ARTS & FARCES internet

I’m still not sold on this whole podcasting thing—I fill the audio channel of my workday with background noise: NPR or the same music I’ve been listening to for 30-40 years. I find that podcasts require active engagement, so my podcast diet is pretty sharply limited to ex-community radio guys and other folks who have experience with the audio form. That’s not to say that I don’t actively listen to some things; having spent a few years in the recording industry, it’s impossible for me not to listen deeply. It’s just that most podcasts just aren’t quite there, qualitatively, yet. I much prefer the written word for news, information, and even recreation.

That said, I can’t understand why gadgets like the Marantz PMD 660 aren’t taking the podosphere by storm. I first learned about these solid-state flash media recorders from my buddy Mike O’Connor who uses the little Marantz to produce his Sex and Podcasting podscasts. If units like the Fostex FR-2 had been available ten years ago, I would probably never have stopped recording live music in the field. Surely these have replaced the not-so-venerable Tascam DAP-1 DAT recorder by now, right? I see that the Oade Brothers are offering modifications to both the Marantz and Fostex recorders. Second generation solid-state recorders will almost certainly shrink in size and battery performance.

UPDATE: Monday, 08 August 2005 08:32AM CDT Mike O’Connor emails (from the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I think) to say that the current apple of his recordist’s eye is the Korg D4 Compact Flash 4-track portastudio. No uncompressed recording, and do digital I/O, but hey, what do you want for US$400.

Last Friday I’m pretty sure I came the closest to dying since being diagnosed with end-stage renal disease six years ago.

The dialysis machine is supposed to shut down immediately if it senses any air in the blood lines, but it didn’t. Last Friday, about halfway through my treatment, I heard a quiet “whoosh” sound and looked down to see a very large air bubble—probably 10cc or so in size—traveling quickly down my venus line. I had the foresight to quickly crimp the line and then a nurse clamped it. The bubble was two inches from making it into my bloodstream. If it had, it would have killed me. The nurse tried to convince me—probably to keep me from freaking out—that the bubble was saline but I showed him that squeezing it just caused it to move on down the line, rather than dilute the blood in the line as saline would.

Want to help with the complete reimplementation and redesign of an award-winning national (US) magazine website?

I’m looking for an ExpressionEngine and MySQL hacker that can help migrate an existing website into ExpressionEngine and work with our team on this demanding project. We’ll be migrating 10 years worth of back issues from an existing IBM database (with a lot of bad HTML markup) into ExpressionEngine/MySQL and implementing a fairly complex information architecture.

Advanced working knowledge of ExpressionEngine, MySQL, PHP, CSS, and XHTML required.

If you’d like to take on this project as an independent contractor, email me with work samples and an hourly rate.

Michael Lynn was a security researcher for Internet Security Systems (ISS) until last week when he resigned. Having provided Cisco with a report that clearly outlined a security flaw in its router operating system last April, Lynn was reportedly frustrated with the networking giant’s slow response and decided the right thing to do was to expose a core vulnerability in the internet’s infrastructure. And that’s just what he did at the Black Hat security conference.

In a conference session, Lynn demonstrated how one could exploit a known security flaw on Cisco routers, in effect taking them over and potentially disrupting traffic on the internet, by executing arbitrary code on the Cisco equipment. Lynn told the session attendees that he had quit his job at ISS after the company decided to cancel the previously scheduled session. Session notes for Lynn’s presentation, “The Holy Grail: Cisco IOS Shellcode and Remote Execution,” were removed from the conference proceedings, reportedly by Cisco employees. “I feel I had to do what’s right for our country and the national infrastructure,” said Lynn, addressing the Black Hat conference attendees. “It has been confirmed that bad people are working on this [compromising Cisco’s IOS router operating system]. The right thing to do here is to make sure that everyone knows that it’s vulnerable.”

Internet Security Systems representatives told CNET that Lynn’s presentation was cancelled because “it wasn’t ready yet.” That’s apparently not the full story. “[A] source close to the Black Hat organization said that it wasn’t ISS and Lynn who wanted to cancel the presentation, but Cisco,” according to the CNET report. “The research is very important, and the underlying work is important, but we need to work with Cisco to determine the full impact,” ISS chief technology officer Chris Rouland told the online technology news publication.

Straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel, a Miami politician, accused of money laundering and soliciting a male prostitute shoots himself on the “polished terrazzo floor” of The Miami Herald‘s lobby. That “polished terrazzo floor” bit must be the New York Times’ idea of adding color to the story.

But you know that can’t be the whole story, this being Miami and all. Herald columnist Jim DeFede secretly taped a telephone conversation with the politician, Arthur Teele Jr. That might be against Florida law. According to the New York Times, “all parties must consent to the recording or disclosure of the contents of any wire, oral or electronic communication.” Except for business calls. In 1991, a federal appeals court ruled that recording business calls without the other party’s consent was legal.

Here’s where it gets weird and will almost certainly make it into a Hiassen work sooner rather than later. The Miami Herald fires DeFede, but only after permitting him to transcribe the tape. The Herald then, according to Abby Goodnough’s account in the New York Times, “published portions of the conversation as described by Mr. DeFede.”

Here’s the money quote from the Herald‘s executive editor, Tom Fiedler:

“We expect our people to act in a highly ethical way, and Jim admitted that he had crossed that line, and I really didn’t see an alternative,” Mr. Fiedler said. “If we have that expectation and someone fails to abide by it, knowingly fails to abide by it, regardless of that person’s talent it means they can no longer be a part of The Herald.”

There’s lot’s of hand-wringing and whining going on in corporate media circles, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s highly unethical for the columnist to record a source without his knowledge. But it’s just peachy keen fine for the columnist’s employer to publish that conversation. That kind of twisted logic doesn’t work anywhere. Not even in Miami.