Author: Chris Barrus

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Last night I had an anxiety dream

Last night I had an anxiety dream about having to send in my PowerBook to Apple for some undisclosed reason. Dream time was spent dutifully waiting on the phone for a RMA number while obsessively making sure I had at least several backups (over and above the usual one) on hand in case I needed to get at the files I haven’t touched in over two years.

Perhaps the most interesting part is that in my dream, cell phone connections still suck. This leads me to believe that like the weather, lousy cell phone connections are as iron-clad a fact of nature as say… gravity.

This also leads me to believe that the most impossible item in the Star Trek universe isn’t the transporter or warp drive, but the lowly communicator.

Windows Media Player is potential

The new version of Windows Media Player maintains a logfile of all the media (digital video and DVD, digital audio and CD) that each user plays on it, much like a browser’s cache. Unlike a browser-cache, however, WMP talks to a centralized server every time you insert new media and transmits a unique identifier number that could be stored and sold to marketers (though MSFT says they won’t be doing this). And like a history file, the media player’s file can be the source of embarassment if spouses, parents, employers, kids, etc get into it and discover your dirty little viewing and listening habits.

Privacy experts said they feared the log file could be used by investigators, divorce lawyers, snooping family members, marketing companies or others interested in learning about a person’s entertainment habits. It also could be used to make sure users have paid for the music or movie, and have not made an illegal copy.

“The big picture might be the owners of intellectual property wanting to track access to their property,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University.Link [bOing bOing]