I normally try to stay clear of political discussions on this site. But recent comments by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) caught my eye. I was startled to read his apparently serious suggestion that copyright holders should be allowed to reach out over the Internet and destroy the computers of those who download illegal copies of music or movies.

Oops. It turns out that Sen. Hatch’s Web site is using an unlicensed copy of a JavaScript-based menuing program, and if the Honorable Senator were to extend his ill-tempered thoughts to software, the server hosting his Web site would be a pile of smoking rubble right now. (For details see the Wired News article Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?)

Now, as someone who makes a living selling copyrighted materials (the meager commissions I make when you buy my books from Amazon.com pay for the hosting of this site), you’d think I would be at least a little bit on Sen. Hatch’s side. And I do agree that most programs like the defunct Napster and Kazaa are simply ill-disguised tools for wholesale theft of intellectual property. But someone needs to tell Sen. Hatch that this is the 21st Century, and that he’s not in the Wild West anymore.

My most recent column at Microsoft.com, Share Digital Photos, contains all sorts of wonderful advice for anyone who owns a digital camera. (It also includes a great photo of my amazingly photogenic cat Katy.)

Since that column appeared, I’ve received several emails from people who tell me that their copy of Windows XP is missing the Resize command that I write about.

Apparently, some graphics programs scramble a DLL in Windows XP. Fortunately, there’s a pretty easy fix. If you can’t find the Resize menu, follow these steps to restore this functionality:

Click the Start button, click Run, and type this command in the Open box:

REGSVR32 SHIMGVW.DLL

(Note that there’s a single space in that command, after REGSVR32.) Click OK.

That should get you back in business.

About six weeks ago, I warned you about Critical Update 811493 (see edbott.com: When an Update Needs an Update…). As promised, Microsoft has revised this patch to address the performance issues that were plaguing users of Windows XP Service Pack 1.

If you’ve been holding off on installing this patch, it’s safe to do so now. You’ll find it on Windows Update.

eWeek Magazine has a chilling report in its current issue: University of Calgary to Offer Virus-Writing Class. The report sent me to the university’s news center, where I found this press release about its class in “Computer Viruses and Malware,” boasting that it will “focus on developing malicious software such as computer viruses, worms and Trojan horses.” According to the professor who’s teaching the course, “By looking through the eyes of the people who develop these viruses, our students will learn what their targets actually are and what needs to be protected…. This attitude is similar to what medical researchers do to combat the latest biological viruses such as SARS. Before you can develop a cure, you have to understand what the virus is and how it spreads – why should combating computer viruses be any different?”

Can we all agree that this is insanely irresponsible? Public health researchers learning to fight SARS or Ebola don’t start by going into the lab and creating their own designer disease first. They work in carefully controlled environments with existing viruses, learning from the inside out. Responsible computer security researchers have plenty of existing viruses to deconstruct if they want to learn how malware works. We don’t need to teach people how to write hostile code.

Given that the age group most often associated with virus-writing is the same as the undergraduate university population, this just seems stupid.

I’m switching from DSL to cable next week. My local cable company (Cox) says I can pay them $15 a month to rent the modem, or buy one from them for $90. Or I can head over to Amazon.com and get the
Linksys BEFCMU10 EtherFast Cable Modem for $77 with free shipping. (A buck less than Newegg.com, even!) Or a
Motorola Surfboard SB5100 for $65. Or a
D-Link DCM-200 for $66 with a $20 rebate.

So my question is: Why would anyone pay $15 a month to RENT one of these things, when the payback period is between three and six months and it takes about 5 seconds to connect one? I just don’t get it.

Well, it’s probably time for someone in Microsoft’s British office to get sacked. The New York Times reported today: ‘iLoo’ Internet Project a Hoax.

Amusingly, several sources at Microsoft and its PR agency confirmed the story last week. Oops!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve begun writing regular columns for Microsoft’s Expert Zone. If you’re into online music, check out my latest column, Master Your Music Library.

If it were April 1, I’d be inclined to dismiss this as a practical joke. But it’s not, so I won’t…

“The iLoo being developed by the MSN division of Microsoft Corp. in Britain is a standard portable toilet — a loo to the English — with a wireless keyboard and extending, height-adjustable plasma screen in front of the seat. … The device is expected to be in use at festivals this summer in Britain, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Tuesday. There’s no word on if, or when, the iLoo will make its way across the pond.”

From Yahoo! News – Microsoft Plans Toilets With Web Access

Would you want to touch that keyboard? And how long do you think those pricey plasma screens are going to last given the typical, shall we say, youthful exuberance of the average attendee at a summer music festival?

OK, how cool is this? Add the Google Microsoft Search page to your Favorites, and you can search for any term, restricting the results to those found on Microsoft sites. Handy when you’re trying to find official answers or developer-specific information.

As always, the Google folks have even come up with a clever logo for this page. Check out the Windows XP-style background!

I was unpleasantly surprised today to discover that Matrix NetSystems abruptly suspended its Internet Weather Report recently. By the looks of some mirror pages, it appears this happened around April 17-18.

For those of you who never saw it, the IWR was a service that regularly sampled routers around the world and then graphically displayed the results in a very cool Java map. Looking at the map (especially scanning the reports from the previous day or so) was often a way to tell whether connection problems were the result of congestion on a portion of the Internet’s backbone somewhere, or whether there was something wrong with your computer.

After a bit of poking around, I turned up a few alternatives:

• The Tera-Byte Internet Weather Report gives a snapshot of status and latency statistics between a Tera-Byte server and a bunch of routers on the Internet. Useful if you host with these guys. Also requires that you know which routers your connections are likely to use.
• Internet Health Report – Does hourly checks of connections between major segments of the Internet backbone by provider (UUNet, Cable & Wireless, Qwest, etc.). Drill down in the connection to see geographic reports. For instance, my Qwest connection gets handed off to AT&T regularly, so I can click on the Qwest-to-AT&T link and see how well traffic is moving from Chicago to Phoenix. Numbers represent latency times where, confusingly, smaller is better.
• AT&T Data and IP Services publishes Backbone Delay and Backbone Loss statistics. You can use the city pairs to get an idea of how traffic is flowing in the US. Not very useful for the rest of the world, and also less than helpful if your traffic is racing around on someone else’s network.
• You can get another perspective from MCI’s Latency Statistics page. Funny, I used to remember it being at Worldcom. Guess they don’t want to use that name anymore.
• For a more global perspective, look at the Real-Time Performance Statistics from Cable & Wireless, which give a very broad picture of how traffic is flowing between four very large parts of the world. Not very granular, but interesting.

And that appears to be it. I can’t find anything that offers the same at-a-glance snapshot of Internet performance that the IWR did. RIP.