Category: Discoveries

December 30, 2005 /

I only found out by way of Jon and Amanda that my second cousin Dawn blogs. Her writing is frank, observant, self-deprecating and frequently caustic. It’s also really, really funny:

“Does this say something about my friend group?

I lost my virginity in room 116 of the Economy Inn in Danville, KY. Centre College students called it the pink hotel, in reference to the color of the neon lights decorating its roof. Oh, and immediately after the completion of the act my loving then-boyfriend (also a virgin) looked at me and said, ‘You know, that was alright, but I’m definitely glad I didn’t wait to get married.’

After taking Heather’s virginity, her boyfriend said, ‘Well, you had to pay for your dinner somehow.’

An anonymous friend lost her virginity to her 31-year-old manager at the Honey-Baked Ham store.

Katherine lost her virginity to a boy nick-named ‘Soup Can’. She cried the whole time.

My personal consolation is that the Pink Hotel has since been bull-dozed to the ground.”

She and I went to Centre together, and we were always friendly, but also a few degrees of network-separation apart. If you read this, Dawn, I’d like to state that I officially regret not hanging out with you more.

December 21, 2005 /

Via Kevan comes a 1978 speech by Philip K. Dick about science fiction, solipsism, Gnosticism and Disneyland that everybody else has probably read before. Regardless, it offered me the best answer to the question “why write?” I’ve ever encountered:

“What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?”

The second time I’ve ever linked Slashdot. Via Downhill Battle.

November 17, 2005 /

Okay, so DC beat me to posting about Sony’s big fat recall, but now I’m scooping him: the rootkit contained GPLed de-DRMS code by DVD Jon! I know that makes no sense. Give me a second.

“DVD” Jon Johansen is a Norwegian hacker who likes to take things like DVD encryption and Apple’s iTunes digital rights management (DRM) software and meet them in a steel cage (and win). He releases the software he writes under an open-source license called the GPL, a legally binding agreement that says “hey, you can freely look at and reuse this source code, but only if you release code derived from it under the same license.” Like the Creative Commons license I use, the GPL is just working within existing copyright law.

Now, the XCP software that’s causing such a fuss–because it installs itself on your computer without your consent when you pop in a Sony music CD, is very difficult to find or remove, deprives you of your fair use rights and makes you vulnerable to a whole new brand of virus–needs a way to interact with the CD-ripping functionality of Apple’s iTunes. iTunes creates AAC files when it rips a CD, which are locked to specific authorized computers (although some of those restrictions may be lifted for ripping–I’m not sure, as I haven’t used it to rip CDs myself). XCP doesn’t want you to authorize any other computers to use the copies you make, though. It doesn’t want those copies to leave the ripping computer ever, at all. So the people who wrote it used DVD Jon’s open-source code for messing with iTunes DRM to make that happen.

In doing so, they created derivative software and kept it closed-source. They did not release it under GPL, violating the terms of the license under which they obtained the code. And they sold it millions of times over.

Here’s the point: this is a massive act of copyright infringement and piracy, on the same scale as the giant duplication rings of Southeast Asia that record labels and movie studios have been trying to stomp out for decades. First4Internet Software, which developed the technology to “stop piracy,” is one of the single biggest software pirates on the planet. Sony BMG paid them millions to be so, and distributed the results.

The Slashdot post I linked above says this comes from the “when-will-it-end dept.” This story is amazing. If we had plotted a fantasy scenario to bring down a record label, we probably couldn’t have come up with anything this good.

November 16, 2005 /

Cool constrained-writing idea: Two Lines, Two Stories, One Day, where two guys trade first sentences and then have to write the rest of a short story. Some of the sentences are great! The stories themselves tend to lean a little hard on sting endings, but they’re still fun.

October 13, 2005 /

When I put on Facebook that my music preference was “whatever you liked two years ago,” I wasn’t kidding. I finally bothered to count this morning and noticed that “Hey Ya” is in 22/24 time. And I’m getting really into the original Extraordinary Machine, the unreleased Fiona Apple album that leaked onto the interweb and got everybody all hot and bothered in 2003. Now the album has been retooled and actually released, and I’m just starting to listen to the stuff I ripped off Maria’s pirated CD that she got from Graham.

Expect a lot of stories that sound like Fiona Apple in a week or so, when I cycle through my current buffer. The buffer is why yesterday’s and next Wednesday’s stories are about outer space, because last week I was getting really into Firefly (on which I was a little behind–it came out in 2002).

In other stuff about music, I can’t stand Harvey Danger, so I’m upset that I have to buy their album. Values versus taste! Does anybody want a Harvey Danger album for a Christmas present?

September 29, 2005 /

Whoa, I made like thirty-five bucks off of Dreamhost referrals! Where by “made” I mean “got taken off my annual hosting bill,” but still!

Thanks, Kyle and soltaridj and procura, whoever you are. (I know who Kyle is.)

September 16, 2005 /

Oh man somebody made a good web-based public social tagging personal library catalog that interfaces with Amazon AND the Library of Congress. Man! I’m not going to get anything done today.

In other news to make my friends geek out, LEGO has released software that will let you build your own virtual models and then buy exactly the pieces you need to make them in real life. Brilliantly obvious. The software is free, but disappointingly closed-source, and only for Mac and “PC” (by which they mean Windows). Opening that shit up could generate a pretty incredible building-hacking community.