G. Andrew Duthie asks: “Will 2005 be the year of Least Privilege” (via Robert Scoble).

Not a chance.  Why not?  Scoble sums it up pretty well (unintentionally):

For those who don’t know what Least Privilege is, it means turning off a bunch of administrator rights so that no software can install without logging off and logging back in as administrator

People don’t want to have to log off and log back on to get stuff installed!  That’s awful.  People want to use their computer and have it get out of the way.  What should happen is that they are prompted for an administrator login when admin privileges are needed and it should all just work seamlessly once such a login has been provided.  Similarly, if they are logged in as Administrator, they should have to provide their password to install software anyway so that they know it’s happening.

Every piece of comment spam I’ve had come through in the past few weeks has tried to disguise itself by using HTML entities to escape letters so that spam filters don’t trigger.  Fortunately, this makes it exceptionally easy to filter out that spam – just block HTML entities.  So as of now, if you type an HTML entity into a comment the comment will be rejected.  If you really need a HTML entity to convey your point, post an entry to your own blog and track back.

According to Reuters, everyone’s favorite former Judge – Donald Thompson – has fronted up to the district court and plead not guilty to 3 felony counts of indecent exposure after his famed usage of a penis pump in court (and other assorted indecencies).  I’m sure the team from CSI will put his DNA sample to good use, though I’d be surprised if there were a big enough twist to make a good episode out of the story.

Robert Scoble points to an article at Microsoft Monitor complaining that Microsoft is releasing too many betas.  Personally, I love the fact that companies are releasing previews of their software openly and regularly and I want to see more of it.  I know if it actually leads to better software or not, but it lets me evaluate new technology ahead of time and decide if it’s worth pursuing.  Most commonly it’s not worth pursuing straight away but later I run into a project that could benefit from that technology and return to see where it got to.  By that stage the product is normally out in a final release (often a 2.0 or 3.0).  The beta allowed me to see in broad strokes what the software was capable of and get a quick feel for it.

I finally gave in an bought a 40GB iPod this afternoon.  I intend to use it as much as a hard drive as an mp3 player though I’m already addicted to having music follow me everywhere, so it may wind up changing the way I listen to music – we’ll see how that pans out.

Where it will be useful (and has already been) is when the band is learning a new cover song and we need to find a copy of the song to refresh the memories of how it goes and work out the details etc.  Previously I’d have to go home, burn a CD and remember to bring it with me to the next rehearsal whereas now I can just plug the iPod into the PA and hear the song.  That alone will be worth the money over time and it only works if you can store your entire music collection on the player, easily carry it in your pocket (my hands are full carrying instruments and assorted paraphernalia) and most importantly, be able to navigate the songs quickly and easily.  I don’t know of anything other than the iPod that meets those requirements.  The fact that all my music is already stored, sorted and correctly tagged in iTunes (it’s only taken about 4 years to get there) is a major bonus.

A while back I mentioned that spamassassin wasn’t filtering my spam too well anymore and that I suspected it might be because the bayesian filter had been neutered.  Apparently I was right.  Since I upped the score for BAYES_99 the amount of spam reaching my inbox has dramatically reduced.  I’m back down to one or two spam messages getting through per week instead of four or five a day.

Very happy.

Technorati seem to have worked out much better ways for claiming your blog in their listings than Feedster – particularly the new auto-claim mechanism (of course you need to trust them a fair bit to use that).  With Feedster I have to paste this stupid link in a blog entry and annoy anyone subscribed to my feed or any of the planets that aggregate my feed with a pointless entry.  So Feedster, when are we going to get a less annoying method?

I previously mentioned that I don’t get Technorati.  In response to that I got a bunch of good responses so I thought I should play with it more in light of those comments.  It seems that Technorati is best used for tracking news as it happens, so the release of the Mac Mini was the perfect test case.  To add to the fun I also ran the same search on PubSub to compare the results.

I’ve been reading Scoble a lot lately and he’s so excitable about blogging and related technologies that I figured it was worth checking out some of them.  So I started playing with Technorati and so far I’m just not getting it.  It’s a far worse search engine than Google, it doesn’t pick up on changes to content particularly well, it requires people to go to a fair bit of effort to ensure that they do wind up in the index and most of it’s search results just point to stupid people ranting on their blogs (you know, like I’m doing now).

Robert Scoble points to an open letter from Jason McCabe Calacanis to Steve Jobs about Apple suing Think Secret.  It comes across to me as the epitome of childishness.  The key to it all comes down to this point:

If you want to sue someone sue your employees who send us the leaks, or your partners who tip us off. They are the ones who sign agreements with you not to talk—not us!

I think I’ve discovered the reason that SpamAssassin has been letting a lot of spam through – the bayesian filter is effectively neutered if you have the net checks on.  Now I’m sure the SpamAssassin team has a bunch of statistics why this is good in the most common case, it’s not working out so well for me.

I live with my spam filters set to throw anything scoring 3 or higher into the spam bucket (I think SpamAssassin’s default is 10) so I’m ruthless with spam and it tends to classify forwarded jokes as spam which isn’t such a loss (it also classifies emails containing flight details from QANTAS as spam which isn’t so good but QANTAS emails look more like spam than the real thing so what can you do?).  Anyway, from what I can tell, SpamAssassin will be a lot more effective for me if I add the following to my user_prefs file:

A while back this article came through the Reuters RSS feed about someone bringing an antitrust case against Apple because he was “forced” to buy an iPod.  Now while my non-laywer opinion is that he has no chance of actually winning (hint: there’s a thriving competitive environment for online music with a wide range of viable alternatives that he could have gone to instead of the iTunes store), it does concern me that people think the courts should be used to enforce open standards.  Doing so would be hugely detrimental to the software world and harm consumers more than it helps them.