Archive for December, 2008

Online Pets?

Okay, I guess I’m going to show my ignorance on the toy industry here, but I couldn’t believe this when I saw it in the store. I was walking through Target last night going after some last minute Christmas gifts and saw this sign. Apparently the whole aisle was designated for “Internet Pets”. They’ve had virtual pets for a long time, but do we really have to have online pets? Perhaps thanks to a little shell scripting and cron we can have fully automated pets that are fed, walked, and loved on automatically. Now I just need to find a way to get my virtual dog to pee outside instead of on the carpet all the time..

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Dec 24th, 2008

RIAA Wants Us to Pay Twice for Our Music

In the past I’ve not really had an opinion on the RIAA. Their tactics of going after individuals is pretty ridiculous, but pirating software, music, and movies, etc. is still morally and ethically wrong. If someone creates a piece of work, whether software, music, movies, or any other digital art and they want to be compensated for it monetarily, then that’s their deal. If someone wants to release their work under the GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, or any other “free” license, then great. Go ahead and use it. Unfortunately, the RIAA has taken enforcing those rules a bit too far. By definition, the people haven’t even stolen anything causing the RIAA to inevitably fail in the courts. They’ve also gone after individuals in the courts who clearly can’t afford to pay legal fees and lawsuits even if they were successful. Apparently, now the RIAA has realized this failure and is now going after ISPs to try to solve the “problem”.

The RIAA is in the midst of deals with ISPs to filter traffic of individuals. When a consumer is suspected of participating in piracy, they will receive warnings and if the actions are repeated, the ISP will shut off that customer. The software and technology behind detecting these kinds of things has been proven somewhat unreliable but even that is beside the point. If ISPs are forced into adding that kind of technology they won’t be the ones covering the costs. The consumers will be the ones paying for adding additional capacity needed to perform that kind of scanning. ISPs would have to add servers, networking equipment, software, and staff to manage the scanning. It would appear that not only does the RIAA want us to pay for our music as we should, but pay extra so that they can be sure we have actually bought our digital media. All this while P2P and other file sharing services simply move to SSL so that their traffic can’t be scanned.

If paying twice for our media wasn’t enough, the RIAA wants to put the responsibility on the ISPs for stopping piracy. According to the report from torrentfreak referenced earlier:

“…in the absence of proof to the contrary, an Internet service provider shall be considered as knowing that the content it stores is infringing or illegal, and thus subject to liability for copyright infringement…”

Apparently now the ISPs have to be the “piracy police” now. We already have to pay enough for connection to the Internet, and now we have to pay for the ISPs to have lawyers on retainer as well. If I have to pay my ISP to spy on my traffic, I’m not sure how much I’m going to be willing to spend on music anymore. I’m sure there’s a lot of others in the same boat. What was the goal of the RIAA anyway? Oh yeah, ensure there’s a market for musicians to sell their music.. Something that most consider a luxury, especially during hard economic times.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Dec 21st, 2008

openSUSE 11.1 On VMware

Yesterday I decided to install the new 11.1 release of openSUSE. Since I didn’t have any spare machines laying around, I threw it on my desktop using VMware Server. The installer was much smoother and a lot more slick than past releases, but probably what impressed me the most was that once the installation was done and I was booted up into KDE, the mouse left the VMware console screen. At first I didn’t realize what was happening. I was going in and out playing with the new OS while getting a little work done. Eventually I got the system fully patched and was ready to install the VMware tools. Then all of a sudden, I realized that the tools had already been installed and my mouse had been going in and out of the console window the whole time. The openSUSE installer had detected that it was running on top of VMware and installed the tools for me. Not too shabby.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Dec 20th, 2008

Patch for IE to be Released Out-Of-Cycle

A very serious flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been found with a patch to be released soon. The BBC reports that the flaw is so severe that Trend Micro’s Rick Ferguson is urging consumers to find an alternative browser at least until the flaw has been fixed. The vulnerability allows an attacker to take control of a user’s computer and steal the user’s passwords. Microsoft has stated that the flaw has only been seen exploited in version 7, but the underlying flaw exists in all versions of the browser. In a Security Bulletin notice sent yesterday by Microsoft, they mention that the update affects versions as far back as 5.01 on Windows 2000 all the way up to version 8 beta. According to the BBC article mentioned earlier, no other browsers are affected. Alternatives to the browser include Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari. I haven’t seen a promised release date for the patch, but the Security Bulletin update from yesterday says that Microsoft intends to update its Security Bulletin today for numerous versions of Internet Explorer.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Dec 17th, 2008

Mac OS X 10.5.6 Available

Apple has released version 10.5.6 of its Leopard operating system today. The update has been called by AppleInsider the “most extensive” update to the Leopard operating system with over 100 fixes in the patch. The update is available now via the Software Update on your Mac OS X 10.5 system.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Dec 15th, 2008

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