Too Far Afield

Apple often does the right thing^tm. Many things Apple does are copied by other companies later. There are good copies and bad copies. But not everything Apple does is good. And sometimes the wrong thing^tm is copied also. Take the recent software update issue as an example. My mother just came to me and said: I installed $randomSecurityUpdate and now I’ve got the Yahoo tool bar on my computer. Can you please remove it? Sure. I can remove it. But this is still bad, as it discourages my mother from installing important security updates on her computer in the future. Adobe is one of those bad players, too. If you download Acrobat Reader, you also install a number of other applications, if you’re not careful. Bad. I wonder why Apple and Yahoo and all the other vendors, who are doing this, compare apples and oranges here. What makes you think I might possibly want a Yahoo tool bar in my Firefox browser, just because I install a security update for another totally unrelated application?

On the 20th of July 1944, at 12:10 hours, the German army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, placed a briefcase with a bomb under the table of a conference room in East Prussia around which Hitler and more than 20 officers had gathered. At 12:20 hours, Stauffenberg left the room. At 12:40 hours, the bomb exploded. While other officers and a stonographer died soon after, Hitler survived.

Yesterday evening I listened to an interesting broadcast on the topic by Deutschlandradio Kultur. You can download the manuscript of the broadcast at Fromm und das realpolitische Kalkül beim Attentat auf Hitler – Hintergründe des 20. Juli 1944.

A friend regularly sends me emails with the subject heutiges shooting (in English: today’s shooting). They always contain links to his photo site. The first time I got one of those mails I thought of something like Littleton or Erfurt.

Security? We don’t need it. We do not place our wireless routers near windows or exterior walls. Doh!

Der Beklagte hätte daher Sicherheitsvorkehrungen treffen müssen, wie die Sicherung des Routers durch ein individualisiertes Passwort, den Einsatz der besonderen Verschlüsselungsmethode WPA 2 und den Verzicht einer Aufstellung des Routers am Fenster oder Außenwänden.

OLG Frankfurt a. M., Az. 11 U 52/07 (emphasis added)