Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
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As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Thursday, February 21, 2002
11:03 - Why is Microsoft watching us watch DVD movies? http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com/privacy/wmp8dvd.htm	(top)
Good ol' Microsoft. The new Windows Media Player in Windows XP "phones home" with unique fingerprinting information every time you play a DVD, sending Microsoft information about the DVDs you watch and tying that information to your e-mail address and (if you're unfortunate enough to have signed up for one) your Passport account. Y'know, everybody is concerned about the loss of civil liberties after 9/11, and how we're willing to accept some inconvenience and some loss of personal freedom in the name of public safety. But I think a much more pressing problem, one that is equally relevant and dangerous in a much shorter time-scale (some things do still move at Internet time, and the rise of an oppressive government isn't one of them), is that nobody seems to show any concern about the tightening grip Microsoft holds over the online world-- and how the whole phenomenon of digital spam and direct marketing is made all the easier and more legitimate with each new Microsoft thing that we decide to accept in our lives. The Windows OS and the Web both reached the peak of their usefulness years ago. There have been no new features in either technology that have brought better ease-of-use, better security, better speed, or a genuine lifestyle revolution since the advent of ICQ, blogs, and Napster. The only new advancements in either context have been for the benefit of advertisers and direct marketers. Hardly a website exists nowadays that isn't plagued with banner ads. P2P file-sharing applications have embedded ads in them now, and everything in Windows now ties in through the ubiquitous web-browser substrate to direct all user activity to advertising streamed from MSN. This is the "new computer revolution": the mass-media-fication of the thing on your desk with the keyboard. This is the only area in which Microsoft is equipped to expand, in fact. It's the only untapped market where it's so hard to screw it up that they can succeed as well as they did with the shoddy Windows OS in the first place (its success is purely because they were able to get it to run on cheap, crappy, anonymous hardware). Spamming is easy, and Microsoft knows it. Their only challenge is in making it tasteful enough that the frogs who see it won't jump out of the saucepan, but will sit still for it until they're boiled alive. Have we become such passive pansies that we will continue to suck up everything that flows out of Redmond? What will it take to get us to realize where this is all going, and to jump out before it's too late? How much more do we have to put up with before laws are passed that make UCITA and the DMCA look like parking regulations, and we're no longer allowed even to question where our personal data is going when Microsoft downloads it at will from our centrally-managed, rented, illegal-to-open-the-cover utilitarian computers? That's where we will end up if nothing changes.