server, and a gateway to other systems on the network. To get to some of the school machines I had to establish an ssh tunnel through the good old peg. But ever since a bad university wire blackout, the machine was down. It had several hardware failures when the power went down, and it never came back up.

Fortunately I found a way to tunnel my traffic through another school machine that had port 22 open and no packet filtering. But this was not the nicest thing to do…

But they finally brought it back up. Wohooo! I can do stuff again! I seriously felt crippled without a remote shell account! God, I need to set up a nice linux server with decent upstream bandwidth somewhere before I graduate - or I’ll go insane once they cut me off from pegasus for good…

Remember that Genuine Advantage thing? Well, it seems that windows update maintainers are retarded in the head. They apparently left a javascript which disables the GA check on the server. According to boingboing, you can skip the verification procedure by simply doing the following:

HBefore pressing ‘Custom’ or ‘Express’ buttons paste this text into the addesss bar and press enter:

javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’)

How long will this work? I don’t know. But if I was Microsoft I would be removing this js script right now. Unless of course the windows update site is such a mess that they no longer know where it is located

Or maybe they do want to leave this backdoor in? Maybe this was left for sysadmins china and India and other countries which were kinda thinking about switching to Linux. As long as people can run an illegal windows copy, there is very little incentive for them to switch to alternative OS.

Once you cut off illegal copies from updates, all the responsible users in the poorer countries have to take drastic steps. They can either run unpatched OS, or switch to Linux (or they can actually buy the license if they can afford it). So I can see a big push from sysadmins in these countries to switch to alternative OS. On the other hand, if the GA can be easily bypassed these admins can still ride the system for another few years - maintaining market dominance of the windows platform. As long as windows is dominant, some people will buy it - even in the poorest nation. On the other hand, if Windows becomes a fringe OS, no one will be willing to pay big bucks for it.

If they wont fix it soon, you will know that I was right about this. MS loves “pirates” because they help them to maintain market dominance. GA is implemented not to curb “piracy” but to do unauthorized reg scans on unsuspecting users.

I had an issue today with a McAfee product. So I got into one of their tech support chatrooms. I didn’t really feel like calling their $2 per minute helpline. Shortly after the conversation started I have realized that I’m talking to a machine. What tipped me off? Maybe it was when he said:

I will be very happy to help you with ActiveX is not enabled and/or blocked

This was right after I told him that I have ActiveX enabled, and IE is on lowest security level imaginable. This guy sounded so much like ELIZA that it was not even funny. Live technical support my ass! Why wont they just tell us that they will connect us to a bot that will go through the standard troubleshooting routine with us? This way there are no nasty surprises when the “technician” suddenly fails the Turring test

You know, sometimes I’m glad I use an inkject printer. At least the government can’t easily spy on me.

Fortunately, identifying you with these micro dots is not that easy. You can (still) legally buy a printer for cash without giving the store or manufacturer any information. Of course police can collect information on documents printed with that specific microdot signature and keep it in a database. They would actually have to get their hands on your printer to check it. Of course this is not as hard as it used to be - now it is possible for them to search your house without a warrant (cause, you know - Patriot Act). So they can ID your printer relatively easily and match you to the paper trail they were collecting.

Now, interesting thing is - Microsoft can potentially find the serial number of your printer via the Genuine Advantage program. Now this might be a little far fetched but we really don’t know how deeply they can scan your machine. Which means that MS can easily ID you given a microdot signature.

Scary stuff…

So far EFF written up some guidelines on how to find it, and identified several printers that do use this technology. If your printer is on that list, I recommend throwing it out the window If you do own a laser printer not on the list, print some test sheets and send them in to EFF.