A Turner Broadcasting Systems exec complained last year that using a PVR is the same as stealing. Hollywood has subsequently waged war on them, going so far as to convince federal judges to order ReplayTV founder SonicBlue to spy on ReplyTV users in an effort to determine if users were skipping commercials.

Now I read that the new owners of the ReplayTV are removing the features that separated it from the Tivo: the abilities to remove commercials and to share programming over the Internet. What you have now is a dumbed-down Tivo wannabe.

Hollywood must evolve or die. If its business model depends on advertising, and the market no longer responds to advertising, tough beans! Guess its time to get a new business model! Strong-arming the electronics industry (a much larger industry, dollar-wise but with not nearly the lobbying clout) is not the way to do it. Convincing the courts to block PVRs is not the way to do it. Accusing your customers – the viewing public – of being crooks is not the way to do it.

I am so tired of the media mafia in this country. If I had a million dollars, I’d launch some initiatives to forever keep Hollywood’s hands off the rights of citizens to decide what media they absorb. The lengths that Hollywood is going in order to maintain their control over viewers is truly frightening.

I support the efforts to build open-source, freely-available PVRs. Not every program is the product of Hollywood. I’d like to see people everywhere producing their own TV shows and sharing them through the Internet or satellite feeds. I’d love to see a new television network, born of PVRs, sprout up across the world, driving a stake into the heart of the idea of rigid, centralized control.

It can be done. The technology is there. And such an idea is guaranteed to produce content far more interesting than what comes out of the brain[dead]-trusts in Hollywood studio boardrooms.

Hollywood should fear the PVR. The PVR, along with the Internet, is destined to relegate Hollywood to the scrap heap of entertainment history.

Swiss students have perfected a way to crack Microsoft Windows passwords in a matter of seconds, taking advantage of a design flaw in the way Microsoft creates passwords. Since Microsoft doesn’t include any random data in the password hashes it creates, the same password on two separate machines will create the same hash.

The students created a large (well, somewhat large: 1.2 Gig) lookup table of all the possible hashes. The result is that 99.9% of Windows passwords can be cracked within five seconds!

Since Unix and Mac OS X adds random data to the hash, they are 4,096 times more secure. Attacks against these boxes would also require 4,096 times more memory.

The students have a webpage which allows you to submit your own Windows password hashes for cracking. Check out the paper here.

I am strongly considering disabling password logins on my home machines and changing them all to 1024-bit SSH keys instead. Typeable passwords are too easily sniffed, logged, or cracked!

I was about to joke to someone for misspelling something on IRC today. The joke was nearly on me when I spelled “misspelled” with only one “s.”

I’m one of the few people who could manage to misspell “misspell.”

I found out this evening that my Iron Curtin protecting my empire from the marauding, comment-posessing hordes must come down. You see, there is a campaign being organized to do just that – bring comments to this humble weblog. For far too long, this weblog has ignored the pleas, the cries of those with no voice on these pages. Can there be no justice for these suffering souls? No quenching their desire to attach little strings of ASCII characters to my entries, expressing their thoughts on the matter? Surely this must end!

In my defense, and all kidding aside, I have spent a few hours looking into doing just this. Today’s mt.net is powered by PHP code over three years old: ancient by Internet standards. Forget fancy style-sheets, bookmarking, and of course, easy-to-add comments.

My choices are to hack the PHP code or start with something new. I could hack the PHP code rather easily, but it still wouldn’t change the fact that the main code hasn’t been updated in forever. The other option of new software seems to be the best route, but there is still the matter of republishing the huge amount of content you’ve come to expect from mt.net. These entries must be imported into the database format of any new blog engine I wind up choosing.

And there is a lot of entries. You see, mt.net has been around for a year and a half now. While some weblogs — and I won’t mention names — are just getting started, mt.net has been providing entertainment of dubious quality since January 2002! That’s an ocean of wasted time, and we’re darn proud of it!

So if anyone has tips on tools for importing MySQL tables into new tables with different columns, I’d love to hear from you. For now, however, you’ll still have to email. 🙂

The 2003 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in. This is a literary contest named after the author who wrote the much-plagarized opening line “It was a dark and stormy night.” Each year, the San Jose State University English department holds a fiction contest where entrants are encouraged to write their own worst opening line for a novel.

For example, here’s the winner in the “Children’s Literature” category:

The Prince looked down at the motionless form of Sleeping Beauty, wondering how her supple lips would feel against his own and contemplating whether or not an Altoid was strong enough to stand up against the kind of morning breath only a hundred year’s nap could create.

I keep threatening to enter this contest some day. Check it out. Great humor here.

I pass a copy of BusinessWeek everytime I walk into the office. The latest issue has a lurid headline of “STEALING HOLLYWOOD: Can the movie biz avoid the piracy that has crippled the music industry?”

Excuse me? “Crippled the music industry?” Funny, I wasn’t aware that the music industry was crippled. I certainly wasn’t aware that the Internet somehow killed the music industry.

What really ticks me off about this is that this headline, in inch-high letters, is declaring the Internet guilty of music-industry murder without the benefit of a fair trial. Where is the proof that Johnny Downloader has brought this business to its knees?

And don’t tell me about those RIAA-comissioned reports. They’re all bunk. In fact, some intrepid music lovers have picked apart the RIAA’s own numbers to prove them wrong. His verdict was that what killed CD sales is the fact that the industry quit releasing CD singles.

I feel towards the music and movie industry the same way I feel towards the airline industry. If these dinosaurs can’t adapt to current market realities, they deserve to die! They don’t need Uncle Sam bailing them out. Any Congresscritter who disagrees needs to meet a cluestick.

I could rant on and on about this but alas I don’t have the time at the moment. Tune into my brother’s site to follow his take on things.

Well, Kelly, Hallie and I spent a fun afternoon visiting my parents across town. We spent close to two hours swimming around their neighborhood pool, having a good time. My brother Allen and his family joined us and we all played in the water a bit.

My mom wasn’t feeling well around dinnertime and so health seemed to become the topic of conversation. After checking my mom’s blood pressure and his own, my dad put the blood pressure sleeve on my arm. After a few pumps, I relaxed and waited for the magic number to appear. I was shocked to see 134/84.

“That can’t be right,” I said. “It can’t be.” In my Navy days, nurses trying to draw my blood accused me of being dead. My blood pressure was so low it took over five minutes for me to fill a sample vial.

I pumped the bulb again and waited for the real results. Once again, the numbers were too high: 134/81. Yikes.

I have been pondering those numbers for the rest of the night, wondering how I got to this point. Looking back on my diet, I don’t see anything but supposedly healthy eating habits. I detest fast-food and eat it only under duress. I eat little red meat and really don’t get much salt in my diet at all.

As for my physical fitness, I haven’t felt better. I have been exercising in the evenings for the past few weeks. Kelly and I walk at least once a week; sometimes twice a week, depending on the weather cooperating. I am also sleeping better than I have in a long time.

I love my new job, and the excitement it brings. Finally, I get paid to show off my geekiness: I out-geek our customers daily. My morning commute is incredibly easy.

So, with all that said, how could I be facing such high numbers? It stumped me all night. That is, until I got a theory.

I am taking Aciphex for GERD, or Gastro-Esophogal Reflux Disease. Looking down the list of Aciphex complications, one jumped out at me: hypertension. My heartburn medicine may be saving my stomach at the expense of my heart!

I feel a little better about those high numbers now that I may have discovered their prime cause. At any rate, I’ve got a good excuse now to give my doctor a call and get that checkup scheduled that I’ve been putting off.

A random search for Mark Turner in everyone’s favorite search engine puts me three notches from the top. Now, if I can only talk more about my photographic skills, and maybe mention my new jazz recordings, I’ll make it to the top. If I dare go into my work with higher-order cognitive operations, I would suspect that I would be accused of conceptual blending. At the very least, my creativity and communications skills might be brought into question.

While I’m at it, I should mention how I’m an expert skier, especially when “the animal” in me comes alive. Oh, and I’m also the optimal president of my own company, Siteseers, Inc., providing Linux solutions. But I don’t yet have a Ph.D.

If you’d like to hear me play saxaphone, I suppose you’re still out of luck.

So I’m looking through the sports page in this morning’s paper and I get to a section called Carolina Outdoors, obsensibly about life in the great outdoors of our great state of North Carolina. As I am flipping through the pages, I notice the bylines of the stories.

Kansas City Star
Dallas Morning News
The Washington Post
Los Angeles Times

It turns out not one article in the whole section is filed from anywhere in North Carolina. Oh sure, there’s a “special correspondent” listed for one article, but there’s no way of knowing where this correspondent lives, either. At the very least, by nature of being a “correspondent” it is surely not an N&O reporter.

In other words, “Carolina Outdoors” is a sham, one that’s pretty typical of the paper nowadays. Where once there was a real local flavor to its reporting, the McClatchy era has turned it into a bland corporate rag.

The Triangle area will never be considered world-class until it has a world-class newspaper. Sadly, the N&O will never measure up.

(On the other hand, sometimes they really nail a story.)