My DSL service at home — from SBC, formerly Pac Bell — went down this weekend. After reviewing my usual “Is it a problem on my end?” checklist, I picked up the phone to call their service line, something I undertake with considerable dread. The couple of other times this has happened I’d gotten recorded messages at the other end saying, essentially, “We’ve got a big problem at our end, we know about it and we’re working on it” — which was fine, it was all I needed to know, and indeed they’ve solved those problems fast.

This time it was a problem more specific to my service. The bad news is I spent well over an hour on the phone line with them; the good news is, the tech at the other end of the line seemed to know what she was doing — which is so often not the case these days — and we got the problem fixed. That seems about all one can expect.

And so I see that Yahoo and SBC are partnering on a big new DSL plan. I know tales of DSL woe are legion, but my experience remains good.

Longtime readers of my column know that I’ve lamented more than once about the disappearance of Ecco, my favorite “PIM” (Personal Information Manager), a cool outliner/datebook/contacts manager that fell by the wayside as Outlook became the monopoly standard. Small communities of Ecco devotees have survived, and the program still works fine, but keeping the faith with a program that hasn’t been developed for five years is not easy.

My heart raced as I read the subject line on a reader e-mail that “Ecco Pro is back! ” It’s not quite like that. The good news is that NetManage, the company that purchased Ecco from its original developers and then orphaned it, has made the program available for free (it’s still copyright, still under license, but apparently anyone can go download it). There’s info here. But there doesn’t seem to be much more going on than that. Still, it’s a perfectly functional Win32 application. Go check it out if you’re looking for a good PIM.

Eric Albert says I got the Apple/Other World Computing DVD story wrong (thanks to Dave Winer for the link). Eric says Apple was right to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because Other World Computing was distributing a “patch” to Apple’s iDVD software, and therefore Apple was protecting the copyright on its software.

Well, based on the original CNET story I think I need to stand by my interpretation. (I can find no other coverage — anyone else see more details elsewhere?) If Other World’s product was actually a modified version of iDVD, if Other World was itself redistributing Apple’s software, then Apple has a case that Other World was violating its copyright (though not that Other World was violating the DMCA — see below). But that’s not what a “patch” typically is; usually it’s a piece of code that a user installs that modifies how a program functions.

If Other World was distributing a separate piece of software that users can install that interacts with iDVD then I don’t see how this violates Apple’s copyright. If that’s a violation of the DMCA then every single software “add-on”, every single software program that interacts with another software program, is in violation of the DMCA. And that’s patently absurd. But this is the kind of craziness the DMCA is moving us towards.

In any case, the DMCA doesn’t prohibit companies from distributing software that modifies how another company’s software works. The language used outlaws anything that “is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner.” In other words, DMCA wants to stop you from creating a tool that’s primarily for the purpose of circumventing copyright protection technology. There is no way under the sun that Other World’s iDVD patch falls under that prohibition.

For an example of the kind of insanity we’re in store for as Hollywood (the “content lobby”) hooks up with Silicon Valley (the “hardware industry”) to clamp down on intellectual property controls, consider this story from News.com’s Declan McCullagh. Apple has told a third-party software provider that it can no longer distribute software that lets Mac users use their Apple-supplied DVD-burning software with external recordable DVD drives. Users can still burn DVDs on their internal, Apple-supplied drives. Apple’s lawyers used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 as their rationale.

But this isn’t about protecting copyrighted movies from being duplicated (you can do that with the same ease or difficulty whether your DVD drive is internal or external); it’s about Apple wanting to force people to buy new computers with Apple’s own recordable DVD drives, rather than upgrading their older Macs with external drives supplied by third parties. In other words, Apple found the DMCA to be a pliable tool, easily adaptable for its own ends that have nothing to do with protecting intellectual property.

As “the content lobby” pushes “the hardware industry” to build more and more copyright control directly into computer hardware like hard drives (as chronicled by Salon’s Damien Cave here), we can expect this kind of rule-repurposing to happen more and more frequently.

I love my digital camera — or rather, I loved it until it broke and I couldn’t fix it.

My father, a much more serious photographer than I have ever been, had a wonderful Nikon camera, now about 40 years old, and he gave it to me several years ago. It hadn’t been used in a long time, some of its controls were stuck, and the little battery for its viewfinder had corroded. No problem — nothing that a toothpick, some solvent, and some work at a table couldn’t fix. So when I went looking for a digital camera a year ago I stuck with Nikon and invested in its Coolpix 775. The camera has taken many wonderful photos of my family, but on our camping trip last weekend it just went on the fritz: the LCD screen read “SYSTEM ERROR” and the zoom lens would not retract.

The frustrating thing was, there was nothing I could do. “SYSTEM ERROR” was not even listed in the instruction manual’s “troubleshooting guide.” I plugged “coolpix 775 system error” into Google and found this depressing list of user complaints on the Reviewcentre site. Seems that this problem is endemic to this camera. Nikon’s advice is to “leave the battery in for six hours” and hope that this fixes the problem, but that didn’t work for me. So now I have to send the camera back to Nikon and hope that they will fix it under warranty, even though — lucky me! — I have actually owned the camera for one week beyond the one-year warranty limit.

This is yet another example of a fundamental principle of digital gadgets: They’re great until they break which is true of some of the best car dvd players. Once they break, more often than not, there’s little the hapless consumer can do. Mechanical gadgets are susceptible to mechanical fixes. Digital devices are opaque black boxes, manufactured under the assumption that the consumer will replace them every 2-3 years so there’s no sense making them too durable. But I think next time I’ll buy a Canon.

My primary browser is Opera, on Win2000. But I find that some sites — mostly commercial sites (we’re shopping for a car so I’m spending some time on auto manufacturers’ over-designed pages) — don’t work well on that combination. No problem, that’s why I keep IE on my computer too. Fire up IE and the sites should work, right? Only lately I’ve noticed that virtually every site that uses a Javascript popup window of any kind breaks my IE. OK, time to upgrade, I figured — I’d been resisting going from IE 5.5 to IE 6 but I took the plunge. No go; I’m having the same problem. Today I downloaded Mozilla and I’m finding that, well, some sites work OK but others are even less compatible than they were on Opera.

Something is badly wrong here. I’d always assumed that the problem was that sites were being designed not to the rules ordained by Web standards codes but instead to the workings of IE, Microsoft’s monopoly browser. But these sites crash IE and don’t work on the standards-compliant Opera, either! If anyone out there has any insights into this mess, send them to me and I’ll share them.