Author: Shawn K. Quinn

Some things just don’t belong in an operating system; this is one of them

What the hell were they under the influence of when they came up with this crazy idea? Am I in the Twilight Zone?

This article on TorrentFreak discusses a report published by the organizations Black Market Watch and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, about ending online copyright infringement in Sweden. The report itself is in what would appear to be Swedish (guessing since it’s about Sweden, though I can only say for sure it’s not in English). What they suggest honestly reeks of George Orwell’s dystopian future: have copyright infringing content blocked at the operating system level.

There are so many problems with this suggestion, so I’m only going to address the most obvious one I see. With copyright comes something called fair use, known outside the US as fair dealing but which is essentially the same concept. Basically, fair use means there are some purposes for which it is allowed to use copyrighted material without having to get the permission of the copyright holder. I am not sure how something in the operating system is going to be able to tell the difference between unlawful infringement and fair use. My guess is that it probably won’t, and will interfere with perfectly legal uses of copyrighted material.

Another big issue has to do with the very basic foundations of computing, and what makes computers and related technology so useful. I have been using computers since elementary school, back when the requirement in Texas for computer literacy class was one semester in middle school. (Now, the requirement is not for a separate class, but that all classes at all grade levels incorporate some form of what is now called technological literacy. This is completely different and shows the difference between technology in the late 1980s versus technology in the mid-2010s; it is quite a stark contrast.)

What made computers so useful then, is that the computer did exactly what one told it to. For the most part, this is still the case, though in more recent times there have been attempts of varying success in eroding this. Examples include things like scanners or copiers refusing to make copies of currency or other documents which pattern-match a list of prohibited items. Sometimes the restriction is on the software running on the computer versus the actual scanner firmware (in the case of scanners), so it’s easy to work around if desired. I haven’t checked lately but it is possible newer scanners may have the restriction in the scanner itself, which to me would fit right in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Another case is DVD copy protection, which is also relatively easy to circumvent. The major obstacle here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which makes it a crime to do so, albeit one which is rarely if ever enforced against someone who just wants to watch a DVD on a PC running GNU/Linux without having to spend more money on a properly “blessed” DVD player or non-free DVD playing software. Most of the same applies to Blu-Ray (and HD DVD) copy protection, though it’s a bit more robust given that it came out after the US government relaxed regulations on cryptography export (in 1996, when the first DVD players hit the market, it was difficult if not impossible to export any encryption systems which used keys longer than 40 bits, which even at the time was laughably small).

There’s also an edge case which may seem far-fetched, but may well become real and a very real problem: what if someone’s original work gets mis-detected as copyright infringing by this system, due to a hash collision or something similar? It’s not as far-fetched as it may seem, given stories like the one about Fox appropriating a clip of someone playing the original Nintendo Entertainment System version of Double Dribble. Fox used the clip in Family Guy, then had the original taken off of YouTube due to a copyright infringement claim, possibly through automated means. Now, what if the clip in question is, say, an original computer animation, and an automated system which is part of the computer’s operating system decides to block it (or even outright erase it) based on a similar content matching system after a TV network uses it? If it were my work, I’d be pretty damn pissed off. Wouldn’t you? Worse, that same operating system module could decide to erase it from my backups if I were to try to restore it.

No. Just plain no. We, the computing public, have a right to have computers free from such an absolutely insane and idiotic system. I acknowledge that copyright as it exists today has deviated far from its original purpose, and may even be considered broken, but this is no way to fix it. In fact, this breaks it even more.

The end of an era: Dwight Silverman signs off from reporting on tech

It’s time for something completely different. I’m going to take time out and shift gears completely from my usual modus operandi, and show some gratitude for someone who has definitely left his mark on technology reporting, particularly in Houston. I do realize this is somewhat late, but a lot of things got in the way of me posting this closer to the time of the event.

Dwight Silverman recently posted his final entry to TechBlog entitled, appropriately enough, “So long, and thanks for all the tech” (also in the style of Monty Python). With that post, Dwight ends nearly three decades of reporting on technology, in deference to his recently accepted position as Senior Web Producer for Premium Products, still at the Houston Chronicle.

As someone who has been an avid computer user since about the same time Dwight started reporting (if not a year or three earlier), allow me to offer a perspective of just how much has changed since Dwight started reporting in the mid-1980s. (He does not name an exact year, but since this is 2016 and he refers to “nearly 30 years” I’m going to guess it was the latter half of 1986.)

At that time, the IBM PC clone market was barely getting started, and it was still fairly likely that people were using the original IBM PC. Yeah, I know it probably sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie to some of you, but IBM used to actually make desktop computers (they wouldn’t sell off that business to Lenovo until 2005). Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, but wouldn’t become the least bit dominant for close to a decade, with the dominant operating system on “PC compatible” computers remaining MS-DOS through at least the end of the decade. (Actually, Windows relied on MS-DOS until the release of Windows 95, and the first consumer version to be a true standalone operating system was Windows XP, but to most people the Windows environment fulfilled the role of operating system even if technically layered on top of MS-DOS.)

The mid-1980s were also the era in which the GNU Project was just barely getting started, with the incorporation of the Free Software Foundation occuring on 1985 October 4, just over three decades ago. The GNU operating system wouldn’t be anywhere near complete for some time; in 1992, Linus Torvalds released version 0.12 of Linux, the kernel, under the GPL, which allowed the first GNU variant operating systems comprised entirely of free software (GNU/Linux). BSD (Berkeley System Distribution) Unix wouldn’t be released under its eponymous license until 1994 due to a lawsuit from AT&T‘s Unix System Laboratories.

The dominant digital storage media of the mid-1980s were floppy disks; our first PC compatible computer in 1990 had both 5¼” and 3½” drives, with the latter becoming dominant by the mid-1990s until the effective end-of-life of the floppy disk medium around 2010 or so (we wouldn’t have CD-ROM drives until the mid-1990s and they wouldn’t dominate until close to the turn of the century). Public access to the Internet was still a few years away (to arrive in 1993).

In their place, we had analog modems which connected over phone lines, on which some ran electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes) and amateur communications networks such as FidoNet. My first modem ran at a whopping 2400 bits per second (I was a bit of a late adopter; the first widespread modems ran at 300 bps with 1200 bps coming in shortly thereafter). Large downloads (such as BBS software, like TAG or Maximus) would often take most of an hour or in some cases, over an hour or even multiple hours at 2400 bps (later I would get a 28.8k modem which would ease the pain of large downloads significantly). These same analog modems would be how most of the first home Internet users would connect, and before the end of the analog modem era, the technology was pushed to its limit: 33.6 kilobits per second, and then 53 kilobits per second over digitally-originated lines (“56K” speed, though the FCC never approved the output power necessary to allow a download speed of 56 kilobits per second).

I could go on and on waxing nostalgic (I could probably write a horror novel about things like debugging IRQ conflicts), and maybe I’ll do some more of that in a later post. Sometimes even I can’t believe the progress that technology has made. I’m known as one of the most “technology literate” people in my family, and even I am not able to keep up with all of the latest developments.

Dwight’s reporting will be dearly missed, but I am confident he will still be able to help the Houston Chronicle remain successful working at his new job there.

In closing, there are eight posts on this blog where I have mentioned or linked back to TechBlog. I present the list primarily as a further testament of Dwight’s impact as a reporter (i.e. even this blog won’t quite be the same going forward).

On the recent violence involving law enforcement

I had hoped when I wrote my post some eleven months ago about the murder of Darren Goforth that it would be the last time I wrote anything about the topic of violence directed against police. Sadly, the recent murder of five Dallas Police Department officers during protests of the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

So we add the following events to the timeline from my previous post linked above (not yet intended to be a complete list):

  • 2016 July 5: Alton Sterling was shot by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following a 911 call from a homeless person saying Alton was threatening people with a gun.
  • 2016 July 6: Philando Castile was shot by Jeronimo Yanez, an officer with the St. Anthony Police Department in Minnesota.
  • 2016 July 7: Five Dallas area police officers are killed (four from Dallas PD, one from DART’s police force) and nine other people are injured in an ambush at a protest organized by Black Lives Matter. It is the deadliest day for law enforcement since the terrorist attacks of 2001 September 11.

The loss of life which Black Lives Matter was protesting in Dallas and elsewhere was unfortunate. I’m not going to go into whether either shooting was justified, but what really bothers me is that someone got angry enough about this to go ambush a bunch of police officers who had nothing to do with either shooting as an apparent symbolic retaliation.

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway for the record. I fully condemn the attack on Dallas area law enforcement officers as a senseless act of terrorist violence and an egregious affront against our decent society and the laws which govern it. Further, an attack against police officers of a completely different jurisdiction than those involved in the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, or for that matter any violent response to the shootings of those two men, is not going to solve a damn thing.

I believe it is still possible for us to unite as a society against violence. If the officers who shot Alton or Philando were wrong, they need to be held accountable. We cannot allow those in charge of enforcing the laws which maintain order in our society to get away with breaking those same laws, or the agency/department policies that govern their work.

As long as they remain non-violent, I encourage whatever future protests Black Lives Matter or other organizations feel necessary to address this issue. But I reiterate the point I make above: violence isn’t going to solve a damn thing. All it’s going to do, especially after the law enforcement officers in the Dallas area have lost their lives for no good reason, is make whatever strife and conflict between citizens and cops even worse.

And yes, I have criticized law enforcement agencies on this blog in the past, and and some point will probably do so in the future. However at the same time I recognize that law enforcement is a tough and dangerous job, and that laws are what hold our society together. As stated by the FSF on their “Words to Avoid” page: “Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice.” And as I have said before, usually those who make the laws get it right, but not always.

Another pharmacy mishap, another young life cut short

Once again, we visit the issue of pharmacy mishaps.

CW39.com recently reported on the death of an 8-year old boy which the mother blames on a mistake made by a compounding pharmacy months prior. The boy, Jake Steinbrecher from Loveland, Colorado, had originally been taking clonidine in pill form. The pills were 0.1mg each and needed to be cut into fourths to achieve the required dosage of 0.025mg.

And then Jake outgrew that dosage and needed 0.03mg or about a third of a pill. From the story:

“But then he grew in size and we needed to go to a third,” Steinbrecher said. “And you can’t cut thirds so we went to compounding it.”

Jake’s new prescription called for 0.03mg doses dissolved in liquid form. They filled the prescription at Good Day Pharmacy in Loveland, Colorado, on Oct. 31.

“Within a few minutes, he fell into such a deep sleep his dad couldn’t wake him up,” Steinbrecher said. “I was pinching him and shaking him and I could not get him to open his eyes.”

They rushed Jake to the hospital where he was eventually airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Denver. He was having seizures, hallucinating and had swelling in his brain.

It turns out, that instead of a 0.03mg dose, he had gotten a 30mg dose. That was in 2015 October. Fast forward to June 7 of this year:

On June 7, Jake fell ill, and began vomiting and urinating blood. His mother rushed him to the hospital. His blood platelets were clotting throughout his bloodstream. This time, the little boy didn’t make it.

The story is still developing, but I wanted to get my thoughts on this out there. From my previous post on a similar situation (skip down to about halfway through or search for the phrase “And there are other situations similar to this”), compounding pharmacies are a favorite target of regulators. Maybe there is a sound reason to this, or maybe not. But often compounding pharmacies are the only choice for certain medications, and to be reduced simply to what CVS, Walgreens, etc are willing to mass dispense in pill form would spell disaster for a large number of patients across the country who currently depend on them.

It’s the “chilling effect” at work once again. When running a compounding pharmacy starts to be considered too much of a risk, fewer will do so, so there will be fewer in operation. Maybe this is exactly what “big pharma” wants in the long term. What the heck do they propose we do in cases like Jake’s where it’s simply impossible to cut a pill into the required dosage?

I can tell you that it’s certainly possible to get dosages wrong even at a non-compounding pharmacy. That said, a simple quick check on drugs.com or a similar reference would have shown that a dosage of 30 mg was way out of whack. I am inclined to believe any decent pharmacist should have caught this error before it left the pharmacy.

Thoughts on the Orlando nightclub tragedy and domestic terrorism

Sorry for the short delay on this, but I wanted to make sure I got it right. Wikipedia has most of the background for those of you who have been living under a rock, in a cave, or otherwise unplugged from the news for the past few days.

I first learned of the tragedy from ABC News shortly after sunrise (in Houston, TX) Sunday morning. I don’t know what I was doing up at that hour, but I just happened to turn on the TV and that’s what came on. At that time they were reporting “at least 20” dead and “at least 42” injured badly enough to be taken to the hospital, which would climb to 49 fatalities (not counting the gunman) and 53 serious but non-fatal injuries.

Like most sane, peace-loving people in this country and around the world, I condemn this act of egregious brutality and terror. I don’t know what kind of political or ideological message the gunman was trying to get across. It could be anything from a religious message, to an outright hate crime against those with different lifestyles. In the broader sense, at least for the moment it really does not matter.

What does matter is 49 lives were snuffed out that should not have been, and most if not all of the 53 injured will never be quite the same again, at least mentally if not physically as well.

What does matter is that here in the US, there still exists a rather high level of intolerance against LGBTQ+ people and their lifestyles (to say nothing of far more repressive regimes around the world). I have nothing against religion in general, but I have seen too many messages of hate taught in the name of religion (whether it be Christianity, Islam, or something else entirely). For the Christians, don’t forget Mark 12:31 (among others which say the same thing), “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The holy books or scriptures of every religion of substance I am aware of have substantially similar sayings somewhere.

What does matter is we have a huge issue with access to mental health care in this country. We as a society still stigmatize those who seek care for mental health issues. The hourly rate of psychiatrists and psychologists is out of reach for most people who really need to be helped, meaning many of the people who really need help can’t afford it. (And public mental health facilities in many counties aren’t anywhere near well funded enough.)

What does matter is we have a real problem with gun violence in this country. I’m not sure what the answer is, and I wish I did. According to Wikipedia, the gunman acquired the weapons he used legally, as far as I can tell. Contrary to what some may believe, he was not on a terrorist watch list at the time he bought them. (I agree that if the gunman had been on a current terrorist watch list, the gun purchase should have been declined. However, that was not the case here.) He didn’t have a criminal record (neither did the gunman in the Sandy Hook shooting, or the gunmen in the San Bernardino attack). The fact the gunman had no criminal record is, of course, little consolation when there are 49 dead, 53 injured, and an entire nation shaken up by senseless, brutal terror. But it does say that the criminal background check required to buy a gun didn’t stop this, and couldn’t have stopped this. Background checks for gun purchases may have stopped many other tragedies that we never get to hear about, but there’s no way it could have stopped this one.

As for what could have prevented this tragedy? I wish I had the answer. (Don’t we all?) I don’t think any of us will have the answer until we get more information about the gunman’s motive. The answer is going to be different if we find this was a hate crime against the LGBTQ+ community, versus if we find this was a lone wolf terrorist act, versus if we find this was a terrorist act as part of a larger organization such as ISIL, versus something else entirely. For now, the best we can do is sit and wait and let the investigation run its course.