TidBITS#769/07-Mar-05
=====================
It's a potpourri issue this week, with Glenn Fleishman testing
the new technologies in Apple's latest PowerBooks, Jeff Carlson
realizing how much he misses Mac OS 9 windowing behavior
in Mac OS X, and Adam's look at LinkBack, a new open source
technology for linking data between applications. Anchoring
it all is Adam's analysis of how digital rights management
technologies are undermining our societal expectations of
how copyright law should be enforced. In the news, we cover
Timbuktu Pro 8.0, Rogue Amoeba's new Airfoil, and the Microsoft
Office 2004 11.1.1 update.
Topics:
MailBITS/07-Mar-05
Two-Fingered Blackout PowerBook Dropping
LinkBack Brings Back Data Linking
Mac OS X Window Behavior
Why DRM Offends the Sensibilities
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/07-Mar-05
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Copyright 2005 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
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MailBITS/07-Mar-05
------------------
**Timbuktu Pro 8.0 Finally Adds Encryption** -- I'm not a
nervous nelly, but it's always bothered me that my Timbuktu Pro
connections are being sent in the clear when I'm not using a
virtual private network (VPN) connection. Finally, Timbuktu Pro 8,
released last week, includes standard SSH (Secure Shell) support
and even uses its built-in compression to enhance speed. SSH
uses public-key encryption to exchange a one-time session key.
As long as you know that the public key is valid - which needs
to be established by what are called "out-of-band" methods of
confirming a certificate's identity - then you have something
close to absolute assurance that no one can (currently) snoop
your session.
<http://www.netopia.com/software/products/tb2/mac/>
Timbuktu Pro 8 also uses Mac OS X accounts instead of requiring
separate account management, has drag-and-drop file exchange from
a remote shared window, allows push installations if SSH (the
Remote Login checkbox in the Sharing preference pane) is turned
on, and works with Rendezvous. A new single-user license costs
$95, and a twin pack costs $180 (other pricing is available for
multiple licenses); upgrades for current owners are 50 percent
off the new license rate. [GF]
**Stream Anything to an AirPort Express Using Airfoil** -- Rogue
Amoeba has released the first version of Airfoil, a program that
can take the audio output of any program under Mac OS X and
stream it using AirTunes to an AirPort Express's audio output
jack. It's a simple piece of software that will delight all
AirPort Express owners who want to stream audio from applications
such as QuickTime Player, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player.
However, due to latency between Airfoil and the AirPort Express,
audio and video will not be synchronized, such as when playing
a DVD and sending the audio to a home stereo; Rogue Amoeba has
posted a possible workaround that's worth trying. There's no
guarantee that Apple might not step in and update their AirTunes
software to disable Airfoil, but it doesn't seem to fall into
the category of things that Apple believes is detrimental to
their products, contracts, or partners. The software costs $25,
but Rogue Amoeba is offering it at an introductory offer of $20
through 31-Mar-05. [GF]
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/>
**Office 2004 for Mac 11.1.1 Update Improves Stability** --
Microsoft has released an update to the English and Japanese
versions of Microsoft Office 2004 (French, German, Italian,
and Swedish versions still to come). All Office programs gain
improved display of inserted PICT images and correct importing
of black-and-white scans from Xerox scanners. In addition,
Excel 2004 features improved performance when calculating array
formulas that include a user-defined function, PowerPoint
2004 better handles opening presentations with invalid font
information, and there's a fix that could cause Office 2004
programs to freeze when users with Adobe Acrobat opened documents
containing forms created in Visual Basic for Applications.
The 17.4 MB update is available via the Microsoft AutoUpdate
utility (look in your Applications folder) or as a stand-alone
download. [ACE]
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/autoupdate/description/AUOffice20041111EN.htm>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=
/mac/download/office2004/update_11.1.1.xml>
Two-Fingered Blackout PowerBook Dropping
----------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I asked Apple to loan me a new PowerBook so I could test
first-hand the hardware features they added in the latest
refresh a few weeks ago: the scrolling trackpad, the Sudden
Motion Sensor for hard drive protection, and increased
backlighting for the keyboard. You can read about these
features in Apple's marketing materials, but it's nice to
test them first hand.
<http://www.apple.com/powerbook/>
Using the scrolling trackpad is more natural than it may sound.
You use two fingers to gesture across the trackpad to simulate
a mouse's scroll wheel, which works horizontally as well as
vertically; the sensor has no trouble telling the difference
between one finger or two. (I've been waiting since college
for 3D gestural recognition; a scholar-in-resident spent a
year working on that, but obviously we're not there yet.)
Apple says the keyboard backlighting is up to 10 times brighter
than in the previous models, and, man, are they right. In a
fully darkened room in the back of my office, I kept hitting
the brighter-backlight function key and the room got brighter
and brighter. It's so bright, in fact, you'll set it below maximum
for most situations.
As for the Sudden Motion Sensor, which detects quick movement and
locks the hard drive heads, you may ask, did I drop the PowerBook
from a great height? Hey, this is a loaner, and I'm responsible
for returning it intact. So, no. But I did shake it and drop it
in my hands, and it surely did pause and restart the drive without
a skip. For a more entertaining test of the Sudden Motion Sensor,
see Amit Singh's exploration of the sensor's capabilities,
including software that adapts to the PowerBook's position (such
as a self-adjusting window that stabilizes itself according to
how the laptop is tilted).
<http://www.kernelthread.com/software/ams/>
LinkBack Brings Back Data Linking
---------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Have you ever pasted a graphic into a word processing document
and later wanted to update it? It's a tedious process of opening
the original file, making your changes, copying the new graphic,
returning to the word processing document, deleting the old
graphic, and pasting the new graphic. It doesn't have to be
like this - applications can share data in a rich fashion that
enables communication between the two applications. In fact,
within limited spheres, some applications already do this, usually
within a suite of programs from a single company. But a new open
source technology, called LinkBack, promises to bring data linking
to more Mac OS X programs. Such a technology would be welcome,
since Apple has made various failed attempts at providing such
connectivity over the years.
If you've been around the Macintosh world long enough, you
might remember Apple's Publish & Subscribe technology. It
appeared in System 7 back in 1991 and enabled you to "publish"
data - a picture, some text, a chart - from one application and
"subscribe" to it from another application - in essence, to insert
a live copy of the published data into another document. That way,
if you changed the graphic in the publishing application, the
subscribed document would automatically receive the changes.
Publish & Subscribe was a nice idea, but as late as 1994,
I was commenting in TidBITS that it was a failure due to a
poor implementation and minimal support from developers.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=01980>
Then there was OpenDoc, a technology Apple introduced at the
Worldwide Developer Conference in 1994 and which became real in
late 1995 and early 1996. Apple never did a good job of explaining
OpenDoc, but in essence it enabled a document-centric interface
in which small modules - potentially from different companies -
combined to provide the power of a monolithic application.
The theory was great: you could put together exactly the word
processor you wanted by adding together the best Find module,
and the best Table module, and so on, and they would all fit
seamlessly into the same interface. Despite the popularity of
Apple's OpenDoc-based Cyberdog program (an integrated Internet
client) and support from a few companies like Nisus Software,
the reality never matched up to the theory, and Apple put OpenDoc
and Cyberdog into "maintenance mode" in 1997. Interestingly, the
OpenDoc community tried to negotiate a "stewardship agreement" for
the OpenDoc Development Framework in exchange for Apple continuing
to ship OpenDoc, but the deal fell through when the vice president
who had agreed to this left Apple.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=02260>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=02239>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=01487>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=01245>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04711>
While Apple was working on the doomed Publish & Subscribe and
OpenDoc, Microsoft developed OLE (Object Linking and Embedding),
which remains in use within Microsoft applications today, and NeXT
created Object Links in 1995.
<http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/ReleaseNotes/ObjectLinks.htmld>
LinkBack, an open source technology jointly announced by Nisus
Software, The Omni Group, and Blacksmith, is a step in the
direction of providing system-wide data linking again. With
LinkBack, which will appear in future versions of Nisus Writer
Express, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, Chartsmith, and Stone Create,
if you want to edit a pasted graphic, you'll instead just double-
click the graphic to edit it in the original application, after
which your changes will automatically be reflected in the
destination document. The pasted data doesn't have to be a
graphic; it could also be text, such as stock quotes that
you want to update automatically.
<http://www.linkbackproject.org/>
Of course, it remains to be seen just how well LinkBack works,
and in particular, how well it avoids problems that have
bedeviled all of these other data linking technologies in
the past. Obviously, widespread support is tremendously important,
since users won't even think about LinkBack unless it's widely
available. The open source nature of the project should aid in
adoption, especially since developers burned by Apple in the
past won't worry that LinkBack will be at the mercy of a single
company. It's also essential that LinkBack be reliable and
easy to use, or the technology will have difficulty garnering
an audience.
So if you're a developer, give LinkBack a look. Just because
Apple's heavyweight data linking technologies have failed in
the past doesn't mean the rest of us couldn't still use a good
solution now.
Mac OS X Window Behavior
------------------------
by Jeff Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
When Apple thrust Mac OS X upon us, it was quite a change.
I remember one colleague remarked that his head was filled with
all sorts of Mac OS 9 troubleshooting arcana, nearly all of which
would be rendered moot once Mac OS X gained its footing. Some
behaviors in the new operating system changed enough that they
disrupted the flow of how we'd been using the Mac for years.
Subsequently, several utilities appeared to bring back those
behaviors (see "Top Mac OS X Utilities: Restoring Mac OS 9
Functionality" in TidBITS-622_).
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06763>
For the most part, my transition to Mac OS X went smoothly without
relying on such utilities. To my surprise, it didn't take long for
me to adapt to the new Mac OS X order. However, one thing remained
an irritation, an aspect I actually forgot about because long ago
I installed a utility that fixed it: Mac OS X's default window
behavior.
**Trouble Begets Frustration** -- When my PowerBook recently
started behaving strangely, I went looking for startup items
that might be contributing to the problems I was seeing. One
utility I disabled was ASM (Application Switcher Menu) 2.0.2,
a utility that provides an application menu like that found
in Mac OS 9. Although ASM didn't appear to be the cause of my
problem, I quickly realized it offers a feature that I absolutely
cannot live without: when I click a window belonging to an
application (such as Eudora or the Finder), ASM causes all
of that program's windows to be brought to the front. Normally,
in Mac OS X, clicking a window causes just that window to move
to the front; other windows in that application remain unaffected.
<http://www.vercruesse.de/>
In fact, that's the only reason I installed ASM in the first
place; I don't actually use the application menu. But being
without this windowing feature drove me crazy for several days.
Mac OS X's default window behavior is nutty. I keep four Eudora
windows open at once: my In box, my list of mailboxes, the Task
Progress window, and the Filter Report. If I'm in another
application and I want to switch to Eudora, I want to see all
four windows, not just the one I clicked on.
One response to this behavior has been Apple's move toward single-
window interfaces, such as iTunes, iMovie, and iPhoto. But other
Apple software can't be confined to one window: Final Cut Express,
which uses at least four main windows, includes a preference
to bring all windows to the front on activation - a different
workaround to the problem. (Perhaps inspired by this example,
other developers could add a similar preference to their
applications.)
I could click the application icon in the Dock, but that's a
mouse-trip to a small target on the other side of my screen,
and it's not always what I want; clicking the Finder icon, for
example, creates a new Finder window if none existed beforehand.
But Mac OS X would prefer to layer windows like shuffled cards,
with windows acting as separate entities instead of as groups
of applications. And having a Bring All to Front command in
the Window menu of every program isn't helpful.
What's needed is a simple preference that enables me to specify
whether all of an application's windows come forward when the
program is brought to the front. In the meantime, several
utilities fill that particular gap.
**X-Assist** -- Despite my earlier comments, this isn't an article
about ASM. Although I haven't had problems with it, the last
freeware version of it is now a few years old. A 2.1 beta version
is available as $15 shareware, but it currently has issues with
Mac OS X Panther and doesn't appear to have been updated in over
a year. If ASM were the only solution around, I'd happily pay
for it, but I don't want to inherit problems.
Instead, I poked around online and found Peter Li's X-Assist,
which seems to offer many features similar to those in ASM,
such as a Mac OS 9-style application menu and a hierarchical
menu to access System Preference panes. It also features a
plug-in architecture for add-on capabilities and a list of recent
applications, but frankly, I turned off all these other features.
X-Assist brings my windows to the front the way they should
behave, and that's all I want. Even better, the software is free,
and, although its version number is 0.7, seems to be rock solid.
<http://members.ozemail.com.au/~pli/x-assist/>
**Other Solutions** -- Shortly after an abbreviated version of
this article appeared on ExtraBITS, several readers wrote in to
either defend the Mac OS X window behavior or to recommend other
utilities that provide the same functionality I've found with
X-Assist. Surprisingly, I haven't been able to find a utility
that _only_ brings application windows to the front in groups.
Typically, it's a preference added to other useful features in
programs such as Proteron's LiteSwitch, TLA Systems' DragThing,
and Peter Maurer's Butler, among others. Most also have an option
to disable the window preference temporarily if you want to use
the regular window behavior.
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/.3c5a36d9>
<http://www.proteron.com/liteswitchx/>
<http://www.dragthing.com/>
<http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=butler&sprache=english&kopf=labor>
Ultimately, this is another example of how one person's preference
is another person's irritation. It was pathetic that I would get
angry at my Mac whenever I switched applications because of what
I perceive to be brain-dead window behavior. But other people I've
corresponded with over the past week have clearly expressed their
relief that windows now operate as independent elements. To each
his or her own, I suppose, and if there's a moral to the story,
it's perhaps that Apple should, in the very first versions of Mac
OS X, at least made the Mac OS 9 windowing behavior an option, if
not the default, to reduce the annoyance for those accustomed to
the older behavior. Alas, the horse has left that particular barn
long ago, but at least there are plenty of third-party utilities
for restoring this behavior.
Why DRM Offends the Sensibilities
---------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
There are many things in the world that you feel to be true,
but you're not exactly sure why. So if you're a thinking person,
you're left with this nagging suspicion that you should
be better able to come up with a better explanation than
"But it's just wrong!"
For many people, myself included, digital rights management (DRM)
technologies fall into this category. Even if we have no intention
of breaking copyright law by downloading music or movies willy-
nilly, and even though many of us earn our livings through the
production and sale of copyrighted material, we're still offended
that the entertainment and media conglomerates of the world - the
Content Cartel, as one commentator has labeled them - are pushing
so hard to ensure that every song, every movie, every television
show, is wrapped up tight in some form of DRM that controls access
to the content and use of it.
Thanks to a talk by Professor Dan Burk of the University of
Minnesota Law School that was organized by Cornell University's
Information Science Department, I have a significantly better
sense of just why DRM makes my skin crawl. If you're generally
interested in the topic of DRM and the law, I encourage you to
read the draft paper on which Professor Burk based his talk.
<http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/about/Feb02.html>
<http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/about/burk.pdf>
**Legal Rules versus Legal Standards** -- As Professor Burk
explained, the law is broken down into two basic aspects: rules
and standards. A legal rule is a specific imperative in which
all the thought surrounding the details of the law takes place
ahead of time. In theory, at least, with a legal rule, the
body establishing the rule deliberates on specifics such as
boundaries, exceptions, penalties, and so on, and for violators
of the resulting law, there is no leeway for interpretation.
For instance, consider a drug possession law that states that
offenders caught with more than 5 grams of marijuana must serve
a 3 year prison term. If some stupid pothead kid falls into
that category, regardless of any other circumstances, it's off
to prison for 3 years.
Contrast that with a legal standard, which essentially posits a
goal and lays down some guidelines for defining illegal behavior,
but which leaves significant room for interpretation. So, instead
of a rigid law stating exactly what behavior is considered illegal
and mandating specific punishment, a law based on a legal standard
would declare that drug possession was illegal, but would leave
discretion in the hands of the judge as to whether the crime
warrants a lesser punishment (in the case of the pothead kid)
or greater punishment (in the case of a known drug dealer caught
with a kilo of heroin).
I'm no legal scholar, but from a common sense standpoint,
I think most people would prefer legal standards to legal rules.
After all, laws are created by politicians; would you trust
a politician - even one of the honorable ones - working with
hypothetical "what if" scenarios to define a crime and a
punishment? Or would you prefer that cases be decided by a judge
with the actual facts of a specific case at her fingertips?
Consider a law that most of you have probably broken in the last
few days - the law against speeding. Would you prefer a law that
said being caught driving over the speed limit was grounds for
an automatic $200 fine, or one that gave the police officer and
the traffic court leeway to see that driving a seriously injured
person to the emergency room was grounds for dismissal?
As Professor Burk pointed out to me in email subsequently, some
people do prefer rules to standards for the simple reason that
the rules are predictable, so you know what to expect beforehand.
He also noted that some people also become concerned about judges
having too much power, although it seems to me that most of the
people who complain about "judicial activism" are politicians,
and are bent out of shape about having competition.
**DRM: Them's the Rules** -- Let's step back a moment. Creating a
law is only one of many ways that societally acceptable behaviors
can be encouraged. If society's overall goal is for people to
drive more slowly and cautiously, putting speed bumps in the
road would have the same effect, as would keeping the road
and shoulders narrow. Of course, those strategies have other
downsides, such as slowing down ambulances or making it difficult
for fire trucks to maneuver, and they don't absolutely prevent
the unwanted behavior, they just discourage it. You can still
drive quickly over speed bumps or along narrow roads. In this
respect, such extra-legal strategies are akin to legal standards -
they leave some wiggle room in the system.
DRM technologies fall roughly into this category of extra-legal
methods of encouraging behavior, but there's at least one
important difference: DRM, like all technology, is an embodiment
of a legal rule, not a legal standard. It's simply impossible to
create a DRM technology that can evaluate and approve exceptions,
no matter how reasonable or legal they may be. If you want to play
a song purchased from the iTunes Music Store without stripping
the DRM, you must use an iPod or iTunes on an authorized machine;
there's no wiggle room at all.
This is a big deal because the law that DRM instantiates is
copyright law, and copyright law is distinctly a case of a legal
standard. Copyright law allows all sorts of exceptions, including
fair use, reproduction by libraries and archives, and musical
performances at agricultural or horticultural fairs (I wonder
how much that last exemption cost?). Plus, in any copyright
infringement case, the judge would have to take into account
what was copied, how it was copied, what the intent was in
copying, and the harm done to the copyright owner in the
marketplace. No matter how hard the Content Cartel tries to
conflate the two under the rubric of "piracy," there's a big
difference between the downloading of a song from Kazaa and
the burning and reselling of thousands of DVDs of the latest
Harry Potter movie.
<http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html>
So now you can see why DRM rubs so many people the wrong way.
It's turning copyright law, which is at its heart a reasonable
legal standard, into a legal rule with no ifs, ands, or buts.
**Permission and Forgiveness** -- There's another aspect to the
way DRM stands in for laws. No matter whether we're talking about
legal rules or legal standards, you're still free to do whatever
you want and then ask for forgiveness if you're caught. As a
result, many violations of the law are never noticed, and many
others never make it to court because the cost to society of
enforcing them is higher than the benefit (a police officer can
make the decision that it's more important to get that injured
person to the hospital than it is to enforce the speed limit).
However, the corollary to this fact is that our laws thus reach
further than we intend. Exceeding the speed limit at any time is
technically a violation of the traffic laws, but no one really
believes that enforcing the speed limit is so important that cars
should automatically inform the police whenever you are speeding.
Similarly, every unauthorized copy of a digital media file is
technically an infringement of copyright law, but few people
outside the RIAA probably believe that every iPod owner should
be hauled into court to justify copying music from a Mac to an
iPod under fair use.
So in the real world, we're used to asking for forgiveness after
committing actions that are technically in violation of a law
(and frankly, we're used to getting away with a lot of violations
that are too trivial to justify enforcing). In the digital world,
however, DRM inverts this system, forcing us instead to ask for
permission rather than forgiveness. Anyone who has ever been a
teenager knows just how problematic that is - parents seldom agree
to the cool stuff. When it comes to technology, the end result
of being forced to ask for permission is that experimentation
and innovation are stifled. If the original Napster and the other
peer-to-peer file sharing networks hadn't scared the hidebound
music industry silly, do you think they would ever have agreed
to Apple creating the iTunes Music Store?
Because most DRM systems start from the written copyright law and
prevent any behavior that would technically be an infringement,
they not only fail to account for the exceptions in copyright law,
they also ignore our societal expectations about how laws should
work in practice. It would be like car manufacturers outfitting
all cars with limiters that could determine the posted speed limit
on any stretch of road and prevent the car from driving faster
than that, for any reason. Talk about grounds for a revolt!
**Room to Move?** In fact, there is a little wiggle room with
DRM-protected content like songs from the iTunes Music Store,
and that's the fact that pretty much every piece of DRM technology
has been broken. According to Professor Burk, the peer-to-peer
tracking company BigChampagne has found that it takes about
4 minutes after release for a song using copy-prevention
technologies to appear on the file sharing networks. So you
could purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, remove the
FairPlay DRM in any one of a variety of ways, and use it in some
way that would otherwise be impossible.
But there's a problem with creating your own wiggle room by
breaking a DRM technology: our old friend the DMCA (Digital
Millennium Copyright Act); see "The Evil That Is the DMCA"
in TidBITS-656_. The DMCA distinguishes between _access_ of
content and _usage_ of content (though it's a relatively fuzzy
distinction), and forbids any circumvention of access control
technologies. However, the DMCA does not forbid the circumvention
of usage control technologies; the thought is that this was the
loophole Congress left to allow fair use of material that you
had legally purchased. However, the problem is that the DMCA
also bans the supplying of tools to circumvent _either_ access
or usage control technologies. In short, you can legally break
any usage control technologies you want, but you can't get any
help doing it, nor can you create tools for anyone else to do it.
Needless to say, this is a barrier which essentially no one can
cross legally.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06997>
There is some hope that the courts have recently seen the danger
behind the DMCA. In his talk, Professor Burk called out a pair
of cases where appellate courts had ruled against plaintiffs
brandishing the DMCA. In one case, Chamberlain v. Skylink,
Chamberlain sued to prevent Skylink from reverse engineering
the codes necessary to make Chamberlain's garage doors open;
Skylink was reverse engineering the codes for use in a universal
garage door opener. The court ruled that Congress had no such
anti-competitive behavior in mind with the DMCA. And in Lexmark
v. Static Control, the court ruled that Lexmark could not use
the DMCA to prevent Static Control from reverse engineering
the chips necessary to create off-brand toner cartridges for
Lexmark printers.
<http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Chamberlain_v_Skylink/>
<http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Lexmark_v_Static_Control/>
The moral of this story, if there is one, is that DRM technologies
are more subtly pernicious in their effect than may be apparent
from first glance, due to the way in which they embody legal rules
and eliminate the human effect in determining how copyright law
should be interpreted and enforced. That realization does little
to assuage the annoyance many people feel when their lives are
unnecessarily complicated by DRM, but at least it puts into words
why DRM is so often annoying, not to mention concerning for the
future of technological experimentation and innovation.
PayBITS: If Adam's article helped you understand how DRM
is undermining copyright law and why that's concerning,
consider a donation to the EFF. <http://eff.org/support/>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/07-Mar-05
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The second URL below each thread description points to the
discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be faster.
**Shared Database Solutions** -- When one reader's organization
starts feeling growing pains, what's the best way to consolidate
information to avoid having several databases on multiple
machines? (9 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2501>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/359>
**Delayed password disclosure technique** -- A new method of
online authentication could help avoid stolen passwords on
the Internet. (8 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2500>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/358>
**Timbuktu 8.0 Finally Adds Encryption** -- Readers discuss
Netopia's latest version of its remote administration software,
including the new Push Install capability to upgrade Timbuktu
easily. (5 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2498>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/356>
**Cleaning House in iTunes** -- Adam's article about culling
duplicates from his iTunes library prompt other solutions from
other readers, including synchronizing multiple libraries and
changing song information for several songs at once. (7 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2497>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/355>
**Simple hosted CMS like Site Crossing** -- Readers suggest other
company-hosted content management systems similar to Web Crossing
Inc.'s new Site Crossing service. (16 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2496>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/354>
**iPods Defeating Insomnia** -- Last week's article about how Adam
and Tonya fall asleep using their iPod struck a chord with a few
people, including one who recommends a special pillow speaker,
and another who explains the mechanism for how audio books can
put you to sleep. (3 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2495>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/353>
**Multiple iTMS authorizations** -- A couple of readers run into
trouble when combining songs from the iTunes Music Store purchased
under two different user accounts, while others don't seem to
be affected. (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2494>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/352>
**Third-party DVD Burner** -- Suggestions are offered to someone
looking to buy a non-Apple DVD burner, both internal and external
models. (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2493>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/351>
**SMTP server while travelling** -- When a reader relocates to
Beijing, she runs into trouble sending email through her old
SMTP server. TidBITS Talk to the rescue! (15 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2492>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/350>
$$
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