I just got pushed…

…over to the Anti-DRM side of the debate.

Chris is compiling a Christmas gift package to send to his Chilean host family. He wanted to include a few DVDs for his host parents. He asked me to help him buy some online. I vaguely recall that DVDs might have some sort of region-based anti-copying bit in them… something that would make a DVD bought in one part of the world un-playable in another part of the world. I look around and sure enough, it is true. Not only is it true, but South America is a completely different region with regards to DVD. Oh well.

Ironically the only way we could realistically send them a DVD is to copy one on my computer, remove the region encoding, and rip it back to a DVD… basically PIRATING IT. Go figure.

Has this anti-pirating technology stopped any video “piracy”?? No. You can go online and find software copies of any movie you would ever want to see, available for download. Even movies that are currently in theaters! But here is a scenario where we’d like to legitimately BUY a DVD, but because the Studios/MPAA/whoever are so damn paranoid of piracy they’ve made it so we can’t… so the only thing we can resort to is piracy! What moron thought this scheme up?

Up until today I had never really had a real stance on the whole DRM debate. Mostly because it had not affected me yet. Yes, I’ve bought many songs from iTunes, but have never had a situation where I could not use it the way I wanted. Gifts are not an issue either because Apple has made it easy to give iTunes data away as a gift. Too bad the bozos who make DVDs haven’t figured out how we want to use them.

Oh well. Our online search came up empty, so we went to a store and scoured the racks for something interesting without the region coding hard wired into the disc. It was damn near impossible to find anything!

The morons in Hollywood really need to reverse their cranial-rectal inversion.

ah, the weather…

Heard from several folks over the past few days asking if we’re under water. We’re fine… high and dry… both at home and at the office. Ironically the office park where digital.forest lived from 1997 until 2005 DID get severely flooded, and at least one of the datacenters in that area (T-mobile) suffered an outage. I’m SO glad we left North Creek Parkway. I miss the paths, and I miss the salmon in the creek, and I miss Teriyaki Etc., and more than anything, I miss Hobin-san and Sato-san at Hana Sushi… BUT I’m so happy to be at this amazing facility in Seattle. (But I digress)

Despite what the news media says, these things happen every year in the Autumn. Usually in November, but it can happen anytime from Mid-October until Christmas. Low pressure sits off Vancouver Island, pushing the jet stream south, pullling cold air down from the north… we get snow all the way down to sea level, and the mountains usually get DUMPED on… several feet of snow in a matter of a day or two. Then just as suddenly, the low moves on and the jet stream snaps back north pulling warm, very moist air from the Pacific. The traditional term for it is a “Pineapple Express.” All the snow melts in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes. It takes the better part of a day for it to come down out of the mountains but if it continues to rain while that is happening the lowlands start seeing floods.

Last year it happened in early November.

This year the temperature change was swift and dramatic. Sunday night I was up late brewing a big batch of BioDiesel. I was acutely aware of the temperature (in the mid 30s F) because I was wearing my big winter coat and I also have a big temp dial on the processor. When I pumped my waste oil into the processor from the settling tank it moved like molasses. I looked at the temp gauge and it read about 34°F (or ~.5°C for my worldly Metric readers.) There was frost here and there around the barn as well, and the gravel of the driveway made that crunchy sound like ice when I walked up it to the house. I awoke and ventured out to the barn at 5 AM to shut off the processor… throwing my big winter coat on as I prepared to leave the front door. As I stepped off the front porch my brain registered something odd. Half way down the driveway I realized what it was… “damn, it is WARM out here.” There was a light rain, and some wind, but the temperature was way up from the night before. Close to 60°F/15.5°C. I shut off the processor (temp gauge there read ~100°F/38°C… about right for a batch of BioD that had processed for several hours) and walked back to th house with the coat in my hands. Checked the weather widget on my OSX dashboard and it reported 58°F/15°C… so my guess was right.

10-12 hours later the floods began down below… like clockwork.

AOL Feedback Loop … Love/Hate.

I just received an AOL SCOMP feedback loop email a few minutes ago. Well, actually I received several hundred of them, which happens all day long, but one in particular stands out:

To: abuseaddressATchuck’srealjob.net (note, this address is not real)
From: scomp@aol.net
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:50:14 EST
Subject: Email Feedback Report for IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
X-AOL-INRLY: barracuda.XXXXXX.net [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] scmp-d21
X-Loop: scomp
X-AOL-IP: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

This is an email abuse report for an email message received from IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX on Fri, 17 Nov 2006 10:50:38 -0500

Note the two timestamps. Today is Tuesday, November 20, 2007. The mail in question being reported as spam was sent …

…THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTYEIGHT DAYS AGO!!!

I’ve grown accustomed to a certain amount of lag in AOL’s feedback loop, but I never would have expected it to grow to OVER A YEAR!

Mind you there is a lot to love about this system. Carl & his crew built a wonderful tool for netops to monitor-by-reflection what is going out of our networks… but the user-generated nature of it tends to rear its head in ugly ways. Mostly it serves us in locating the occasional web forms that are being exploited by spammers, which was the case in the above example. But the firehose of legitimate mail being tagged by AOL users as spam far outweighs the trickle of actual tinned-meat smelling stuff. Mailing lists, ecommerce confirmation emails, morons who forward *everything* (I eventually will hunt every one of them down and .. sigh), and honest-to-goodness personal correspondence makes up 99.999% of the feedback loop from AOL. It truly provides insight into the feeble mind of most AOL users.

We have setup a mail filtering system that files away all the vast majority of legit stuff based on sender, and it leaves the oddball stuff for human parsing. This one above ended up for me to parse, and I just had to say something about it in public.

So there, I have.