Samurai.Chris

www.joyoftech.com

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?

[ full article from TorrentFreak ]

MacHeist 3 is up and rolling, and has already had 2 nanoMissions and 1 full mission. If you've never participated, it's a lot of fun. They people behind it, known as "the Directorate", have created an immersive online game environment where participants get to act out their latent hacker fantasies, solving puzzles and breaking through some very clever "security systems" (puzzles) with the end goal of getting free copies of popular shareware apps for the Mac.

 If you're a Mac user, and haven't tried it, I recommend checking it out. Like I've said before, it's a lot of fun. And it's a chance to join a very friendly community of Mac users from around the world.

 www.macheist.com

This is pretty amazing...

WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE AND OPINIONS AHEAD.

Ok, this from the WSJ:

Worries Over Jobs's Health Weigh on the Stock

Note that the latest storm of "concern" for Steve's health was touched off by a story in Rupert Murdoch's sleaze-journal, the New York Post. I cannot effing believe the shitheads on Wall Street are going to the NYP for information!!!

Moreover, where do they get off hiring investigators to snoop around and track his doctor visits and whatnot. And now hiring doctors to look at pictures to evaluate his condition?! Am I the only one here who thinks this smacks of that douchebag Senator Frist diagnosing Terri Schiavo by video tape?!

Furthermore, it looks an awful lot to me like some of these hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street shitheads are treading DANGEROUSLY close to HIPAA violations in the way they're trying to snoop around and get access to his medical information. I get that they have a vested interest in his well-being since he is so integral to Apple, but for fuck's sake!!! This is going too far. Let the guy be... if there's a problem, he'll disclose it when he's damned good and ready, and if the SEC doesn't have a problem, then the analists (intentional misspelling... makes you pronounce the first 'a' long) need to sit down and pour themselves a nice tall cool glass of shut the fuck up!

While it may not be absolutely precise, it's pretty damned close, given that the data is pulled from a variety of sources (including the UN, the EPA and the US Census Bureau). In any case, it's good food for thought...

And if you're at all interested in what I had to say, go here. 

This was definitely amusing...

Tech writers are yammering on about CES (as they do every year), but 2007's most important piece of gadgetry wasn't introduced in Las Vegas... it was introduced in San Francisco on Tuesday, January 9 at the Moscone Center, and it's going to change the world. I'm talking, of course, about Apple's iPhone. This thing is, in a word, AMAZING. If you have the spare time, watch the Keynote address where Steve Jobs introduces Apple's latest revolution.

Nice knowing ya, zune! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way to irrelevance... oh wait, you're already there!!! 

Pinched from the Celebrity Mugshots section of The Smoking Gun.
(copyright apparently held by CourtTV.com and/or its affiliate sites)

It's almost banal to observe that we live in very complicated times, particularly with respect to how we get information. Madison postulated that in order for the American Experiment to work, an informed public was a critical dependency. Yet we live in an era where much (if not most) of what we see and hear is governed by a few corporate megaliths.

The Nation recently published an interesting "manifesto" of sorts, dubbed A Ten-Point Plan for Media Democracy. The article was written by Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy. If you care about how information is delivered to you and the shape of things to come as we forge ahead into the digital age (and you should!), I think you'll find it a worthwhile read.

Net Neutrality is still up in the air, as well. It's important to keep abreast of the issue and keep the pressure on Congress not to allow the giant telcos to create an internet fast lane for the highest bidder and a dirt road for the rest of us.

As anybody who knows me groks in fullness, I hate spam and am inclined to do everything I can to help fight it. I've tried all sorts of mechanisms to protect one of my heavily harvested addresses, but that's pretty much as useful as shutting the barn doors after the horses have already gone off to the glue factory.

Anyway, rather than going into the lengthy details of my various battles with spam, I want to talk about something interesting I found at AuditMyPC.com (while running my semi-regular security checkups)... they've got this new feature called Anti-Spam that is designed to mess with the nasty little spam-bots that crawl the internet in search of harvestable email addresses. Basically, it fills the list withrandomly generated  bogus email addresses... over and over and over again, so the rat-bastards running the bots get lists full of useless garbage.

June 23 Update: Here's another one I found at Dave Siegal's/Stephan Mischook's Killer Websites page: Spam Blocker Coalition.
spam blocker - help fight spam email!

Admittedly, it seems imperfect (maybe they can just write a script to scrub their lists, or alter the bot to ignore the link) but it's worth a shot.

I also wonder what implications this would have for search engine spiders... it'd be a bit of a shame to send them on a perpetual loop. I'm guessing their spiders are a bit smarter than the average spam-bot, tho.