http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm

Windows 7 will not include IE in Europe.

I don't like IE. I don't use IE. I hate designing for IE.

However, what the hell gives the government the right to fine a company based on what they include with their software? Now they're basically being forced into releasing an OS without a browser? In the year 2009, Windows ships without a freaking browser? Anti-competitive practices? Really?

It's not like it's difficult to install a different browser. In fact, now it's going to be more difficult, because how the hell do you go to getfirefox.com without a browser to begin with?

I suppose Apple shouldn't include Safari? Kubuntu shouldn't include Konqueror?

I like free software. I like open source software. What I don't like, is doing the following to install my browser.

cmd
ftp
open releases.mozilla.org
anonymous
anonymous
cd pub
cd mozilla.org
cd firefox
cd releases
cd latest
cd win32
cd en-US
type image
lcd C:\
get "Firefox Setup 3.0.11.exe"
bye
exit

Give me IE, please.

Discuss.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8003799.stm)

This morning, the verdict in the well known Swedish case against TPB was released: guilty.

They've been sentenced to one year in jail on top of $4.5 million (USD), for something not so different than what Google does. Jailtime for a search engine? Doesn't sound too good.

I followed this case closely because regardless of what one thinks of piracy and such, ThePirateBay was operating legally in Sweden.

A few years ago at my school, a freshman Information Technology major, Jesse Jordan, created Phynd, a file indexing LAN search engine. It was used by professors and students, sharing research, development files, course content, and about 25% of the time, sharing music. Now, Phynd didn't discriminate about what files it indexed; it listed everything as long as that computer had opted-in to the service. It did what Google does, but for a LAN.

But the RIAA found out about it, contacted the Dean of Students, had the service shut down, and came after Jordan who had to settle for every saved penny he had. Twelve thousand dollars is a lot of money for a freshman in college (especially when that college costs about fifty grand a year and we all have huge amounts of student loans). He operated a completely legal service, but they took him for everything.

You can read a little more about Phynd in Chapter 3 (page 62 of the following pdf) Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, available online for free through a Creative Commons license.


So what about this guy that has over 1,000 completely legal torrents on ThePirateBay? And what about all the users like him, that make use of the largest torrent tracker in existence? What about nearly this entire category? Ever try downloading a 3-disc linux distro over HTTP?

Just some food for thought, no particular argument here. Feel free to discuss civilly in the comments.

I recently had my seventh BYONDay!

Here's a picture from my first day on BYOND:

Pmac and I standing outside of Balzack's Castle in DWO 1.5


BYOND's been good to me these past seven years, and here's to many more!

About a year ago, Microsoft launched the DreamSpark service. DreamSpark allows college (and some high school) students to access many expensive Microsoft products and training, 100% free of charge, including Visual Studio 2008 Pro, XNA Game Studio 3.0, Windows Server 2008, VirtualPC, and more. According to wikipedia, the service has been expanded to allow students from more than 80 countries to access these software packages to further their education.

Signing up was simple.
Step 1: Get a Microsoft Live ID (hotmail, etc, I already had one)
Step 2: Check to see if your school is on the list. If so, you're pretty much done!
Step 3: If not, you can access DreamSpark through JourneyEd, an academic software website. They will verify your status as a student and give you a DreamSpark activation code. I had to wait about 12 hours to get the code.
Step 4: Get free access to tons of great software.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profit!


This is an example of Microsoft "doing things right". Software like this should be free to students, who will likely be using it in their professional careers and shouldnt have to pay an arm and a leg while learning the ropes.

Take that, Adobe CS4!

The Obama Administration has recently weighed in on damages for copyright violations of up to $150,000 per violation.

Whether you are pro-piracy or anti-piracy, I think we can all agree that the idea of download one mp3 causes $150,000 in damages to the music industry is absolutely ludicrous. By stealing one song, you have apparently caused damage worth of 15 thousand times the cost of the average CD, or one hundred and fifty thousand times the cost of the song if you bought the individual mp3 on Amazon or iTunes or what have you.

Let's do some math. Right now, the second most popular music torrent on ThePirateBay is the entire Pink Floyd discography. There's 777 files in that torrent, but there's lots of album art so for the sake of easiness, let's assume 277 files are JPGs and 500 are mp3s. This torrent currently has 1,226 seeds (for the non-torrenters: a seed is someone who has the complete set of data, i.e. all the files). While it's obvious that seeds are only a small fraction of everyone who has downloaded this torrent (most people stop seeding immediately after downloading, or once they have reached an upload:download ratio of 1.000).

So we can say there's 500 mp3s which have been downloaded by at least 1226 people.
500 songs * 1226 people = 613000 counts of copyright violation

613000 counts * 150000 USD = $91,950,000,000 USD

Almost Ninety Two Billion Dollars worth of damages from one torrent.

Do you see how this doesn't add up? According to the IFPI (which from what I understand is like the UK RIAA), the global music industry is worth 130 billion dollars.

So what these nutjobs would like you to believe is the damage done by that one torrent on ThePirateBay has is more than 70% of their worth. Interesting...

[edit 1]
Actually, it seems that there was 431 jpg files in that torrent (jeez, album art much?), so that brings the music down to only 346 songs. Even so, this is still $63,629,400,000, nearly half the net worth of the global music industry.

[edit 2]
For anyone who wants to pull out the "Yeah, but they said ranging from $750 to $150,000", I'll give you this:
The private music torrent tracker what.cd has had 14,239,659 "snatches" (downloads). A snatch counts only the download of the torrent, not all the files within. What.cd does not have discographies, usually just albums (some singles, too, sure). If even the average snatch had 5 songs, you're talking about $53,398,721,250 USD in damages from one private torrent tracker (math: snatches * 750 usd-per-song * 5 songs-per-snatch = 14239659*750*5).

[edit 3]
Furthermore, according to this video, produced by Sony BMG, 694,000 songs are downloaded every five minutes. This means that 138,800 are downloaded every minute, which means that 199,872,000 songs are downloaded every day. Apply the minimum figure of $750 per violation and you see that $149,904,000,000 USD in damages are done daily. Use that maximum $150,000 figure, you see that $2.99808 × 10¹³ USD (That's $29,980,800,000,000 or almost thirty trillion dollars) in damages are done daily.

You can understand why I don't care about any figures thrown around by the IFPI, RIAA, MPAA, and all like them. It's propaganda, and when you start putting it all together, you can see how ridiculous it is.