Macking 136

Microsoft Pwns* Your Vote, Too
Recently, as in just before the election, HBO ran a movie called "Hacking Democracy," exploring the ways that the Diebold corporation, as well as the others, have created a system that lets unauthorized people easily and simply modify the results of the vote. Experiments were performed, sample votes were conducted, all documented on videotape.
If the rest of the news media weren't also Pwned, this would have generated headlines for weeks. (Some of the footage was part of a BBC broadcast in 2004.)
*Hack-speak for Owned - controlled by outsiders.
At the very root of this, not expressly named, was Windows. All of those voting machines are running Windows. How easily hacked? One of the experiments involved a PCMCIA memory card that was supposed to store the results of the tallies. It is supposed to contain nothing but data (and nothing at all when being first plugged into the slot). It contained an unauthorized Executable (.exe) file. So did the others.
The code for modifying the tallies, supposedly uneditable and untraceable, was downloaded from the Web by the show's producers. They wrote an application that would apply a -5 negative value to one side and a +5 value to the other. Then they ran a single-issue vote before the cameras where the voters gave one side six NOs and two YESs. When the Diebold box printed out the results we all saw the results: seven YES and one NO. There was no trace of the malware after the process had run.
After witnessing this example and hearing testimony, the California Secretary of State decertified the machines for use anywhere in the state. Ohio, however, after seeing the same and other evidence, ordered $20 million worth of machines from Diebold for the 2006 election. Thirty other states are using Microsoft-infected voting machines. Secretaries of State are still forbidden by law from having access to the source code of the applications used for both marking votes and tallying results. Secretary of State is a partisan office in most states, so there has been little motivation in many red states to do anything about the problem.
To see all the gory details and follow up on the issue, check out Black Box Voting.
The best part of all this, of course, is the fact that the Dems won in a rout anyway. A four-million-vote thumb on the scale didn't help the Repubs. But the problem is still there, waiting for improvements in the hacks and more nefarious work on the part of the voting machine providers to make sure the 2008 election is hacked. The only solution is to kick Microsoft out entirely and run open-source software exclusively so the entire process can be tracked and verified.
Radio commentator Thom Hartmann insists that in no state should the vote be privatized. Every level of our public elections should be owned, supervised and checked by elected officials and volunteers. As it stands, no one has the legal right to inspect the workings of the voting machines. Make sure your local representatives hear from you.
Oregon's vote-by-mail system is almost completely free of these problems. Even though the counting machines are electronic scanners, there is a paper trail that can immediately verify the accuracy of the count. More states need to move in this direction.

Locating Corrupt Fonts with OS9
Have a corrupt font somewhere that crashes your Mac every time Quark tries to display a page that contains that font?
You need a Mac capable of booting into OS9, so if you do, here's how to find a single corrupt screen font without using the mouse at all.
First, open the folder that contains your fonts - the one in the System Folder and the one you organize all your others. I call mine "Fonts for Suitcase." Sort that folder By Kind so they are all clustered. This should be the last time you have to use your mouse.
Select the first suitcase in the list. Hold down the Command key and type O A O. This opens the suitcase, selects all the sizes of the fonts within, and then opens them all at once, each in their own little window. While gazing at the screen to see all those open windows, repeatedly type Command-W to close each one. The last command closes the font suitcase but leaves it selected. Tap the down arrow to select the next in line and repeat the process.
When you hit the suitcase with the corrupt font size it will either crash upon opening, or it will display the font in Geneva. Remove that font from the suitcase, close it and reopen your crashing document. There is a good chance your problem will be gone.
It can seem to be a daunting task, to open and inspect every size of every font you have, but this will let you sort through hundreds of fonts in less than half an hour. Under OSX there is no way to extract a single font size from a suitcase.
(I wrote this for MacDirectory but it is worth running here because most of you won't ever see that magazine. It's not well distributed.)

iTunes 7 Bug
I finally found something wrong with the new version: The Visualizer, which displays animated patterns to the music used to run fine on my twin-450 G4 tower, but version 7 plays at only three frames per second. Absolutely terrible performance on old Macs. Stick with version 6.5.2 or older if you use this feature. So far, Apple has not reduced our rights and options for dealing with purchased music from the iTMS, but be sure you go to Preferences, Advanced, Importing and set your options from AAC to MP3, 192 Kbps or higher so you won't be throwing away so much data when you are importing CDs. MP3s will work on any player, not just the iPod.

Another Day, Another $50,000
A friend reports that the company he works for was down for the weekend while they tried to resurrect their network after being hit with the ZeroDay virus. How did they get infected? Consultants bringing in laptops, plugging into the network and Zap, $50 grand worth of lost productivity and work to clear it out. But that's okay, say the directors, it is a cheap, small price to pay to help keep Microsoft in business and provide extra billable hours for the IT department. There isn't a thing the company is doing that could not be handled for less money by running a combination of Linux and Macintosh systems exclusively, but then people wouldn't get the spontaneous vacations, now would they? All we can do is point and laugh.

They're Just Shameless
Walter Mossberg reports in the Wall Street Journal Personal Technology that the Microsoft Zune song-pricing scheme is as close to bait-and-switch as is legally possible. Here is a paragraph exposing the scam: "...worse, to buy even a single 99-cent song from the Zune store, you have to purchase blocks of "points" from Microsoft, in increments of at least $5. You can't just click and have the 99 cents deducted from a credit card, as you can with iTunes. You must first add points to your account, then buy songs with these points. So, even if you are buying only one song, you have to allow Microsoft, one of the world's richest companies, to hold on to at least $4.01 of your money until you buy another. And the point system is deceptive. Songs are priced at 79 points, which some people might think means 79 cents. But 79 points actually cost 99 cents."
The rest of the report is pretty contemptuous.

M$ Backs Off on Vista
Due to demands from developers, Microshaft has backed off on their stated limitation of two installs of Vista maximum allowed before requiring you to rebuy it. Like the voters, the people who must work in the M$ world do have limits to what they will put up with.
This includes Mackers as well, of course, because some of us will indeed be installing Vista on our Intel Macs, which will let us bypass corporate demands that a computer be a Windows computer. Maybe the purchasing departments won't pay for Macs, but now they will have no legitimate reason to prevent us from getting them. You will, of course, have to go through the same daily virus/spyware prevention that the all-Windows users should be doing. Just be sure to install Firefox for your Web browsing and use anything you can but Outlook for your email.

Cigarette Ads
Have you noticed how much TV advertising for Dell, HP and other computers resemble cigarette ads? (Those of you too young to remember them on TV should visit YouTube and search for "Cigarette ads.") They would always paint beautiful pictures of green grassy meadows with fluffy white clouds while beautiful models gazed lazily into each other's eyes as the announcer intoned how it was all about "taste," while never getting around to explaining why you would actually want to use tobacco in the first place?
When the government-ordered warning labels and disclaimers were spreading, the tobacco industry did not fight the demands to get their ads off of TV, partly because the equal-time provisions (remember them?) that allowed for antismoking ads were starting to be effective. Also, all that money could be migrated to print and billboards.
Imagine if Dell had to put a warning label on all the boxes and ads with words to this effect:
"Consumer Warning: This product contains Windows, software that will expose you to 120,000+ viruses, worms, trojans and spyware. You could find this computer taken over by spammers and surreptitiously used to do their dirty work through your Internet connection. You must run daily updates to anti-malware programs you have to purchase to prevent such a takeover. Not doing this could expose you to legal liability. You agree to allow Microsoft, their developers, the movie and music industries unfettered access to your machine to delete files as they see fit, should their automatic scanning software decide that you are not authorized to use or possess those files."
Quoting Monty Python, "Sales would plummet!"
Oh, and don't be too self-satisfied, Mackers. Some day we will get a few pieces of malware of our own.

Skype Eats Your Bandwidth
Are you using the Skype internet telephone service? Even when you are not using it, it can use half a kilobyte of data transmission per second (1.3 GB per month). This can be quite significant if you have a limited service. This is so it can serve as a "supernode" allowing others to know when you are available to receive calls. Some universities have banned the service because of this. You can quit the program or force your Mac to sleep to stop the hemorrhage, but then you can't receive calls. Skype knows of this problem but so far has done nothing to fix it. A program called NetLimiter can throttle down the drain, but of course that program is Microsoft only.
Check with your ISP before ordering Skype to see if you have a limited bandwidth service. The speed of your service isn't an issue; the slowest DSL connection is sufficient, but if they limit your maximum transfer, you can't use Skype.
Cringely on PBS wrote a column about this, and the general limitations imposed on Skype users. He also covers the subject of saturation and how all networks expect only 10-15% of their users to be active at any given moment. Good info there..

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)