I was searching around on the peer-to-peer networks yesterday, looking for a new copy of Microsoft Office to download. What I found instead was a whole load of letters and documents on someone’s hard drive. He had obviously set up his client wrong and was accidentally sharing everything on his computer. I had to get off to work so I downloaded a couple of interesting looking things to read later. When I did read them I was amazed, I won’t go into the details because I think it might turn out to be a rather interesting story but I was very keen to see what other stuff I could find on his computer today.
So I was doing a very specific search today for the name of one of the documents I found yesterday. I knew that nobody would have a document with the exact same name apart from that one computer. Once I’d found the computer I could then try and browse around for more interesting stuff. So I was very surprised when the program found more than a hundred matches. I was after something called “442 Kharzid SENT”. The matches were called things like “442 Kharzid sent.zip”, “442 Kharzid sent DEMO.zip”, even “442 Kharzid sent_Teen_Porn.jpg”, and they were all the same size and all available on the same computer. I suspect that these files must all be viruses, maybe designed to allow spammers to use other people’s machines to send their spam. I downloaded one (most viruses don’t affect Macintosh computers) but Norton Anti-virus didn’t recognise anything wrong. Maybe this virus is too new for them to be aware of it.
This is a very scary idea for file sharers. If you were searching for the normal kinds of things that people look for, something that would return loads of results, you’d have no way of knowing if some of those results were actually being created on purpose in order to get you to download a virus. I have a feeling this story may be appearing in the mainstream media in a few month’s time.
I’ve always found the idea that gay people are born that way a little depressing. Gay men are usually more stylish, funnier, cooler dancers and better at empathising with people than straight guys. They have a much wider range of sexual partners available to them and casual sex is much more acceptable to those partners. It just seems like more fun being gay. Unfortunately I have a very hard time finding any man sexually attractive and I’ve always believed that I was simply born this way; there was no cure.
However help may be at hand. The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality says that people become gay because of things that happen to them in their childhood; they’re born with the same sexual preferences as anyone else. And they believe that people’s sexual orientation can be changed by the use of therapy. The site is rather biased towards people who want to stop being gay, presumably because they want to become right-wing politicians or live in a really small town, but obviously the therapy could be used to enhance the patient instead of restricting his desires. I couldn’t find any sections on heterosexual reorientation in the site but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
The film studios have been experimenting with technology that is supposed to detect when someone is using a camcorder to pirate a film. They’ve got this gadget that sits at the front of the cinema and looks around for camera lenses; if it sees one it takes a photo of the naughty pirate and calls the cops. Let’s leave aside the discussions about whether this will work or if it invades people’s privacy - the idea’s insane because it means that they are spending money on quality control for the pirate DVD industry.
At the moment if someone offers you a cheap DVD of the latest blockbuster you’re probably not going to buy it because you’ll assume it’s a crappy copy made with a camcorder with terrible sound quality and someone’s head in the way. If the film moguls could stamp out all pirate camcorders overnight then you’d know for sure that the pirate DVD you were being offered must have somehow been copied from the cinema release. Even if it was quite expensive the chances are that it would be decent quality.
So the studios are embarking on a plan that will increase the value of pirate DVDs and thus the profit margin for the pirates. Why are they doing this? Either I’m a genius for seeing the implications or they are seriously stupid for not. Or maybe they are a bunch of frustrated, bitter old men who can’t stand the idea of losing even the slightest bit of control over their ‘product’ and who don’t mind if that means that the people who work in their industry will lose out, in other words just the same as the record industry.
The Lomo is a cheap Russian camera that takes lovely pictures. My friend Giles bought one and it broke, like he thought it might. So the way to get Lomographs is to fake them not make them. I do it by using second curtain sync flash with long exposure times but that only gets the blurry bits right. It’s hard to explain; look at some Lomographs and then fake your own.
This is exactly what I want my iPod to do. Get the latest news from the BBC, say, and download it so that I can listen to it on the train. I wonder if the BBC is supporting this yet?
People sometimes carry on as if software piracy were just a question of clicking a few buttons. OK, sometimes it is, but it’s often really hard work. I wanted to watch some mpeg-2 coded video on my Mac today and it turned out that I had to buy a small plug-in, called a component, for Quicktime to be able to do that. The price is $19, but it’s £19 if you live in the UK. Well, that’s just a rip-off. It ought to be about £10.50. It’s not as if Apple have to actually send it to me, it’s just a download. So I started up my p2p file sharing software and went looking for a copy I could download. Hours later and I know an awful lot more about the various versions of the component that Apple have released over the last year, with no documentation it’s been a hard slog, and I still haven’t got hold of the software I wanted. I’ve downloaded several versions but none of them worked, at one point I was convinced I’d downloaded a trojan instead so I had to scan my hard-drive for viruses. I’ve installed various other players and converters that claimed to be able to handle mpeg-2s, with no success. And I’ve got back-ache from sitting in this uncomfortable chair all day. So when you hear the suits complaining about people stealing software and getting a free ride don’t forget that it’s not all milk and honey out here in piracy land.
While we’re talking about the great things that the US is capable of, how about Apple? They are a cool company in several ways. I remember when a county in Texas refused to give tax breaks to them because their employee medical programme was available to same sex and unmarried partners as well as spouses; Apple promptly said they would site their office building elsewhere. When the iTunes store was launched most people thought that it was a great example of how the record industry should have dealt with the ‘problem’ of peer-to-peer music file sharing. However, some people think that the whole record industry is corrupt and unfair to musicians and that the iTunes store just perpetuates that unfairness.
“Despite huge new efficiencies created by internet distribution –no CDs to make, no distributors to store and ship them, no CD stores to build and run– artists receive the same pathetic cut [that they have in the past].”
The Downhill Battle site is well designed and very interesting. I’d say it’s worth a bookmark.
I think I’ll subscribe to Stay Free Magazine, despite trying to not buy American things if I can help it. This magazine is a real example of the great things that the US is capable of. They sponsored a showing of an alternative soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and now they’re selling it. They host downloads of loads of short films that can’t be distributed because of copyright claims by big businesses. They’ve been giving away a CD of copyright infringing music. Their editorial critiques of the media are spot on. Go on, have a look - Stay Free Magazine
You might not worry too much when you hear about all these people being arrested or harassed by the various secret and not-so secret police forces employed in the so-called War on Terror. Even if you’re a Muslim you might still believe that it only happens to people who behave unwisely. However, nobody is safe and the spooks account to nobody. A couple of weeks ago the US authorities ordered an Internet Service Provider in London to hand over servers belonging to Indymedia, a radical media organisation, for examination. All the web sites hosted on those servers were taken offline. Indymedia were never told the reasons for the seizure or who had removed their computers. The FBI said that it was not their operation; the Metropolitan Police said that they weren’t involved. And this is supposed to make us feel safe. Or is it supposed to make us feel scared?
And I thought I was quite cool when I made my own midi interface back in the 80s. This guy has made his own really techno looking sequencer, it looks just like it was made in a factory. I am amazed. I know that proves me to be a nerd. I admit it. SEQUENTIAL CIRCUITS PRO~1 MONOPHONIC SYNTHESIZER WITH HIGH SPEC MIDI