Fair and balanced update: Franken beats Fox

Salon: federal judge Denny Chin threw out Fox’s attempted injunction against Al Franken’s new book, which uses “fair and balanced” (a phrase trademarked by Fox) in its subtitle. The judge appears to have had a field day slamming Fox, suggesting that they could be in danger of losing the trademark if they pursued the suit further, and getting in some fabulous zingers:

…the judge pointed out that one of O’Reilly’s own books is titled “The O’Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life.” “Is that not a play on ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly?’” Chin asked, noting that the movie title is also trademarked.

“I don’t know,” replied [Fox lawyer] Hanswirth.

“You don’t know?” asked the judge…

Hanswirth went on to argue that Franken has diluted Fox’s trademark by using it “to ridicule Fox’s No. 1 talent, Mr. O’Reilly.” She then suggested that, because Coulter is on the cover, “somebody looking at this could determine Ms. Coulter has some kind of official relationship with Fox.”

“The President and Vice President are also on the cover, are they not?” asked Chin. “Are consumers likely to believe they are associated with Fox News?”

God bless the judicial branch, which appears to be the only part of our government that has retained any common sense.

Another weekend, another trip…

We’re heading to Portland this weekend to visit Shel and Vik. That I have been focused on work and inlaws too long this week is evidenced by the fact that the only thing going through my head right now is Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” with these words:

We’re going to Portland, Portland,
Portland, Oregon,
We’re going to Portland.
For reasons I cannot explain
I’m driving four to eight hours south
To Portland
And I may be seeing fender bending
Every mile from Tacoma
Or maybe there’s no construction there now
But I have reason to believe
It’ll take until late eve
To get to Portland

To Esta, who is making it real

Esta writes about her last day in the office before starting her course of study at Union Theological Seminary. I want to offer my heartfelt congratulations to her for finding the courage to make a really, really big move, and doing it it with clear vision and optimism in spite of the uncertainty. Esta, you may be my little sister, but it’s a big step—probably bigger than mine—and I wish you all the best luck in the world, and God’s guidance.

More SoBig fallout: blacklists

In my mail this morning, along with the few SoBig messages that made it past my ISP’s mail virus filter and my junk mail filters (see this entry at MacOSXHints for a rule to filter the rest as junk manually), was a notice from Yahoo! Groups that my account had been paused because I had exceeded the maximum number of bounces to my email account. I clicked the provided link to reactivate my account, then looked at the bounce history. Interestingly, only one bounce happened during SoBig; the rest were ancient history. But the email that bounced yesterday was hard bounced by my ISP because the IP address that sent it had been blacklisted. Not by my ISP, by SpamCop.

Now think about the implications of that. Because of an email worm with its own mail engine, not just ISPs and spammers but innocent users could end up on blacklists run by third parties—with no warning. Maybe Dave and others are right about this being the end of email.

On finishing Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren has been my “current reading” since the beginning of the summer; I was beginning to think it had taken up permanent residence in the lower left corner of my blog. I finally finished it in the airplane on the way to Pennsylvania last weekend. The book is, as Jonathan Lethem writes in a cover blurb, a labyrinth that swallows readers alive; it is also a profane bit of countercultural magic. Delany’s Kid explores his own broken mind, his sexuality, and the landscape around him even as he discovers the magic of the written word. The sudden shift to multiple simultaneous viewpoints in the last 150 pages of the novel kicks everything into overdrive.

At the same time, I think I know why I never read the book before—for one thing, it’s a sure bet to have been removed from my hometown library shelves at some point or another. But I also think even if I had found a copy I would have had a hard time getting through it. It’s one of the few “science fiction” books I know that is an easier read if you’ve finished Joyce’s Ulysses first.

SoBiggest

Lawrence points to a News.com story that sez Sobig is aptly named: the fastest spreading virus ever. Guesses as to what made it spread so quickly: a combination of good social engineering (randomly selected forged return addresses) and good spam-filter-busting capabilities (the rotating subject lines, the changing return addresses, the changing attachment name). No surprise: the BBC says that Sobig seems to have been written by a spammer who needed a way to get his messages past spam filters.

Frustrating point about this worm: it really has nothing to do with Outlook. It doesn’t exploit any Outlook vulnerabilities—except maybe the fact that it’s easy to click and execute an attachment in Outlook, and to read Outlook address books. The worm carries its own mail sending engine around with it. And because the worm is so self reliant, it isn’t easy to avoid it—there’s no “magic bullet” patch that will keep it from spreading. Except behavioral changes on the part of users, and maybe switching OSes.

More SoBig updates

Something I didn’t mention in my initial posts about SoBig: the worm can send mail by itself, since it contains its own SMTP server, and will forge return addresses based on entries in your Outlook address book or your Internet cache. So if you see email from me, no, I’m not infected with the virus, but someone else who knows me or has read my web page is.

Technical details of SoBig at the Berkman Geekroom. Reaction from Kevin Werbach: “either email is broken, Microsoft’s email software is broken, or those two statements are the same.” Rob McNair-Huff at MacNetJournal has been hit hard, as has Mark Frauenfelder at Boing-Boing.

Sobig keeps getting bigger; Son of Blaster

I got something like 60 messages on my home email account between 10 pm last night and 7 am this morning, all carrying the Sobig virus. Dave Winer had about 650 infected messages. Who is opening these damned attachments??? The BBC has more information on Sobig.

Meanwhile, the worm designed to patch the Blaster vulnerability, known variously as Welchia and Nachi, is spreading in the wild and Slashdot reports it’s slowing emergency response networks in Canada.

Could we all just knock it off for a few minutes, please?

Double your pleasure

MacOSXHints points to a new firmware hack that claims to enable some hidden features of the Apple standard SuperDrive that ships in PowerBooks, including my 15″ 1 GHz model. Promised benefits: CD burning at 16x, DVD-R at 2x, and DVD-RW capability. It’s not really a “hack,” more a way to apply the OEM’s firmware upgrade to allow the drive to operate at its promised capacities.

I’m not sure I’m going to try it out. I kind of like my machine the way it is now and don’t have a burning need to double my media burning bandwidth. But I downloaded the upgrade (and the downgrade, just in case) anyway.