Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Sign the anti-DRM pledge to boycott Sony

Pledge to Boycott DRM!

You can bet I signed this sucker and fast!

DRM severely restricts our rights as users, creators, and members of the global community. We will not stand by and let fair use grow extinct as a consequence of poorly thought out technology and the laws that support it.

I've been keeping up with the ongoing saga through boingboing.net

Monday, December 5, 2005
Sony rootkit ripped off anti-DRM code to break into iTunes
Sony's DRM supplier XCP ripped off a free software project so that it could defeat Apple iTunes.

Remember when Sony got nailed for including code an open-source crack for iTunes in its rootkit DRM? Princeton researcher Alex Halderman has been patiently teasing apart the rootkit, looking for an explanation. Why would Sony's arms-merchant rip off an anti-DRM program for its DRM?

Halderman concludes that the XCP -- the Sony rootkit -- was intended to be used to crack open iTunes and insert Sony's music into it, without allowing Sony customers to convert their music into MP3s along the way.

This exposes one of the things about DRM that most people miss: it doesn't really matter what permissions a given DRM grants or prohibits (as fun as it might be to point out the absurdity of a DRM that keeps you from listening to your own music). The important thing about DRM is that it gives the company or consortium that controls the DRM control over who can use the DRM.

So Apple can make an iPod and shut Real and Microsoft and Sony out of it. Napster can make a subscription music service and shut Apple out of it. And so on.

Reverse-engineering Apple's DRM is hard, but not overwhelmingly so. Jon Johansen and his pals generally went through each new release like a hot knife through butter (Jon's got a new job and says he's putting his Apple-coring hobby on hold for a while, so the iTunes 6 version of DRM has stood for longer than its predecessors).

So when Sony's arms-dealer was making its munitions, it added an attractive new feature for Sony and others: the ability to break DRM to sneak music into iTunes.


So yeah, definitely sign this Pledge because it's useful as a movement to get people more aware of our rights as consumers.

Damn the Man!

online protester, that's me:

american edit mashup

dean gray tuesday

24 hours of civil disobedience with over 200 protesters linking to the album.

i also included two other mashup albums just to make it easier on those who want to hear a diversified mashup voice.

you may see my link in the group, you may not. they're doing a random mix each time the page loads to give everybody's servers a break.

go and take a listen. it's pretty damned awesome. at least in my ears it is.

You put up a manger, he puts up a hanged santa...

Blindfolded Santa Hanging From Noose At Home Upsets Neighborhood

A large blindfolded Santa hanging from a noose from a high tree in a man's yard has angered homeowners in a Florida neighborhood, according to a Local 6 News report.

***

This should probably not entertain me as much as it does. But it does entertain me. Somebody tried to bring "lynching" into the mix as though this should offend for reasons other than "oh! the children!"

But it's his right to put this up ... just like it's a church's right to set up a manger ... or what have you. Christ on a cross, Santa on the end of a rope...

bill, you ignorant slut...

here's where you sign up to tell o'reilly (as in fox's chief ho and typical right-wing slut/hypocrite and not the uber-geek publishing firm) that you wish to be added to his list of evil left-wing liberal bloggers. yay for killing x-mas. when the pest control person wished me merry christmas i promptly took the clipboard out of his hands and smashed him into the cement in front of my house before dragging him out to the truck and forcing him to ingest his chemical load.

just kidding about that ... i accepted, responded and wished him a happy new year as well. i couldn't care less, but how else can i keep my socialist cred? HA!

now i barely write in this, but this idea (which i saw on first draft) makes great sense. and it's fun too.

which reminds me. taking part in dean gray tuesday.

doing photography which makes me feel odd in a weird sort of way. how to explain that i'm a non-nra gun person? i detest the nra, but appreciate guns? so i did a shoot for a pro-gun calendar yesterday that's more james bond than bikini babe with rifle.

It's too damned hot here. I want to go to hell!

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7 x 7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all.

The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that.

The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (-300ºK), gives H as 798ºK (525ºC).

The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed. However, Revelation 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone [sulphur] means that its temperature must be at or below its boiling point, 444.6ºC.

We have, then, that Heaven, at 525ºC is hotter than Hell at 445ºC.

[From the blog Jesus' General via http://cabbageskings.blogspot.com/ - this was too good a post to just not share]

Disenfranchised...and we're not even in Florida. Or Black:

we got purged from the voting rolls. fucking disenfranchised.

we pay our taxes. we've lived in texas for over a year and a half. i can't comprehend how this happened.

we voted the first year we moved here. last year there was only three things on the ballot that we could vote for and nothing we researched was on that ballot!

i don't know if you've ever had your vote stolen but this year, tonight, i'm crying and i feel like somebody punched me in the stomach.

you want to talk about democracy? representation? THIS IS NOT IT! this is thievery and stealing.

when shawn and i made our decision four years ago that we should move to new zealand we should have stuck by that instead of getting sidetracked.

so we're putting the house on the market (shawn's already talked to our realtor) and we're out of here as soon as we can get a good price and the money and paperwork together to go.

we won't have a vote there either, but at least we'll have a valid reason for it -- instead of this thievery.