How cool. Looks like a couple of companies are working on technology to make it easier to connect multiple high-speed home connections to share big fat data pipes with multiple people. If you hit that connection when none of your friends/neighbors are, you could get some absurdly high speeds through inexpensive home lines. I’m very interested in this.
Category: Random Ramblings
Anything that catches my fancy as a topic I want to cover. Truly random crap.
Gaming Hobo
Here’s a site I plan on visiting often. I like this guy’s style.
Apple fixes small privacy rights issue
I didn’t write about the original problem, but apparently Apple has fixed an issue in which personal information was sent to Apple when users shopped in the iTunes store (and since I don’t shop there, I’ll admit to not carefully reading up on the problem). The fix is a simple and obvious one. Now, when shopping, there is a note that your system can send some information to Apple about your browsing, and Apple can send back recommendations for similar songs and videos. You have the option of turning this feature on or off. Which, of course, is the right way to handle the situation.
Military opinion piece
Nothing I can say would add to this article. Read it and see commentary on recent criticisms of former politically active vets from James Webb, Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam.
Bush’s illegal eavesdropping leads nowhere?
Current indications are that the wiretapping which should lead to the removal of the current president were of little value. And this isn’t just the case according to the liberal media. This conclusion comes from the people performing these illegal eavesdropping measures. So, we as a nation have a president who is willfully, very intentionally, and arrogantly ignoring laws put in place to protect American’s rights so he can gather nearly no useful information? Wow, he continues to show himself a bad president in my eyes.
Broadcasters want to take away your VCR
OK, that’s not quite true. But there is an idea being pushed by broadcasters to close what is called the analog hole. This speaks to the fact that anyone can copy regular TV and share/distribute/re-mix/mash-up what they have copied. An example of this is the VCR, which happily records whatever analog signal comes through it if directed to. Another example is video capture cards used in many PCs and video recorders like Tivo or ReplayTV.
Over at Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felton has written up a very good brief on the technology new bill the broadcasters are trying to get passed would use.My own sensationalist headline aside (it won’t take away your VCR, but would impact future sales of video recorders), this is another example of big business trying to restrict users’ rights because some users abuse those rights. And to be honest, I’m not so sure why it is wrong for me to get a copy of a show from a friend when I missed the show and my friend recorded it. But if this new bill becomes law, that could very well be impossible in the future.
Fun, simple game – Geek
Reminder of the 8-bit days.
Server in a UPS casing
Useless cool stuff.
DVD Jon thinking ahead
He’s not going to let another good domain name get away. This guy does great things for the world of technology.
Gore on Bush
I’ll be honest and say right up front that I’m just a bit tired of hearing from Al Gore. However, in this case, I think he says the right thing. In fact, I don’t think he goes far enough. Not only should Bush be removed from office for his illegal wiretaps, the insider group of 8 Republicans and Democrats should also be removed from office for not bringing this abuse of executive priviledge to light years ago.
Custom Amiga FPGA build
While I’m sure this won’t be of much interest to either of my readers today, I still think it’s pretty cool. Over on the forums at amiga.org, someone has written up a bit about his work rebuilding the Amiga custom chipset via FPGA. I never had an Amiga, but I always appreciated the technology that made them so good for their time. This is a pretty cool project.
Malware advisor
Interested in keeping up with the latest goings on in the world of bad software? Make regular visits to the Malware Advisor. You’ll probably learn more than you ever knew you could about all the bad things some bad people do to get bad software on your computer and make it do bad things. There are lists of possible ways your machine got infected, likely hints that you are infected, fixes for various infections and links to forums where people talk how to fix the infections the advisor doesn’t yet show how to clean. Well worth visiting.