Culture

Buzz Out Loud 799: Pop a cap in your usage

Molly Wood Former Executive Editor

Molly Wood was an executive editor at CNET, author of the Molly Rants blog, and host of the tech show, Always On. When she's not enraging fanboys of all stripes, she can be found offering tech opinions on CBS and elsewhere, and offering opinions on everything else to anyone who will listen.

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Molly Wood

Aug. 29, 2008 2:13 p.m. PT

5 min read

Comcast comes clean with its bandwidth cap: it's coming, it's coming in October, it's 250GB, and they won't give you any tools for monitoring their use, and if you exceed your cap twice, you get the boot for a year. So, we have a little fun with that. Also, a little fun with IE 8 Beta 2 bugs, the lack of Kindle this year, and the pseudo-alphabetical distribution of spam.
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EPISODE 799

Comcast puts a cap on Net usage
http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2008/08/25/daily35.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10028506-2.html
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-comcast-to-roll-out-monthly-usage-cap/

Kaminsky DNS bug claimed fixed by 1-character patch
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/29/127210

Microsoft warns of IE8 lock-in with XP SP3
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9113739

No new Kindle this year
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007628.html

Yahoo kills their social network
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10028716-36.html

Psychologist invents new uber-wiki
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/29/mememoir_uber_wiki_announced/

Android developer challenge winners announced
http://code.google.com/android/adc_gallery/

Alphabet decides who gets most spam
http://www.pcworld.com/article/150464/alphabet_decides_who_gets_most_spam.html

Coca-Cola readying 100-flavor soda fountains
http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/29/coca-cola-readying-100-flavor-soda-fountains/

Voice mail

Camilla
Rant of the week.

Josh Denver
So… About the hydrogen…. Seriously.

RogueTess
Why water is different than OS X

E-mail

Hey Guys,

About the story in 798 - artists not selling their music on iTunes because of lack of an album only option - I disagree with the stance that this purely the record labels trying to exert more control. In the Ars Technica piece you will notice the it says Kid Rock decided to pull out of iTunes not his label. I’m assuming that this decision is because it’s a concept record, which is something of a lost art these days.

I work on three music projects in which I write, produce, and release all the music myself through Tunecore. While I love the service and it’s very convenient to release to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and others, I find it to be a rather frustrating process to figure how to release our music in that i write in terms of a concept album and to break it up is difficult decision to make because you feel like you are putting something out there that is out of context. What ultimately I decided to do is to use iTunes to release compilations containing songs from all three projects and use Amazon mp3 the sell them as an album only, as you failed to mention or you didn’t know Amazon does offer this option.

I leave you with this if Pink Floyd released the The Wall today would have gained as much acclaim, attention and influence on later bands as it did in 1980 when it was released or would be just about Another Brick in The Wall and Comfortably Numb.

Great show.

Eric - DC, Soon to be back in Austin

**********

Buzz clique,

It appears in episode 798 you have finally addressed one of the fundamental issues that have divided our two nations for decades. I thought I’d set you straight as to what the deal with ‘pants’ is.

There’s a reason why pants is a British adjective for something that is not good. This is because when we use the word pants we don’t think of a pair of well cut, nice fitting khakis from Gap, but rather a pair of sweaty, skid marked, discarded undercrackers.

The American use of pants in place of trousers has always bothered me slightly, but not as much as the over pronunciation of the letter I. I will not be going to EYEraq, taking antEYE-depressants or installing Norton AntEYE-virus. Pretty sure you guys aren’t guilty of this one though. Right on, and more power to you.

Love the show, and what the frack is a Kindle?

Greg, London

P.S. Caprica? WICKED!

**********

Buzz Fellows,

I simply cannot believe that the circumstances behind the situation of the Pants story (from episode 798) exist at all! Everyone knows (or, apperantly they don’t!) that you never, ever store customer’s actual (plain-text) passwords ANYWHERE.

The standard practice is to use a Hashing algorithm to create a unique and one-way translation of the user’s password into a key. This key cannot be reverse engineered to obtain the original password, but the same password will always generate the same key. So, when you store or check a user’s password, you hash whatever they enter and compare the key to the key you have in your database.

If you store plain-text passwords, as Lloyds TSB clearly does, then you run the HUGE security risk of providing a malicious attacker with thousands of users’ real passwords, which could be used immediately to log into their accounts. This is all a story within itself BEFORE we even get to the fact that someone felt the need to change a user’s password!

When I read “In these cases an advisor can read the full password.”, I nearly had a heart attack.

~EndangeredMassa

**********

hey buzz crew

i have been waiting to hear about a solution to the firefox flash video issue, as it affects me all the time!
i mostly have 15-20 tabs open when browsing.. maybe that does have something to do with it?

in the mean time, i’ve found that i can watch flash video in firefox ( 2 / 3 ) without the issues by using the ‘ietab’ extension

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

So, everyone can use this while they wait for adobe and mozilla to work it out!

Cheers

Aladar

**********

I was the person who created the JaMoTo Analysts site. I don’t know if you noticed, but the logo I used was the NTT DoCoMo (The Japanese cell phone carrier) logo, I changed the logo around a little bit and added some effects, but the next day I got an email form DoCoMo asking from me to take down the logo! I don’t even know how they saw the page so fast! The email said that the DoCoMo logo is there property and that it should not be used or altered at all, and that if I don’t take down the logo it could lead to quote “LEGAL ACTION”! My first thought was to take down the logo, but should I? Do I have the right to use a heavly altered logo on the site. I have no intention of making money off the site, I am not selling a product or anything. I have no idea what to do!

-Hayden