Regrettably, the floppy disk is not dead

I used to have boxes and boxes of floppy disks. Today, I think I have maybe a dozen disks in all, and I would have to do a pretty thorough search to find them all. For the most part, floppy disks are completely unnecessary. I can boot from a CD to accomplish most maintenance tasks. For simple point-to-point file-transfer operations (“sneakernet”), USB flash drives are much more effective. For archiving files, I use writable CDs or, increasingly, DVDs.

In fact, I’d gladly throw away those remaining floppy disks, except that Windows XP still uses them for two essential tasks:

Creating a Password Reset disk. (If you don’t have one of these, you should. Open User Accounts in Control Panel and then click Prevent a forgotten password in the Related Tasks sidebar.)
Supplying a system driver during Windows setup. I built a new PC last month with an SATA drive as its system drive, but my Windows XP setup disks didn’t include the proper drivers, and the only way to provide the driver is using a floppy disk. Because that new PC didn’t have a floppy drive, I had to create a custom Windows setup CD with the correct drivers.

Frankly, I’m amazed that both of these legacy operations are still hard-wired to accept only floppy disks as the target. Please, Microsoft, don’t let these restrictions survive in Longhorn!

Update: In the comments, Chris Hedlund mentions that he’s about to put together a similar system and wants to learn more about creating a custom Windows XP install disk that contains the SATA drivers. I did it, and it was surprisingly easy, although you might not think so when you first see the instructions!

Start with this thread from the TechIMO forums. Scroll about halfway down to the post entitled “Install SATA drivers without floppy disk.” Follow the instructions carefully, and be prepared to visit this page at the Elder Geek’s site for instructions. If your copy of Windows XP is pre-SP2, start at the beginning with the Elder Geek’s instructions for how to create a Slipstreamed Windows XP CD Using SP2. The Elder Geek has special instructions for extracting the necessary Microsoft Corporation image file, or you can download it from the link included in the TechIMO Forum post. It sounds daunting, but the actual process is not that bad.

Highways West

Ken Layne has a new Web site called Highways West. As longtime readers know, Judy and I live in Arizona and love it. One of our favorite animals, of course, is the roadrunner, aka the “Clown of the Desert.” Today, Ken published a profile of this amusing bird entitled “Huzzah for the Roadrunner!” and it inspired me to link to his site.

We see roadrunners in our neighborhood a couple times a year. We used to have one that lived in the desert near our back yard. He’d come around to visit (and kill snakes) every so often. One memorable morning, as I sat reading the newspaper and drinking coffee, I watched a roadrunner walk by, followed minutes later by a coyote. The moment would have been complete if an Acme anvil had fallen from the sky right then and there.

I snapped this shot of a roadrunner who used to jump on our roof and tramp around. He was especially scruffy.

If you plan to do any driving in the Southwest, the Rockies, or the West Coast, check out Highways West. It’s packed with fun, useful, offbeat information. The travel forums are new and look like they’ll be useful too.

Organize your photos with Picasa

If you have a digital camera, Picasa is worth a try. I used the software before Google bought the company and fell in love with its slick, simple interface. My favorite feature is the timeline view, which lets you scroll through your photo collection by the date the pictures were taken, ignoring folders and cryptic file names.

Recently, Google released a new version:

Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you know. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.

Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print at home, make gift CDs, instantly share via Hello™, and even put pictures on your own blog.

Danny Sullivan has an excellent review that compares Google Picasa 2 and Adobe Photoshop Album 2 at Search Engine Watch. I’ve got several thousand digital photos here. I really should get them organized one of these days!

Peter Near compares Media Center Extenders

XBox or HP?

I personally believe that the XBox is the perfect client for Windows XP Media Center Edition, and have been pushing for this option for years. I was ecstatic when I found out that the Extender for XBox was in development.

I’m now lucky enough to own both the HP x5400 and more recently Extender for XBox, and have spent some time comparing the two.

This is a very thorough review that should answer most of your questions if you’ve been thinking about integrating a Media Center PC into your home entertainment system. For what it’s worth, I have the Linksys extender, and it is identical in function to the HP model that Peter writes about. I highly recommend it.

If I were a billionaire…

… I would have bought the negatives for this photo shoot and burned them:

Bill Gates Strikes a Pose

~~Reportedly, these were for a Teen Beat photo spread, 1983.~~

Update: J-Walk checked with Snopes, which has the actual provenance of these pics:

Verdict: Real photos; inaccurate description.

These images are actually publicity photos taken of the then 30-year-old Bill Gates coincident with the initial release of Microsoft Windows in 1985. The Corbis photo archive identifies their depiction thusly: “Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, reclines on his desk in his office soon after the release of Windows 1.0. 1985 Bellevue, Washington, USA.”

(Via Boing Boing.)

Give your security feedback to Microsoft

Steve Lamb is lead Technical Security Advisor for Microsoft’s ITPro community in the UK. He’s in Redmond this week and is soliciting feedback for Microsoft product groups.

I’m working with the product groups for the entire week and am keen to give your feedback regarding security functionality of our products(Windows, Office, Security Business Unit) to the management, technical and product leads.

So now’s your opportunity to get your comments, frustrations and suggestions for improvements to those that can make a difference – I’ll champion your cause providing the feedback is constructive 🙂

If you’ve got something to say, go visit Steve’s blog and post your comments there.

MCE 2005 and HDTV

In a comment on a post about Longhorn, my buddy Michael writes:

I’m confused about one thing: [Paul Thurrott] has a lengthy discussion about Windows MCE 2005 and it’s support for HDTV. But he has it as “already been released”, but I thought it was still a few months away. (maybe he’s talking beta release?)

Windows Media Center 2005 is out now. I’m running the official release. A few sites have recently posted details about a rumored upgrade this fall; as far as I know, that upgrade isn’t in beta yet. According to the rumors, HDTV support via Cable Card will be a feature in this upgrade.

MCE 2005 does indeed support over-the-air (OTA) HDTV. I have a Fusion HDTV card in my Media Center test computer. I hooked up a simple indoor antenna and I was able to watch broadcasts from one local station in HDTV. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a reliable signal from any other stations, making the indoor antenna experiment a bust. I’m off to Radio Shack for a new antenna one of these days to see if it works any better, but it looks like an outdoor antenna is the best way to get access to OTA HDTV.

The Fusion card is QAM-compatible. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the subject and in theory, it should be able to decode an unencrypted HDTV signal from my cable company. I don’t think that MCE 2005 supports QAM, however, only ATSC, and thus it can only tune OTA HDTV channels for now. I’m still trying to wrap my arms around how all this technology interacts. If anyone has any insights to offer, feel free to add them in the comments.

What happens when you don’t understand technology

Every so often I wonder why our legal system thoroughly screws up any issue that involves technology. Then I read posts like this one, from attorney Martin Schwimmer at The Trademark Blog, and I start to understand.

It was brought to my attention that a website named Bloglines was reproducing the Trademark Blog, surrounding it with its own frame, stripping the page of my contact info. It identifies itself as a news aggregator. It is not authorized to reproduce my content nor to change the appearance of my pages, which it does. In response to my inquiry to Blogline’s CEO as to whether they sell advertising, he indicated that they ‘are not currently running advertising.’ Nevertheless, the Blogline’s home page currently is soliciting ‘targeted advertisements.’ I would also assume that Blogline is accumulating commercially-useful mailing lists (its privacy policy appears to allow it to sell information). The privacy policy also has a provision entitled ‘mergers and acquisitions’ clearly allowing it to sell its lists.

Thus, in my view, Bloglines’ reproduction of my site is a commercial derivative work. Bloglines has agreed to remove my site from its service and I thank it in advance for its cooperation.

This is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Schwimmer publishes an RSS feed. You can see it here. Go ahead and click the link and you can see it in your browser in a separate window. Note the complete absence of any formatting. This is how RSS feeds work. In fact, Bloglines is a news aggregator, and a really good one. An aggregator picks up the contents of a Web site from its RSS feed, minus any design elements and contact info, and displays it within the aggregator. (Mr. Schwimmer is going to be really, really shocked if he ever discovers how many people are reading his RSS feed in other news aggregators and are seeing exactly the same stripped-down display of content as Bloglines users.)

As of today, 71 people subscribe to this blog through Bloglines, and I thank every one of you. I even have a little button on my home page that allows Bloglines users to automatically add a subscription just by clicking. If you’re curious about how RSS works, this is an excellent way to get started.

(Via Scoble’s link blog.)

Update: Derek Slater, Harvard-based copyright wonk, tries to take Schwimmer’s complaint seriously:

One of the key issues seems to be what having an RSS feed implies others should be able to do with one’s website. If Martin had no RSS feed and Bloglines was simply scraping the site, it seems people would feel very differently. But why must RSS make a difference in this case?

As I wrote in a comment at Derek’s site: Perhaps the difference is that Martin chose to publish a version of his own site, minus formatting and contact information, in the RSS format, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. The word syndication should be a tip-off that you want other people to make your content available. This is the usual and customary definition of RSS. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous, and if Schwimmer wants to change the commonly accepted definition of how RSS feeds are used, he really needs to start a larger argument, not throw a public hissy fit over a company using his RSS feed exactly as it was intended to be used.

Moral: If you don’t want your site syndicated, don’t publish in a syndication format.

Microsoft: OK, OK, we’ll fix the Windows Media DRM flaw!

Chris Pirillo hears from Matt Calder at Microsoft with an official response to the DRM debacle:

While this issue is not the result of any exploit of Windows Media DRM, we do recognize it may cause problems for some of our customers. To help mitigate these problems, Microsoft is committed to providing an update to Windows Media Player in the next 30 days that would allow the end user more control over when and how any pop ups display in the licensce acquisition process.

Chris recommends turning off the option to automatically acquire licenses for protected content. Sadly, that option has zero effect on this flaw. He also says, “ Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; Windows Media is still a fantastic format.” I agree.

Update: I have re-read this comment a few times, and I’m not sure what it means. Yes, they’re apparently working on a patch. “Allow the end user more control over when and how any pop ups display”? If the patch doesn’t change the default behavior and prevent Windows Media Player from opening a Web page that can prompt the user to install software, it will be essentially useless.

Someone at Microsoft doesn’t get it

According to a report at eWeek.com, Microsoft has no plans to fix a security flaw that affects Windows Media Player. (I’ve written extensively about this earlier; see this entry and the follow-ups here, here, and here.) This quote, if accurate, is wrong on many levels:

Microsoft officials stressed that the latest attack scenario does not exploit a vulnerability in the software.

“Not every problem comes with an automatic technology solution. In this case, the priority is to educate users and get them to understand the importance of not downloading files from untrusted sources,” said Mike Coleman, lead product manager with Microsoft’s Windows division.

“If strangers are trying to entice you to open a file, chances are they’re setting you up for a bad experience. We need to continue our work on getting people to understand what’s going on and get them to develop better download habits,” Coleman told eWEEK.com.

Mr. Coleman doesn’t get it. In a narrow sense, it is true that this does not represent a vulnerability that can cause software to be automatically installed. However, there are at least two security issues that need to be addressed here:

Windows Media Player 9 is able to bypass crucial protective mechanisms in Service Pack 2 and display ActiveX download dialog boxes that force the user to make a decision about installing software. As Microsoft’s official white paper on changes to functionality in SP2 states: “Providing add-on install prompts in the Information Bar rather than a dialog box reduces the occurrences of users inadvertently installing code on their computer.” As I documented earlier, Windows Media Player 10 behaves properly. This is a bug and should be fixed.
In all versions of Windows, an attacker can misuse a feature of Windows Media Player 9 that is designed to provide information about licenses to the user. The HTML code called by WMP 9 opens in the Internet security zone. This is unsafe. Several years ago, Microsoft redesigned Outlook Express so that all code in HTML-formatted messages runs in the Restricted zone. They should do the same with Windows Media Player. This step wouldn’t restrict the functionality of informational messages or the Windows Media Guide, but it would eliminate the ability of attackers to exploit the connection between the browser and the player.

A reporter from ZDNet UK got a similar response from a Microsoft source:

“This Trojan appears to utilise a function of the Windows Media DRM designed to enable licence delivery scenarios as part of a social engineering attack,” said Microsoft in an emailed statement.

“There is no way to automatically force the user to run the malicious software. This function is not a security vulnerability in Windows Media Player or DRM.”

But Microsoft didn’t say whether Windows XP SP2 fully protected users from unwanted downloads.

“Internet Explorer for Windows XP SP2 helps prevent downloads from automatically launching. Users who have installed Windows XP SP2 and turned on the pop-up blocker have an added layer of defence from this Trojan’s attempt to deliver malicious software,” said Microsoft.

As I noted before, this is incorrect. The pop-up blocker and SP2’s Information Bar don’t work properly if Windows Media Player 9 is installed. People who have chosen not to upgrade to WMP 10 (which is classified by Microsoft as an optional update) are at risk.

I’d like to see a response from someone on the security team at Microsoft. I’m hoping that someone who truly understands this issue is already working on the fix.

Update: It appears that Microsoft may actually be working on this after all. CNET News reports:

A Microsoft representative said the software company was continuing to pursue the problem.

“We are concerned, because it is behavior inconsistent with what we would do with our DRM,” said Mike Coleman, lead product manager for Microsoft’s Windows client consumer division.

Microsoft is planning to release an update to the Windows Media Player that will shut down a file’s ability to automatically pop up a Web page, unless the user turns that function on, a representative said.

Read additional comments by Eric L. Howes at Broadband Reports (“Blaming the User: MS & WMP Adware Installations”) and Suzi at Spyware Warrior (“Microsoft’s Totally Inadequate Response”).