I feel the need to put two stories in one BLOG post. One of them is rather blatant, and the other, though quite a bit more subtle, actually bothers me quite a bit more, as it points out how many people can be spied on at once!
The first, blatant one will also live on in the "Google News Feed" on the right, at least until this story gets "stale", and I sure as heck hope it doesn't!
It is about an NSA Whistle Blower named Russell Tice. For a while, after he got fired from NSA for, I don't know, Whistle Blowing? ... he held his tongue, afraid of recriminations from the Bush Administration. So, now that Obama is in office, he has a two-day interview stint with Keith Olbermann. Oh well, all Journalists bugged? Or [left wing conspiracy theory] only the "liberal" journalists? Or [right wing conspiracy theory] only the populist/constitutionalist/libertarian journalists? Take your pick, it looks ugly, no matter how it's spun.
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Second, more subtle story, but scarier to me: All 30G Zunes fail simultaneously.
Yes, I'm also a computer professional, which is why the above story scares me. But let me put this in simple English: Microsoft is blaming the simultaneous crash of however many 2006 30G Zunes on a simple Leap Year "glitch". OK. So, people thought the world would end on January 1, 2000, due to an unfortunate habit of some programmers to use only the last two digits of the year. The world didn't end, but a bunch of funny web glitches occurred, which I sure wish were still available to chuckle about. I also recall at least one state classifying the 2000 Model cars (which, of course, were on sale in 1999, as usual for a car company), as "Horseless Carriages".
An excerpt from Zune's Own Forum follows:
Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device.
Why do I harp on this? Have any of you seen anything this intrusive? All multi-million owners of this device need to, in effect, force a reset to "Factory Settings" [my guess, based on the context of asking people to allow the battery to "fully run out of power"]?
But this isn't the worst part of this. The worst part of this is why this device needs to know about leap years to play MP3 Music files? Even if you're doing "Digital Rights Management", to protect files that you download to the device, do you necessarily need to know how many times, or exactly when, a particular song is being played? To the second? (These devices failed, pretty much simultaneously, suggesting that a central Satellite was the point of failure, not a bunch of individual consumer devices).
Is anybody else concerned about this, especially if we look at these stories together?
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