Background

For those completely unfamiliar, YouTube is an advertiser-supported service that allows users to upload and download videos for free. In a world where personal upload bandwidth is not yet remotely sufficient for most individuals to self-publish even text and images, this serves a fairly valuable purpose. Although to start it seemed to be publishing primarily unauthorized copies of already published material, it seems to have matured to the point where it consists primarily of home clips of people recording their pets, their vacations, their silliness (or outright stupidity), and their personal accomplishments.

Mark Russinovich over at SysInternals ran into a nasty surprise recently: a rootkit was found on his system. More disturbing, however, was its source: one of Sony's content-restricted audio CDs. Their latest DRM appears to install drivers on the system that not only interfere with system functions, but hide themselves to prevent detection and removal. The license agreement on the CD doesn't even mention this software. An entire analysis of the software, down to the very gritty technical details, can be found at the above link.

According to InformationWeek, Microsoft has managed to get two Massachusetts Democrats (William Galvin, the current Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, and state senator Marc Pacheco) to oppose the OpenDocument standard politically. The standard, now ratified, is scheduled to go into effect starting January 2007, but there is now a hearing scheduled for October 31, and Andy Updegrove, legal counsel to OASIS, apparently received a call from a reporter who claimed that Galvin "would not approve" the standard, despite the fact that he doesn't appear to have that authority.

I finished a network upgrade today changing out my old Netgear gigabit switch for a SMC 8508T, and the old, flaky Netgear gigabit NIC for a D-Link DGE-530T, identical to the one in the resonant.org server. This is all 32-bit PCI, still, but that's all that my aging systems support. With jumbo frames now active from end to end, I'm still only seeing 28MB/s via HTTP (with about 98% CPU usage on Apache) and around 23MB/s (with about 40% CPU usage) via SMB. Since my uncached hard drive output on the server is only about 20MB/s, this isn't really that bad, per se, but I was hoping for much better. At this point, I appear to be capped by user-side CPU overhead and by the PCI bus itself, so I won't be getting much better until I completely overhaul both systems to have modern motherboards and processors. That's an order of magnitude more expensive than this experiment, so it's unlikely that I'll be doing it anytime soon.

On the plus side, the network instability appears to have cleared up. I still have one test left to run, but my first test case that reliably locked up the system within minutes has been running now for about half an hour without any problems whatsoever.

Massachusetts has finally released the final version of its policy on data interoperability, and the requirement that all future software purchases conform to [w:OpenDocument] is still there, despite the strenuous objections of Microsoft (rebutted several places already, the most amusing of which may be the extended rebuttals in the comments of a Microsoft blog entry complaining about the decision).

Jason Striegel from BlogCadre has an interesting tale posted a few days ago about how at some point his instant messaging address got confused with that of a celebrity, and then subsequently confused with the address of some sex chat bot.

In the former case, he had little difficulty convincing people one way or the other... but in the latter, he apparently had quite a bit of trouble proving that he wasn't a poorly written perl script, ostensibly designed to deliver sex chats.

Bruce Schneier has linked to an interesting story about how Michael Larsen, a contestant on Press Your Luck memorized the possible pseudorandom sequences (there were only 6 at the time), and used that knowledge to win himself over $100,000 and vacation prizes. Another account of that story is here, at a site that also hosts a number of compressed clips of the show, including the episode in question.

A comparison was made at DPReview of the new 24-105 f/4 with the 24-70 f/2.8L, the 35 f/1.4L, the 70-200 f/2.8L, and the 70-300 DO IS lenses.

Quick summary of results:

The 24-105 is not so good at 24, spectacular from 35-50 (even matching the prime), good at 70 (better than the 24-70), and not so good at 105. It's stronger overall than the 24-70 from 35-70, but weaker at the wide-angle side.

Given these results, my own personal thoughts are that the availability of IS on this lens still makes it a better choice than the 24-70 for general walkaround use, despite the high cost ($1,250 at B&H), and weakness on either end of the zoom range, and inability to reach f/2.8. It creates an excellent overlap on a full-frame camera with the Canon 16-35 and the Sigma 80-400. The 24-70 f/2.8 may still be better for indoor shooting.

An engineer-photographer in the Netherlands has built a portable laser-triggered platform for capturing insects in flight. The resulting pictures are quite spectacular.

Link credit to Pharyngula.

I noted recently at DPReview that Canon has finally made good on its promise to put out a free repair for all BG-E2 battery grips with serial numbers less than 096000 and free replacement of all of the old-style BGM-E2 AA battery converters for the BG-E2. My own BG-E2 falls into this category, but doesn't seem to be as badly affected as many. I will probably send in the BGM-E2 for replacement, but I can't decide if it's really worth the downtime to detach the BG-E2 from my camera when the only problem it has is very occasional glitching, that may be not be fixed by a change in the way they handle the electrical contacts.

More information can be found on the above linked web page, or by calling (toll-free) 1-800-828-4040.