Be scared. This stuff has been bubbling under the radar for awhile. The DMCA passed in the late 90’s with broad bipartisan support in congress (it was actually unanimous in the Senate). It has been overall a horrible thing. If this ACTA stuff ends up getting into law in anything resembling these leaks, it will be much worse. So far though, I haven’t seen any of the revulsion at these kinds of things that one sees online translate into any actual resistance to these sorts of things by the people in government who will actually end up deciding what happens.
Negotiations on the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement start in a few hours in Seoul, South Korea. This week’s closed negotiations will focus on “enforcement in the digital environment.” Negotiators will be discussing the Internet provisions drafted by the US government. No text has been officially released but as Professor Michael Geist and IDG are reporting, leaks have surfaced. The leaks confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations. The Internet provisions have nothing to do with addressing counterfeit products, but are all about imposing a set of copyright industry demands on the global Internet, including obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection policies, and a global expansion of DMCA-style TPM laws.
Still waiting to see actual Pirate Party candidates on any of my ballots. They will probably instantly get my vote as long as they aren’t otherwise complete nutjobs. Which knowing small third parties in the US, they probably will be. But I can hope.
My iPhone 3G now only works when it plugged into a power source. The rest of the time it reboots every few seconds (not long enough to actually finish booting) until it runs out of battery.
Sometimes after having been plugged in for awhile it will be ok for up to half an hour before it starts the rebooting thing. Sometimes. Not usually.
But it works fine as long as it is plugged in. Joy. I always wanted a cellphone that only worked when attached by a cord to a power source. Wonderful.
Of course I went out of warentee a couple of months ago and had neglected to get AppleCare. Bleh.
Maybe it will magically fix itself if I bash it a few times with a rock.
I guess I should follow up… turns out my spam spike was pretty much an illusion. I wasn’t really getting much more spam than before. Rather, the mail client on my iMac, which is also the machine I use to automatically check the size of mailboxes, etc, had an issue with one of the indexes it uses (I think). Each hour it would get confused and redownload a bunch of messages from the server that in fact it already had. It would do this over and over again, basically as fast as it could. After rebuilding the mailbox, suddenly all that fake mail was gone, and things were basically back to normal. (Minus a bunch of spam I had deleted in the mean time.) You can see the pattern above, showing when the problem started, and when it was fixed.
So, I spent the last few hours identifying a few incompatible things* I had starting automatically which therefore caused me trouble and a few other random minor issues that required some troubleshooting, but I seem to now be happily running Snow Leopard. Woo! I wouldn’t be surprised though if a few other random issues turn up over the next few days. But for the most part, so far this is living up to the “snappier” promise. I gained back almost 40 gig of space after the update, and everything just seems to be running more quickly and smoothly. Hopefully it will stay that way.
A couple of the enhancements to the dock and expose and such are nice too, but so far the main thing I am happy with is just that I can navigate around my daily tasks more quickly. My poor 3.5 year old machine had gotten pretty bogged down. (Look, I have it running lots of crap in the background pretty much non-stop, although I used this as an excuse to kill some things I had running, and I’ll probably kill more before I am done.) Anyway, it feels much more actually usable than it did a few hours ago. This should make our decision to hold off to 2010 to replace this aging machine a bit easier to live with. :-)
* The nasty one was iStat Menus. They say 2.0 (not yet released) will be Snow Leopard compatible, but the current version, 1.3, caused a royal mess when I first booted after upgrading. If you have this installed, you would be well advised to uninstall it before doing the Snow Leopard upgrade.
Scoble interviews Ian Sefferman, someone who used to work at my current employer in a group closely related to my own group. He talks about his new venture AppStoreHQ.
Not quite back to the original rate, still significantly greater actually, but just as suddenly as the onslaught began, it has subsided. It would be nice if it returned to where it was before, but I’ll take what I can get for now.
This is a chart of the amount of spam I have in Spam folders that I haven’t yet glanced through to look for things that got in there by mistake. (Yeah, yeah, I’m way behind.)
As of around 12 UTC (plus or minus a few hours) on Friday 7 Aug, the number I’ve been getting has moved from about 500 per day, about the rate it had been at for basically years, to almost 22 THOUSAND new spam emails per day.
Is this happening to other people? Or is it just me?
OK, I mentioned last month that I was trying out Mozy for offsite backup. That experiment is now over. Bottom line, when I had it backup about 15 Gig of stuff where only a handful of files changed per day, it seemed to work pretty well. When I added an additional 35 Gig or so of other stuff representing tens of thousands of files, thousands of which changed each day… yes, mail folders amongst other things… it just could not get itself set. It would take it almost a day just to do the scan to figure out what changed, and then once it tried to start uploading, I’d get estimates of over a week to finish the backup. Which I was willing to let it do for a “first backup”. Except for the fact that as long as it was running, either in the preparing stage or in the actual uploading stage, it seemed to slow my computer to beyond the crawling point to the almost unusable level. Now, maybe with a computer that wasn’t three and a half years old and therefore pretty slow to start with, or with a bandwidth pipe 10 or 20 times faster than what I have… maybe with that this would work for me. Or maybe if I only really wanted offsite storage for a small portion of my stuff (rather than all of it). Maybe it would be fine then. But for my particular use case… it just was not working. Not at all.
So, a few minutes ago I finally gave up and uninstalled it. I’ll have to figure out how to cancel the $5 a month before too long too. (Or Brandy will kill me, we’ve been trying to get rid of these extra monthly charges for things we don’t use, not add more of them… :-) )
Anyway, goodbye Mozy. I wanted you to work for me. I really want a good offsite backup solution, but so far the online ones still aren’t practical for me.
And the alternative, periodically cloning my time machine drive and then taking it somewhere other than my house for storage… also is a bit too much.
