Sunday, May 26, 2002

For entertainment purposes only

Glenn Reynolds links us to this, about defeating Sony's CD copy protection with a magic marker. I'm all for protection of intellectual property, but I'm having a hard time crying about this one.

That gave me an idea for another way to use your CD burner. Throw away your batteries - just plug the inputs straight into the wall and copy electricity! Then you could play it back any time you needed the power, just like a perpetual motion machine. If you needed more power in the same space, use a DVD burner instead. Right?

I would hope that most people from civilized societies nowadays would find a problem or two with the above scenario, even if they don't know exactly what it is. The ones who try it anyway, well, let's hope a breaker trips before you start a fire or get burned or electrocuted. Nah, we'd better not spread that one - there are enough strange ideas already.

For instance, legend has it that when telephones were new, scamsters would call people to tell them that the phone company was going to blow out the lines, and they should take their phone off the hook and put a pillowcase over it to catch the dust. And this nearly rendered the phone systems inoperable.

Yesterday I got a call from a relative asking about an email she had received. It told her to delete jdbgmgr.exe from her Windows system because it was a virus. This is only the latest in a series of similar scams going around - here is a list.

If they're going to do that, the least they could do is have people delete something really malicious. Like AOL.

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