Microsoft’s “Stupid Button”

June 28th, 2006

I woke up this morning to discover that my PC became smarter
overnight: now it tells me that I might have purchased a
fake/counterfeited copy of Windows XP.

Well, of course it is! I live in the Third World. Walk
around my city and I’ll give you a thousand pesos each time you find a
user with a genuine copy of Windows; I’m confident I won’t even use up
five-K. This is one of our “perks” here–while folks in First World
countries legitimately purchase every piece of software churned out by
the Evil Empire, we do so, too–only at a fraction of the real retail
price. And by “a fraction,” I mean, “crumbs,” baby.

Somebody said that the whole software industry is just like sex: for every dude who pays for it, a hundred gets it free.

But this rampant software piracy is actually a good thing for
Microsoft–with almost everybody eager to use Windows “because it’s
illegally free,” this bootlegging “system” keeps Linux outside the
gates.

But recently, there’s this uproar over the new Windows Genuine
Advantage (WGA) authentication software, or what ZDNET’s Ed Bott calls “Microsoft’s Stupid Button.”
Many people see it as Microsoft’s “kill switch”–it’s probably
Microsoft’s sneaky way to disable non-genuine Windows installations,
apart from the fact that, basically, this is Microsoft messing with your machine’s security. What freaks out everybody is the fact that Microsoft itself does not deny it.

Says Ed Bott:

“…Currently, Windows users have the ability to opt out
of the Windows Genuine Advantage program and still get security patches
and other Critical Updates delivered via Windows Update. The only thing
you give up is the ability to download optional updates. Hackers have
been working overtime to find ways to disable WGA notification.
If WGA becomes mandatory, would it mean that Microsoft could prevent
Windows from working if it determines – possibly erroneously – that
your copy isn’t “genuine”? That’s a chilling possibility, and Microsoft
refuses an easy opportunity to deny that that option is in its plans.

What’s most disturbing about this whole saga is Microsoft’s complete
lack of transparency on the issue. And before the ABM crowd jumps in
with predictable “What did you expect?” comments, let me argue that
Microsoft actually has a fairly good track record on transparency
issues in recent years. Windows Product Activation is very well
documented, and when a similar uproar occurred in 2001, it was
squelched quickly by some fairly prominent postings from high-level
executives who provided details without a lot of spin. Likewise, the
Microsoft Security Response Center has done an exceptional job at
providing quick responses to security issues. (Just ask Adam Shostack.)

Currently, no one at Microsoft is blogging about this fiasco. No
executive has been quoted on the record about it. There are very few
technical details available, and those that have been published are
being tumbled through the spin machine and spit out as press releases.

If Microsoft really does plan to turn WGA into a kill switch in September, be prepared for an enormous backlash.

Yesterday, I rewatched Kevin Costner’s The Untouchables.
Robert de Niro there, at one point, is fuming mad; he kicks everything,
spits in the floor, and grumbles, “I want him dead! I want his family
dead! I want his children dead! I want him dead!”

I think around some months ago, while the new WGA version was being
cooked up, somebody at Microsoft was probably aping Robert de Niro with
the end-user in mind.

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The Notebook

June 28th, 2006

Toilet
“I have to take a dump,” Jessie whispered.

“What? You mean, now?”

Jessie winced; I saw desperation in his eyes. It made me shiver. It made me mutter to myself, Oh, shit, indeed.

This was in third grade. Our teacher, who was heavy with child and
terribly cranky, was introducing a new math concept that required us to
work with strange symbols. I was straining to understand the whole
thing when Jessie, who sat beside me, tapped me with an icy hand and
winced and said he really, really had to shit.

“What did you eat?” I was trying to keep my voice down, hiding my
embarrassment over this shitty conversation. “Why now? Couldn’t it wait
till the next decade?”

Jessie tried to speak, but he suddenly stood up with that strange
gait as if he had a small animal coming out of his butt. He went to our
teacher, whispered something, then off he went. He walked out the door
like a duck in pain.

I felt guilty somehow. Jessie was, after all, my best buddy. I had
other pals, but Jessie was my Heavy Artillery; he was one of those Luca
Brasi types who were brutal to enemies and loyal to friends and a
weapon you only unleashed to destroy countries like the former USSR.
Jessie was very useful when, for instance, one of the nasty kids from
another grade level wanted to smash my face because I had committed the
terrible mistake of playing in the seesaw that the kid apparently
“owned.” It didn’t help that I tried to give the corny explanation that
only “God could own the seesaw.” I would have been dead had Jessie
didn’t intervene on my behalf; he had that ugly scowl and those fists
that would force the copious birthing of second thoughts even in the
head of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Jessie became my loyal friend because he was sort of slow. It would
take him a while to understand the lessons, and often he’d rely on me
to supply the answers during spot quizzes. I was not really smart, but
I was not daft, either. Maybe I just knew my way around little tricks.
When you think about it, the world is just an endless Easter egg hunt;
others stumble in the grass and use brute force to look for the eggs,
while others just sort of feel the right places where to look. Jessie
fell in the former category, while I probably belonged in the latter.
Or maybe I was just lucky in some strange way.

But the point is, Jessie regarded me as some sort of savior for
“academically” saving his ass so many times. There was one irritating
moment when I was even tempted to call him stupid to his face, only
that I suddenly remembered Jessie’s strategic role in the schoolyard’s
system of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and the wisdom that you never, ever call your “nuclear warhead” stupid.

So when on that shitty morning Jessie sallied forth to crap, I felt
a pang of guilt. It was one of those feelings that suddenly blanketed
you and made you remember all those shining instances when Jessie the
Good Guy stood beside you to battle the schoolyard monsters. It was an
ugly feeling, something I’d probably never get used to. So what I did,
I also went out and followed him to the restroom.

I have to tell you about the restroom. It was a place where the word
“rest” was as alien and awkward as Eddie Gil in Malacañang. It had that
sticky stench that would cling on your skin and clothes, and its walls
had ugly rust stains that must have been there since the Cretacious
period. Entering the restroom felt like entering the maw of some huge
beast that had severe halitosis.

I found Jessie in the last cubicle that the rest of the world
usually ignored. I knocked softly on the door and, to lighten things
up, said something like, “Did you eat over-ripe pineapples? Because
your shit smells like The Sickness.”

Jessie opened the door a bit and stuck out his sweaty face and said, “I need water.”

“Water? You wanna drink here?”

“No, no,” he said. “I need to wash my—”

“Okay,” I said. I looked around. I tried turning the faucets but
they coughed out air. There was a plastic drum in a corner, but it was
much taller than me and there was no way I could get anything that it
contained. Exasperated, I gave Jessie the bad news.

Jessie frowned. “I’m dead.” Then something flashed in his eyes. He said, “Get me some paper!”

“Toiler paper? I have no—“

“Any paper! It doesn’t matter,” he said, wiping his forehead with
the back of his hand. All this while he’d been sitting on the toilet
and sticking his head out the door. “Get me some scrap. Anything… Or
get me one of my notebooks.”

My mouth fell open. His notebooks? You know you’ve hit
rock-bottom when you’re beginning to sacrifice dear things like school
supplies. Jessie loved his notebooks because they served like some sort
of status symbol; while the rest of us kids had notebooks with pictures
of local movie stars on them, Jessie’s notebooks were the expensive
types that had pictures of the Transformers and Voltron, which were way cool. It was a mark of Jessie’s stature in our universe. Besides, he loved his notebooks so much he rarely wrote on them.

“You can’t be serious. You’re sacrificing them in the name of some crappy—”

“Oh shut up! Just get my notebook, okay?”

I said nothing. I frowned and decided he must be insane. But I had
never been in the kind of shoes he was in, so maybe I just didn’t
understand the magnitude of his dilemma.

I ran out and went back to the classroom, only to find the class in
the middle of a spot quiz. Everybody was in the heat of answering their
papers. I quickly forgot all about Jessie and how he must have festered
in that cubicle for an hour more. I only remembered him and the
notebook he needed to wipe his butt when the quiz was over. But then,
it was too late. Jessie appeared at the door, an uneasy smile on his
face. When he came over, he even thanked me.

“Because you didn’t come,” he said. “You just saved my notebooks from my desperation.”

I stared at him. “Don’t be corny,” I said. “You’re making me want to take a dump, too.”

Later that school year, Jessie would crap once more, and it would be
worse because he’d do it right on his seat—right beside me. I would be
so ashamed of him that it would mark the end of our “friendship”; in
the budding self-consciousness of people in the third grade, there were
few things you could get away with, but defecating in the classroom was
not one of those things. Literally shitting in class marked you for
life in our small town. And by “life,” I mean, until high school.

“I used all my paper money,” he said. “Say, can you lend me some money for my fare home?”

Sure, I said. I felt so tired and sick to my stomach. This whole
business was making me wish I should have flushed Jessie down the
toilet bowl—if only I had water.

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Another Week

June 23rd, 2006

Cutting the crap: A call center agent from the Third World calls a spade a spade.

Rizal and his little-known connections.

Technology: Making computers more “humane”, and the lure of OpenBSD.

Websites that made us look: Pretty bloggers, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and the Square One for the creative.

Pop artifacts: ASH-friendly, ass-friendly, and another one for your wood.

Other things in the footsoldier’s armory:

[Image by Rebecca Hitchman and Magnus]

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Your Blog’s 15 Minutes

June 19th, 2006

Somebody sent me this link today. It’s called 25peeps, which I hear is a cool way to enjoy what Andy Warhol would call your blog’s fifteen minutes of fame.

The last time I checked, 25peeps
has a dozen pretty faces and amazing bods on its homepage, and who
knows, it might be your tits, err, I mean, face flashing next.

My favorite featured blogger there right now is Lindsay, who maintains a nicely written blog and,
well, it doesn’t hurt that she publishes a lot of her semi-nekkid
photos. Who doesn’t want that?

So if you have a blog and you want ten million people flooding it, check out 25peeps and the world is yours. Yes, I mean it.

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A Week of Skirmishes

June 16th, 2006

Essential Cruelty: Spiders to me: “We come in peace.”

Sacred Cow: Cardinal Sin as Bond, James Bond

Websites that made us look: first shags, strange people, Death’s insufferable know-it-all, and the manliest bastard of ‘em all. And yes, a curiosity for the artsy.

Films: One pretty Korean movie, and free open-source eye candy.

Software: Who cares about Windows Vista? We do.

Gaming: The guys with the largest gaming cojones in the world.

Other things in the footsoldier’s armory:

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Creature Feature

June 13th, 2006

My room was slowly becoming like the set of a low-budget horror flick.
The reason: I just couldn’t find the heart to kill the spiders.

At first, there was only a single occupant. One spider was weaving a
web across my room’s fluorescent tube that I thought, maybe it wouldn’t
hurt if I’d allow this guy to live. If you knew me, you’d be surprised
with my sudden turn to being merciful. I have always squashed bugs at
first sight. I stomp on them, spit on them, piss on them.

I especially have a specific hatred for roaches, and I suspect the
hatred is coming from what I call “species envy”—after all, these
little fuckers have been here far longer than my own species, and they
doubtless will outlive my kind long after the last human civilization
has fallen. The puzzling fact of the tandem of their uselessness and
indestructibility as a life form would usually make me chuckle in my
dark moments of lucidity. That’s why I hate them.

But there was something about spiders that made me relent to an
“armistice”: their persistence, perhaps, and the way they reminded me
of Sisyphus? Their dogged, singular desire to accomplish their little
goal?

So I shrugged and turned my back and focused on my work. The next
thing I’d see, ten amazing days later, was not a simple web but a
bustling gauzy galaxy of Spiderville: a growing empire of almost
invisible strands you’d see only when light brushes on them.

One night I counted something like more than a dozen spiders. My
ceiling was getting thicker and thicker with them, and I imagined they
approved what crappy thing I happened to be writing (I usually work in
my room). There was one instance when one of them rappelled from the
ceiling to my shoulder and made a soft landing on my laptop. Rappelled! Like those guys from SWAT! But instead of squashing the interloper with my fist (see Destroying the Beautiful),
I gently poked its belly. It panicked and pulled up frantically. It
made me laugh; there was something irresistibly comical about a
frightened spider, something that made you imagine that it might be
thinking: “Oh, crap! Nobody mentioned this human in the travel
brochure!”

I couldn’t destroy them for some reason. Maybe because they reminded
me too much of a regular extended family: there was the pair of large
spiders that I assumed were Ozzy Osbourne and his wife. There was the skinny gray one that looked like Paris Hilton. There was a squat one that reminded me of Mike Enriquez. There was Etta Rosales and Love Anover, and all the famous stuck-up Filipino bishops from the CBCP. They were all having a party on my ceiling.

I knew this was bad; you begin anthropomorphizing
bugs, and humanizing the toilet seat might be next. I was beginning to feel like I was that guy in Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express: talking to the soap, to the wet towel, to the empty house. But in probably the
same way I didn’t care much about social approval, it wasn’t also
bothering me that my room was beginning to look like the structural
carcass of some failed ancient civilization.

One late afternoon when I came back from [insert vapid existential exercise here],
I met my mother coming out of my room with a broom in her hand and a
smile on her face. Then I saw why: she had cleaned up. Everything in my
room was squeaky clean.

And when I looked up, there was nothing, nothing, nothing. Everybody was gone. Somehow, I felt a pang of loneliness.

After that, I got very busy; those were frenzied periods of my life
when days consisted mainly of dunking my head into one blur of futile
human activity to the next. But one night, as I hammered away on my PC,
a spider rappelled down from the ceiling. I looked up and followed with
my eyes the source of its long thread, and what I saw stretched my
mouth into a grin. The little guys were at it again, rebuilding their
empire.

I felt a strange calm, that sort that puzzled you because you’re
unsure what it means, because you couldn’t instantly find the source of
that confusing delight. But then, I realized what was making me happy.
So I did the only nice thing I could think of.

I destroyed them all—in one easy sweep. The fuckers didn’t even have time to blink.

Visit the Skirmisher.

 

 

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Crossing the Rubicon

June 6th, 2006

I’ve packed up and dragged my dripping paraphernalia across the Rubicon last week, which is just my pretentious way of saying I’ve bought a domain for the new Skirmisher blog. I got tired of Blogger acting more and more like a petulant spinster landlady throwing her weight on me when all I’d want was some more breathing space and the freedom to splatter my sidebar with dancing naked chicks. What’s wrong with that?

Before anybody arrives at the fair-enough conclusion that I’m an ungrateful bastard (which I usually am, but not entirely in this case), I’m grateful for Blogger because, after all, it’s free. But in the past month or so, I’ve had growing needs that Blogger couldn’t anymore feed. I wanted to do this and that, but Blogger kept shaking its head and saying, “No, no, no, you silly twit, you can’t eat that!” So I stopped and meditated on the wisdom of setting up my own home and tweak some Php. Which I did, but only after much bloodshed.

The Skirmisher, at its heart, is also a “thought experiment in motion,” much like the old Skirmish of Dark and Light blog. But I’ve created it because I want to spread the idea’s wings a bit wider. A small bunch of “like-minded individuals” are also helping me out in the daily posts, which also means the blog will be “buzzing” every single day with nice, filthy things to crap about. There are just so many interesting things into which I’m sinking my fangs these days that you have to open the door a bit further to let more sunshine in. There’s so much garbage you have to haul. So much blood you have to spill. So many throats you want to open with your teeth. And exactly the reasons why life, despite all its crap, is so fucking beautiful.

Our transition from a Blogger blog into a full-blown “online disease” is best summed up in the Monty Python words: “We’re no longer the knights who say, ‘Ni!’ From now on, we’re the knights who say, ‘Ecky-ecky-ecky-ecky-p’tang-zoo-boing-goodem-zu-owly-zhiv.’”

I’m still trying to figure out a way to let other people who are not my cousins and friends to register and pitch in their stories and integrate everything into the whole framework. Yes, I hear it can be “easily” done (so say the geekier among us), but I want it done in “a beautiful way.” Currently, I’m tinkering with Scoop, while Wordpress is already sitting there like a queen and taking care of the blog’s smallest concerns. The Devil inside me says Scoop is The One, but I try to ignore it and listen to the other gremlins that my own host says are “equally cool,” like Drupal.

I don’t know, I still have yet to sink my fingers into these sandy, fuzzy things.

After all, it’s already a major feat for me to be able to kick the Skirmisher out of the door and into the world; you know, it’s not my only life, thank you very much. I still have to watch House MD [many thanks to Caloy], deal with people I work with from another part of the globe, do silly things like writing what my grandmother considers “an ugly version of Madame Bovary,” shoot the shit.

For the kind folks who’ve been stumbling in the darkness of this blog for the past few months, thank you. I’m playing my flute once again. Update your feeds and bookmarks and links and follow me to the new rabbit hole—the Skirmisher. 

There’s a world going on.

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“The Skirmish” on Bloggy Award

June 6th, 2006

Bloggy Award slathered some nice words on The Skirmish of Dark and Light.

The free lunch shouldn’t be far behind.

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