0:56 video.

The design may save your finger, but it looks like you have to replace the blade and the safety mechanism if you accidentally trigger it.

Yesterday, I followed up a link from Glenn Reynolds and discovered that the conventional Volokh Conspiracy url: www.volokh.com was working just fine again.

Last month, it was impossible to access that eminent legal blog using that address from several East Coast computers. My theory was that someone with a grudge against that blog had distributed a Trojan which overwrote that address in the Hosts File. I was planning to edit my Registry one of these days to fix the problem, but then Glenn Reynolds mentioned hearing about the problem, and identified an alternative working URL: www.Volokh.Powerblogs.com, eliminating the need to go to all that trouble.

I’m glad the issue is gone, but I wish I knew what really happened.

Anime JDZ – How’d I get those bangs? And why are my eyes that weird color? Doesn’t look like a proper Bishōnen to me.

Ever wonder what you’d look like young, old, Caucasian, African, Oriental, an anime hero, or a member of the opposite sex, insert a photo image of yourself at this University of St. Andrews Perception Laboratory site, and morph away

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers, and GMSV, where she found it.

South Africa has the highest incidence of reported rape in the world. One in three women questioned in a recent Johannesburg poll said they had been raped in the last year.

In response, a new invention will soon be marketed, a female-used condom-like device with teeth.

Some liberals are outraged.

This is a medieval instrument, based on male-hating notions and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape and violence against women in this society,” said Charlene Smith, one of South Africa’s most prominent campaigners against rape.

“It is vengeful, horrible, and disgusting. The woman who invented this needs help.”

On March 14 I reported finding it impossible for several days, since around March 10 or 11, to access the Volokh Conspiracy Blog at its conventional address: www.volokh.com.

Clearly, my experience with this problem is not unique, since Glenn Reynolds blogged about this yesterday (March 18).

Professor Reynolds kindly supplies a solution which saves all of us affected the necessity of logging into our computers in Safe Mode and searching the Registry for a corrupted Host file.

All one needs to do is use Volokh.Powerblogs.Com instead.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Last Saturday, I clicked on an Instapundit link to a Volokh posting, and got the traditional MS Explorer negative page-not-found response.

The page cannot be displayed

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

Even important blogs have technical difficulties, so I simply shrugged and made a mental note to try again later.

But when the problem was still there on Monday, I concluded there was more to this than meets the eye.

About a year ago, my personal computer was infected by a Trojan, which exploited one of those only-too-numerous Microsoft vulnerabilities. It was the sort of thing which hijacks your computer to send out thousands of replications of itself covertly, degrading system performance significantly in the process.

I would never have known it was there, but for the fact that I could no longer log into Norton to update my antivirus software. The Trojan wrote to my Host file instructions directing all prominent antivirus website addresses to a dead address.

Wikipedia discusses this kind of hijacking technique in its Host file entry.

Further investigation established that my wife’s notebook was blocked from Volokh Conspiracy by the same malware. But a friend in California last night was not impacted by this problem.

I don’t recall exactly which file needs to be edited, but I can tell you that correcting this kind of problem is a lot of work. One has to turn off System Restore, reboot the computer in Safe mode, then edit the Registry to get rid of the illicit Host file entry. Entering Safe Mode is a bummer for me, because it will mess up all the icons on desk top, producing even more work sorting them all out again.

Would readers please check to see if they can link to Volokh Conspiracy, and tell me via email, or in Comments here, if they are also experiencing the same problem?

A former employee reveals 14 icompany secrets about HP printers.

1: Many HP Printers, like their laser printers, have a built-in page-count after which they won’t work. This resides in the a transpart sometimes called image or drum kit. Rather than get the printer fixed, it’s often cheaper to buy a new printer, OR you can do a NV ram reset. It resets everything in the printer, including all the page counts, but it’s not without risks.

2: To get past the voice prompt system, repeatedly say “Agent.” It will take two or three repetitions, but it will get you to a human.

3: If a set of cartridges cost more than the printer, don’t buy the printer. It’s considered a “throwaway” printer. HP service techs are told to spend no more than 30 minutes working on these because at that point, you are costing HP money.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

“Introducing the book,” i.e. the codex. A medieval user has problems with that piece of technology, the book.

2:24 video

Hat tips to David L. Larkin and Karen L. Myers.

Never Yet Melted has been out of service since yesterday as the result of a type of database error which seems to strike about three times a year. I can usually fix this error quite easily, but every now and then the easy fix will not work, and repairs are more difficult.

We have some planned inprovements which, we hope, will eliminate these kinds of lengthy outages in future. But, you know how it is….

The world’s oldest surviving newspaper Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar (Mail and Domestic Tidings, subscription required), has gone to web-only publication.

AP:

For centuries, readers thumbed through the crackling pages of Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper. No longer. The world’s oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace. The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden’s Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. It’s a fate, many ink-stained writers and readers fear, that may await many of the world’s most venerable journals.

Meanwhile, the world’s most meretricious and unpatriotic newspaper is losing staggering amounts of money, and Arthur Sulzberger sees the handwriting on the wall, too. Interviewed at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Haaretz reports that Sulzberger said, “Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet.”

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

No printed Times? Whatever will we use to line the bottom of our canary cage?

Michael Geist, in the Toronto Star, points out some things about Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, which are enough to make me think twice about my future OS plans.

For the past few months the legal and technical communities have dug into Vista’s “fine print.” Those communities have raised red flags about Vista’s legal terms and conditions as well as the technical limitations that have been incorporated into the software at the insistence of the motion picture industry.

The net effect of these concerns may constitute the real Vista revolution as they point to an unprecedented loss of consumer control over their own personal computers. In the name of shielding consumers from computer viruses and protecting copyright owners from potential infringement, Vista seemingly wrestles control of the “user experience” from the user.

Vista’s legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user’s knowledge. During the installation process, users “activate” Vista by associating it with a particular computer or device and transmitting certain hardware information directly to Microsoft.

Even after installation, the legal agreement grants Microsoft the right to revalidate the software or to require users to reactivate it should they make changes to their computer components. In addition, it sets significant limits on the ability to copy or transfer the software, prohibiting anything more than a single backup copy and setting strict limits on transferring the software to different devices or users.

Vista also incorporates Windows Defender, an anti-virus program that actively scans computers for “spyware, adware, and other potentially unwanted software.” The agreement does not define any of these terms, leaving it to Microsoft to determine what constitutes unwanted software.

Once operational, the agreement warns that Windows Defender will, by default, automatically remove software rated “high” or “severe,” even though that may result in other software ceasing to work or mistakenly result in the removal of software that is not unwanted.

For greater certainty, the terms and conditions remove any doubt about who is in control by providing that “this agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights.” For those users frustrated by the software’s limitations, Microsoft cautions that “you may not work around any technical limitations in the software.”

Those technical limitations have proven to be even more controversial than the legal ones.

Last December, Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand released a paper called “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.” The paper pieced together the technical fine print behind Vista, unraveling numerous limitations in the new software seemingly installed at the direct request of Hollywood interests.

Guttman focused primarily on the restrictions associated with the ability to play back high-definition content from the next-generation DVDs such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (referred to as “premium content”).

He noted that Vista intentionally degrades the picture quality of premium content when played on most computer monitors.

Guttman’s research suggests that consumers will pay more for less with poorer picture quality yet higher costs since Microsoft needed to obtain licenses from third parties in order to access the technology that protects premium content (those license fees were presumably incorporated into Vista’s price).

Moreover, he calculated that the technological controls would require considerable consumption of computing power with the system conducting 30 checks each second to ensure that there are no attacks on the security of the premium content.

Good grief! I can just imagine how many programs will get removed by Defender.

Microsoft announces the release of new versions of its flagship products.

Preston Galla of PC Word has 15 reasons to switch to Vista.

But Mike Elgan of Computerworld has some compelling arguments as to why you should wait to get Vista already installed on your next PC, or just switch to a MAC.