First off, let me say that I have no desire to get into the Dobbsian xenophobic gang-bang currently going on in this country. It’s ridiculous.

That said, the huge rash of Chinese-made toy recalls during the past few months is enough to make even the most level-headed cringe. And it has to be said that this isn’t something new, either – vinyl lunch boxes, clothing with painted snaps, fish, dog food, etc, all of Chinese origin, have all been recalled for contamination as well over the past couple of years, and so really, I’m not sure this is news except that the problem is so pervasive.

I guess my initial feeling was, “well, that’s awful, but there’s an easy way out of it – just don’t buy crap made in China if it’s anything that might be problematic.” I mean, folks, there is a price to be paid for all of those things you get at WalMart – the whole reason that stuff can be and is sold here so cheaply is that someone is able to get it at that price and still make a profit, and it doesn’t take an Upton Sinclair to tell you that part of that “low price” comes at the workers’ expense and the rest of it at the consumers’. Of course, that’s being a bit callous – the real problem is that most of the country can’t afford to buy anything but WalMart-esque crap (ask any grad student where he or she got his or her bookshelves – it costs more to make your own out of boards and cinder blocks than to buy some crap shelves at WalMart last I checked!), and so we buy what we can afford and hope for the best in terms of what it contains.

And clearly that hope has been misplaced, much as Big Business and the Chinese government would like you to believe otherwise. (By the way, before I sound too xenophobic, let me stress that were American corporations able to get away with such practices, I know they’d cut corners in exactly the same ways in a heartbeat, so this is not really about the Chinese per se. And if you believe otherwise, I have this two-for-one bridge-and-swampland deal for you…)

Anyhow. So we don’t shop too often at WalMart – sure, we pick up vast amounts of toilet paper and some bulk stuff from Sam’s Club, but we’re pretty careful about what we get from there, and again, it’s mostly about affordability. But if we want food, we mostly get it from Whole Foods in spite of the price. And we don’t buy a lot of “disposable” crap, so we look for higher-quality goods instead of running for the cheapy WalMart stuff. But we’re not made of money either, so this doesn’t mean we don’t have any of that crap – we just try to minimize it.

Of course, now that we’re having a baby, we want to be careful about a lot of these things. I’m careful about where my fish or chicken comes from, since the baby eats what I eat, and we’re careful about where we buy fruits and vegetables, but that’s not worrying about Chinese imports – that’s worrying about American agricultural and trade practices more than anything. And Christian and I decided we were going to try to completely avoid Chinese-made clothes when we decided to go shopping for baby clothes.

HAH. Go ahead. TRY it.

We went to some reputable, slightly upscale stores just to get some basics, and every tag that showed a country of origin (and this was most of them) said, you guessed it, Made in China. Having no choice in the matter, we decided we’d just avoid anything with painted buttons or snaps and wash things a few times before the baby wears them (which is fine, we’d have done that anyway), but we felt a little stupid.

And then, today, I was wandering around in the local snooty shopping district (which is near our house) and decided to wander into a toy store for babies. I was looking for a heavy baby doll to practice with before the baby comes (and give to the baby when he’s a little older), and was looking at various rattles and toys and such. This is one of those “educational toy” stores, so everything’s relatively expensive, and what do you know… I couldn’t find a thing meant for a baby to put in his or her mouth that wasn’t made in China. Since colored plastic Elmos and Doras were tainted with lead, there’s no reason to believe that plastic rattles and teething toys might not be. Sure, they might be safe, but who wants to risk it? (As a side note, I’m really glad my mother won’t be buying stuff for this kid, or we’d have a wonderland of crap “picked up at Walgreens” that we’d have to dispose of, but that’s another story…)

The problem is this – how much choice do we have anymore, even if we’re willing to pay for it? Even if you want to avoid Chinese-made stuff, just to protest (since this country believes the power of the pocketbook is mightier than God – and it’s ironic that the people who often believe that most strongly are the people who will use their Bibles to beat you down any other time, but anyway…), it’s actually much harder to do than you might think, particularly because there are large sectors of the marketplace where country-of-origin labelling is not mandatory.

I suppose it’s time for us to start looking for nice wooden toys made in, say, Germany… I like those toys anyway, but I’m not sure I have enough arms and legs to afford them, and I’m not giving away my firstborn

But can someone please explain to me why, on August 31^st, Walgreens is advertising Halloween candy at 2/$5 and has their costume displays out already???

I mean, geez, school hasn’t even started in a lot of places yet…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6960961.stm

From the article:

In Milwaukee alone, 20 to 25 new homes with a combined market value of some $2m (£1m) are being foreclosed, or repossessed, every day. State-wide there was a 34% rise in the number of people who faced eviction in 2006 and Ms Derus believes that that number will double this year.

and:

Some observers say the fact that Wisconsin should end up with a large middle class sub-prime problem is a warning for the rest of the United States as it is famed for is financial conservatism.

The fact that we live in a country where crippling debt is normal, even expected, for the working middle class is sad enough. The fact that they can’t pay for medical care and are thus victim to institutionalized loan sharks is really awful. And it’s unfortunate to see Milwaukee hit so hard, though I know it’s happening everywhere. While I’d never move back to Milwaukee for personal reasons, it is one of the better places in the U.S. to live…

Apparently, the guy who writes xkcd has had similar experiences – here’s his variant: ( ):

Can I just say again how much I love xkcd?

Oh, and I guess this puts me into R-rated blog territory, even if it’s harder to detect. Bad me

But just for kicks… it’s been around 300 days since I wrote that post, and the average number of hits per day from around the beginning has been about 100. Even if you presume 30% of those hits were from people who absolutely love U3 or who were looking for something else (and I think the roughly 200 negative comments on the post indicate that’s probably being pretty generous), that’s still about 20,000 people who thought U3 sucked. You got that, SanDisk? Since this blog, right now, has just under 40,000 hits, that means that most folks who’ve bothered to come to my quiet little corner of the Blogosphere came here to find a way to get rid of your software…

What’s really funny is that the stats drop happened all at once. Like, Monday, it got 202 hits (pretty normal, lately). Tuesday: 56 hits. Wednesday: 28. All at once, I tell you …

Perhaps the U3 guys got annoyed and decided to try to do something about their search rankings Alternately, WordPress changed its stats counter again. (Or insert your own hilarious conspiracy theory here! )

Either way, I couldn’t care less – I do think it’s rather amusing that these guys got bitten for their bundled, involuntarily installed software that apparently messed up a lot of people’s systems.

But as a farewell to U3, I thought I’d give all you U3-haters a treat that my husband sent me a few weeks ago via Slashdot. Apparently there’s an Information Week article stating that Sandisk will abandon its U3 technology in favor of a partnership with Microsoft to “carry a complete image of their desktops around in their pockets.” From the article:

As part of the plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology, which adds some smart features to USB devices. Independent software developers that have created U3-compatible applications will be offered help migrating their products to the new technology, which has yet to be named.

Now, I don’t know that the resultant Microsoft/SanDisk product will be any better – but it will probably be more clearly advertised, since these guys seem to want to make money specifically off of the technology rather than stealth-bundling (and yes, I do think that showing the “feature” in small print on an unbelievably cheap drive is stealth-bundling).

I’m not any more likely to buy one of these guys than I am to intentionally use U3, but I do have some advice for Microsoft and Sandisk this time: either let users install the new software themselves, or give them a very clear reference to how to get rid of it if they don’t want it. Preferably, if you preinstall your software on the drive, you should include the removal software with the disk and let users decline anything that might be installed on the desktop from the get-go, and give them the option to uninstall your software from the thumb-drive the first time they plug it in.

If you can’t do that, don’t advertise it as a thumb drive. People have certain expectations for what thumb-drives do, and screwing up multiple systems by installing software and messing up drive settings arbitrarily on every computer they touch isn’t one of them, unless they’re infected with a virus. Package it instead, in big letters, as a “Windows-only desktop replication device”. With a big warning that it will screw up your CD-ROM drive settings for no apparent reason. And possibly eat your dog when you’re not looking

In response to Steve Jobs’ Open Thoughts on DRM, global DRM giant Macrovision published this corporate crap as a response.

Daring Fireball translates this into actual human-speak for us.

Pretty funny

I have two comments about this – first of all, isn’t it sad that 47% of non-business grad students cheat? If you have to cheat, you’re in grad school for all the wrong reasons. And you make life suck for those who don’t cheat, since many classes are graded on a curve. It’s also incredibly demoralizing for honest students. (And don’t give me a lecture about grad students from cultures where communal learning is the norm not knowing better than to “write group solutions”, either – when I was in CS at Purdue a few years back, it was common knowledge among the grad students that there were groups of students cheating, and those students had heard the same lecture about the rules we had.)

Secondly, and more importantly… is this gap really a surprise to anyone? Business students are choosing a profession which is about the bottom line and personal financial profit. Other grad students, particularly doctoral students, are (in the general case) on crack if they are doing graduate study in their fields with the goal of getting rich. It’s all a matter of intent.

Given that people who study business are specifically learning to assess risk versus potential profit, since the risk of getting caught cheating – and paying an appreciable price for it – is usually much lower than the potential profit (particularly in this day and age, where universities appear to do whatever they can to avoid litigation), the only thing to stop them from cheating is their own ethics. That, or making the risk much greater. Remember, folks, that this is a field which is about capitalism in a society where capitalism is the unofficial state religion. Everyone is supposed to be out for #1, and so on. None of this is surprising, though it is sad.

I’ll add a disclaimer or two here, though. First of all, I have two good friends who’ve studied business, and they’re fine, ethical people. (I’ve also had a few bosses who claim to have studied business and who are neither fine nor ethical.) I should also mention that there are MBA programs in the U.S. where ethical business practices are an important part of the curriculum, and I commend these programs for doing the right thing. Not everyone in business is bad, nor do I mean to imply that – my point is more that given the nature of what’s being studied (and the study’s authors address this point), it shouldn’t really be surprising that a higher number of graduate students whose field suggests very different interests and values than the fields of other graduate students might also behave differently from graduate students in those other fields.

Whether it’s MBAs, other grad students, or undergrads, it’s really time to start attacking the problem from both ends – ethics and risk. It’s time to start emphasizing academic ethics again (can you spell plagiarism, boys and girls?) and making the consequences of cheating much more dire. I think it’s time for universities to start kicking out those students who cheat instead of giving them second, third and fourth chances. I know this is a lot more work for professors, and that’s the real shame – preparations for academic hearings are a pain in the ass as far as I’ve seen, and collecting evidence is no fun – but this has really gotten out of hand.

47% of graduate students??? Ugh. Shame on you, people. Shame on you.

I saw this nice little 1GB USB flash drive when I was in Wisconsin last week for 30 bucks (after instant rebate) at a Best Buy. I was there for something else, but my dad had just misplaced his USB drive just before an extended consulting trip to North Carolina, and I figured I’d call and ask if he wanted me to pick one up for him. (My question was really whether I should buy one or two – 30 bucks is a very nice price for a decent amount of storage, and I figured Christian and I could certainly use it.)

So 60 bucks later, I left Best Buy with two little USB drives. They’re nice and small, have a retractable USB connector, and don’t have a cap to lose (which may or may not be a good thing). I thought it was a good buy in any event. When I got to the car, though, I noticed the fine print about U3 technology and some crappy software bundled on the drive (Skype with a free month of voicemail, some password storage software, and an anti-virus package, I think). Eh, I thought to myself. I’ll just wipe it when I get home. As I’ve implied before, I don’t really like companies deciding what’s installed on my hardware for me.

Well, I finally unpacked the thing today, and for some reason or other decided to look up this U3 stuff before I plugged the thing in. I like to know what devices and software are going to do before I let them run amok on my system. Sure enough, Amazon’s reviews of the drive had lots of complaints about the U3 Launchpad application running everytime the drive was plugged in, lots of undesirable stuff going on in the background, errors if the drive was not removed using the U3 tool instead of the Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” application, etc.

Ewww… I thought. This could suck… Bunches of people griping about it can’t mean anything good.

Of course, I’ve overestimated people before.

But after finding out how to fix it and forwarding the link to my father (who I hadn’t talked to since he got to North Carolina and started using the thing), I found out even he had had trouble with it. He’s a darned smart cookie, and he was pretty irritated:

It is REALLY annoying. It even told me that I had removed it improperly without using the f@3$%$*** eject button, even though I had disabled it from windows. … [I] will fix it after I transfer my files, but it’s nice to know that I don’t have to throw the damned thing away!

So I figured posting the fix might not be a bad thing, and might speed up some frustrated person’s search on how to get rid of the unwanted software. Fortunately, poking around at the SanDisk site reveals that it’s pretty easy to get U3 and all of the associated crap off of your drive.

Here’s how it goes, if you’re running Windoze (I don’t know if U3 even runs for other OSs, so if you’re running MacOS X or a *nix distro, the fix may be as simple as just formatting the drive):

1. If you’ve used the device before, make sure you’ve gotten everything off of the drive you need. You’ll be reformatting it. (The application may have an option that allows you to keep the data – I don’t remember – but better safe than sorry.)
2. Plug in the drive – the U3 launchpad will load. You can close the U3 tour program and whatever main window pops up if you like, but leave the U3 launchpad icon in the system tray enabled (i.e. don’t exit the launchpad application entirely).
3. Download SanDisk’s U3 Launchpad Removal Tool (opens in new window) – as the site says, make sure the USB device is plugged in and Launchpad is still running.
4. Run the tool, and choose the option which completely removes U3 and formats the drive.

Voilà, you now have a regular old USB drive which you can break in any way you want.

(Edit: If the SanDisk tool above doesn’t work for you, you might try the uninstall tool from u3.com – thanks to Olaf for the information. I had no trouble with the SanDisk tool, but I can only speak for myself!)

I admit that I am not a fan of bundling unwanted applications with devices or other software. Hell, I get annoyed with programs that install links to URLs for internet providers on my desktop, let alone executables that hide on my disk doing God-knows-what. (Well, ok, I have a pretty good idea as to what, but that’s only because I take the time to find out and eradicate them.) This is just one more example of how companies think it’s really OK to do whatever they want with your machine once you’ve bought something from them – purchase this OS, and you tacitly agree to relinquish control of your data. Purchase this DSL package, and you agree to have MSN as your ISP, even if you don’t need the service. Purchase this hardware, and you agree to let data be tracked that you would otherwise keep private or to run certain applications on your machine that you have no desire or need for.

Now, I understand that part of the reason that drive was so cheap was probably because there was some monetary incentive to SanDisk to push U3 out to consumers. And it was easy enough to get rid of once I looked for a solution. But let’s face it – Joe Blow who uses his CD drive for a cup holder and thinks he breaks the Internet every time his connection lags is not going to know how to find a solution. My feeling is that unless the software is clearly advertised on the packaging along with an explicit mention of how to get rid of the software, companies have no business installing or running anything on your machine that is not directly related to the product you intended to buy.

I loooooove corporate America. Yes, yes I do.

Standard disclaimer: If anything breaks as a result of following any instructions anywhere on this site, the responsibility lies with you, not me. I’m a poor academic – suing me would be pointless anyway…

(Added 1/10: Thanks to Jim C. for the updated Sandisk removal link.)

I closed comments at some point because it became clear that there were people who, regardless of how and what I said, thought I was implying that this would somehow keep things private from your ISP. Which is lame, because I’d never say something like that. We simply did this because it annoyed us. It’s not very useful.

Also, I made the mistake of calling Busybox a Linux distro in the original post, which it is not – it’s a toolset which, with a Linux kernel added, for example, is useful on embedded devices. My bad. Correction noted, and thanks. However, leaving a comment on another page because the comments are closed here is itself a wee bit annoying. Please don’t do that. The comments were closed because the post is dead. Thanks.

So today Christian and I were setting up the extended network in our new house here in scenic Denver. I set up the DSL modem just for my computer yesterday, since Christian has no power in his suite of rooms, and noticed that the modem had a “web activity log” utility and thought, grumbling, that we’d have to get around to turning that off, because surely there’s an easy way to turn that off, right? I put it out of my mind and went out to dig holes in the garden.

Now today, we decided to get Christian set up temporarily until his study is ready to go, so we moved everything around, reconfigured the network, and threaded a lot of cords and cables into the room next to my study. When we were going through the modem configuration page to set things up, Christian saw the web activity log, and his head started spinning around. Now, we had no choice of modems when we ordered from Qwest, and I did not look around on the web enough to notice that Actiontec advertises this as a “feature” (you know, so that you can keep an eye on what your kids/husband/dog are doing on the internet). But clearly this is not something we want.

Sorry folks, but the last thing I particularly want is a modem that is keeping track of what I am doing. When I surf the net to satisfy my Bernd das Brot fetish, I don’t think it’s really anyone’s business. More to the point, in these days of creepy surveillance everywhere, I don’t particularly think it’s a good idea to have hardware sold to me by my ISP keeping track of what I do on the internet, even if Qwest was the only major phone company not to sell customer information to the NSA. It’s not like Qwest couldn’t keep track of what we were doing on their own, but this does seem like a suspiciously convenient solution to the problem of ISPs having to store huge amounts of customer data – why not have the customers store it on their own? And let’s tell them it’s a “feature”! They’ll be thrilled.

Neither Christian or I were happy about it, and while we found a few posts on the net complaining about this “service” being available (and not readily removable) to the customer without his or her consent, we found no solutions. Fortunately, the Actiontec GT-701 (and several of their other modems, it seems) is running BusyBox (a tiny little GNU toolkit intended for embedded systems), so you can actually telnet in and do stuff to it. With quite a bit of poking around, Christian found where the activity log hides, and we symlinked it to /dev/null to get rid of it. Worked like a charm! There are no guarantees that they won’t hide it elsewhere if folks start shutting off their logs, but in the meantime, here’s the dummies’ guide to how to get rid of that activity log (the only assumption I make is that you can read and you have access to some sort of a telnet client – there’s nothing hard about this):

First, you’ll need to telnet in to your modem with your administrative username and password. If you don’t remember it, it can be changed from your browser on the modem’s web page under Advanced Utilities > Admin Username & Password. In general, unless you’ve done something fancy, your modem (and its web interface) is at 192.168.0.1. If not, you probably know where it is. Anyway, telnet to wherever it is:

> telnet 192.168.0.1
Trying 192.168.0.1...
Connected to 192.168.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.

BusyBox on (none) login: youradminusername
Password:

BusyBox v0.61.pre (2006.02.18-05:21+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

#

Ok, so now you’re in. You’ll want to change to the directory where the log is hidden:

# cd /var/tmp

The file you’re looking for is log_web_activity. First, you’ll have to remove the file so that we can make it point to something harmless:

# rm log_web_activity

Now, and this is important, in order to prevent the log from being written to, you need to create a symbolic link from the old file name to /dev/null (if you know nothing about Linux/Unix/whatever, think of it as a lovely black hole to which you’ll be shipping your data). If none of that made any sense to you, fear not. Just type what I tell you to type. Afterwards, that pesky file should disappear for good!

# ln -s /dev/null log_web_activity

Now log out of the modem, and you’re home free:

# exit
Connection closed by foreign host.
>

Edit: Note that you’ll have to do this anytime the router reboots. Since, as Christian kindly notes in the comment below, /var is a partition in RAM (and thus it – and your symlink – get hosed on shutdown) and the startup scripts can’t be edited since they’re all in read-only memory, you can’t do anything about it permanently unless you’re industrious enough to build a new ROM image.

In short, anytime your modem loses power or reboots, you’ll have to go through the steps above again.

That should be it.

Now, I’m not saying there might not be people who might have uses for that activity log, but I just don’t think there’s any good reason for my ISP or the manufacturer to put something like that on my modem by default without asking for permission, and plenty of evil reasons for them to do so. This is bad form by industry, and given that your average Joe is unlikely to take precautions to make the box less accessible from the outside, it seems to me to be a reasonably serious violation of privacy. Or maybe the FBI will start getting subpoenas for web activity logs for all Americans who’ve looked at German websites this week dedicated to grumpy bread-shaped puppets with arms that are way too short because some terrorist had bread for breakfast.

Either way, bad idea, Qwest and Actiontec. Bad idea.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Qwest or Actiontec. Sometimes I’m barely affiliated with me. I also take no responsibility for your modem breaking, exploding, or calling up the FBI to tell them about your bread-shaped puppet fetish. If you really don’t know what you’re doing, call someone (not me) and ask. Use this information at your own risk.

Edit: Thanks to bluezoo7 for catching my typo in the log path…