Yearly Archives: 2003

Information Rights Management

This entry was posted in Information on by

The supporters of the Patriot Act who argue that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear will love this new bug feature that is part of Microsoft’s Office 2003, Information Rights Management or IRM:

Information Rights Management (IRM) in Microsoft Office 2003 gives organizations and information workers another mechanism to help control their own information. IRM is a persistent file-level protection technology from Microsoft that allows information workers to specify who can access and use documents or e-mail messages, and helps protect that digital intellectual property from unauthorized printing, forwarding or copying.

Mac users may not be so happy:

Because the technology is exclusive to Office 2003, it does mean that not only can protected files not be read in Mac versions of Office, they will also be inaccessile to users of older Windows versions, including Office XP. To solve this Microsoft has released a plug-in for Internet Explorer 6 that utilises a built-in HTML version of the rights managed file, which the authoring application automatically creates.

This will likely be a problem for other folks who have not submitted to microsoft. For instance, do you use open source products like Linux, Firebird, Mozilla or other non MS browsers or email programs. You may soon find yourself unable to read certain emails, web pages or documents that have been created in the Office 2003 environment.
I expect you will be reading a lot more about IRM and its implications.

Points of View

This entry was posted in Iraq on by

Both Hesiod, Counterspin, and Joe Katzman, Winds of Change, stated that the denial of service attack that brought Hosting Matters to its knees today was something directed against warbloggers in general. Both were wrong in their initial posts.
Hesiod, gloats:

AT BLOGGERHEADS: It appears that most of the top pro-war blogs were subjected to a massive denial of service attack today.
Heh. Indeed.

Joe Katzman initially sounds like he’s found another piece of the liberal media conspiracy:

there appears to be another round of DoS cyber-attacks in progress against a number of prominent warblogs.

Yea, this impacted some warbloggers but in fact the attack has been directed against one specific site (Internet Haganah) which lives at Hosting Matters. All the rest were simply drowned in the fallout.
Joe K updated his original post noting some of the left sites that were also down and, overall, wins the exchange with Hesiod based on a detailed followup and the posting of a bunch of useful information on denial of service attacks.

Spanking

This entry was posted in Culture on by

Julia, Sisyphus Shrugged, has been reading some of Lisa Whelchel’s book Creative Corrections and has some thoughts on spanking:

(FWIW, my persistent thought about spanking is that it’s the last refuge of the incompetent, but mileage varies on that one. At the very least, a parent who can’t think of a compelling reason to restrict their communication with someone a fifth their size with imperfect impulse control to the non-violent might want to consider carefully their decision to homeschool that child in light of the questionable nature of their own impulse control.)

I would extend this to suggest that they should have considered carefully their decision to have children in the first place.
NB: The permalink for Julia’s post on this seem to be missing tonight so this is the one at 10:04 PM on October 21st, 2003.