Update Flash Without Adobe’s Crappy Download Manager

Recently, Adobe has pulled a hall-of-shame move and began trying to sneak in the installation of a craptacular background program called the “Adobe Download Manager” when updating Flash.  That’s just great, you know, since there are security updates for Flash almost every month.  So how do you get your required security update without Adobe’s bullshit download manager?

It’s a fairly simple process, and actually takes advantage of the generally-hated-by-most-people User Account Control (UAC) in Vista and 7 to block an unwanted action by a program.  And people say it’s nothing but annoying.

(Note: These instructions are for Firefox on Windows 7 or Vista; anything else and you’re on your own.)

1. Download the Flash updater directly from here.
2. Close all browser windows (including any opened by Prism).
3. Run the updater.
4. Start your browser back up.  Adobe will now sneakily try to install their awful download manager on your system.  This will generate a UAC prompt asking for administrative permissions to install.
5. Click “No” on the UAC prompt to stop the installation in its tracks.

Screw you, Adobe.  You’re in the Hall of Shame for trying to install backdoor software with critical security updates to a ubiquitous web technology.  And win one for UAC!

Web Hall Of Shame: Wired News Hijacks Your Clipboard

It’s a given that you can’t trust the Internet.  I mean, you’re connecting to random strangers’ computers, downloading code and data, running some of that code (usually in a sandbox of some sort), and then hoping nothing bad happens.  For that reason, I use the NoScript add-on to Firefox, which aggressively blocks scripts (especially third-party scripts) from running – unless I whitelist them.

Despite my general distrust, though, I still harbor a hope that most of the sites I regularly visit aren’t bad actors.  When it turns out they are, it’s a bit of a shock.  When it turns out to be one of the oldest names in net publishing, it’s really disheartening.

Wired News has a really cool article on lasers blasting mosquitoes out of the sky.  When you copy-and-paste from that article, it hijacks your clipboard and changes what you copied.  Try it yourself!  (Of course, if you’re running NoScript, you’ll need to temporarily allow all scripts on the page.)

From the article, copy:

The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight.

And then paste:

The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/death-star-laser-zaps-mosqitoes-dead/#ixzz0fKgTWFBU

Yup, they hijacked your clipboard, and added a tracking link.  Who the hell does that?

Wired, you’re officially in the Hall of Shame.

A Law & Order Episode in the Making

Ever wonder where Law & Order episodes come from? If you’ve ever watched the show, you know that they often scrape the headlines, sometimes mix-and-match style, throw in a homicide, and set Jack McCoy and the Good Cop/Bad Cop on the case. So when I was reading this article about the drug raid on the home of a Maryland mayor, I couldn’t help wondering how long it will be until we see the episode on this one. Except for the lack of a murder – easily written in by even a semi-accomplished screenwriter – this one seems to be cake-in-a-box for prime time television.

And now, here are the plot points of my imaginary episode. Determining which are real and which are fake is left as an exercise to the reader.

1. A small-town mayor is suspected of having a lot of drugs.
2. The jurisdiction of the police is fuzzy, overlapping with several neighboring towns.
3. The police are issued a warrant.
4. The police execute the warrant, knocking down the door, shooting two dogs, and discovering an unopened package containing 32 pounds of marijuana.
5. While recovering the body of one of the dogs, which escaped out back, the police also discover a dead body in the back yard. It is identified as a big-city lawyer with 2.5 kids all in an expensive prep school.
6. The police uncover an elaborate plot involving the mayor, the dead lawyer and a big-city drug dealer to use the mayor’s house as an exchange location. Police arrest the drug dealer.
7. It turns out that the warrant was a standard search warrant, and not for a no-knock warrant, thus making the search illegal. The mayor’s attorney gets the drug charges (32 pounds!!) thrown out, and the murder rap is also teetering, and Jack McCoy the district attorney gets to say “fruits of the poison tree” like six times.
8. The DA figures out how to put everyone away, using a clever legal tactic and impeccable oratorical skills. Everybody gets 25-to-life, and the DA rubs it in their faces with a semi-smug, semi-stoic head wobble. The end.

Best APOD Ever

Do you know about the Astronomy Picture of the Day? It’s a site, courtesy of NASA, that showcases a cool, interesting, or sometimes funny picture that comes out of the world of space exploration, astronomy, and cosmology.

For those of us too lazy to go to the site every day, there’s even a nice RSS feed to stick into your favorite reader.

Anyway, yesterday’s APOD was, I think, the best one ever. Courtesy of that dancing guy, the July 22nd picture is actually a movie; and rather than being about astronomy, it’s about things closer to home.

Take five minutes, and check it out. Totally worth it.

The Other Thirty Percent

I’m watching the Cubs – Zambrano just had a nice 1-2-3 inning – and in between the top and bottom of the first inning is a commercial for a drug for genital herpes.

One study found that up to 70% of people who had genital herpes got it from their partner when they had no signs of an outbreak.

So, what I want to know is: What about that other 30%? Did they just not notice? Were they drunk? Or is there some sort of oozing-sore fetish I haven’t heard about?

Sans Garfield

I used to really enjoy reading Garfield as a kid, at least partially because we had a big cat that looked quite similar to the lasagna-loving feline. As I got older, I realized that, though funny to an eight-year-old kid with an orange tabby cat, like most of the comics on the funny pages, it was long past its prime.

Amusingly, the tubes have breathed new life into Garfield – by removing Garfield from them. Now, I know that this old meme is old, but my mom hasn’t heard about it yet, and the only way she’s going to is by reading it on my lame-ass blog.

Also, today’s posting particularly good.

Candle Cannon

The geek in me would be remiss if I didn’t post this video of the Candle Cannon, the biggest air vortex cannon ever created. Marvel and enjoy.

The Candle Cannon: Behind the Scenes movie is also excellent. And for a small dose of air-vortex humor, there’s a short rendition of the Three Little Pigs, which, it turns out, is about 1/3 the length of the real story.

Real-World Slurm Meta-Parodoy

If Slurm is, as I believe, intended to be a scathing parody on the real soft-drinks we Americans consume so voraciously, despite all their horrible effects on our bodies, then what happens when that parody is made real and actually marketed as the very thing it parodies? Is that some sort of meta-parody? Or is it just really, really sad?

Slurm can found on the web, and used sans license in good faith, for fair use commentary purposes.

New Nine Inch Nails Breaks the Mold

I’m a long time fan of Nine Inch Nails, so news of Trent Reznor’s latest release would be exciting enough on its own. Above and beyond the music, though, is his trail blazing attempts at media distribution in a modern world – one without the record companies greedily leeching profits from the artists for discernible purpose. He knows there are ways to make both music and money in this brave new world, and he’s willing to take risks to find the right approach. I think this may be the best attempt to date.

With the release of Ghosts, Trent begins by releasing the first nine tracks, entitled Ghosts I, for free on his web site. Go download them now, if you’d like. Then, the next three sets of tracks can be bought for only $5. At that price, there’s almost no reason not to buy it! As a bonus, both sets come with a 40-page PDF booklet about the music, a bunch of cover art, high-resolution wallpaper images (in both 4:3 and 16:9 ratios), and avatar art for your favorite forums.

And then we move into the physical realm. If you prefer discs, or like me, just have to have every NIN album ever released, you can purchase the two-CD set, including a printed sixteen-page booklet. The cost is a mere $10. Targeting the real collectors is the $75 two-CD set in a fabric case. It is accompanied by a Blu-ray disc with slide show set to super-high-quality versions of the music. And for the budding musicians in the world, it also comes with a data DVD containing all of the recordings in multi-track format – ripe for remixing. (More on that in a moment.)

For the die-hard NIN fan, a limited edition collectors set was offered for $300. It included everything before it, as well as two high-quality, frame-suitable prints of the cover art, and a fabric-bound hard-cover book of the art, signed by Trent Reznor. Only 2500 were made, and even at $300, they are already sold out.

Finally, on top of all of this, the whole thing has been released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. This means that not only can you share the music with your friends, but that anyone can use Ghosts as a starting point for their own work, including up-and-coming amateur musicians, YouTube videos, or background music at your church. And all of this without the fear of gray-area legal repercussions from a broken copyright system.

So download the music, and enjoy it. Buy the rest, if you like it. Share it with your friends. In the meantime, after I’ve had a chance to listen to it, I’ll post my thoughts on the actual music. The non-musical portion is certainly amazing.

Nine Inch Nails and Ghosts I-IV images by Nine Inch Nails, licensed and re-published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

It Depends On Your Definition of “Short”

From the Washington Post Corrections for October 12, 2007:

An article in the Oct. 7 Magazine about roller derby said the television series “American Gladiators” was short-lived. The show ran from 1989 to 1997.

Sure, eight seasons cannot strictly be considered short-lived on television, but perhaps the original author was thinking in terms of social consciousness. American Gladiators’ popularity occupies that brief inter-decade period where the cultural norms in our minds, that normally separate one decade from the next, are mixed and blurred beyond simple identification, into a sort of slurry of pop stereotypes. When I look back, and try to place it, American Gladiators clearly falls within the Casio-keyboard, big-haired, cocaine-fueled nineteen-eighties.

And though the facts certainly disagree, I can’t help but forgive any writer who’d want to at least imagine that era as “short-lived”.