The Wall Street Journal reports how your medical history can affect your insurability. Finding and correcting errors in your medical history can save you a bunch of money.

(H/T to The Consumerist for the link)

Bruce Schneier caught this story of an Austrailian kid who broke a $70 Million government supplied porn filter in under half an hour. The software was being given away free to schools, libraries and families.

Schneier says it best:

Remember that the issue isn't that one smart kid can circumvent the censorship software, it's that one smart kid — maybe this one, maybe another one — can write a piece of shareware that allows everyone to circumvent the censorship software.

It's the same with DRM; technical measures just aren't going to work.

Duh. Whoever sells DRM to big companies is a criminal. A very wealthy criminal.

I have always said that Google has the best search engine and I still believe that (for now). But when it comes to their other offerings, they've proven to be a bit dodgy. Now comes news from someone who's been paying attention that according to their terms of service, any content you produce with their Google Apps belongs to them!

Write a love letter to your girl and find it on a greeting card later with no royalty fees or otherwise due to you.

Microsoft is announcing new service packs for both operating systems soon, but urges people not to wait and to "upgrade" to Vista now.

Yeah right. Unless Vista SP1 addresses the DRM and spyware issues, I will continue to avoid it and recommend that other people do the same.

As for XP service pack 3, I'll be watching to see if they try to add some of the bad "features" of Vista or some other thing that makes XP less attractive. In other words, beware any attempts to break XP in order to force people forward.

To compete with the current market leading in online digital music downloads (Apple), Walmart will be offering music for less money and with NO DRM. That means you can copy the song to any device you want, as many times as you want with no tricky, annoying software blocking you.

Finally, someone gets it.

It turns out that Comcast thinks they have the right to control how someone uses the Internet. Bittorrents, often, but not always used to distribute copyrighted content is one of the types of filesharing that big nasty companies like the RIAA target. Whether in the spirit of cooperation with the RIAA or just to save a little money by preventing heavy Internet users from actually using the Internet, Comcast is throttling Bittorrent shares and actually blocking seeders (people who provide the content originally).

If this disgusts you, now is a good time to become a supporter of net neutrality.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, but it did. Smoking damages your genes and some of the damage is irreversible. The article doesn't say, but I wonder if that means you can pass the defects on to your kids or if that kind of stuff gets filtered out. Someone with more biology experience than me can clear that up.

It's well known that body language is very difficult to control and often gives away your true thoughts and feelings for those capable of looking for the signs. Now a German company is trying to make software that understands those slight signals in order to produce superior quality manipulative ads.

Here's something that will become a catalyst for a lot of bad things, a tiny generator that could be used to replace batteries in devices that are hard to reach. Why is this a problem? Think "hidden wireless camera". Think "active RFID tag that lasts forever". Oh man…

The new Chinese law specifies the rules and regulations for reincarnation including the need to seek government permission. What sounds insane at first turns out to have a legitimate reason… if you're a country like China.

But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

I don't know how they get away with calling these non-profit. The Consumerist calculates that the interest being paid by their example case is still at 252%.

Leaving comments that are short and irrelevant to the conversation is a spammer trick for getting bloggers to approve their comment (which usually has a link attached to a site they want to drive traffic to). However, I got three such comments with no links so I wasn't sure if they were spam or not at first. However, I solved that pretty fast.

Do a simple google search for "Dakota Bolkestein" and you'll see that everywhere there is a commenter with this name, the comment is the same; "Thank you".

Yesterday, I got two more ambiguous comments so I looked them up too:

It's clear that these are not comments by real people, but I wonder what the point is if there's no link associated with them. Either way, I've now deleted those comments and will be watching the given article for more of the same.

The results of this case are signifigant because the RIAA didn't have to prove that the defendants actually shared anything. They won their suit because they were able to prove that the defendants made the songs available in their shared folder which, to the RIAA, is the same as distributing whether or not anyone actually downloads it.

Whenever you get something like this, always go to the source, never respond to the e-mail.

From the Washington Post, a fairly concise description of what the CSPC is, where it came from, why it's necessary, and why it's almost completely irrelivant today.

(H/T to Consumerist.com for the link)

So he's finally gone. He didn't get prosecuted yet, but will he? That's the question.

Gonzales's resignation is the latest in a series of high-level departures that has reshaped the end of Bush's second term. Karl Rove, another of Bush's close circle of aides from Texas, stepped down two weeks ago.

On this, all I have to say is that the rats are leaving… hopefully that means we'll see a sinking ship soon.

It's so nice that our spy chief slipped up and released this information. If it helps the lawsuits against AT&T and the like go forward, all the better.

One comment about something McConnell said:

McConnell also said telecom firms should have immunity from lawsuits.

"If you play out the suits at the value they're claimed, it would bankrupt these companies," he said.

…. Your point? Typicall of the Bush administration to cite allowing lawbreakers to continue in their positions because, gosh, it would be bad to have consequences for illegal actions.

Here's a neat thought. Drug test the sewage to determine the drug usage of whole cities or neighborhoods. This would be a great tool for determinining safe places to live, though there are certainly some privacy implications if this were used to narrow down to individuals.

Microsoft uses the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool, a piece of DRM software with a catchy marketing slogan, to spy on your computer and then make a decision whether or not your version of Windows is valid. Assuming that it decides it's not (even if it is), it will disable your computer. The best part of the deal is that on Windows XP machines, they slipped the "tool" into the list of critical system updates so that anyone who didn't bother to look over the list of installs on the last update (or just has fully automatic updating turned on), would get the software without knowing about it.

Well, it turns out that problems with the WGA server can shut down a lot of computers, very fast. It's nice to know that DRM works isn't it?

There's been buzz that the new game, Bioshock, comes installed with a rootkit. It turns out that it's rootkit free… sort of.

The point here is that people were worried that there's inappropriate software secretly installed with the game, and that much is true, it's just DRM, not an actual rootkit.

As Ars Technica puts it:

Systems like SecuROM attempt to defeat common modes of piracy, but are indeed loathsome to gamers, as they quite often cause problems for legitimate users who have paid full fare for their games. They also make it difficult for gamers to move game data to a hard drive for easier play and quicker access.

Sure, they are anti-consumer and they are annoying. But for now, SecuROM isn't a rootkit.