I Don't Usually Spam E-mail

But this was cute:

Subject: Snappy Answers to ........

Young Americans will die in battle.
-- Would you prefer they die in skyscrapers?

The United States is taking unilateral action against Iraq!
--So far, it's a 90-member worldwide "unilateral" coalition.

We are in a rush to war.
--A 12-year rush?

Tough inspections can disarm Saddam Hussein without invading Iraq.
--12 years of inspections have done wonders so far.

We should let the inspectors finish their job.
-- We did. They didn't. We will.

Why fight? The Iraqi military is weaker than in 1991.
-- But their biological weapons and chemical weapons are much more dangerous.

There's no proof of weapons.
-- We know they have 'em, we know they hide 'em, and we have tape recordings and photographs. What more is needed? An Iraqi rocket in Martin Sheen's shorts?

If we invade, Saddam Hussein might use those weapons of mass destruction against us.
-- I thought you said Iraq didn't have them?

But terrorists might attack if we invade Iraq.
--Oh, so if we don't attack Iraq, terrorists will never strike again?

We shouldn't go to war without a UN resolution.
-- ANOTHER resolution? What about the last 18 resolutions? Shall we use them as wallpaper? Or shall we use the same resolutions Bill Clinton used in Bosnia? (he didn't go to the UN on Bosnia)

We don't have a real declaration for war.
--It's called "Joint Congressional Resolution #114."

We are giving 20 billion dollars to Turkey. We could use that money at home.
--OK, we'll use that money to strengthen our Iraqi border with Wyoming.

If North Korea has nuclear weapons, why aren't we invading them first?
-- Uh...hello...isn't that the point?

European leaders are against the war.
-- The Reichstag wasn't attacked. The Grande Place wasn't attacked. The Kremlin wasn't attacked. And the Jerry Lewis Lifetime Achievement Museum wasn't attacked. America was attacked. And besides, except for the
tantrums of France, Belgium and Germany, only three European nations aren't willing to defend freedom. The entire rest of Europe is with America.

The French don't support the war.
-- Oh, did they surrender already?

Germany objects to this war.
-- Germany objected to Reagan's "attitude" towards the Soviet Union. Of course, they objected to our presence in 1943 as well.

Belgians are against the war.
-- I can live without waffles and ice cream.

Russia doesn't support the war.
-- They are still angry over Reagan's brilliant Cold War victory.

Polls show Europeans are against this war.
-- Polls show Europeans believe their freedom was achieved by endlessly debating in marvelous dining halls, conveniently forgetting their right to be pompous blowhards was granted with American blood, not fabulous wine
and brie.

We should build a coalition with our friends.
-- With friends like these, who needs enemies?

What happens if we can't build a United Nations coalition?
-- Who cares?

But the UN is the world's most respected governing body.
-- Not as respected as the US military.

America has always waited until enemies attacked.
--Now that oceans can't hold back enemies, pre-emptive war is forever a necessity.

War will cost billions!
-- So how much is YOUR city worth?

President Bush says he's willing to violate the 1976 executive order forbidding assassinations of foreign leaders.
-- As soon as the ink is dry on rescinding that idiotic order, will someone please pull the trigger? The line forms to the right.

Many Senators don't support Bush.
-- Are you speaking of the Senators from Bordeaux?

Tom Daschle says George Bush has a "credibility gap"
-- When was the last time we came to Tom Daschle for the truth???

These problems didn't happen under Clinton.
-- Actually, they happened. But Clinton ignored them. Now, Bush will clean up his mess.

But Clinton didn't start a war.
-- Unless his girlfriend was testifying before congress.

Bush senior should have taken out Hussein in '91.
-- That 1991 UN resolution forbade a march on Baghdad. Remember?

Millions of peace activists are demanding we stop the war.
--Millions of Iraqi's are begging for us to start the war.

Thousands of innocents will be killed or injured.
-- That's a lot less than Hussein is killing right now.

Protesters have genuine objections to war
-- Just like they did in WWII? Korea? Vietnam? Panama? The Gulf War? Somalia? Haiti? Bosnia? Afghanistan?

People are coming from all over the world to act as "human shields".
-- Quick...hurry up...before the bombs start dropping.
This is about American Imperialism.
-- So which country do we own? Name our colonies? What nation sends us their tax dollars? If America was imperialist, we'd already own the entire world. Who could stand in our way?

This is Blood for Oil
-- The only blood is the Iraqi people tortured, starved and killed while Hussein builds massive palaces to hide nuclear weapons...all financed with Iraqi oil.

This is a racist war.
-- America happily endorses a multi-cultural attitude towards anyone who dares to take away our freedom. Regardless of race, color, or creed; we will hunt them down and kill them.

A U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is a great recruiting tool for terrorists.
-- Have fun recruiting people into oppressive misery as they enjoy their first taste of freedom.

An attack on Iraq could seriously undermine and destabilize Arab nations.
-- Destabilize the region? What stability? The sooner we topple these oppressive 14th century terrorist regimes the better.

Are we prepared for a multi-billion dollar occupation?
-- Were we prepared to liberate Europe and Japan in 1945? South Korea in 1953? Grenada? El Salvador? Kuwait? The Eastern Bloc? Afghanistan? Nations always love Americans when we rescue them from tyranny. The price of freedom is never free.

Polls show Americans are more concerned about the threat from al Qaeda than from Iraq.
-- It's not a war against Al Qaeda. It's not a war against Iraq. It's a war against terrorism. Anywhere we find it. One nation at a time.

American opinion is against the war.
-- No, it's not. A majority of Americans want to fight now, not later.

According to a recent poll. . .
-- You know what? Screw those polls. We're in a war against terrorism. If you don't want to fight the ones who would murder you and your family in a heartbeat, get the hell out of the way. Go visit Paris. Or Antwerp. Or Berlin. Or Moscow. And stay there. Forever. But this time, don't call us when the heathens are at the gates.

Coming soon to an e-mail box near you...

Source of Maps of the Middle East

People have been looking for more detailed maps of the Middle East on-line. Here's a few:

Iraq
Baghdad (area)

Kuwait (Political)
Kuwait (Relief)

Qatar

Iran

Syria

Turkey (4016K)

Saudi Arabia

Jordan

Middle East

Hope you find these links useful.

I Guess I'm One of The Lucky Ones Too

"We are the lucky ones"

Yeah, OK, I can hear some of you now (those people who live in negativity-land) who will grouse that those days were full of hidden child and spousal abuse, alcoholism, and racism. Well, we could have fixed all those things without changing the good things, no?

It's Getting Worse

As you can see from this article, the SARS situation is getting worse. It appears that this outbreak started with a doctor from China (the area where SARS is thought to have come from) that was visiting a hotel in Hong Kong.

Cases have now been seen in Switzerland and New York City. I think this is going to get much worse before it gets any better. Since we have no treatment for this particular virus family, it's quite chilling to think what could happen in the next few months.

Hopefully Medical Technology Can Stop This One

Today the World Heath Organization and the U.S. Center for Disease Control released warnings about a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). You can read a FAQ about the little we know about the disease here.

Due to the mobility of our population, the disease seems to be spreading rapidly. It seems to me to have some of the same characteristics of the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918. The theory at this time is that it started somewhere in the Far East (China, Vietnam, etc). At this time, 9 of the 150 known persons with the syndrome have died, which is a 6% mortality rate. Pretty darned high. It's a little early to panic, but there seems to be a lot of genuine concern in the medical community about this one.

I did some searching, and came across something that looked similar, the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) which has been around a while. ARDS is not a disease in itself, its what happens to persons when they have some injury to the lungs or already have pneumonia. I found a treatment for ARDS, which may be what the medical community is using to treat this one. ARDS seems to be a direct consequence of SARS, though they seem almost the same.

The Spanish Flu Pandemic (so called due to the fact that reporting about it wasn't censored in neutral Spain) appeared and disappeared quite quickly. In fact, in 1999 this article asks if it could happen again. (The article is Part 1 or 2, but I couldn't find part 2). In 1997, a new strain of Influenza that is carried by birds was passed to humans in Hong Kong.

Both this Flu and the Spanish Flu died off quickly. Which seems very odd to me. In 1918 there was little ability to fight it. What caused it to go dormant?

Also, at the time draconian laws were passed to try to limit the spread of the disease. People are complaining about the Patriot Act now, imagine what will have to happen if this syndrome manifests itself in the same manner as the Spanish Flu did. We can communicate warnings much better now than in 1918, and medical researchers can share information, but we also travel more freely, and the disease may spread more quickly than anything before unless we do something about it.

This, along with West Nile Virus are a little disconcerting to me. Hopefully technology can nip this one before anything bad happens. At a 6% mortality rate, and with one-quarter of the US getting the Spanish Flu in 1918, we could see 4.2 million fatalities if the same rates of infection occur.

I hope history doesn't repeat itself.

This Is A Great Country

[shallowjack]
I'm sitting here, blogging and getting paid. Another Computer Forensics case, this time looking for porn. So I'm getting paid to look at porn. What a great country, no? Of course, having to wait for the computer to do keyword searches of a large hard drives entire contents can take a while, so I have to wait before I find the stuff.

I started the case this weekend, and while I was waiting for an md5sum to generate after a dd bit-copy of a forensic image to an analysis drive I turned on the TV. It takes a while on some of these drives for the copy and checksum to generate.

So I'm flipping channels, and I come across The Quick And The Dead. Yeah, so the plot is no different than a million other spaghetti westerns, except this one skips most of the hoopla and gets right into gunfight after gunfight. Way cool. To top it off, Gene Hackman is the bad guy, and Sharon Stone is the main character. So we have one of my favorite actors to watch, and one of my favorite actresses to look at, along with gratuitous violence and debauchery.

I don't know how personable Gene Hackman is in real life, but he is a great actor. I've enjoyed him in all the films I've seen him in, from Lex Luthor in the Superman movies, to the conspiracy theorist in Enemy of The State. In this one, he is the guy we all love to hate, and Sharon Stone is the one who is looking to take him out. For some reason (yeah, right!) they have Sharon Stone sleeping with no pants, but still wearing her boots. Oh well, its a fun movie to watch if you don't need a complex story-line. It's just good entertainment. Then again, my moniker comes from my favorite movie of all time, Big Trouble In Little China, so who I am to say what is bad?

Anyway, I see the DVD (yes, it's out on DVD) can be had for around $10, so I think I'm going to try to find a copy locally and pick it up.
[/shallowjack]

A Little Young To Be A Designated Driver

Maybe Dad had been drinking? Hmmmm. My oldest is 7, I don't think she could see to drive the car.

Could Blogging Be Dangerous To Your Health?

You...yes....YOU! Get up off your arse and get moving. Don't spend all day reading blogs, chatting, or playing your favorite on-line games! According to the European Repiratory Journal you can die from sitting in front of your computer for too long. Check out some of the comments to the article as well, you might find a few of them interesting. One woman claims her husband died from it. Of course, she says 1995 was when he died, long before the Internet was a popular as it is today. Probably died from a heart attack. Another guy built a computer desk that makes him stand to use it. Wow, that would just be too uncomfortable for me.

Well, do Jack a favor and move around a bit, wouldn't want you to die of a blood clot because you were spending too much time reading my blog.

New Worm Crippling the Internet

If you have noticed that many sites are off-line or hard to get to, it is due to a new worm that is affecting servers running Microsoft SQL. It's affecting the core Internet routers. Here's a picture of the state of the Internet as of 8:00AM GMT 1/25/2003:



The techy explanation (Thanks to HD Moore (sflist_at_digitaloffense.net and Worm Info) for this):

A worm which exploits a (new?) vulnerability in SQL Server is bringing the core routers to a grinding halt. The speed of the propagation can be attributed to the attack method and simplicity of the code. The worm sends a 376-byte UDP packet to port 1434 of each random target, each vulnerable system will immediately start propagating itself. Since UDP is connection-less, the worm is able to spread much more quickly than those using your standard TCP-based attack vectors (no connect timeouts).

And also from HD Moore:

While there were some intermittent network problems before, it wasn't until about 12:00 AM CST (01/25/03) that the worm started causing seriouis trauma to UUNET/Worldcom's backbone.

The worm appears to be abusing a stack overflow vulnerability reported a few months ago by David Litchfield, the original advisory can be found here:

http://www.nextgenss.com/advisories/mssql-udp.txt

There are still reports of the worm successfully exploiting patched systems as well, but I have not been able to verify that.

Disabling the worm is as easy as killing the sqlserver.exe process or just rebooting the box. Just make sure that you unplug the system from the network before it comes back up.

The patch: Q323875_SQL2000_SP2_en.EXE

More disassemblies:

http://www.boredom.org/~cstone/worm-annotated.txt
http://www.snafu.freedom.org/tmp/1434-probe.txt


I posted a local mirror to the Switch to....Linux post I made below because it was offline, and wondered what was going on. This explains it.

More "Switch" Hitters

I have many Canadian friends, and in keeping with the 'Switch To' thread, here's another interesting one:

Switch to.....Canada?

Not really funny (well it could be, depending on your political leanings) but the site is interesting. Please link all the psycho anti-war activists you know to it. Maybe we can jettison a few....

Do We Really Want This?

The Pentagon is deploying videophones to "public affairs officers" in order to "counter hostile propaganda". So now when some knob of a 'journalist' reports that the US military has bombed some civilian target near the front lines without verifying the information, the Pentagon can counter with video feed directly from the front lines.

Sounds all well and good, and might actually show some of the more empty-headed anti-war protesters that they shouldn't take every word that comes from a foreign (hostile) country's government as their gospel. But what happens if one of these public affairs officers (PAO) is in the midst of giving a 'report' and the enemy forces penetrate the area during a counter-attack? You could potentially have very graphic scenes of American soldiers (or the PAO) being killed or severely injured. They are also talking about putting one of these video phones with a B-2 bomber crew. What happens if the plane gets shot down (I know, very unlikely) or has a malfunction and crashes? I don't think that would have the desired effect that the Pentagon is hoping for by deploying this new technology.

Of course, the video feed is supposed to go to 'journalists' who would hopefully edit out such events, or choose to report them without the accompanying video. However, we all know that the broadcast news media will at one point just start streaming the information 'live' and without any editing, or choose to release the whole grizzly affair anyway, saying that the people have a 'right to know'.

The only thing that might save it from this fate is the rate of transfer. That videophones have a maximum bandwidth of 128 kilobits per second, just a little more than twice as fast as a dial-up modem connection, only since there is no analog to digital conversion, its the equivalent of a dual-channel ISDN line, which is sufficient for 30 frames per second video if the subject isn't making quick movements. I also don't think the cameras in the videophones have as high a resolution as standard television crews cameras, so you probably won't get the greatest details. It might make quick-moving battle scenes look quite garbled.

One can only hope.

James Can Relate To This One

There was this guy who used to get arrested regularly around here, and he had the misfortune of having a smiley face in the center of one of his fingerprints. Wasn't even necessary to check his prints against the database, everyone knew who he was as soon as the prints were taken, yet he still tried to lie about who he was.

Oh well, criminals who try to change their identities aren't rocket scientists...

But a few of them might be hackers.

;)

Talk about Expensive Cartridges

Go ahead, print yourself some organs.

Brings a whole new meaning to buying refills, and you thought ink carts were expensive before, ha!

Switch to....

You might have seen the Apple "Switch" commericals which try to convince you to switch from "PCs" to Macs. There's a couple of good parodies that can be found...

Switch to....Mac?

Switch to....Linux (Eeeevil Distro)

(25 Jan 03) UPDATE: Looks like she canna take it anymore Cap'n - www.ubergeek.tv where the Switch to....Linux parody is at must be overloaded. I have it mirrored here - Without permission of course, the site is down, I don't know who to ask permission of. So if someone from ubergeek wants me to take it down, just drop me a line and it will be gone.

Spam, Spam, and more Spam

When someone says 'Spam' do you think of the meat by-product canned loaf, or do you think of unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE)?

If you read blogs regularly, or are a blogger yourself, you probably think of the latter.

So, what do you do about it? Its a question I get from clients all the time. In fact, the elimination of spam (UCE) is becoming a high-dollar industry. Companies buy e-mail filtering software all the time to protect from improper e-mails going to and coming from employees.

First is to try to avoid having your e-mail addressed published on any public web site or anywhere in the USENET Newsgroups. "Spammers", those who send out spam or the people who sell e-mail address lists, have programs that crawl the Internet's public areas looking for e-mail addresses to add to their lists. However, keeping your e-mail address private is very difficult. Most on-line order systems require it, and once you order something, they will sell your information when they get the chance. This is why many people have multiple addresses, one that they keep 'secret', and the other(s) that they use for online ordering and for public consumption. However, all it takes is someone who has your 'secret' e-mail address to send you one of those electronic greeting cards and its all over.

So what else to do? The politically active amongst us will try legislation. As you can see, most of the states have passed laws regulating spam. Some states even allow you to sue spammers for cash if you can prove in small claims court that it was unsolicited. If you read the different laws, you'll wonder why the spam in your state doesn't follow any of the regulations. That's because these laws are rarely enforced, as it is too easy for 'small-time' UCE spammers to operate. Law enforcement would be overwhelmed trying to deal with it all.

So now you're at home, the laws aren't being enforced, and spammers have figured ways around your e-mail program's rule set. There are even people who have written elaborate programs and statistical analysis theories about spam that still get some of it. I myself manage several domains, one of which gets a lot of spam, and I get all of the bleed-over from defunct accounts. Someone at Chaos Theory pointed me to a neat service that filters spam.

Cloudmark Spamnet is a Peer-to-Peer spam filtering service that I've been using for a few months. It works the same way as Kazaa and other file-sharing programs do, only you share 'spam' lists. If you get a piece of spam, you click on the "Block" button in the Cloudmark program which then generates a unique mathematical serial number for that spam. Then if anyone else who is running Spamnet gets that mail, it automatically gets flagged as spam and moved to the appropriate folder and/or deleted. Its kind of neat, you have everyone working together to identify spam, and everyone benefits from it. Of course there are two drawbacks: One is that is people classify spam differently - one persons' spam is another persons treasure; The second is that it only works with Outlook 2000 or XP (Not Outlook Express). However, it does work very well. I had a few false positives at first (mainly due to the fact that I am subscribed to several e-mail lists on Bugtraq), but its been near 100% accurate.

Earthlink and other ISPs now offer spam protection (its usually opt-in, that means you have to turn it on), as do many of the 'free' web-based e-mail services.

Maybe we should start tracking spammers down and sending them to North Korean Concentration Camps. Oh wait, I forgot - the North Korean's (along with the Iraqi's) situation is our fault. Oh well, what a better place to send them - well maybe they could join the human shields who are headed over to Iraq...

It's Battlefield 1942 Day

I am just about recovered from the LAN gaming party I attended with James over at Hell In A Handbasket. Took us two hours to get started, I swear I only get invited to these things for my Network Engineering skills. (I think I said that before). We played from 6:00PM to 3:00AM - and by the end of the evening, James did pretty well. He certainly was nice Sniper-fodder for me on the Omaha Beach level of Battlefield 1942. In fact, you can see James in action here. He's the Brit doing the head bobbing.

Actually, I have photos of the whole debacle (hold your mouse over the pic for the caption):

Bad Week for Jack's Technology

Murphy's Law was in full effect this week, taking out my 19" Optiquest monitor. Had it for just about 3 years, and it just went dark when I turned it on one morning. The hard drive has also been doing some strange things, and I am running diagnostics right now - hopefully it will be in better shape than the monitor. So I put the monitor on eBay (I've sold quite a few 'broken' items there), and started researching and looking for a new one. Good 19" monitors will run you at least $250+. Sure you can buy cheaper or generic ones, but you get what you pay for, and when it comes to looking at something everyday for probably another 3+ years, I prefer something this is pleasing on the eyes. Cheap monitors, mice, and keyboards should never be purchased if you use a computer frequently.

I decided that if I was going to spend at least $250, I might as well spend a little more and get a flat panel LCD monitor. Problem is, I do a lot of computer gaming, and up until recently the response rate on LCD monitors was not sufficiently fast enough to prevent blurring of objects in the game. I play a lot of first person shooters, and prefer the sniper-type weapons, so being able to see small object clearly is a must.

I found a Planar PV174 which met all the criteria I was looking for. A sub 30ms response rate so that there was no blurring during DVD playback or gaming; 17.4" screen - which was about the same size viewable as my 19" monitor; DVI and Analog inputs, so that when I upgrade my video card I can use the Digital Video Input connector for even a clearer screen; a built in USB hub; built in speakers (however, they are very weak); and light and small enough to haul around to LAN parties.

So I put it on my computer today, and it was immediately taken over by my oldest daughter, as you can see here:

With her and her friend playing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone every chance they get, I am relegated to my backup computer system, which I have geekified as much as possible:

Yes, it's supposed to be a portable notebook computer, but I have so much stuff plugged into it now, its a pain to move.

I Make Mine with Soft-drinks or Beer

Seems a Foam Factory in St. Louis burned up. I don't know about you, but I don't need to order my foam, I get enough of it from Diet Caffiene Free Coke or in my Low-carb Lite Beers. Why would you need a factory to make it?

OK - I know its not that type of foam, but a neat headline would have been: "Fire department uses foam to put out fire at foam factory." As they often use Foam to put out fires involving certain types of materials.

Spyware

One of the things I do for a lot of my customers is to take their current computer desktop systems (usually called 'obsolete' by the vendors pushing 2Ghz machines for the business office) and give them a 'tune-up'. Usually by 'cleaning-up' the operating system be removing all no longer needed programs and optimizing the settings of the software in use.

Let's be honest. For most SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) and medium sized business users, a 500Mhz computer is more than enough to run any word processor, spreadsheet program, e-mail client, web browser, accounting package, etc. They don't need a 2Ghz+ system with a 64MB 3D Video card that can get 200+ frames per second in Quake 3 or other graphically intensive games. Sure, those of you who do photo or video editing, heavy duty CAD, or mathematically heavy computational programs (<-That phrase probably breaks several rules of English grammar) can always use more memory and CPU horsepower. Most business computers rarely use anywhere near their total capacity. In fact, the amount of empty hard drive space out there in the business world is probably pretty staggering, but that's another discussion.

So I take these 500Mhz machines and remove the 50+ viruses I find, usually of the Klez variety. No exaggeration either, that's probably the average number I find. I had one client who had over 1,400 viruses on his system, no wonder it wouldn't boot anymore. After I clean the viruses off, the second thing I do is remove the Spyware.

What is spyware? Chances are everyone of you reading this article probably have 1 or more spyware programs on your system. Some are hiding, and some are quite obnoxious and are looking at you right now with their beady little eyes from your systray (That's the group of tiny little icons directly next to where the time is displayed in the lower right hand corner of your Windows desktop). One of the most obnoxious of these is Gator. Like those annoying pop-up ads that appear at every web page? If you do, then install Gator right now. It puts EXTRA ones into your surfing experience. Like other companies to know all of your internet use habits, or even use your computer's idle CPU time while you're not using it all without your permission? Then install Kazaa media desktop. Of course, you DID agree to install all this stuff in the "Terms of Agreement" that you click through without reading. 'B3D Projector' is one of the worst and most insidious pieces of software that installs with Kazaa.

I usually find 40-50 pieces of spyware on each system. Some are so agressive that they cause the machine to crash every time the system is turned on, because they rush to send their payloads of information off to their corporate masters, who have Socially Engineered you to install it on your system.

Removing viruses, spyware, and defragmenting the hard drive (in safe mode for those of you who still use Windows 95, 98, or Me) usually increases system performance dramatically.

How do you get rid of all this malware? I prefer Command Antivirus to kill Viruses, and Ad-Aware for removing Spyware (be sure to get the Refudpate before you run Ad-Aware). With Ad-aware, do a registry scan, deep registry scan, and scan all of your hard-drives (CD's and floppies probably don't need to be scanned)

Stop your system from doing things you don't want it to do, and get rid of spyware now. Use Kazaa-lite instead of Kazaa. Try to at least skim through the software terms of agreement before you install anything, and don't forget your aluminum foil helmet to keep the government mind-control rays out. (Italicized portion is only meant as a JOKE and is not meant to comment on the sanity of the author of this article. No government agents need to visit my home to verify. I am totally sane. Yes, I am.)

DMCA vs. Sherman Act 

It is the old Razors and Razor Blades lesson. Shaving product companies sell Razors for low-low prices in order to make a large profit selling the replacement razor blades.

Some people might say it is not 'fair', or some might even say its not 'ethical', but there is nothing illegal about selling products this way - nor should there be.

No where is this paradigm more prevalent than in the computer printer market. Printers by Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, and other companies have the ability to print photographic quality pictures from a home computer. These printers can be obtained for less than $100. If you want to shop around, you can probably find the printers even cheaper than buying direct from the manufacturer.

However, the printer toner cartridges is where the manufacturers make up the lost profits. Toner cartridge kits for these photo-quality printers can easily approach $50, half the price of the original printer.

So as the old cliché goes, "What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?" Or more accurately, what does razor blades and printers have to do with the topic of this article.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in 1998. The main purpose behind the Act was to protect intellectual property rights in the digital world. At the time the bill was being considered, many organizations warned that the Act's language was such that it could easily be used to squash competition in the marketplace.

As this article at news.com reports, it is apparently going to be used just for that purpose.

Lexmark is suing a company that makes chips that allows other companies to produce "generic" replacement toner cartridges for a greatly reduced price. As an example, I bought black and color toner carts made by 'G&G' and 'Meritline' for my Epson C60 printer for about $7 each. If I had bought the Epson brand carts, it would have cost me $25-$30 each. Lexmark puts computer chips in the toner carts so that the printer can identify the cartridge type to be sure that it is the correct type. No chip, no printing. However, a company named 'Smartek' has created its own chip that sends the correct signal to the printer, thus allowing the use of 'generic' toner cartridges.

There are only two reasons I can see for having the computer chip in the toner carts in the first place. One is to be sure that the consumer doesn't accidentally damage their printer by inserting the wrong cart. The other is to be sure that the consumer can buy and/or use no other brand of toner carts other than the Original Equipment Manufacturer's (OEM) brand.

I'm guessing its more the second reason than the first. All the OEMs have to do is make the carts different sizes to assure that they aren't used in the wrong printer. Most of the carts that have the chip are already different sizes than carts used in other printers that are made by the same OEM. Therefore, a reasonable person would be led to believe that it was for no other purpose than to prevent competition. Maybe it does send information to the printer indicating ink levels, but that could be done with a sensor built into the printer just as well.

Lexmark is using the DMCA in their suit, but it seems to me that their actions themselves violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. They are attempting to stifle competition and create a monopoly of replacement parts for their printers. Lets go back to the razors and razor blades example. You can now buy replacement blades for your razor from another company other than the one who originally produced it. The DMCA covers 'digital' property, and was originally intended to stop Internet piracy, so why don't razor OEMs have the same protection under a different law? They don't and it would be silly for anyone to consider that they should. So why do technology companies get this protection from competition? If you follow the same logic, they shouldn't. If someone can produce a replacement supply part, then why shouldn't they be able to sell it? And the DMCA covers copyrighted material. Is toner or ink copyrightable?

Some may argue that it if you let someone copy a toner cartridge, then they could just as easily produce a copy of the entire printer just as easily. I may see someone coming to that conclusion, but it is already being done by the OEMs themselves. Could someone please explain to me how the common operation of any consumer level inkjet printer is different across the three OEMs I mentioned earlier? Epson, HP, and Lexmark inkjet printers all do the same things in almost the exact same way. They feed along a "U" or "J" shaped path, a printer head moved by belts and gears sprays toner onto the paper from similarly shaped toner carts, and then pushes the paper out of the front of the printer. If you took all of the brand marking off of the common inkjet printers and put them in front of a person who didn't know the styling of the plastic cases, I doubt any of them could tell you which printer was made by which manufacturer, and how they worked differently.

In Jack's opinion the DMCA is a bad piece of legislation that needs to be repealed and re-written. Technology companies need protection of their intellectual property, but in a more reasonable fashion.

But until then, the next time a lawyer from some tech company pins you up against the wall and asks you if you've paid your licensing fees under the DMCA, you tell him "the check is in the mail"...