The Substantially Similar Weblog

The United States Supreme Court refused to hear the White House’s appeal in Walters v. Conant, a case Altshuler, Berzon (the firm I’m currently working for) has been working on for several years. The case involved the question of whether the federal government can punish doctors for recommending or discussing marijuana with their patients. The Supreme Court’s denial of cert means that the Ninth Circuit opinion stands, upholding a permanent injunction preventing the federal government from punishing physicians where the basis of the punishment is solely the physician’s professional recommendation of the use of medical marijuana. This is a major victory for the medical marijuana movement here in California and elsewhere.

I’ve started using blosxom to generate this weblog, rather than my own home-spun code. I considered making the transition invisible by keeping an identical layout, but the calendar looks better on the right. I’ve also spruced up the stylesheet a bit. I’ll be working in more stuff over the next few weeks, but most of the archives from the old weblog should already be here.

Immediately visible improvements include an RSS feed for those of you who prefer to read this weblog through an aggregator, as well as the ability to comment on individual posts.

SunnComm Technologies says it will sue Alex Halderman, the Princeton University graduate student who recently published a paper showing how SunnComm Technologies’ MediaMax CD-3 Copy Protection could be defeated by pressing the “shift” key. Says Halderman:

“I’m still not very worried about litigation under the DMCA, I don’t think there’s any case. I don’t think telling people to press the ‘Shift’ key is a violation of the DMCA.”

This just in from BNA’s Internet Law News:

NO SHIFT IN CD COPYING
A Princeton graduate student says he has figured out a way to defeat the MediaMax CD3 software, which is supposed to keep music CDs from being copied on a computer. John Halderman said the MediaMax CD3 software could be defeated on computers running the Windows operating system by holding down the Shift key, disabling a Windows feature that automatically launches the encryption software on the disc.

More details from news.com and Wired. Pretty amazing stuff—defeat DRM with the “shift” key!

Weather

I’ve been in the Bay Area for 33 days so far, and i don’t think it’s rained once yet. Although I did play bicycle polo in Golden Gate Park as the fog set in, which was almost like rain, except it wasn’t coming from the sky. September was about as sunny and pleasant as any place I’ve ever lived. Somehow, the climate seemed to know that the month was over, and now there’s a thick cloud blanket over the whole state. At least the part that I can see.

BART

It took me about two weeks to figure out a social norm around boarding BART (one of several non-integrated rail transit systems here). People were always lining up in certain places when there was no train. I hadn’t really paid attention and just walked up to the door and entered. I only recently realized that there are black spots painted on the platform every 15 feet or so to indicate where the doors will be when the train stops, and I was essentially cutting in line every day, probably pissing people off. People were too nice to say anything, though, and I finally figured it out. I’ve talked with some other folks who said they had similar experiences when first moving to the area.

Two Buck Chuck

Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck is all the rage here. Being able to buy drinkable wine for $2 is a privilege I thought was reserved for the French. Although many myths abound about how Trader Joe’s can sell the wine so cheaply (including the apocryphal story that American Airlines could no longer carry corkscrews on flights so they had to dump their whole collection), apparently it’s just a matter of oversupply. It also appears that California is the one state where the “Two Buck Chuck” really is Two Bucks. It’s practically an institution here; I had never heard of it back east.

So those are some of my naive East Coast first impressions. You are now prepared for your first trip to California.

Good discussion on linux-elitists bashing broken challenge-response systems (or, to clarify “challenge-response systems, which are by definition broken”). Including an excellent explanation of the problem by Karsten Self.

Incidentally, if you don’t know what the Joe Job is, here’s a good definition.

I’m returning from dinner with an old friend at the Greens, a fantastic San Francisco vegetarian restaurant (strangely, they no longer use their old URL, greensrestaurant.com). It’s been years since I’ve seen this friend, and she’s now a medical doctor, and I’m on the verge of being able to call myself a lawyer. Dinner was her treat, with the excuse that she’s actually finished school.

There’s a certain comfortable pleasure in talking about old things that have become fuzzy and no longer painful. Having been out of college now for substantially longer than I actually spent there, the experience has shrunk down to size and now makes sense. Thinking about taking a job that might last many years seems reasonable in a way that it hasn’t before.

This evening—and really to some extent the past several weeks living here in California—have caused me to realize that, whatever this last transitional life phase was, it’s now over. I’m now “here,” and I know what “here” feels like.

The funny thing about life transitions is you often don’t recognize them until they’re over.

I’ve decided it’s time to jettison the background image (“wallpaper”) for this weblog. Time to move on to bigger and better things.

I’m actually shopping for new blog software, as I’ve decided I’d rather not be maintaining the software that generates this thing for the rest of my life. And it doesn’t do a very good job at generating good URLs, and the comments feature is broken.

I’ve been experimenting with b2, b2++, WordPress, pyblosxom, and blosxom. So far blosxom seems to be the winner, but I’m open to suggestions. Anyone want to advocate for a particular package? Requirements are free software license (DFSG approved, for example—so no MoveableType) and able to run on a standard GNU/Linux server. I’d also like it to have a good (and sustainable) URL system, permit more than one keyword or topic to be associated with each blog entry, and be an extensible framework where you don’t have to spend a year studying the code before you can write a plug-in.

I’ve been getting hammered with the latest W32/Swen@MM virus like there’s no tomorrow. Usually these things aren’t such a problem for me, but I’ve got nearly 1000 emails in the last day or so, and much of my email checking goes over a 56K connection, and spam filtering only happens once I’ve downloaded the messages. Not to mention that, for whatever reason, SpamAssassin doesn’t recognize the Swen virus emails as spam.

If you’re in the same boat, there’s a good solution. Get mpartinfo2hdr, a tool written just for this purpose. mpartinfo2hdr adds a header line with the md5sum of attachments. Then add the following lines to your ~/.procmailrc:

 :0fw | mpartinfo2hdr.py :0: * X-Msg-Part-Info:.*b09e26c292759d654633d3c8ed00d18d virus 

You’ll need to put the proper path to the mpartinfo2hdr.py script. Of course, this only works if you are a GNU/Linux user, have python, and use procmail to filter your email. Don’t try this at home otherwise.

You’ll also need the python email module (Debian package python2.1-email), if you don’t have that already installed on your system.

It’s a great relief to be able to check email in a reasonable amount of time now, though.

Update: a similar option is to just put the following in .procmailrc:

 :0 B * ^TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA * ^AAAA2AAAAA4fug4AtAnNIbgBTM0hVGhpcyBwcm9ncmFtIGNhbm5vdCBiZSBydW4gaW4gRE9TIG1v * !< 100000 virus 

This will only catch Swen, of course. The advantage of the former method is you can quickly customize it to catch emails with any particular md5sum attachment. The advantage of this method is that you don’t need to invoke a separate script for each email that comes in, something which would certainly have a performance hit on a large server.

Last night, I played Bicycle Polo for the first time, out in Golden Gate Park. It’s a pretty funny sport. You have to keep the mallet in your right hand (it also helps to switch your breaks so that you can break with your left hand without toppling over), so you spend a lot of time circling around trying to approach the ball on the proper side. It is possible, but difficult, to reach over with your right hand to the left side of your bike to hit the ball. You also have to come at the ball parallel to the direction of the field, which also causes a lot of circling and recircling.

They’ve got a pretty dedicated group here which seems to play every week. The field was close to the ocean end of the park and it was so foggy that it was difficult to see the other goal much of the time. There is also a nice beer break in the middle of the game, after which the quality of play increased markedly.