Napster: close but no cigar

I finally got around to trying out the new Napster music service and I have to say I am pretty impressed. Not with the technology, that is somewhat buggy, but with the value of their $9.95 a month subscription service. Not to make this sound like a Napster commercial but... when I can stream or download (yes, download!) as much as I want or can listen to for $9.95 a month I think I'm going to be pretty happy. Yes, its true that they only have a million or so tracks and there are some big omissions (wot, not Beatles?), but almost anyone can eat vast tracts of time finding music they have never heard before.

The thing that breaks the deal for me is that I can download the music for offline use, and offline use on at least three computers, so effectively by three different people. That doesn't apply to streaming, only one person gets to stream or listen to their radio stations at a time (or you will be forced to login after each track) but three computers playing saved music is not bad. Naturally if you believe DRM on your music is evil then you'll hate Napster since if you stop subscribing all those tracks will suddenly become useless. But my opinion is that for the $120 I'd spend on Napster subscription I'd get way more utility from it than I will ever get from the 10 CDs worth of store bought music that represents. And if you really want to own the music you can still buy it just as like you do with iTunes or Microsoft Music - at $0.99 a track.

At last: an anti-spyware tool from Microsoft

Microsoft finally unvieled their AntiSpyware tool, its downloadable in beta-form. Having just spent several hours clensing the latest in a long line of spyware ridden PCs I thought I'd give it a try. So far its "two-thumbs up" from me. The download and install went without hitch, the instructions were simple and I selected a complete scan as opposed to a smart scan. Surprisingly the complete scan only looked at my C: drive and ignored my E: drive, but there are options to select other drives is available. You can also schedule scans to occur automatically and a daily 2am scan is by default scheduled after installation. A daily 11pm update of spyware definitions is also scheduled by default.

The complete system scan of the 35,000 files on my almost full 80Gb C: drive plus the registry took just under 15 minutes. Afterwards it reports 6 "threats" of which two were in an archive of files from an old laptop, three were left over files and registry settings from an old install of Kazaa (which may or may not include spyware), and one way a legitimate FTP server (Serv-U) that is sometimes installed by spyware as a backdoor to your system. Along with each threat was a list of all the files and settings that comprise that threat plus a description of what it was and how it might compromise the system.

I was offered options to remove, quarantine or ignore the threats, with a default selected on the severity of the threat. There was also an option to set a system restore point which was by default off (I think it should be on by default). I decided to remove all the threats except my FTP server which I told it to ignore so that further scans would not report it as a threat. The removal went fine except that my request to set a restore point first failed for unknown reasons. The things I chose to remove were not active spyware, just unused files and registry settings so it wasn't a great test of the removal functions.

My experience is that few if an anti-spyware tools can really do removal well - you at least have to boot into safe mode first, an unpleasent experience for most consumer users, and you may also have to kill other processes manually like Windows Explorer - something average consumers and even some more experienced users are not going to be able to achieve. Some threats also require manual hacking of the registry and other settings which is beyond the vast majority of PC users to achieve without a high risk of SNAFU.

The AntiSpyware tool also offers to report your infections to something called the SpyNet anti-spyware community, presumably for statistical tracking of threats. SpyNet was operated by the Giant company that Microsoft acquired it antispyware technology from so when you report to SpyNet you're actually reporting to Microsoft. I have not attempted to analyse what information is sent back but I'm reasonably confident its benign data.

Beyond spyware scanning the tool offers realtime protection by various "agents" it installs. These monitor registry settings to detect rogue processes that are attempting to install themselves into your system, or mess with your Internet Explorer setup. This sort of functionality has been available before in the Webroot SpySweeper tool, and in various standalone products. In general I'm highly in favour of this approach to stopping spyware because by the time spyware is actually installed its often too late to do an easy cleanup following a subsequent scan. Besides, blocking spyware before its installation is the only way to ensure that your privacy and systems security is preserved. I've yet to see what the various agents do when a threat is detected trying to install itself - if its as user friendly as the rest of the program then I'll be happy.

Some advanced tools and options do exist such as blocking any Visual basic and registry modification scripts from running, and selectively disabling all the various startup applications. The latter has always been available on Windows XP via the 'msconfig' application, but not in a very user friendly way. Having this integrated into the tool itself is a good idea and will aid those trying to assist spyware infected clients. There is also a page that lists all the Internet Explorer settings that are commonly used in browser "hijacks" and lets you selectively restore them to their defaults. Finally there is a privacy tool called "Track Eraser" that can be used to erase cookies, browser password and form settings, and other application stored histories. The list of applications it knows about seems to be a fixed one, but it does include several non-Microsoft applications such as Acrobat Reader, ICQ and Kazaa.

Overall I have to say two-thumbs up. When I have some experience of this tool with a real spyware infection I'll give a further report. My biggest concern so far is the rumours that Microsoft will actually charge to use this tool. I'm very surprised that they do not bite the bullet and admit that providing this service to Windows users free of charge should be a cost of doing business. I suspect that part of the reason for charging would be to avoid anti-trust issues as providing a really effective and free tool to block spyware (and eventually viruses from what I've heard) would put many anti-spyware companies out of business.

From my perspective I say "be gone parasites!". If they can do a better job then Microsofts free tool then they'll survive, if not then the have no legitimate reason to exist since they were just exploiting deficiencies in the core Windows OS that never should have existed. They never should have expected their business model to remain valid forever - just as all those people who were selling firewalls. Unlike browsers and media players anti-spyware, anti-virus and firewalls are things that not only should be provided with your OS, I would say they must be otherwise Microsoft is making its self liable to a huge class action suit by every Windows user. It also good for Microsoft to provide the tool for free because they must have a huge load on their customer support caused by spyware and viruses, ditto for every Windows reseller like Dell, Gateway, HP etc. etc. The simple act of including an effective and easy to use deterrent and save them and everyone huge amounts of money and resources and make desktop OSes much more economically viable and efficient proposition.

Municipalities against the corporations

Ron Sege writes over at news.com about a broadband bondoggle in the making. Although coming from a corporate background Sege writes in favour of letting local municipalities compete with existing broadband service providers. He argues that recent legislation in Pennsylvania is serving against the best interests of the people by impeeding the expansion and improvement of broadband access where existing carriers are dragging their corporate heels in the interests of short term profit.

I couldn't agree more. I had an argument about this recently on my local ISPs forum. My opponent in the argument just kept saying that having government entities provide services is a) unfair competition and b) inefficient. He claimed that a government has an inherent and unfair advantage against any external competitor. Furthermore, this advantage makes government service providers lazy and inefficient and unable to promote or invest in new improvements.

I couldn't agree less with these arguments - most of these municipalities are wanting to provide services because their local providers are not innovating or even providing basic servic. The encumbant service providers are unfairly exploiting their position and frequently exploiting a monopoly advantage.

Furthermore governments are directly responsible to their citizens but customers are usually at the mercy of their providers when that provider is essentially operating a monopoly or trust. Just as people what they think about their local phone company and look at how many are ditching those phone companies to go with mobile phones where there is at least a choice of a few providers in most markets (even that is reducing).

The "digital dialtone" market desperately needs more competition and in IMHO any source is a welcome one. If corporations can't compete with local municipalities then they need to re-examine why they are in business in the first place. Perhaps they need to IMPROVE their service, offer NEW services and be MORE EFFICIENT themselves?

You say QWERTY, I say DVORAK...

Engadget has a story on a new keyboard that's using the ABCDEF... style key layout. While beginner typist friendly its certainly not friendly to the regular keyboard users hands. As you may know the familiar QWERTY layout was designed to be friendly to the manual typewriter internals - by placing frequently used keys far apart it reduced the number of jams. As a by-product it required the typist to use the most finger motion compounding the problem of repetative strain injuries in typists. Now we're all typists we are all suffering dailing from the archaic QWERTY keypad. And the ABCDEF layout isn't really much better.

A long time ago (1936) the Dvorak layout was figured out to be the one requiring the least amount of finger motion. Named after its inventor August Dvorak and not the key layout it was made an ANSI standard in 1982. Placing the most used letters close together meant few trips to the peripheries of the keyboard and less straing on the fingers. Dvorak also claimed his layout was actually faster - although this is now widely disputed (see Wikipedia for some papers on this topic) - and hence that Dvorak was the Betamax of keyboard layouts. Other layouts are possible, including Dvorak layouts for one handed typists (left or right hand only), and ones that use chorded keypresses (multiple keys pressed at a time).

To me the big problem is, if I went out and retrained myself to use a non-QWERTY layout what would I do everytime I went to use someone elses keyboard? Or when someone else wanted to use my keyboard? Much pain and suffering would ensue. The solution seems to me that keyboards should be designed to have a tiny LCD or some other kind of presistent display technology, that can be remapped on the fly. Inserting some kind of personality card, detecting the user precence via RFID, or even scanning a thumbprint (its fine for non-high security uses) could remap the keys to the current users favourite layout. Since the well trained keyboard user seldom looks at the keyboard anyway the actual labels on the keys aren't that important most of the time.

An alternative is that we all carry our own keyboard with us and have it connect wirelessly with whatever system we are using - indeed in my vision of componentized and networked personal computing systems everyone should be able to walk up to any computer and do this anyway. There should be no requirement to touch anyone elses computer physically to use it, even for POS and vending style applications. With the advent of folding and rollable keyboards this seems even more feasible.

Backup!

Having read a story about yet another all singing, all dancing home gadget with oodles of hard-drive storage I'm lead to wonder, "What if the hard-drive crashes?". Now I know some people, especially the sales people, will tell me that hard drive failures hardly ever happen these days, but its also true that drives in the home can be subject to quite a beating. No air conditioned, temperature controlled environment for them. Now they get to sit in hot sweaty appartments inside machines with air intakes covered in pet hair and chassis' subject to regular kicks by swinging feet, not to mention beltings with the vaccuum cleaner once in a while.

Such harsh treatment at home is probably why most hard drives sold for consumer use now only have a one year warranty vs. three or more years for enterprise use. Manufacturers were just taking too much of a hit with returned drives to make a three or more year warantee viable.

So my message to consumre device manufacturers - if you sell me a set top box, home media computer or anything with a hard drive inside it, for heavenes sake give me a way to a) backup my data, and b) replace the hard drive without significant down time and data loss. Can you imagine what happens now to the average Windows Media Center or TV owner when their hard drive fails? They kiss goodbye to hundreds of ripped CDs (we hoped they were ripped and not ripped-off MP3s from Kazaaa etc!) and hundreds of hours of favourite TV shows carefully saved over months if not years. Plus they almost certainly have to return the system to the store or manufacturer to get the drive replaced and OS reinstalled.

Hard drive storage is now so cheap (around $50 for a very respectable 80GB 7200rpm drive) that conusmer appliances should come with hot swappable RAID storage, or support an external or hot swappable spare drive e.g. using eSATA or Firewire (please no extra power cords for it either) that can be used as a boot drive should the main one ever fail. Such things might add $50 to the cost of a system but really, ammortized over the lifetime of the device and considering the impact it will have when the drive eventually fails or requires upgrading - it'll be priceless.