I have previously written about the arms race between Apple and those who seek fair use of the tunes they buy from the iTunes Store. Ver. 4.5 of iTunes defeated Playfair’s de-DRM strategy; Hymn renovated it. Now Apple’s up to ver. 4.6 and, if you really need to upgrade (?perhaps to avail yourself of AirTunes’ functionality?) you will find that Hymn’ed songs won’t play. Hymn embeds the user’s name and email address in the unprotected .mp4 file it makes as a sign of good faith, as if to insure that the unprotected files are not redistributed. Well, iTunes 4.6 looks for the embedded identification information and simply refuses to play those files. Here is a method of getting past that in iTunes 4.6 by taking a hex editor to your unprotected songs.

Paul Boutin: Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free:

“So I whittled the world of options down to three steps that, on most PCs, can be done in less than 20 minutes. (Once you’re done, you’ll need to run some programs that take longer than that, but there’s no need to sit and watch.) Just as important, they’re all free, thanks to a mix of promotional offers and hacker idealism. Some of these instructions might seem obvious, even dumb, but I was surprised to find that many of my friends’ PCs had missed one or another of them. Any computer user who got hit by the Sasser worm hadn’t bothered to do the second step. Do all three, and you’ll be protected against the most common infections and still be left with time and money for lunch.” (Slate)

Four adult epilepsy patients who had had a grid of electrodes implanted on the surfaces of their brains (for the purpose of accurately localizing their seizure focus) learned to move a computer cursor on screen with their mental processes alone and, with only hours of practice, play a simple computer game with their minds. As boing boing, which pointed me to this item, suggested, I wonder how long it will be before the Pentagon starts implanting these grids into their clientele.

This observance of the 35th anniversary of the 1969 release of David Bowie’s Space Oddity made me recall the Pan Am “First Moon Flights Club”. If you remember, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) put Pan Am’s name on the shuttle the protagonists ride to the moon. When the airline announced in late 1968, during a break in ABC-TV’s coverage of the Apollo 8 mission, that it would begin accepting reservations for the first commercial flight to the moon, it was deluged with requests and quickly established the club, which was essentially a waitiing list dignified by a wallet card. I was one of the charter members of the First Moon Flights Club and showed off my increasingly dog-eared membership card, with a number somewhere in the low 1000’s, to anyone who did not believe my boast that I was on the waiting list for a moonflight. I swore that I would do anything to raise the airfare by the time my name rose to the top of the list. By the time Pan Am stopped taking reservations in 1971, club membership stood at over 93,000 strong, and rival TWA had a similar arrangement. I don’t know what ever happened to my card, although I doubt the waiting list was transferred anywhere else when Pan Am went out of business in 1991. And although some opine that space activities will never be profitable until tourism services begin, I don’t suppose I am going to break my terrestrial bonds in this lifetime.