The Substantially Similar Weblog

Richard M. Smith· performed security audits· of the official George Bush and John Kerry websites; the results were posted· on Declan McCullagh’s Politech· list. Both sites come up short in many ways, but Kerry is the clear winner for choice of technology:

It appears that the open source vs. closed source debate has also entered the presidential campaign. The Kerry home page comes from an Apache Web server running on a Red Hat Linux box. The Bush Web site on the other hand is hosted on a more corporate Microsoft-powered IIS 5.0 server and uses ASP.NET. I did not check to see if this IIS server is up to date with Microsoft security patches.

(yet another entry that should really be filed under multiple categories; “politics->electoral” and “free software->politics.”)

I just recently discovered qemu·, and the result is that I’m a happy camper. I’m preparing for the Bar Exam using antiquated software from MicroMash·, the “other” bar prep company (cf. Barbri·, at about twice the cost). The program is basically a Visual Basic quiz application written originally for Windows 3.1 and updated slightly in the intervening time (the questions, of course, are entirely up to date to current law). It’s not a bad system—it tracks your progress as you go, and feeds you questions in the areas where you need to focus.

Obviously, there is no GNU/Linux version of the program. Less obviously, but perhaps predictably, the program doesn’t run under WINE· either. I’ve found that new, highly complex software like Microsoft Office XP works much better under WINE than old, very simple programs like this quiz program. There was also no easy way to extract the questions so that they could be presented by some other Linux-native software.

Enter qemu, a virtual machine emulator included in Debian·. With qemu, I can run a full-fledged Windows 98 box (or any other version of Windows that I might own) in a window on the Linux X desktop, and the bar prep program runs fine. Because my laptop is pretty fast, the resulting system is faster than any Windows 98 system I ever had in my Windows days, despite the emulation layer. Network and sound work as well. I had previously tried this on bochs, a similar emulator, but it was painfully slow (I think there are other advantages to bochs).

Plus, no worry about viruses and other forms of Windows pestilence, since the whole system is contained within a single file. Backup or “snapshot”? Just copy the file. Want to take a break? Just pause the whole machine. It’s all quite clever.

qemu is also in various stages of emulating several other common processors, including the PowerPC, so someday you could run Mac OS X Panther (or Jaguar, or whatever they call it), on a GNU/Linux system on a commodity PC… Even, say, an XBox·.

It strikes me that these sort of emulators are crucially important to the eventual world domination of linux. Just as today the only way I can run my old Commodore 64 software is with vice·, someday the only way to run the thousands of obscure Windows programs now extant will be with WINE and virtual machines like qemu and bochs.

I’ve noticed lately that increasingly irrelevant results are topping out Google searches. It’s frustrating to see the once vaunted PageRank technology start to fail in the face of determined spammers and quasi-spammers.

For example, I was looking for places to have brunch is Roslindale, where we’ll be moving in August. The top result in a search for “roslindale boston brunch” is this site, which seems to be nothing more than a list of keywords associated with Boston. Sometimes the top result in Google is nothing more than a page with a list of apparently random search terms, apparently attempting to draw you in to some commercial enterprise or pornography.

Is there anything we can do as netizens to fight back and help Google get back on track? I realize it’s not helping much for me to link to the abovementioned site, just further boosting its PageRank. But I wonder if the time has come to move beyond voting by linking, and create some sort of trust-based cooperative Google spam filter. That is, there could be a way to vote against a site and thus diminish its PageRank. Your negative vote, like your positive vote, would also be a function of your PageRank.

I expect the folks at Google are smarter than I and are working diligently to solve this problem. Probably the “negative vote” idea would eventually be attacked by the same evildoers who are screwing up the positive PageRank system. As a friend of mine once said, Google is good, but it’s just one person, and there are tens of thousands of people who are all aligned against it. Eventually it’s going to lose.

Ray Bradbury·, author of the acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451·, is demanding that Michael Moore· apologize and change the title of his new film·, Farenheit 9/11·, which starts playing this Friday·. Bradbury says he wants to avoid litigation, but it’s not clear he’ll back down unless the film’s title is changed, which strikes me as unlikely.

This is poor judgment on Bradbury’s part. I would be willing to put money on the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 helping sales of the book Fahrenheit 451. I’m not sure what sort of claim Bradbury would make, but I assume it would be under trademark law. I can’t imagine Bradbury demonstrating: (1) that there will be any likelihood of confusion at all as to the source or origin of Moore’s film or (2) damages. Or perhaps it would be a claim for copyright infringement. I’m not aware of any cases where a copyright holder has demonstrated infringement based on similarity of title alone, but I may be mistaken.

This reminds me of the ongoing battle over DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album·, in which the Beatles’ record label has shut down distribution of a remix of the White Album. In both cases, a younger generation who may not have been exposed to the earlier work is made aware of it, and is much more likely to purchase copies of the earlier work.

Fundamentally, though, it’s not about money, it’s about control. One of the points John Zorn makes repeatedly in the documentary A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky is that you can’t control a work of art you’ve created. It’s not really “yours” any more than a child you create is “yours.” You have all these ideas about what you want your child to be and what you want your child to do, but it takes on a life of its own and you just have to let it go. I’m sure, however, that many copyright holders do not entirely share Zorn’s philosophy.

Tonight I saw A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn· at the Coolidge Corner Theatre·’s summer jazz program·, an excellent documentary about one of my favorite non-categorizable musicians·.

In the film, Zorn rails against facile attempts by critics to pin him down into a packageable description (“Ornette Coleman meets Klezmer Music”). He talks about people judging with their eyes (“Oh, trumpet, sax, bass, and drums, I know what this is”) rather than their ears, complaining that our culture is far too visually-oriented even when it comes to music.

This film is as much about the filmmaker, Claudia Heuermann, as it is about its subject. Halfway through the making of the film, John Zorn apparently refused to answer the phone or return Heuermann’s calls, and she couldn’t even locate him. So she turned the camera back on herself. But of course this is the case with all documentaries to some degree, it’s just more transparent here. In this sense, A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky was reminiscent of My Architect· (IMDB link·), the story of the son of legendary architect Louis Kahn and his journey to figure out who his absent father really was. You never find out who Louis Kahn was, but the insight into the character of his filmmaker son Nathaniel is profound.

Zorn did see the final product and approved, although enigmatically. I believe he said something like, “Nothing is changed.”

I just tried ‘evil’, and to my dismay (but not surprise) my custom built kernel is vulnerable. My system locked before I could even see the results of having pressed ‘return’ after typing the ‘evil’ command.

If you’re in charge of a public Linux system, please get patches immediately—they’ve got one for 2.6.7-rc3 as well as 2.4.25 and 2.4.26.

I wonder if the mainstream press is going to pick up on this and say “Look, Linux is just as insecure as Windows!” It’s basically impossible to get the mass media to understand that even a major exploit like this one pales in comparison to any one of the dozens of trivial Outlook or IE cracks that are circulating.

I’ve been back from the honeymoon almost a week and too busy to blog thus far while I’m working part time and studying for the bar (it often surprises civilians that law school doesn’t give you any specific bar exam preparation). But here is a “taste” of our honeymoon for your enjoyment:

We stayed at Le Chat Botté, a wonderful little bed and breakfast in North Hatley, Quebec. Every morning the innkeeper cooked a wonderful three-course breakfast for us, three days of which are captured above (each row is one day). For the first four days, we were the only guests so we got especially individualized attention. All of the meals were vegetarian, and started out with a glass of frothy fresh-squeezed juice—a different juice each day. The garnishes always came from the innkeeper’s garden, right outside the dining room window. I was going to try to put captions to explain what the dishes were, but I don’t remember all the subtleties so I’ll just have to leave it to your imagination.