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Showing off my stick

So I was going to make this innuendo-laden post about what I do with my stick, but decided against it. This is a family blog after all. Anyway, USB sticks are cheap these days, so I always carry a couple of them with me. The latest acquisition is a 4GB Cruzer which I bought the other day for around €20.

Of course, the first thing you need to do when you buy a Cruzer is to remove the god-awful U3 software that comes with it. Fortunately they do provide a removal tool (it’s on a hidden partition on the drive or something). But once that’s done it’s a very useful drive in a very practical form factor. Now, here’s what I did with my 2 drives. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gadgets | 1,999 views | 4 Comments »

Pirates vs. Big Media

As foreseen, interesting things are happening in the wake of the recent MediaDefender email leak. Based on information gathered from said email messages, The Pirate Bay is now going after several huge media conglomerates, filing police reports alleging “infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.”

While the chances of any charges actually going to criminal court are minuscule, I can’t help but love these guys.

Posted in Politics | 1,017 views | No Comments »

Hot stock tip!

I don’t trade stocks, and couldn’t care less about most of them really. But lately there is one particular technology company I’ve found some pleasure in keeping an eye on - SCOX. When I’m bored I just watch the little desktop widget showing SCO’s freefall.

No idea what I’m on about? Check Groklaw for the entire SCO saga in all it’s glory!

Posted in Linux | 875 views | No Comments »

Anti-Piracy Ad from The IT Crowd

Posted in Film | 652 views | No Comments »

Opensource phone?

A while ago, I invested in a Nokia N95 Smartphone running the Symbian S60 3rd ed. operating system. It’s a great phone, with all the features you expect from a high-end smartphone: 3.5G, A-GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 5 megapixel camera, MP3 player, up to 2GB of storage.

Never the less, there are much more interesting things on the horizon, particularly in the Linux based smartphone arena. I’ve been looking at two of the most promising projects, the OpenMoko Neo1973 and the Qtopia Greenphone unit. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gadgets, Linux | 765 views | 4 Comments »

Internal MediaDefender emails leaked

Infamous RIAA legal attack dog MediaDefender seems to be in a bit of a pickle, as over 700MB of internal emails have been leaked to the public. And a juicy catch it is! Grab the torrent and read them for yourself - there should be hours and hours of entertainment in there, detailing not only entrapment operations of dubious legality, but also some nice first-hand accounts of MediaDefender screwing over their own customers (the RIAA member labels) and manufacturing statistics.

Among these gems you can also find confidential information such as a spreadsheet complete with names, social security numbers, home addresses and so on for several MediaDefender employees.

According to the source of the leak, the emails were obtained as a MediaDefender employee forwarded all his work email to his private GMail account, then proceeded to register with a torrent community forum using said GMail address, and used the same password (”blahbob”) for his forum account that he had used when registering his GMail account. Genius.

Update: Via Slashdot, Ars Technica has posted the first part of a comprehensive analysis of the leaked material. Good reading!

More Leakage: It’s just not MediaDefender’s week is it. Someone’s gotten hold of their phone call and Gnutella tracking database as well (torrent available here). I don’t think “pwned” even begins to cover it anymore.

Posted in Music, Politics | 1,978 views | No Comments »