Linked List: July 6, 2006

Microsoft Windows Kill Switch? 

Bruce Schneier on the growing rumor that Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage system components enable Microsoft to disable a working Windows installation if they believe it isn’t “genuine”:

The stupidity of this idea is amazing. Not just the inevitability of false positives, but the potential for a hacker to co-opt the controls. I hope this rumor ends up not being true.

Although if they actually do it, the backlash could do more for non-Windows OSs than anything those OSs could do for themselves.

See also this follow-up from Ed Bott, with a rambling non-denial denial from a Microsoft PR flak.

(Via Nat Irons via email.)

JWZ on the mbox Format 

Speaking of mbox, an oldie-but-goodie from JWZ on the mbox format specification, or lack thereof:

RFCs specify internet protocols, that is, on-the-wire formats. The thing that the original poster is looking for is a description of the BSD Mailbox file format (which is not something an RFC would cover.)

But, here’s the good news, there is no true specification of this file format, just a collection of word-of-mouth behaviors of the various programs over the last few decades which have used that format.

It’s All^H^H^HOnly About the Apps 

Rich Siegel on the switching-to-Ubuntu saga:

The problem I see with this line of reasoning is that it conflates the hardware and the OS with the applications that run on them. That’s an easy mistake to make, since those bundled applications are refined to the point that they integrate closely with each other and the OS, and also because they form the basis of the first-run experience for almost every Mac OS X user, new or old.

However, the applications are not the platform.

He also points out that Apple Mail never used mbox for mail storage — it used a very mbox-like format that wasn’t really mbox.

The Power of Positive Whining 

Jeffrey Zeldman:

Write about a usability error at Amazon, and 100 sites that copy Amazon will improve.

New 10.4.7 ‘dashboardadvisoryd’ Daemon Phones Home to Apple.com 

Daniel Jalkut reports on ‘dashboardadvisoryd’, a new background daemon Apple added to 10.4.7 that phones home to Apple.com every eight hours so that you can confirm that the Dashboard widgets you download are identical to the ones featured on Apple.com. A clever idea, and almost certainly harmless, in and of itself, but this sort of secretive “phoning home” feature — which wasn’t announced and which can’t be turned off without hacking skills — really gets people worked up.

When you introduce a feature such as this, no matter how innocuous the data is that’s transmitted back and forth over the wire, you must explicitly inform the user about the feature and give them an option to turn it off.

On RSS and Atom 

DeWitt Clinton:

Fortunately all is not lost. While I don’t want to get embroiled in a format war, I will say that I’ve found the Atom 1.0 standard to meet the needs of nearly every single problem that I’ve thrown at it. Amazingly so, actually. I’ve been consistently impressed with how well the authors of the Atom syndication format anticipated the needs of the advanced content syndication community. There has yet to be a use-case that I’ve explored — and I work with some thorny ones — in which Atom has let me down.

I feel the same way.

NY Times Reports That Microsoft Is Developing Its Own iPod Competitor 

If true, this is definitely going to piss off companies like Sony and Samsung that have bundled Microsoft software in their own players. Note, though, that this is just a rumor, albeit a rumor in The New York Times. The Chicago Tribune had a story on this yesterday, but their primary source was Rob “Let’s Just Get This Over With and Call Me ‘Jackass of the Week’ Yet Again” Enderle.

Anyway, the big hook in both stories that Microsoft’s supposed player is going to have built-in Wi-Fi. Maybe it’ll have more buttons, too.