This is the sound of sweet, sweet irony sinking its razor-sharp teeth into a deserving ass: MPAA’s University wiretapping product taken down for violating copyright. In essence (the information at the end of the link is murky), the MPAA used open-source code (GNU, a flavor of the *NIX operating system) to develop a sniffer to detect copyright violations on university networks, which they offered publicly. They used the code without honoring the attached license (the GPL), which states that full attribution and disclosure of the source code must be made public, and therefore violated the terms of the DMCA (legislation their lobbyists they helped draft). Under the DMCA, a member of the Ubuntu community sent their ISP a takedown notice, which the ISP complied with under terms of the DMCA.
Yes, indeed, I may have to get tickets to this particular concert. I know a few people who would go with me, too, just to say we saw them live before Eddie strangled Dave.
Hrm. Use the directions on this page to flash the ROM on a MacBook Pro and make the DVD player region free. I have not used these directions, so caveat emptor.
From our friend Jason, this morning: Maryland to Tax Computer Services. 6% on consulting and custom code, effective January 1. What does this mean for me? Less work, I suppose. I’m not happy about this.
Ward Sutton takes on the deisgn of campaign logos in the New York Times. (via)
Jesus Christmas, I would have sold my everloving soul to Satan for this model when I was a kid. Some kook in Japan is building a model of the battleship Yamato in his living room, the ship that inspired my favorite show, Star Blazers. (via)
Cricket legend seized in Pakistan. Listen to this NPR interview with Imran Khan from Monday—it’s the most damning description of our country’s misguided foreign policy I’ve heard in a long time. The more the US meddles with foreign countries, the more destabilized they become.
I could have used this a couple of weeks ago: How to use a Creative Commons license, by one of the editors of BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow.
Ha, ha. Karma is a bitch, boys. A Washington publisher is being sued by several conservative authors over book royalties. The plaintiffs include the Swift Boat asshats and several others. Favorite quotes: “It suddenly occurred to us that [the publisher] Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”
Um, no, dude. They’re just acting like a capitalist company. See how that feels? That’s called “Middle Class America”.
I’ve been stymied for the last few days by a particular bug in Internet Explorer that wasn’t letting me make pretty images like I wanted to. Thanks to this article, I found a workaround that solved my problem, made me slap my own forehead, and reaffirmed my faith in my coding abilities.