Chad’s News

The 2008 Ig Nobel awards have been announced.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Here’s an interesting take on why the Allies won World War II. (The first link is to the actual picture, and the second is to the associated article.)

Link #1: http://s3.amazonaws.com/…

Link #2: http://www.socyberty.com/…

eBay angering its sellers is not a new topic here at Chad’s News. This time it’s trying to institute a PayPal-only policy. I think the online auction business is ripe for some newcomer to replace eBay as the best auction site—much in the way that Google came out of nowhere to overshadow Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Lycos, and other search engines.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Did you know that US tire dealers can sell “new” tires that are over 6 years old? The linked article tells how an informed consumer can avoid this situation.

Link: http://consumerist.com/…

The general consumer probably doesn’t know that sellers of DRM-protected music have to actively maintain DRM management servers for the rest of eternity or else the digital music files will become unplayable. When a seller decides to leave the business, it’s not very long before executives wonder if running expensive DRM servers is really going to enhance shareholder value, especially since the servers no longer have any effect on revenue.

Let me share my own experience. About a decade ago, I purchased a nifty program named MusicMatch Jukebox. I mainly used it to rip or burn CDs. But it also had a music player and, rather than having one program to rip CDs and one to listen to the music, I just used MusicMatch for both. Over the years, MusicMatch started selling music via its player, and I eventually started buying tracks. Sure I was constrained to one music player and a few portable music devices, but I typically listen to songs via my computer. In all I bought about 50 songs. Then in 2007, MusicMatch was purchased by Yahoo!, and I was forced to migrate to the Yahoo! music player in order to listen to my songs. I didn’t like Yahoo’s player, and I finally decided to cut my losses and start over with iTunes (I’d had a hard-drive crash and bought an iPod in the interim). The story ended there for me, but it continued for others. Earlier this year, Yahoo! Music announced its decision to shut down its DRM servers, effective tomorrow. Songs purchased from MusicMatch will still play, but they cannot be transferred to other computers or devices, and they won’t survive a Windows install. So at some point they will become unplayable. [See update at end of article.] The recommended method of keeping protected songs is to burn them to CD and then re-rip them as mp3 files. But if you do this, you’re taking a song that has already lost some of its quality due to compression and then losing even more quality by re-compressing it. This is not a satisfactory solution.

Here is what I do. When I want to purchase a music track, I first go to amazon.com. Amazon sells non-protected songs for about a dollar apiece. If I can’t find it there, I go to the iTunes store. I cannot conceive that Apple will ever shut down its DRM management system, because it’s sold billions of songs. Should Apple attempt to do such a thing, the customer outrage would be of epic proportions. Sure, it restricts me to the iTunes player and iPods/iPhones, but I’m okay with that.

Link: http://www.engadget.com/…

Update: Apparently I missed an update in regards to the Yahoo! shutdown. After an angry customer response, Yahoo! offered coupons for DRM-less mp3 downloads.

Update #2: Walmart has changed its mind. Also, xkcd has published a comic that explains the situation.

When I first saw this video, my jaw literally dropped. Then I kept asking myself “How? How did she figure that out?”

Link: http://www.neatorama.com/…

I’ve heard some of the US Presidential candidates talking about “clean coal,” which could cause one to infer that there is some special type of coal that, when burned, does not produce pollution. As far as I know, this is not the case, and the linked article has an example of what “clean coal” really means.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

Back on Monday, September 8th (yes, the Chad’s News submission queue is getting a bit long) United Airlines stock lost 75% of its value, or $1.14 billion, and its trading was temporarily halted. It all turned out to be a misunderstanding, and by the end of the day the stock had mostly rebounded to its previous price. There’s been a lot of finger-pointing and inconsistent announcements, but here’s the best take on what happened:

1. Nobody is sure why, but the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s website republished a six-year old Chicago Tribune story about United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing. The article showed up in the current news section with only the current date (Sep. 7th) on the page.
2. The automated Google web crawler picked up the story and, because of the incorrect date, classified it as current news.
3. A financial industry worker did a Google search on bankruptcies and encountered the outdated story. Despite claims that information in the article “would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002,” this worker distributed an alert through the Bloomberg News Service.
4. Traders received the alert and cried “Sell! Sell! Sell!”

So the headline of this article isn’t completely accurate, but in the confusion following the event Google was one of the parties being blamed.

Link: http://blog.wired.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

These days, nearly every network adapter has an associated number called a MAC address. This number is (almost always) unique and is defined in the network card hardware—making it permanent and unchangeable. Thus one aspect of wireless network security is to only allow access to devices with specific MAC addresses. And while this is a good practice, it will not keep out a determined hacker. Despite what I wrote above, MAC addresses can be easily spoofed at the operating system level. The linked article explains how to do it in Windows. This is another reason why there is no such thing as total network security without encryption (and even then, it has to be the right type of encryption).

Link: http://www.online-tech-tips.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

The linked article explains, in layman’s terms, how the largest bankruptcy in history occurred. I figure we, the taxpayers of the United States, should know something about AIG since we now own the company. And for those who want a more general explanation of “What the #$@(&* happened to our economy, there’s this Freakonomics article.

Link: http://www.mentalfloss.com/…

Mental Floss is holding a contest for students, where five winners will each receive $10,000 to be applied towards tuition. Even if you’re not eligible for the prize, the site is one that I regularly read and recommend.

Link: http://www.mentalfloss.com/…

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email account was taken over by a hacker. Authorities believe the hacker was able to find enough information about Mrs. Palin in the public domain that he could ask for a password reset and answer the “secret questions.” Unfortunately for him, however, he wasn’t as good at covering his tracks as he was at hacking.

Link #1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

Link #2: http://www.computerworld.com/…
(via Kim Komando)