Sunday, June 27, 2004

Professors find RIAA Lawsuits ineffective with further research - CD Freaks.com: "After all the RIAA's effort on filing lawsuits currently totalling over 3,000 and the approval of the Pirate Act, there is more and more research aiming to prove that file sharing is not the culprit. Video games and DVDs which are widely available on P2P networks are still selling very well with DVD sales still on the rise. Also, many industries suffered significant decline following the Sept. 11 economy decline.



Now the recording industry claims its lawsuits are finally paying off after US CD sales have risen by 10.6% in the 1st quarter 2004 from last year. However music downloads are also back on the rise, up 5 million to a total of 23 million over the same period. This indicates that CD sales seem to depend on how well file sharing is doing, thus contradicting what the music industry claims."
Bush Sees Priority as Popularity at Home, Not Europe: "My job is to do my job." says Bush. Another sentence for history.
Firefox 0.9! No, wait, 0.9.1! (aka Lessons learned?) - MozillaZine Forums "So, here's the question : WAS IT WORTH rushing 0.9 with a puny RC just 5 (FIVE!) days before? Did it do a lot of good to have 0.9 included on the CD with Moz 1.7 just to have users forced to download 0.9.1 a couple of weeks later? With all the hype surrounding Firefox (as a poster child of OSS and IE slayer), that 0.9 did way more harm to Firefox image than 0.9 did good as a release!" in other words, don't use 0.9 wait for 0.9.1

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

AOL quits enterprise IM game | CNET News.com "AOL's move out of enterprise IM underscores the lack of success the company, and its rivals, achieved in luring businesses to pay for software that many workers were already using for free." that's internet! free(dom) wins!

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Incredibly interesting speech for Microsoft about DRM. It's terribly long, some pices are copied below:


"we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law: 'any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it.' This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you."

"In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and
Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD.
She sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say,
Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered with an algorithm
called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS un-scrambler."

"It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the
records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much
innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD players?
They've gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the weird and
amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up by the VCR?"

Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry,
told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film
industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."

But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it
determined that any device capable of a substantial
non-infringing use was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this
Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive
the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get
another business-model or go broke."

At the heyday of Napster, record
execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that
Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film's run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.

Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that
Hollywood was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it,
they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could
hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them
and made the product they thought their customers wanted.

When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone
companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just
writing the latest installment in this story. Mako says that
phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad
for the cellphone economy, because it'll put the extortionate
ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that
just because you bought the CD doesn't mean that you should
expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3 player,
and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to
expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about
alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning?
Is that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market?

Friday, June 18, 2004

SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: Time to Dump Internet Explorer: "IE is a buggy, insecure, dangerous piece of software, and the source of many of the headaches that security pros have to endure"

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Robert Moore: Entertainment industry killed my company - CD Freaks.com well, that's sad :(
What's this Gmail? - Guide - Short-Media
Slashdot | Microsoft Plans To Sell Anti-Virus Software
"If you are like most PC users, you may feel that your PC is slow or unstable. You can't run many applications or your PC will slow down. Or you have to reboot frequently due to crashes or application freezes. This page (link) contains all the secrets to making your computer fast and stable in minutes! No computer industry insider would want you to know this (link), as they will have a hard time trying to persuade you to upgrade your system to the next Windows Software or expensive hardware upgrade." I didn't expect this kind of messages from www.lockergnome.com Will they sell me Viagra next time?

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Yahoo! storage goes negative | The Register: "We give you email, you give us storage space"
Firefox - The Browser, Reloaded v0.9 released. Great browser (If it wasn't for the crappy new theme included in this release.....)
eBay item 8111352149 (Ends Jun-21-04 08:59:27 PDT) - TONS JAPANESE VIDEO GAME COLLECTION FOR SALE PS2 XBOX.. super auction in eBay of many videogames consoles, take a look at the photos!!
Virgin King Branson Drives Car Across English Channel, I only blog it because of the funny paragraph comparing british vs american billionaires.

Monday, June 14, 2004

Italian gov text spams entire country | The Register Berlusconi learnt the lesson from Aznar, cell phones *are* important.

Sunday, June 13, 2004

Saturday, June 12, 2004

The Complete Edition of Murphy's Laws
AMD: An apology very funny
Regarding RSS reader evangelism [Scribbling.net] this guy is terribly wrong. I discovered RSS in dailyrotation.com and now I am aggregating content with bloglines.com RSS is just wonderful and great for average user.
Dave Winer "ubiquitous white-on-orange XML buttons"
Microsoft delivers 'the Facts' about Linux | The Register "Nick Barley, business and marketing director of Microsoft UK, said the "tabloid view" is that the battle between Microsoft and Linux is a struggle between "the free world and a big monopolist run by the richest man in the world"." yeah, that struggle is a fact ;)
Microsoft feels price squeeze from Linux "Microsoft Director Marketing Nick Barley has admitted that their customers are increasingly using the tactic of dropping the L-word in their dealings with Microsoft."
GrepLaw | Lindows Gives Up "Lindows threw in the towel, not because they lost any court case, they have won at every turn, but because Microsoft has brought so many lawsuits in so many foreign jurisdictions that Lindows simply can't afford to defend them all. [...] If that doesn't provide an argument for some sort of binding international IP arbitration regime, I don't know what does."
GRAND THEFT AMERICA

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Britney Spears spelling correction at Google, or different ways to spell her name.

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

The Free & The Unfree - The P2P Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com interesting article on IP.

Some facts I read there: 60% of genome patents are hold by US, 50% of soybean grown worldwide is GM (genetically modified).

It focus on four industries: Media, Medicine, Agriculture and Software.
Optical Camouflage, amazing!!!!!!!!!

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

In Brazil, Microsoft decries Linux use | CNET News.com

"I don't know if this is the best way to attract investment into the country," the executive said. "I know this is not the best way to create a base of development from which to export because there's no revenue from something free."
Why the FCC should die | Perspectives | CNET News.com "Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn't work for the Soviet Union, and it's not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good."

Monday, June 07, 2004

Reason: Database Nation: The upside of "zero privacy", long and interesting article on how databases leave you without privacy and how you benefit from that.
Emergent cheese-sandwich detector enlisted in War on Terror | The Register: "It's very bad luck for USA Today that on the very same day they reported the profound failing of the FBI's digital and computer analysis systems in the Madrid bombings, they published a column suggesting that just such technologies could prevent such attacks in future."

Sunday, June 06, 2004

RIAA wants your fingerprints | The Register, incredible. They are worse than comunists (comunism wants to control everything, capitalism doesn't)
Interview with Ben Goodger (chief developer of Firefox)

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Nokia's 3220 Airtexter I like this phone!
Linux News: Open Source: The Penguin That Ate Microsoft: "open-source software generally requires less computing power, a factor that its proponents suggest could be especially important because a new version of Windows slated for release in 2006 will be beyond the capacity of many older computers."
Zeropaid.com - Harry Potter and the wizard idea to foil cinema pirates (UK): "Surreptitious recording from cinema seats, sometimes interrupted by the head of the person in front shifting and blocking the action, has become a serious menace, according to the industry." Now, that's funny!