So, to hide my new Kindle behind a VPN that pretends to be in Japan (so it won’t trigger region-detection forced on the ebook market by publishers), I had to resurrect an old wireless access point and put it behind a machine that could NAT out through an OpenVPN tunnel. I grabbed a dusty old Shuttle from my closet, put a fresh distribution of OpenBSD on it, and then had it lose all of its BIOS settings when I moved it to a more convenient place in the house.

I’d forgotten about the joy of replacing CMOS backup batteries; we’re so spoiled today.

Details on nearly three million customers stolen. So, how’s that switch to renting your software by the month working out?

Adobe Acrobat release notes:

"Because PDFs are used so universally, they can be a target for hackers. Adobe provides regular updates to safeguard your computer from attacks."

What they really mean:

"Because we took a perfectly-safe document-formatting system and crufted it up with Flash and JavaScript and anything else we could think of, downloading a PDF file is about as smart as blowing a junkie in a third-world shantytown. Have a placebo and come see us again next month."

Japanese spam tries to get you to join pay web sites that offer access to women. Chinese spam tries to get you to open virus-infected Excel spreadsheets.

Security advisory from Adobe about all versions of Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash/Acrobat except the just-released CS6. The fix? Buy CS6. The workaround:

"For users who cannot upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe recommends users follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources."

Dennis Ritchie has died.

"I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum."
    -- dmr@alice.UUCP

Or, in this case, “Pool! Out of the loop!”, which explained how someone’s straightforward Python-based service had managed to open 350 simultaneous connections to the MySQL server in a matter of minutes, under very light load. Another one of those “glad we caught it in QA” moments.

Between the product page that focuses almost exclusively on vague descriptions of bundled apps, the extremely weak coverage of yesterday’s press conference, and the distinct lack of detailed product reviews based on actual shipping hardware, one might wonder if you’re not terribly excited about releasing the ThinkPad Tablet, even with the real digitizer hardware that makes it possible to use a stylus for more than fingerpainting.

I managed to find confirmation that it supports the regular Android Market as well as the Lenovo App Store, but does it work with Amazon’s App Store? Can you cleanly delete unwanted bundled apps, such as McAfee for Android? Does the note-taking app include all of the optional handwriting recognition languages, such as Japanese? If not, are they available as add-ons?

The product doesn’t seem to be really getting launched, y’see. Most of the press coverage is still from over a month ago, and is a mix of direct quotes from press releases and handwaved comments about how good it will be when it’s finished.

Which suggests that until this week, it was still so rough that it couldn’t be sent out for real reviews. This might have been okay if you’d been the first company to launch an Android tablet, or perhaps even if you hadn’t already shipped a similar one (without the pen) in the IdeaPad line.

[Update: the ship date keeps slipping on lenovo.com, and I don’t think it’s due to a huge number of orders…]