The Real Analysis

So, I went into Circuit City this evening to buy a new computer. More specifically, an HP laptop.

Of course, the sales reps love to try to convince you to buy more crap — with one of my favorites being the “warranty plans”.

For a two year warranty plan, it costs 179$. And, its actually just adding a year of coverage to the machine — it already comes with 1 year. Plus, its through some third party company — not HP. Who knows what their policies are.

Anyways, the store rep. quickly says “it comes with one free battery replacement — so it pays for itself!!!”. Well, that sounds ok — especially since he tells me it is an OEM battery. One problem though — I know I can get an OEM replacement battery online for around 90$.

I tell the rep this — he quickly tells me that the claim is based on the store price of 150$ for the battery. Thats great — except one problem — it doesn’t pay for itself. There is still a 29$ difference. Plus, it will only pay for a new battery after one year — despite how I have already paid my 179$ — because of how the warranty doesn’t kick in until the second year.

The rep notices his math is wrong — he is over by 29$. The warranty won’t pay for itself. I point out to him that the store should stop telling him to say that unless they want to get sued by someone. And trust me — someone crazy enough probably could sue and win (I’m guessing the store would just settle outside of court).

What a great world of technology we live in….

It seems that the more people I talk to, the more I recongize a “hatred” against attorney’s in this country. Sure — in California last summer I saw a sign stating “Welcome to California — The Sue You State”, but I don’t think that really explains what’s going on in regards to the legal problems in this country.In some cases, I would agree with an eposide of “The Simpsons” where an attorney is run over and asks to be remembered as “a drain on society”. Sure, there are many lawsuits out there which I view as friviolous — especially in regards to individuals suing each other for “damages” which are purely accidental, and indivdiuals suing companies for millions of dollars of damages which are likely unjustifiable in many cases. According to a German individual who I worked with last year, in Europe they laugh when they hear about the amount of money which is awarded in some US lawsuits. At the same time, the Japanese typically don’t sue at all — their culture simply doesn’t view it as “the right way” to proceed.

However, when I look at the work done by an organization such as EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), ACLU, or many of the other organizations I’m part of, I recongize the importance of legal work in many scanarios — which is perhaps why I’m interested in becoming an attorney myself. And while I’ve read many ‘annoying’ court cases over the years, this one really does it: http://www.circleid.com/posts/811611_david_ritz_court_spam/.

As the article describes, the individual mentioned (David Ritz) has been prosecuted for performing a zone transfer (AXFR) of DNS information, along with utilizing various other network tools. 

Without getting incredible technical, a zone transfer is similar to me handing you a document listing all of the names of the people who live on a street. A “zone” holds information about a domain (i.e, schlinky.com) and all of the different services under it (i.e, blog.schlinky.com). Nothing more, nothing less.

Here, lets perform a zone transfer right now:

http://www.dollardns.net/cgi-bin/dnscrawler/index.pl?server=a.root-servers.net&name=msn.com&type=AXFR&class=IN&lr=12&submit=Send+Query

Oh wait… you can’t perform a zone transfer on msn.com. Apparently MSFT has admins which correctly (well, not technically ‘correctly’, theres no formal RFC or standard for this) lock down their DNS servers.

Let’s try another.

http://www.dollardns.net/cgi-bin/dnscrawler/index.pl?server=a.root-servers.net&name=mydomain.com&type=AXFR&class=IN&lr=12&submit=Send+Query

Hey… look at that. We were able to transfer the zone for mydomain.com. Now, according to the court ruling which was issued, what I just did broke the law (nice…). So, what’d we get? In general, the list of information tells us a name of a site under the zone, what type of record it is, and then the data associated with that record (typically an IP address as A records are most common).

For instance:

I now know that mydomain.com is hosted on two different IP addresses, setup in a round-robin DNS enviorment. Whoopdie do. I could have gotten that with a general ping also, or just with an ALL request without the need to transfer the entire zone, but whatever.

Now, there is a few interesting things which I can see via the zone transfer:

These all look interesting. I have no idea why you would have fun.mydomain.com or fig.mydomain.com — and if I snooped around enough I might find some sort of purpose (i.e, perhaps they are test sites being used by admins and could be a potential security risk if not locked down correctly). beta.mydomain.com could easily be a testing site — hopefully that’s locked down correctly also since you wouldn’t want someone attempting to break the security of your beta.

Hmm, looks like they’ve got some sort of a promo website being built also. Hopefully thats correctly locked down — wouldn’t want people using promotions which should’nt be accessible yet.

Besides for what I’ve mentioned above, there is nothing particularly interesting about this domain. I can see its mail servers and get a general idea of the infrastructure associated with this company, but this is no golden key (unless one of the aformentioned sites isn’t correctly locked down).

Now, why would you want to do something like this? Debugging is one — I commonly perform AXFRs when I’m attempting to determine a network problem. Sometimes I will see a round-robin enviorment and change my host file to utilize the other system if I detect one of the servers which is part of the robin is down. Other times, I will utilize when I’m setting up my own network — I had to query the DNS data of the Exchange hosting provider which I outsource for my business in order to correctly setup my domains SPF records.  

There’s no real “security problem” associated with zone transfers — assuming that you have competent administrators who lock down the items under DNS. However, sometimes it can just be best to disable them on the domain — something which is easily achieved (as shown by the transfer attempt on msn.com above). For instance, a company might have an Asterisk / VoIP server on their domain. If I transfer their domain and see voice01.company.com — I now know the servers information. If I had malicious intentions, I could attempt a DoS or DDoS attack against that server in an attempt to bring down the companies voice network. The end result is that transfering zone data only has the potential to help you find a security risk — its not actually a security problem itself.

David Ritz did exactly what I just did (ie, AXFR DNS data from a zone). The court documents mention it under the “Statements of Fact”.

——————— 
“On February 27, 2005, David Ritz (”Ritz”) connected to Sierra’s DNS server. In the course of that connection, he issued a host -l command which requested a zone transfer from Sierra’s DNS server. Sierra’s server responded with a full zone transfer, providing Ritz with the network map showing all of Sierra’s private domain names, private host names, and internal non-routable IP addresses.”
——————— 

Yeah, ok. He used the ”host -l” command to perform his transfer. I used the DNSCrawler website to make it easier for me to demonstrate what I’m talking about. However, knowing the owner of that system, he most likely has that perl script using the host -l command in the background and is then just reporting it back to the web interface. The rest of that statement is indeed what we just got on ’mydomain.com’ — a network map of the system. Now, what “private” domain names he recieved I have no idea. As far as I’m concerned, everything we just saw was completly public and publically accessible. It also mentions internal non-routable IP addresses — ie, the IP addresses used by the computers inside of the company — ones which don’t typically interface with the public internet. Why those IP addresses were in the same zone file as sierra’s main zone is a mystery to me — it sounds like we some real crack-pot DNS admins here. But in any case, putting them into the same zone file, or even on any publically accessible DNS server in a zone which can be AXFRed makes those addresses publically accessible in my mind.

To shut-up anyone who claims I’m not using the ‘host -l’ command because I’m afraid of committing some sort of crime:

——————— 
[root@node101 ~]# host -l mydomain.com ns1.mydomain.com
Using domain server:
Name: ns1.mydomain.com
Address: 64.94.117.193#53
Aliases:

mydomain.com name server ns1.mydomain.com.
mydomain.com name server ns2.mydomain.com.
mydomain.com name server ns3.mydomain.com.
mydomain.com name server ns4.mydomain.com.
dev.mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.184
ns1.mydomain.com has address 64.94.117.193
ns2.mydomain.com has address 64.94.31.67
ns3.mydomain.com has address 66.150.161.137
ns4.mydomain.com has address 63.251.83.74
ns5.mydomain.com has address 64.94.117.199
ns6.mydomain.com has address 63.251.83.72
redirect.mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.186
mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.184
mydomain.com has address 66.150.120.131
*.mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.184
chat.mydomain.com has address 64.85.73.20
forum.mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.181
promo.mydomain.com has address 216.148.213.147
bounce.mydomain.com has address 64.85.73.100
mkt.mydomain.com has address 64.85.73.100
notification.mydomain.com has address 64.85.73.28
renewals.mydomain.com has address 64.85.73.28
lists.mydomain.com has address 216.234.106.37
lyradmin.mydomain.com has address 216.234.106.44
mailix.mydomain.com has address 216.148.213.134
webmail.mydomain.com has address 216.148.221.141
webmail2.mydomain.com has address 216.148.221.133
webmail3.mydomain.com has address 216.148.221.132
images.mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.185
scripts.mydomain.com has address 216.148.221.140
beta.mydomain.com has address 193.230.129.57
fig.mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.184
fun.mydomain.com has address 216.34.13.250
newsletter.mydomain.com has address 216.112.64.102
partner.mydomain.com has address 216.34.13.250
sitescope.mydomain.com has address 216.148.221.156
afs.mydomain.com has address 216.148.221.143
cadomains.mydomain.com has address 216.34.94.177
members.mydomain.com has address 212.100.224.151
training.mydomain.com has address 212.100.224.151
tutorials.mydomain.com has address 212.100.224.151
securemx.mydomain.com has address 216.148.213.147
——————— 

But according to the court documents, Rizo also performed some other terrible actions

——————— 
“At various other times, Ritz issued a variety of commands, including host -l, helo, and vrfy. The afore-mentioned commands are not commonly known to the average computer user.”
——————— 

Goodness — this guy is doing things which are not known to the average computer (individual) user? And my god, that chemist over there is performing titrations which the average individual can’t do either. This is terrible!! Both of these people must be bent on destroying this country!

Ok people — lets look at what each of those commands do. “helo” is a command utilized by mail servers — infact, its used by every mail server which wants to be able to communicate via SMTP — the most popular mail protocal on the planet. So when you send grandma at rocker1154grandma@gmail.com those pictures of you and your friends on the beach, the mail server which talks from your provider (lets say Comcast) to her provider (gmail) must utilize the “helo” command.

Since that might not mean much to you, lets do it outselves to understand the terrible crime this man committed. To keep things in track, lets talk to the mail server of mydomain.com — which we know according to the DNS records from above is mx.mailix.net.

——————— 
[root@node101 ~]# telnet mx.mailix.net 25
Trying 216.148.221.135…
Connected to mx.mailix.net (216.148.221.135).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 mx.mailix.net ESMTP Exim 4.63 Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:20:02 -0800
——————— 

Wow, all of that code. Must be something BIG. Real big! But its not — basically what just happened is I connected to the mail server, and it gave me a 220 message — its way of announcing itself, along with the protocol we can use to talk (ESMTP) and the mail server its running (Exim 4.63). Oh, and it mentions its current time… hizzah hizzah.

Let’s run the helo command here.

——————— 
helo node101
250 mx.mailix.net Hello node101 [74.000.000.000] (yeah, I blocked out my IP)
——————— 

Check that out people — another crime. I told the mail server that my name was node101, and it responded with a 250 message greeting me (mail servers are just so nice!).

Now, what’s this vrfy stuff. Well, vrfy is just a method used to verify that a user exists on a remote domain. So, if Comcast is talking to GMail, they want to verify that rocker1154grandma@gmail.com exists before they try to send the mail. Just terrible. Lets try and verify that postmaster@mydomain.com exists.

——————— 
VRFY <postmaster@mydomain.com>
252 Administrative prohibition
——————— 

Now, that was unexpected. I attempted to verify that the address postmaster@mydomain.com exists, and I got back an 252 “Administrative prohibition” message — basically saying that the mailserver has been configured to refuse to perform this action. Not sure why, but the admins for that mail server don’t want us to be able to check the status of a mailbox with VRFY. Thats ok though — we can do it another way.

——————— 
MAIL FROM: <bschlinker@blog.schlinky.com>
250 OK
RCPT TO: <postmaster@mydomain.com>
250 Accepted
——————— 

So, I told the mailserver “hey — its bschlinker@blog.schlinky.com — I wanna send some email to postmaster@mydomain.com — is that cool?”. The server responded by accepting the destination, so it worked.

Anyways, this guy must have done something else. Let’s go back to those court papers:

——————— 
Ritz frequently accomplished his access to Sierra’s computers by concealing his identity via proxies and by accessing the servers via a Unix operating system and using a shell accounts, among other methods. He also disguised himself as a mail server.
——————— 

That’s interesting — we just did everything on there — except for the proxies part. I guess I could go ahead and do that, but there is no “law” against annoymous internet communications anyways. I don’t see why that’s even a factor here. And yes folks — I did just “disguise” myself as a mail server — except for how mailservers don’t typically mistype while I did a few moments ago.

———————
In the late winter or spring of 2005, Ritz published the zone information he copied from Sierra’s server in the form of a file he published by making it accessible to the Internet and which he named “zilla_queries” (”zilla queries file”) — that file contained the internal domain structure of Sierra.
———————

Alrighty then. I officially proclaim the zone-transfer which I performed above of “mydomain.com” to be known as the “zilla_queries2″ file. You can even download it — I have uploaded it in .txt format to this entry. Good stuff.

http://blog.schlinky.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/zilla_queries2.txt

Now, we’re done with the technical analysis of this one. The rest I’ll cover in my next post discussing how Sierra claims this hurt their security, etc.

                Perhaps Congressman John Dingell explained it the best when he stated that “the FCC appears to be broken” during a House Telecommunications & Internet Subcommittee hearing in early December. More specifically, Dingell is referring to the numerous decisions which the Federal Communications Commission has recently made despite continuous bipartisan and bicameral opposition – including recent rulings which change the fundamental rules within both the media and telecommunications industries. Much of the blame for the current situation appears to be headed towards the Federal Communications Commission chairman – Kevin Martin – who has been widely criticized by other commissioners within the FCC, members of congress, and many different special interest groups. It’s no surprise then that a new congressional probe targets Martin specifically and asks for information in regards to why “a trend appears to be emerging of short-circuiting procedural norms” at the agency.

                One of the largest and most recent complaints about Martin is his attempt to implement a rule known as the “70/70 rule” – a provision of the Cable Communications Act of 1984 which allows the commission to “promulgate any additional rule necessary to provide diversity of information sources”. The requirements for the implementation of the “70/70 rule” are the basis for its name – the FCC must be able to demonstrate that over 70% of the country has access to cable services, and that 70% of those who have access are signed up for service with a provider. The objective of this provision was to ensure that the FCC could force the cable companies to provide a diversity of information via their infrastructure, by for instance having news stations which are owned by different companies broadcast to consumers – in an attempt to ensure that no single organization could control the news (and put the country in a situation similar to that of the book “1984”). While the rule itself appears to have been developed with good intentions, Martin has been criticized for what many believe is him “reinterpreting” or “rewriting” the rule to meet his agenda.

For years, Martin has been attempting to implement a system of purchasing cable channels one by one – ‘a la carte’ – enabling consumers to purchase only cable channels which are of interest to them. According to Martin, his objective is to ensure that the consumers don’t need to pay for channels which they don’t want – such as when an individual subscribes to a “tier” on cable such as “expanded basic” just to get access to five or ten of the channels within the tier. The idea has been floating around in Washington for years, but has never been implemented despite continued support from many different consumer groups and special interest groups such as “Parents Television Council”. The reason for no implementation? As the New York Times reports, when the Federal Communications Commission’s previous chairman Michael Powell asked for a cost analysis study to be run on ‘a la-carte’ cable, he was surprised to discover that implementing an ‘a la-carte’ system of buying channels would raise the average consumer bill – not lower it. The primary reason this is understandable – companies such as ESPN (owned by Disney) charge Comcast a price per month per customer who can access the channel. The most recent agreement between Comcast and ESPN put the price per customer at 3$ per month. However, if “a la-carte” billing was to be introduced, it’s possible that only half the number of customers would actually subscribe to the channel. For ESPN and its advertisers the result is half the number of people watching the channel and half the amount of money coming in from subscriber fees. The result is lower revenue for ESPN from both advertisers and subscriber fees – and since the sports giant is not going to tolerate lower revenue, their only choice is to raise the price per subscriber to over double the original rate.  As a result, the concept of “a la-carte” was thrown out the window – until Chairman Powell left and Martin joined.

According to the New York Times, one of the first acts of Martin as Chairman of the FCC was to repeat the previous study of “a la-carte” cable – producing a study which attacked the original one and caused major disputes in regards to the methods utilized to compile the second report. Yet, despite the continued disputes over the second study, according to Martin’s interpretation of the “70/70 rule” he has the authority to force cable companies to adopt “a la-carte billing”. How does this ensure diversity of information entering the household? It doesn’t – in fact, it most likely would reduce the number of channels entering an individual’s home and result in smaller networks shutting down completely – resulting in many individuals and groups questioning Martin’s objective. Some users on popular discussion forums such as “BROADBANDReports.com” speculate that Martin’s long term objective is to get a political-career in  his home state of North Carolina – a state where “family values groups” such as Parents Television Council have a lot of control and would like to see the option to purchase only “wholesome” channels. Martin providing such an option would likely please many of the residence of the state, and the backing of a major group could help him in any future political run.

It’s not just Martin’s attempt to implement “a la-carte” cable which is under question though – but also the data which he claims demonstrates that the requirements for the provision are met. According to a letter sent to Commissioner Adelstein at the FCC by research analyst Craig Moffett from the analyst group “Sanford C. Bernstien & Company”, it is “mathematically [im]possible” for the cable industry to have reached an adoption rate of 70% according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings which cable companies disclose their customer totals in. Instead, Moffett predicts that cable adoption rate is only at 52% within the country – a full 18 points away from the requirement for the implementation of the “70/70” rule. However, despite Moffett’s analysis, Chairman Martin continued to push for the rule to be implemented right up until the last minute – when he finally agreed that the FCC’s own data was not reliable and allowed the cable companies to submit data showing the size and number of customers in their markets.

The FCC not having reliable data sounds on the industries which it regulates sounds like a very scary concept – and it goes far beyond the cable industry. According to a recent Government Accountability Report analyzing the commission’s data on the current state of broadband deployment within the US, the agency is currently unable to assess local deployment – especially in regards to rural areas. Perhaps this is best outlined by the agencies yearly report – which currently claims that “more than 99% of the country’s population lives in the more than 99% of zip codes where a provider reports having at least one high-speed service subscriber”. The result? According to the FCC, broadband penetration is excellent throughout the United States – with over 80% of US zip codes having access to four or more providers. The problem? The FCCs data analysis method is barbaric – according to the commission, if one home in a zip code has broadband access that marks the entire zip code as having broadband access. As a result, a consumer within a rural district using slow and costly satellite broadband technology would mark the entire zip code as having broadband – despite how local utilities such as cable and telephone might not have deployed any infrastructure. The result is inaccurate data about broadband deployment throughout the country — with the FCC unable to tell which areas actually have extensive deployment of broadband services. This is a scary thought when the FCC is the agency which was developed with the intention of ensuring deployment of telecommunications services in all areas and which lists “broaden the deployment of broadband technologies” as one of its “Strategic Goals”. Attempts by groups to obtain broadband records — including carrier’s current deployment statistics by groups such as “The Center for Public Integrity” have been continually blocked – with the most recent court – the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — citing that it could cause “substantial competitive harm” to the providers.

For some, writing a blog is just constant work which they run out of time to deal with.

For me, its just that I’ve had so many ideas about what to write on (currently over 75 drafts) that I haven’t gotten around to finishing any of it.

At the same time, I’ve been busy starting up a company and doing all sorts of work — lets see if I can get back over here.

As a side note, I’ll be beginning to “simulcast” my blog entries from my companies new startup blog and over here — when I see it fit.

TurnItIn is a service offered by parent company iParadigms — which overall seeks to attempt to decrease or completely eliminate plagiarism by running an online comparison service which compares submitted documents to a large archive of content. In general, TurnItIn checks submitted work against a variety of sources including:

• General content on the Internet
• Newspapers and Magazines
• General Educational Content
• Some Published Books
• Other Submitted Student Works

In order for a school system to use its software, they must license it from TurnItIn — at the cost of about .80 cents per account in small institutions — and lower prices in larger institutions. Many teachers find the software easy to use and most students overall do not have objections to utilizing the software. Assuming that they have not plagiarized – they are told they have nothing to fear. Of course — this is far from true. TurnItIn gives its users many things to fear — including the fact that many of them are being forced to submit their assignments to a corporation which utilize them in order to turn a profit. Remember — TurnItIn makes a good amount of agreements with customers based on how their system can detect if one student is plagiarizing off of another — and therefore, TurnItIn is theoretically making money off of the archival of user papers. The problem with this – most users never agreed to their papers being archived by the service — it’s not even mentioned within their Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. And at the same time — even if it was, it may still not be binding, as many school systems ‘force’ their students to use the service or receive a failing grade – with no alternative option available. As a result, TurnItIn is making money off of student papers without ever licensing them from the students — and yet claiming that “fair use” protects them.Let’s look at a few problems with TurnItIn’s argument — the requirements for Fair Use.

• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• the nature of the copyrighted work;
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

As far as I am concerned, TurnItIn is immediately disqualified from utilizing ‘Fair Use’ as any type of backing based on how it own applies to situations of non-commercial nature. However, TurnItIn still attempts to get around this — claiming that it is helping to protect the copyright owner, and therefore should still be allowed to continue. Overall, this is still another bad argument — I never asked to have my intellectual property protected by them nor did I ever agree to it. It is similar in concept to a credit check company forcing me to accept their service for free. Yes — you are helping me protect my credit, but I never asked for this service. Despite this, many students still fail to recognize the abuse of their intellectual property which is occurring. Although TurnItIn is making large amounts of money off of the archival of student’s papers – it appears they do not care that they have little legal ground (shown recently in a case won against McGill University by a Student) – and will likely continue to offer their service. In the end, TurnItIn seems to once again have done an excellent job on claiming to prevent intellectual property abuse / while committing it themselves.

As I most recently witnessed in Senator Chris Dodd’s speech at the Center for National Policy — global warming has become a major new concern on the minds of many Americans. As a result, the race for Preisdent in 2008 will likely depend at least partically on how canidates address the issue of global warming — and what their actual plan is in order to accomplish resulted.

But how many politicans so far have shown actual plans for reducing carbon emissions and starting to work to fix the issues at hand? How many potential solutions have been shown — how many politicans have actually explained in-depth what they would do in order to change the current playing field for enviormental concerns? So far — Chris Dodd is actually the only individual that I have seen come even close — and even his ‘ideas’ didn’t impress me too much. Mr. Dodd agreed on the importance of new energy sources (mainly nuclear due to how it is clean) — but even then still failed to address many of the issues associated with such new energy sources. Nuclear power for instance is dangerous in the sense that the spent radioactive material needs to be transported and stored — something which no canidates (to my knowledge) have addressed yet. Right now the federal goverment is looking to store the nuclear waste in a storage facility in Nevada — a storage facility which is already too small for the amount of nuclear fuel spent. And yet — other countries such as France have developed technology which can refine nuclear waste and reuse it — a process which could nullify any need for storage and decrease the safety concerns associated with reactors. At the same time, France and other countries within the European Union have developed new nuclear technology which is free from the risk of melt-downs due to core-design changes. And yet — none of these politicans have bothered to mention any of this, or how it could help the United States — which makes me wonder if they are really keeping track of what is going on in the world.

Dodd did make a good point in regards to how the ability to be enviormentally friendly should not depend on ones income — and that programs should be developed to enable the poor within the country to be enviormentally friendly. The importance? — just look at China. With over 2 billion people, China has individuals who are rich and some who are poor — with those who are poor unable to afford enviormentally friendly services and systems. As a result, the countries air quality continues to deteriorate rapidly and its become apparent that without major changes in policy the air for the Olympics may not be sufficient for atheletes. Therefore Dodd is correct in the sense that everyone needs to be able to be enviormentaly friendly — it is just recongizing how to get there that these politicans need to begin to explain.

Its one thing to develop an idea — its another to actually follow through on it.

Microsoft Windows Vista has introduced a slew of new features to the Windows Operating system — with a large amount of the changes occuring at the core level — resulting in them being ‘invisible’ to the average consumer. Infact, the most common thing I hear about Windows Vista on a day-to-day basis is its new ‘Aero’ interface — not major core changes such as how the systems is built off of Windows 2003 Code — one of the most secure server operating systems I have ever used.

Since I first began to use a black and white Apple Laptop in 1992, I’ve been well aware of HP Printers — infact, I’ve never owned another brand.

From my HP Deskwriter to my two current HP OfficeJet units — HP has offered the quality and backing I’ve relied on for over 10 years.

Thats what I was so surprised and disappointed when I discovered how terrible many of their printers are being rated these days by customers — for completely valid reasons. As I am myself in the market for a new HP OfficeJet (my D135 is giving printhead errors on the Cyan printhead — but replacing the printhead does not solve the problem — resulting in me believing it is a more internal problem) I took a look around to determine what the successor to the D135 is — the 7110.

Much to my surprise however was how many individuals were now associating this newer unit with more severe problems then I had experienced with my original D135.

Among them — ink being used too quickly, HP attempting to cause cartridge “expirations” early, and in general poor build quality.

As I have read a lawsuit recently against HP for developing expiration dates to help encourage additional sales (enabling HP to generate additional profit), it was not much help when I read about the poor build quality and the high ink saturation. As many reviewers pointed out — you may be buying a 399$ printer — but HP still wants more of your money — which they can now get via parts and ink.

For now, instead of giving HP 399$, I’ll only be giving them 166$ as I buy a new HP OfficeJet 6110 at my local Circuit City.

One would have suspected that after 100,000 DMCA takedown notices (for 100,000 videos), Viacom would want a short break — especially since some of the notices they sent resulted in content not related to Viacom being removed.

But Viacom seems to have decided that it is sick of YouTube serving / hosting copyright videos of its content without any permission — despite how YouTube itself is not directly responsible for the content — and as of yesterday (March 13th) has chosen to procceed by sueing Google directly.

Viacom clearly isn’t seeing the full picture here — at least in comparision to others such as CBS — whose own chairman has reported to investors that its pact with YouTube had provided “a big promotional boost for its shows.” Instead, Viacom is looking at this potential new tool for promotion of its television shows as the movie industry viewed VCRs when they began to appear — a device / service which can destroy them.

That is of course not saying that copyright law is not important — or that users don’t need to recognize what can be uploaded — but instead that it is important that Viacom review what effects these videos are actually having on them.

Lets take a more in-depth look:

• Most videos online which include Viacom content are two or three minutes long — not the full show. They demonstrate key parts (funny moments, etc). Therefore, individuals are still going to go to the television and watch Viacom’s sacred advertising — and infact, more may go since they have been able to find a show they like. I serve as living proof of this — after seeing clips of “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report”, I set both to “Season Pass” on my Tivo. Same with non-Viacom shows such as after seeing the “Special Comments” from Countdown over on MSNBC.

• Viacom seems to have forgotten that even if a show is longer then this two or three minute time period — it is probably not going to hurt them overall. Many users still want to be able to watch television the conventional way — however, they are unable to “placeshift” and “timeshift” there television shows. (Remember, companies like Viacom are even fighting against services such as Tivo / TivoToGo and SlingBox — claiming that these services could result in copyright problems for the company). If Viacom wants to allow users to keep watching shows, they need to develop a cheap (that does NOT mean 5$ per show) and effective system which allows for their content to be viewed with cross-platform capabilities.

• It appears that Viacom is probably also a tad interested in the revenue YouTube is making off of the advertisements associated with their content. Infact — they are interested enough that they are looking to start up their own new service: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/10545

The new question: When is this industry going to embrace this technology, and recognize how to distinguish between video which is helping and video which is hurting?