Why don't more conservatives go to university?

Why are most university professors liberal? Two academics, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, have done a study that suggests that most conservatives simply aren't interested in the sorts of things that attract people to academic careers. Matthew Woessner himself is an interesting counter-example: he's a fan of Fox New, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh and usually votes Republican, and unlike most of the conservative students he has studied, has a deep interest in the scientific method. (Although he clearly doesn't apply it to Fox, Giuliani or Limbaugh...)

The Agonist has this to say:

What do you do when there are not enough laissez-fare loving, personal responsibility professing and family values fundies at your university? You make it more socialist:

The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students

I've often thought that conservative politics simply meant "handouts for me, not for thee".

Read more here.

Last major music labels give up on DRM

The last two of the big music labels -- and of course the independent labels weren't stupid and arrogant enough to install spyware and rootkits on their customers' computers -- Warner Music and Sony BRM, have finally stopped trying to hold the tide back and have given up using DRM on their music downloads, at least for most of their catalogues. Warner caved to the inevitable in December last year and allowed Amazon to sell mp3s, and in January Sony BRM also announced that they are giving up DRM for music downloads.

This isn't quite the death of DRM for music, but it's close.

Another reason to hate Flash

There's a lot to hate about Flash video. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of saying this when I myself put Flash videos on my blog. If YouTube would use a decent format, I'd be onto it so fast your head would spin.

It's not a fully open standard, making it near impossible for anyone to create Flash applications that don't depend on Adobe. There are a zillion movie players for .avi, .mpg, and even a handful for .mov, there's only one player for Flash .swf applications. (In fairness, mplayer can, sometimes, play .flv videos. mplayer is awesome!) That's a warning sign of data obsolescence.

Specifications for the Flash formats are only released to developers on the condition that they don't create Flash players. Flash videos contain executable code, which is a serious security hole: it's only a matter of time before somebody creates a virus which runs through Flash, even on Linux. Most Flash applications are poorly written, with terrible user interfaces and buggy implementations: Flash sites frequently lock up my browser. You can't index or search Flash sites, or copy text out of them, and if you are blind and use a screen-reader, web designers who use Flash are giving you a big F-U. And if you're a movie creator, why on Earth would you be happy with the crappy, low resolution, compression-artifact-filled ugliness that is the typical .flv file?

I could go on, but I'll just link to one more reason to avoid Flash if possible: Adobe is now adding Digital Restrictions Management software to the format.

Finally, there's a classic suite of arguments against DRM that will be as true for online video as they were for music. DRM doesn't move additional product. DRM is grief for honest end-users. And there's no reason to imagine that new DRM systems will stop copyright infringement any more effectively than previous systems.

The things you never hear about

I understand that it's a big world, and it's impossible to keep up with everything happening everywhere.

But still, it's kind of creepy and shocking to discover that the Middle East's version of the Berlin Wall was (temporarily) knocked down a month ago, and nobody I know has heard anything about it. Described by one commentator as "the biggest prison break in the history of man", Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, described it thusly:

About 3:00 am on Wednesday morning Jan. 23, well-coordinated explosions demolished the iron wall built by Israel to seal the southern border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt (the Philadelphi axis). Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed across the border and entered the Egyptian side of the town of Rafah, which had been bisected by the wall, in search of food, gasoline, and other basic commodities which have been in short supply for many months in Gaza. The first wave of Palestinians to cross consisted of hundreds of women who were met with water canons and beatings by Egyptian security forces.

Read the rest of his op-ed here.

For that matter, most people I know didn't even know there is a Wall cutting off Palestinians from their own farms and jobs, or that it has already lead to the avoidable deaths of innocents.

Bad writing and poor grammar

One of the most pernicious myths about English grammar is that you should never split an infinitive. Linguists point out time and time again that the prohibition against splitting infinitives makes no sense in English, and that it was originally derived from Latin and French where it is impossible to split an infinitive.

An infinitive is a verb with the word "to". For example:

• We plan TO GO immediately home.


• At the time I intended TO INVADE only half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO KICK the guy viciously.

And here they are again split:

• We plan TO immediately GO home.


• At the time I intended TO only INVADE half of Poland.


• My auntie told me TO viciously KICK the guy.

There's no doubt that sometimes splitting infinitives can weaken a sentence, but very often it makes it clearer and stronger. In case you still believe that infinitives should never be split, please read this and this and this.

But then there are still those who continue to spread the superstition that splitting infinitives is bad grammar, like the aptly-named "Lousy Writer". When I first came across his site, I had just spent a delightful half hour or so browsing the World Wide Words site. Compared to Michael Quinion's delightful prose, which has flow and rhythm, going to the Lousy Writer site is like having your eyeballs sand-blasted. I can't imagine taking the Lousy Writer's advice on style matters, or common English idioms.

There's at least one common construction where even the most rabid "Thou
Shalt Not Split Infinitives" mavens end up splitting their infinitives:

• An effective way TO more than DOUBLE your income is by mugging little old ladies.

On a related note, are you shamed by you English?



Click thumbnail for full-sized image.

I so have to get a t-shirt of this

Thanks to BoingBoing:



(For the benefit of anyone who has been living in a cave for the last thirty years, the person in the image is Fawlty Towers' Manuel, shown in the style more familiar from the iconic photograph of South American revolutionary Che Guevara.)

Taking back democracy

Sick of the Republican Party trying to block them from voting, students at Prairie View A&M University in Texas decided to take back democracy one street at a time: literally.

Faced with systematic efforts to disenfranchise blacks and Democrat supporters, such as putting polling places seven miles away from the voting precinct, more than 3,000 students took to the highway, blocking it as they walked the seven miles to the polling place.

Nice one guys!

Technical Virgin

The things that offend people, or that people are afraid will offend people (not necessarily the same thing!) often astounds me.

In 2006, actress and mother Melanie Martinez was sacked from her job of host of the PBS television program "The Good Night Show" because of two 30 second videos she had made over five years earlier. The videos, for the now-defunct "TechnicalVirgin.com" website, were send-ups of public service announcements for abstinence-only sex education.

Here are the two videos:

Boys Can Wait



Also viewable here.

I Have A Future



I'm amused (in that "have to laugh or else I'd cry" way) by this comment defending PBS:

But I think in her case she openly lied to her employers. Every job interview has that "prior history" question where if you did anything that would effect your job, it's best to say it then.

"Every" job interview? I've been to a couple of dozen job interviews (some of them were even successful) and I've never been asked if I'd done something that would make me morally unsuitable for the position. And for all we know, she did disclose the videos when she was hired. But if she didn't, it doesn't follow that she lied -- far more likely she just never imagined that they could possibly be an issue.

Deputizing the ISPs

One of the more insidious dangers coming out of the copyright lobby is the idea that ISPs must be made responsible for enforcing copyright law on their behalf by choking off infringing material. It's a rather bizarre concept, no different from the idea that the Post Office must scrutinize every piece of mail posted for signs of illegal activities.

In practice, not only would this a huge burden on ISPs, but it's also ridiculously impractical. Since infringing bytes aren't coloured differently from non-infringing bytes, the only "solutions" are to either non-selectively cut off entire avenues of communication, or make an expensive and ineffectual attempt to analyze Internet traffic, trying to detect infringing material. That sort of censorship is ripe for abuse and prone to errors. And let's not forget the privacy implications of having your ISP actively monitoring every packet of data you send.

Such is the influence of the copyright lobby that the idea is being taken seriously, so it is good to see that British bastion of middle-class respectability, the Guardian, slam the idea:

Some internet users are irresponsible, and their behaviour may even be damaging Taylor's clients. But in seeking legislative relief for this distress, governments need to strike a balance between the wider public interest and the demands of a particular industry to defend an increasingly obsolete business model. And though the record industry is important, it's an economic minnow compared with the IT industry.

An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.

Who owns data?

Ed Felten raises a very important point about many of the debates we have about data portability: we start off by making a poor assumption, and that closes off options.

An example is the Internet storm over Facebook canceling well-known blogger Robert Scoble's account. Scoble had amassed a vast amount of data in his account, and got caught using software tools to export it. Facebook has a vested interest in locking people into their service (more users = more advertising revenue), and the way they have chosen to do this is to give people free accounts, encourage them to invest a lot of time creating valuable (to the users, if not anyone else) data, but prohibit them from extracting that data elsewhere.

Hmmm... I must update my Blogger backup script. It hasn't worked well since Google made the upgrade from Blogger version 1 to version 2.

The poor assumption that we make is that data -- facts -- must be owned by somebody. As Felten says:

Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue. In fact, much of the confusion we see stems from the unexamined assumption that the facts in question are owned.

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate — all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

---

UPDATE: Chris Finke has an innovative solution to the Facebook problem, one which could (in principle) be extended to all similar such websites. His Facebook Scavenger extension for Firefox lets you capture copies of the data once it's in your browser.

The downside of proprietary data

Mark Pilgrim is a published author, Google employee and long-time Apple Macintosh user and programmer. In the Macintosh universe, he's part of the pantheon: although never an Apple employee, and not quite up there with folks like Andy Hertzfeld, he's nevertheless one of the minor demi-gods of Apple mythology. He also helped create one of the few Mac viruses (the MBDF-A), but co-operated with police on his arrest and paid restitution for the damage done.

Putting aside his checked past, Pilgrim was considered one of the Mac power-user evangelists, so it came an unpleasant shock to the Mac community when he finally discarded his Mac in favour of Linux. There were tears and predictions of doom. Those predictions turned out to be wrong, and Pilgrim is predicting that 2008 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. (With the sudden expansion of notebooks running Linux, like the EEE, I think those predictions will finally be right. And not before time.)

Not long after jumping ship to Linux, Pilgrim discussed his experiences with long-term data storage, and his frustration with the difficulty of keeping data accessible over a time frame measured in decades instead of months or years. The bottom line? Long-term storage of data is like a series of migrations from data format to data format. Anything which makes that migration harder is going to hurt you. Companies like Apple who don't grok openness are constantly trying to lock people into their products, then change the products. Every time they do that, there's pain and inconvenience for users, and usually the loss of data.

Pilgrim's conclusion is that using open source software and, more importantly, open formats, goes a long way to reducing this problem. You will still need to migrate data from computer to computer (anyone think that the computers of 2028 will still be running Windows Vista?) but the pain will be less.

There’s an important lesson in here somewhere. Long-term data preservation is like long-term backup: a series of short-term formats, punctuated by a series of migrations. But migrating between data formats is not like copying raw data from one medium to another. [...] But converting data into a different format is much trickier, and there’s the potential of data loss or data degradation at every turn.

Fidelity is not a binary thing. Data can gradually degrade with each conversion until you’re left with crap. People think this only affects the analog world, like copying cassette tapes for several generations. But I think digital preservation is actually much harder, in part because people don’t even realize that it has the same issues.

[...]

So if you care about long-term data preservation, your #1 goal should be to reduce the number of times you convert your data from one format to another. You should also strive to increase the fidelity of each conversion, but you may not have any control over that when the time comes. Plus, you may not know in advance how faithful the conversion will be, so planning ahead to reduce the number of conversions is a better bet.

Open source software is not a panacea for this sort of data loss: as Pilgrim discusses, the open source photo-editing software Gimp uses a deliberately undocumented file format that no other application can fully read.

If you care about accessing your data in ten years time, then go read the rest of his conclusions. (And if you care about people accessing your data in 200 years time, print it out on good acid-free paper and deposit it somewhere dry and safe.)

The Unbearable Burden of Blogging

Well, perhaps not quite unbearable...

A big hello to Metro over at Metroblog, who liked my stuff enough to comment three times in one sitting and then promise to blogroll me. Don't worry Metro, if I steal your Avid Fans I'll let you steal some of 'em back...

That makes him, or will make him, the first blogger to blogroll me (hint hint Metro...) other than that reasonable conservative Jon Swift, but he'll link to anyone, even liberals and progressives. Thanks Metro.

More bloggage shall happen soon, but for now I'll just point folks at my other blog where I'm experimenting with Wordpress. Typical... here I am busier than a really busy guy who's just taken on two more commitments, and I've got fans relying on me to entertain and educate them.

If only I could use that TARDIS technology to be in two places at once...

Does the USA need a stupider motto?

Thanks to Terrifel from the Straight Dope message boards:

1956 was of course the worst year that the United States had ever faced. Wracked by turmoil and social upheaval, beset by enemies within and without, the nation thrashed about like a dying, constipated beast. Whole cities crumbled into ruin amid the chaos as American society teetered on the very brink of collapse. The horror of that time has made the name of Eisenhower synonymous with anarchy even to this day. My father would never talk about how he and his family survived those grim times.

Fortunately, in the very nick of time, legislators realized the true cause of the crisis: America's national motto wasn't stupid enough. Like all of the country's other woes, this disaster could ultimately be traced back to that most sinister of Americans, Thomas Jefferson. The same treacherous impulses that led him to betray his rightful King also inevitably prompted him to sabotage the fledgling nation by giving it the worst possible state motto: E pluribus unum. Not only was this an unforgivably pompous classical reference, its subversive message-- "out of many, one--" would result in a catastrophic tradition of escalating tolerance and unity that was doomed to tear the country apart in less than two hundred years.

Read more.

I think it is time to change the motto from "In God We Trust" to "Try And Stop Us". Or perhaps "Are You Looking At Me?".

I have my crash recovery back!

I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open. Not as many as some -- I work with one system administrator who regularly has 60-80 tabs open at once. But I'll frequently have a dozen or two.

So it's very frustrating when a browser crash or power failure knocks out all those tabs. Its not always easy to find them in your browsing history.

Some years ago, the Konqueror web browser introduced a Crash Manager that created a menu of any web sites you had open when the browser last crashed. Good stuff! You could open them all at once, or pick them one at a time.

Unfortunately, some time ago that feature was dropped from Konqueror as by default. I've missed it. A lot. Fortunately, Firefox now by default will recover from crashes by giving you the option to reload all your pages. Unfortunately, that's an all-or-nothing situation, and it doesn't help you if the crash was caused by one of those pages.

At long last, I've found how to put the crash recovery tool back into Konqueror. Its a two step process:

1. You need to have the KDE Addons package installed. On Fedora, a command like sudo yum install kdeaddons should work. Or use one of the graphical package managers like "Add/Remove Software".


2. In Konqueror, go to the Settings menu and choose Configure Extensions. Under the Tools tab, tick the Crashes Monitor checkbox.

Since I generally prefer Konqueror for 90% of the websites I visit, I think I'll be using it a lot more from now on.

Beer, glorious beer

In the mid-1990s, I went through a stage of making my own home brew beer. It was reasonably successful, but a lot of effort considering that I'm not a big beer drinker, so after a four or five batches, I stopped.

Fast forward to January 2006, ten years almost to the day since the last time I had brewed beer. While cleaning up my garage, I came across a dozen or so bottles of my home-brewed pale ale that I had forgotten about. I was under the impression that beer didn't age well beyond a year or two, so I started pouring them out into the garden. Being a little slow, I didn't notice until the fourth or fifth bottle that they still had a good head and they didn't smell bad. In fact, they smelled delicious.

After a nervous taste I soon learned that ten year old pale ale not only smells delicious, but it also tastes delicious. It had darkened in colour to a dark red-gold shade, and had a magnificent malt flavour. Those last half-dozen plus bottles went straight into the fridge, and I enjoyed them over the next couple of weeks.

Today I stumbled across what is surely the very last bottle of home brew. One last lonely stubbie of pale ale, bottled on 2nd of January 1996. If beer becomes magnificent after ten years, words fail to describe what it becomes after twelve. A process worth repeating perhaps?

The dissolute doctor

I stumbled across a blog -- alas, no longer being maintained -- from a British doctor, "Venial Sinner", who writes about the daily traumas of being a doctor in the British hospital system. Not a lot of humour there, except perhaps the gallows variety, but he writes good blog.

There's his frustration at seeing the only chance of identifying a mysterious disease disappear because of the interference of ignorant, judgmental, self-appointed god-botherers:

We have a single lead: an area of infective looking tissue on CT which we could biopsy and culture. Sharon cannot consent to the procedure; she does not currently have the capacity. In the morning, we spoke to her mother who agreed that the biopsy should go ahead all the same and that she would consent to this in place of her daughter (as the law allows).

That was the morning. By the afternoon everything had changed. Sharon's mother had some news. She had gone to the church and spoken with the Elders. The Elders has listened to the story, considered, and pronounced their verdict. Sharon had had no brain infection. God punishes those who live dissolute lives and Sharon had taken drugs. God does not like drugs. His punishment had been severe but he had heard the prayers of Sharon's mother and, being a good and merciful old chap, he had relented. Sharon would recover and all would be well. There was no infection and, ergo, there need be no biopsy. Sharon's mother, a devout Christian, swallowed it whole. She withdrew her consent for the biopsy immediately.

There's his example of how modern medicine can utterly fail to cure patients, and in fact make their life even more miserable and the common problem of patients with medically unexplained symptoms.

On learning that the new Polish government was cracking down on homosexuals, and that the Party Boss had declared that "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it.", Venial Sinner remarked:

Downfall of civilisation, you say? Goodness, sounds bad. Who’d have thought it? You start off by letting two men hold hands in the street and before you know it the whole of mankind is poised to plunge backwards into benighted barbarity.

Cheers doc, where ever you've got to.

More nonsense about Open Source vulnerabilities

Computer World is claiming that Red Hat Linux and Firefox are "more buggy" than Microsoft Windows.

That at least is the conclusion you are supposed to draw from the article's title, the summary and the opening paragraph:

Windows not that bad after all
By Matthew Broersma, Techworld

Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.

So they say. But if you read on to midway down the second page of the article, you get a very different picture:

Red Hat [Linux] was found to have by far the most vulnerabilities, at 633, with 99 percent found in third-party components. ...

Windows had only 123 bugs reported, but 96 percent of those were found in the operating system itself.

So let's see how that works. Red Hat Linux, which ships with multiple hundreds of third party applications, almost all of which are non-critical and don't even get installed, has about six vulnerabilities in the operating system. Windows, which ships with a handful of applications, has about 118 vulnerabilities in the OS. According to Computer World, an OS with six vulnerabilities is more buggy than one with 118 vulnerabilities.

Yeah, right. Sure it is. Just how much advertising does Microsoft do with Computer World?

The article goes on:

In the browser field, Firefox led the way with 64 bugs, compared to 43 for Internet Explorer, and 14 each for Opera and Safari.

However, in an examination of zero-day flaws - reported by third parties before a patch was available - Secunia found that Firefox tended to get more patches, sooner, compared to IE.

Out of eight zero-day bugs reported for Firefox in 2007, five have been patched, three of those in just over a week. Out of 10 zero-day IE bugs, only three were patched and the shortest patch time was 85 days.

You got that? The shortest time IE was vulnerable to known security bugs was nearly three months, compared to just over a week for Firefox.

But IE only looks as good as it does because ActiveX bugs are counted separately: IE had no fewer than 339 ActiveX bugs in 2007. If you include them in the count for IE, as you should, then you're comparing 382 for IE versus 64 for Firefox.

You almost -- almost -- have to admire the journalist's gall in trying to push a whopper of this size. Sadly, this sort of behaviour is very common: half-truths and deceptive statements in paragraph one, the actual facts buried deep in the article. That way you're not lying, because all the facts are there.

The people doing this know that there is a strong correlation between the number of readers and how close to the top of the article: for each extra paragraph you bury something under, you reduce the number of readers by a surprisingly large percentage.

I've written about the tendency of the IT press and security industry to make misleading if not dishonest comparisons between Linux and Windows before.

Don't mess with the geeks

What happens when a clueless US senator pretending to run his own MySpace webpage hires clueless web developers to do the job for him?

In an attempt to prove how 21st century he is, 70-year-old Senator John McCain hired web developers to create his MySpace page. Unfortunately, they hotlinked to the wrong person's files.

When Mike Davidson learnt that McCain was "stealing" his bandwidth, he decided to play a little joke on the Republican senator:

'I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.'

Davidson replaced the image referred to in McCain's profile. However, the new image was a lot less prosaic: it described a political about-face by McCain on the subject of gay marriage and a penchant for partnerships between passionate females.

'The only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.'

McCain should consider himself lucky that the image wasn't redirected to Goatse Man.

The article is a little sensational, describing it as "the perfect cybercrime" despite admitting that no laws were broken -- except possibly by McCain, who I'm sure had no authorization to use Davidson's computer resources.

Speaking of hotlinking from MySpace, those of you running your own Apache webserver might find this little rewrite rule handy:


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([a-z0-9]+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=signout [redirect,last]


WARNING: I don't run my own webserver, and consequently I haven't actually tested this. No warranty is given. Use at your own risk. If it blows up your computer and eats your dog, don't come crying to me.

The jazz club versus the collections agency

SGAE, the royalty collection agency that operates in Spain, recently sued a jazz club for failing to pay royalties on music played. The club responded by stating that they only played royalty-free Creative Commons music, and magistrate Luis Sanz Acosta ruled in their favour.

The royalty collections agency's evidence was poor at best. Especially noteworthy was the recording they claimed was made in the jazz club but was actually recorded elsewhere. The judge was not amused.

What is especially satisfying is that the magistrate displayed a good understanding of "música libre" and the Creative Commons -- no doubt far better than the SGAE, which stands to lose financially if significant numbers of Spanish musicians drop out of their cozy little system. Monopolies never really understand the people who opt out.

For those who are unaware of how the royalty system works, it goes something like this:

The collections agency collects royalties on the musician's behalf, based on an estimate of how many times his or her work is played. Once the money is collected from (e.g.) the radio stations and bars, once a year the agency pays it to the musician, assuming:

• The royalty is more than a certain minimum amount.


• The agency can find your bank details, and don't confuse you with somebody else and pay your royalties to them.


• You have filled out all the paper work they insist on.


• They remember to actually make the payment.

If any of those conditions (especially the last) are not fulfilled, you have to wait for the next year's pay run to see a cent. If you specifically ask, they'll offer to try harder to remember to pay you next time. In the meantime, they get to collect the interest on your money for another year.

Naturally this does not apply to musicians who can afford more lawyers than the collections agency, but since musicians generally only get into such a happy state by collecting royalties, there are far fewer of them than outsiders to the music biz usually imagine.

Buy our product or we'll sue you

Two US companies have issues cease and desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Real Networks and Adobe, warning them to stop not using their Digital Restrictions software.

That's right. Buy our product or we'll sue.

The manufacturers of the DRM software, Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com, claim that their product makes water not wet "effectively controls access to copyrighted material", and therefore failing to use their snake-oil product is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

[The DMCA] makes illegal and prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners. Under the DMCA, mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the act.

How's that again? If you fail to use DRM, that's the same as circumventing the DRM software that you would have used if you had used any.

(Or, to put it another way, if you give a sandwich to your friend without charging him money, you're guilty of being an accessory to theft, because your friend effectively stole from you the money he would have given you if you had asked for any, and therefore you assisted him in his crime. And if your brain hurts about now, you're not alone.)

That's a rather... unusual... interpretation of the DMCA. It's almost certainly a publicity stunt, and unlikely to go any further, but it isn't that far removed from media companies' efforts to outlaw open formats and mandate ineffective and restrictive technologies.