Irony Defined - Liberal Huffpost hires Riaa CEO and then hijacks artist's work

Liberals - Gotta love them.

First of all, the Huffington Post hired Hilary Rosen, a former CEO of RIAA, as their 'political director'. RIAA has been employing draconian methods aimed at trying to 'prevent piracy' such as filing hundred thousand dollar lawsuits against Harlem grandmothers who don't even own a computer. (huffpost puffpeice on rosen)

So, while the Huffpost brings aboard a RIAA hatchet lady, they pull this neat trick. Here are the details

• An artist, Paulo, posts a time lapse video of clouds to youtube and pretty much puts it in the public domain. It is undeniably his work.
• People start using the video as a basis for some paradoy. OK so far.
• An offshoot of the Huffington Post, 236.com, creates their parody using the clouds video. However, they tag the video as being copyrighted by them
• Paulo gets a nastygram from der volks at google saying his video violated copyright and was being taken down.

So, the sweet irony here is that the Huffington Post hires someone who headed an organization that was, by all accouts, overly agressive in copyright enforcement. Then one of their organizations goes and puts their copyright on someone else's work which results in the original artist's work being removed from youtube by google.

Links

• Original post by Paulo
• Update by Paulo
• I originally came across this at Boing Boing with articles about the Riaa Ceo and the video hijacking. . The folks at Boing Boing lean a bit to the left. However, I'd recommend the site as a daily read. There is a good selection of technotrivia and a lot of great articles on privacy in the digital world. In addition, they have some really good Steampunk finds.

Merrie Olde England - Circling the drain

It seems that England is becoming more and more of a Nanny state with every passing moment.

One of their theme parks has forbidden parents from using PDAs, smart phones and the like.

From The Sun:

A THEME park has banned adults from using pocket computers – so they spend more time having fun with their kids.
Any parent seen tapping on a PDA will have it confiscated by special wardens at Alton Towers

Wait a minute - Who won WWII? This sounds more like "You Vill NOT use der PersonalKomputenGelfanger or Ve Vill Schooot Yoo Between der Eyes Schwienhunt. Paaapers Pleeese!!"

First of all, my phone and PDA have sensitive information, although it is password protected. I would never hand it over to some lackey theme park employee. In today's world it is often necessary to keep in touch. Parents could be doing something as simple as texting the babysitter at home to see how the other kids are doing.

At any rate, I'm going to cross Looney Land off my list of places to visit if I ever get to take a trip across the pond.

Laptop Crash and Burn Recovery

I'm finally getting my HP dx6000 noteback back to where it was. The crash of the C drive was a royal pain.

I did manage to get the crashed drive running using the recovery partition. That wiped out all the installed apps but I was able to reinstall what I needed. In addition, I will now be able to pop that drive back in and get rid of any personal information.

Getting the machine back to 90% functionality took the better part of the day. The first problem I ran into was that the bracket for the new drive had holes that were about a quarter inch further apart than the original drive. In other words, it was not going to fit. I didn't want to swap the brackets around without checking with tech support so that the warranty would remain valid.

HP tech support said to swap the brackets. That was easy enough. The drive is shipped blank and I had to run the recovery CD that HP sent. That process took a whole lot longer than I expected. The install of Windows wasn't that bad. However, the installs of the HP software seemed to take quite a bit of time. There were long periods with a totally black screen and a cursor and nothing else.

One thing that was really creepy was the software that loaded in the task bar called FBI GUI Manager. I started thinking "Gee is the FBI loading some type of keylogger, they can't be stupid enough to blatantly brand it". It turns out that FBI GUI stands for file based installer graphical user interface. That is software that will create a recovery partition on your new hard drive. The one bit of advice I can give once you kick off the recovery cd is PATIENCE!!. The second bit of advice is PATIENCE.... It took about 5 hours before the process had totally completed. There were a lot of reboots and screens that just sat there with no progress indicators.

Once everything was done, it was time to run windows updates and then start reinstalling all of my applications.

Contingency plans for laptop failures while on the road

My previous post detailed a failure of the hard drive on my relatively new Pavillion Laptop. Stuff like that happens and I'm still very satisfied with HP.

Anyway, the good news is that the failure happened at home. Had that happened on the road, things might have been a little more of a pain. Here are some thoughts on contingency planning for those who travel and absolutely have to have their laptops.

• I am going to make a Knoppix Linux boot CD. That should give me a decent amount of limitied functionality. It gives you an OS, browsing and openoffice. My air card won't work and my wireless probably won't work. I would need at least one USB stick to store any data.
• There are some tools such as the ultimate boot cd and bartsPE that I'm going to make sure are packed with the laptop for the road.
• When we travel, my son usually takes his laptop. I'm going to make sure that I have my aircard software and some of my other important software on his machine.
• I have to make sure that I have my critical data available on either a usb, usb hard drive, remote computer or dvd. Whatever choice, the data should be encrypted. I just got fios and they have some online space that I'll look into.
• I'm going to burn my critical apps to DVD or cd and bring those. In a complete disaster scenario, you could always take the old credit card and buy another laptop at the local office store. That is an expensive way of doing things but it could end up being necessary.
• Going back to the remote access. Having a machine with your data available via RDP or something like Go2mypc could be a great help. If you have a linux boot cd and wired access, you could get at all your data and apps.

New Laptop Hard Drive Crash and Burn

My 5 month old HP Pavillion dx6000 just had a hard drive crash the other day. The good news is that I don't store data on that machine so nothing was really lost.

A call to HPs tech support got immediate results. Within a half hour, they had run through the diagnostics and set up shipping of a replacement HD and recovery CD.

What had happened was that the machine locked up while I was in a $tarbuck$ working with the aircard. I though a power off and reboot would work. I got the Windows repair (Windows Vista Home Premium). That went through it's stuff and came back with a message that the drive was defective. HP's tech had me run through the BIOS HD testing and it came up with the same message so they started the replacement process.

The problem I was faced with was that I had some data on the machine. I'm not comfortable returning a drive with data to any company. (id theft and all that). I would think they have adequate internal controls but in today's litigous society, you can't be too careful. You never know when a lawyer is looking for a victim to sue.

After you go through the startup repair, there is an option for advance diagnostics. I tried the system restore to an earlier point but that didn't work. I then tried the 'restore to factory defaults'. That got the machine up and running. The nice thing was that the way HP partitioned the hard drive any data I did have was on the D drive.

I was able to reinstall my aircard, the norton trial and openoffice. I'm almost 90% functional until the replacement hd arrives. When it does, I will be able to delete all my personal info, wipe out any windows saved passwords, cookies etc and then run a disk wiping app to clean things. That way I've done my 'due dilligence'.

The problem with the potential compromising of data on a returned hard drive is that you could find yourself open to a major lawsuit. Some people, especially those subject to any government regulation, should consider taking a sledgehammer to the drive or perhaps a couple of rounds of jacketed .45 and not returning it. You will be charged for it but the $200 cost is less than one hour of attorney's time.

An amazing example of interactivity

Check out this amazing interactive shopping site.(link may not be safe for work depending on how prudish your boss and co-workers are) A model will try on different lingere. It is NOT a porn site. Just an amazingly creative example of interactivity.

It's a site from the other side of the Pond from the same folks who brought us Benny Hill and Are you Being Served. Gotta love the brits.

Violate ISP customer's privacy and rip off web publishers in one shot

I just read an interesting thread at Webmasterworld about an ISP inserting their ads into web pages.

First of all, consider that the ability of web publishers to run their ads on their pages to generate revenue is what allows for so much free content on the Internet.

A major Internet Service Provider, Charter Communications, based out of St. Louis Mo. is implementing a plan where

1. They will sniff deeply into the packets of web pages going to their clients (ie spy on what you are looking at)
2. Insert thier ads into those pages, apparently overwriting the ads put on those pages by the publishers
3. Make this an Opt-Out situation with a hokey cookie based solution. In other words, you have to jump through hoops as a customer in order not to have this 'feature'

So, what is wrong with this?

1. Customers will essentially have thier ISP snooping on everything they do. In addition, the third part partner of the ISP will have available every detail of your surfing habits.
2. Publishers will be deprived of their income. Again, the mechanism that provides for the wealth of free content on the web is the ability of publishers to place ads on their pages.
3. Web sites will essentially be defaced. This may be more of a problem than you would think. Suppose a site is required to follow Section 508 accessability standards. The publisher of the site carefully follows all requirements. Now you have some third party inserting code and content into the site that may not be 508 compliant. The publisher may find themselves facing a 508 based lawsuit for something totally beyond their control. What about banking sites. You can visit your non secure (http) pages at your bank and your ISP might be putting ads there that you believe are part of your bank's site.
4. The process is OPT-OUT. By default the majority of the ISP customers will probably have no idea about the implications of this 'feature'. They will not bother to opt out.
5. The 'Opt-out' process is cookie based. So, if you clear your cookies, then you have just opted back in. If you use a different browser, you have opted in. If you get a new computer, you have opted in.
6. This is most likely a copyright violation. Similar schemes have happened before such as Gator and Microsoft's infamous 'Smart tags'. Gator settled out of court and Microsoft bowed to public outrage.

What can you do?

• Publishers with adequate financial resources can look into starting a multi million dollar lawsuit against any company employing this type of technology. They might want to call the free 800 numbers of these companies and ask a whole lot of questions about the 'feature'
• Publishers might have to consider blocking visitors from ISPs employing this technology. If enough publishers did this, then there might be some backlash from the ISP's customers against the ISP.
• Publishers might want to look at the referrer and, if it is from one of these pirates, put a notice at the top of each page "NOTICE - Your ISP , Greedycommunications, is monitoring your web surfing and changing the content of this site. Call their tech support at 1-800-nnnn for more details"
• Complain to your congrescritters.

Some links

• Charter Communications page about their 'feature"
• More details about this from Wired Magazine

Patrick Murphy D-PA votes for forfieture of your home if your kids download music

Patrick Murphy, Democrat of Pennsylvania has voted AYE on a House bill that would essentially allow the government to confiscate your home if your kids download a couple of songs.

Yep, you got that right. If your 12 year old downloads a couple of songs, you can lose everything. If one of your kid's friends comes over regularly and uses your wifi, some bloated pig like Michael Moore can start procceedings that will throw you out on the street and cause you to lose your medical coverage and leave you penniless.

Yep, Comrade Murphy has voted to put everything you've worked for all of your life at risk for downloading some music. Worse yet, there are scenarios where you may actually have purchased the music legally but can't prove it. How much of a chance do you think you will have against the million dollar lawyers of the recording industry.

Our House of Representatives have decided that the rights of emotional misfits like Britney Spears (of the missing panties and drug use fame) and others of her ilk are so important that you can lose everything. Also, keep in mind that RIAA has been known to prosecute people who were entirely innocent like people who don't even own a computer.

If you have a business, you had better have a clear no-piracy policy and aggressively enforce that. The problem is if you fire an employee for piracy, they'll probably sue you. Shakespeare was right in Henry VI about lawyers.

• Roll call for this abomination
• Find your representive and tell them how you appreciate their caving into the drug using, emotionally unstable hollywood dirtballs
• Find your Senators and ask them to vote this piece of idiocy down.
• If the Senate is corrupt and greedy enough to cave into the Hollywood special interests, then ask the President to veto this Stalinist-Leninist idiocy
• Even the Department of Justice said that the bill is idiotic