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I am thoroughly sick of the phenomenon I call the Draco Malfoy Effect. This is the process by which young (and not-so-young) women become convinced that not only are evil bad-boy types desirable, but completely reformable. Liking the maverick is nothing new for the Hollywood-hypnotized masses, especially seeing as how he’s so often played by a desirable star. However, liking the villain–the kind who has not yet been definitively shown to possess a heart–to the point that you believe he can be saved through sex with either a) you, b) your Mary Sue, or c) the ingenue of the cast is, to my thinking, simply bizarre.

I’d love to have a discussion on this. Please comment. (Even if you think I’m the one with her head on crooked.)

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To be honest, I haven’t used any instant messaging system much since college. But every once in a while I fire up Gaim just to see if anyone I know is on AIM or ICQ. I have a Yahoo account, but I’m not sure anyone I know actually uses Yahoo Messenger, and I’ve been avoiding MSN mainly on principle.

Sadly, it seems the IM wars have returned.

This time it’s Yahoo that’s blocked other clients from connecting to their networks. The most high-profile victim has been Trillian, another client which talks to multiple IM networks, but of course Gaim was hit as well. What’s interesting, this time, is that Yahoo claims it’s doing this to cut down on spam.

Now let’s think about this: In order to send and receive instant messages on Yahoo’s network, you need a Yahoo account, correct? So no matter what software a spammer uses to connect, he still needs to log in, which means Yahoo can control them inside the network. This is where current IM systems are fundamentally different from email: instead of many independently-controlled systems talking to each other, each IM service is one system with many accounts, more like a website with required registration. Place limits on what clients can do, and (barring bugs in your server) no matter what client someone uses, he can’t get around your spam/virus/hack controls.
Continue reading →

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Long story short: while Eudora is still my favorite Windows-based email program, its HTML rendering is so bad that I had to read today’s Microsoft Technet newsletter on my Linux box. (And before anyone comments that I can set Eudora to use IE’s rendering engine, I don’t want the security mess of letting Internet Explorer handle my email.)

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This morning I recieved both a bogus “Out of Office” reply from someone at Halliburton (presumably from a virus that spoofed my address as the sender) and a new 419 scam variant, this one claiming to be someone in Iraq. (I still think of them as Nigerian scams, but they’ve gone seriously international over the past year or so.) Subject line: “EVERY IMPORTANT” (really!)

Something to consider on those vacation messages: I was just sent some random Halliburton employee’s cell phone number. Not that I have any use for it, but would you hand out your cell number to any random person on the Internet? I know I wouldn’t!

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This is from an ad for Comcast cable-modem service that arrived in today’s mail. I almost threw it out, but then I noticed something very odd about the middle picture on the front:

Picture of an iMac silhouette running Internet Explorer

Now it may not be obvious at this resolution, so how about a closer look at the corners:

Close-up of screen corners showing IE toolbar and window border

Wow – that’s the first time I’ve seen Windows XP running on an iMac!

I guess with Comcast you have to fire up VirtualPC just to run Internet Explorer. 😉