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I’m reading an amazingly well-written editorial by Naomi Wolf of The Guardian. This woman has guts. She compares the current state of affairs in the U.S. to a fascist regime. She outlines in so many steps how fascist governments come to be, and how the U.S. is already far along this path, following in the footsteps of people like Hitler and his Nazis, Stalin, Mussolini, etc. She backs up all her claims with documented research, so it’s hard not to feel about ill and a bit uneasy about how much truth there is to all this. Wow!

Link

Revision3, a large and popular entertainment firm (hosting such shows as Diggnation, Tekzilla, etc) recently had massive downtime over the holiday Memorial Day weekend due to a Denial of Service attack. Rev3 uses a BitTorrent tracker to distribute (legally) their shows, because the BT protocol greatly reduces the amount of bandwidth necessary to distribute files. Let me be very clear on this… They host no illegal content. Their BT tracker is only used to distribute shows that they have the rights to. So now, on to the fun part…

Someone, or some company, apparently took offense to Revision3 using Bittorrent to distribute its own slate of shows. Who could that be?

A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.

Now why would MediaDefender be trying to put Revision3 out of business? Heck, we’re one of the biggest defenders of media around. So I stopped by their website and found that MediaDefender provides “anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention industry.” The company aims to “stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the internet and peer-to-peer networks.”

Who pays MediaDefender to disrupt peer to peer networks? I don’t know who’s ponying up today, but in the past their clients have included Sony, Universal Music, and the central industry groups for both music and movies – the RIAA and MPAA. According to an article by Ars Technica, the company uses “its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.” Another Ars Technica story claims that MediaDefender used a similar denial of service attack to bring down a group critical of its actions.

So I picked up the phone and tried to get in touch with ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard. I eventually had a fascinating phone call with both Dimitri Villard and Ben Grodsky, Vice President of Operations at Media Defender.

First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server.

Second, and here’s where the chain of events come into focus, although not the motive. We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of “Hi”s brought down our network.

There’s lots more in the original article but what you’ve read so far is really what happened. MediaDefender are nothing more than thugs working for the highest bidder. A “legit” company trying to stop internet piracy … how? Ah right, by executing Denial of Service attacks and distributing fake torrents of copyrighted material. Sounds pretty subversive… In fact, it doesn’t sound “legit” at all. Rev3 lost a lot of revenue that weekend, so let’s hope MediaDefender will pay. According to Rev3, they’ve got the FBI involved.

I’m trying to get this news out because everyone needs to be aware. It’s not alright for companies to use illegal means, no matter who they’re fighting, and it shouldn’t be condoned simply because the company has the backing of large government-supported groups. Don’t brush this off, tell your friends. Write, call, and email your Government!

Link1, Link2

We knew it wouldn’t be long before Do-No-Evil became Try-Not-To-Do-Much-Evil, but that day came and went a loooong time ago. Google buying YouTube wasn’t even that big of a deal, and now it’s just “how things are.” Though now… perhaps we were a bit hasty letting everything go unmentioned. YouTube will now show you demographic stats for videos you’ve posted, the feature was rolled out as a new part of YouTube Insights, which appeared in March.

From mashable.com

For now, you get a bar chart representing the percentage of your audience in different age groups, and a pie chart showing the breakdown of gender. You can then filter that data by country or for a specific time frame. Additionally, YouTube has rolled out aggregate data, so you can see the combined demographics for all of your videos. The data is all anonymous.

Link

Taken from CBS News:

The long-awaited court decision stemmed from San Francisco’s highly publicized same-sex weddings, which in 2004 helped spur a conservative backlash in a presidential election year and a national dialogue over gay rights.

….Today’s ruling by the Republican-dominated court affects more than 100,000 same-sex couples in the state, about a quarter of whom have children, according to U.S. census figures.

Link to the Article, Link to the official documents.

In my opinion, this is great. California has set an exemplary precedent, now let’s get the conservative states to open their minds a bit.

Zero Pollution Motors is a U.S. based car import company that plans to bring Air Cars to America! These new clean-cars seem almost too good to be true. Who would have thought we’d have cars powered by compressed air?

According to the website:

To drive the world’s cleanest car is no longer wishful thinking. The Air Car is the first affordable and accessible clean car. It brings us our dream: to drive pollution-free and free of fuel dependency. By Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards, the Air Car is classified as a “zero pollution car”, as there are no emissions from the tailpipe.

So how does it work?

Since the Air Car is running exclusively on compressed air, it emits only air - zero pollution. The air expelled from the tail pipe is actually cleaner than the air used to fill the tank. This is because before compression, the air is run through carbon filters to eliminate dirt, dust, humidity, and other urban Air impurities that could hamper the engine’s performance.

Well that’s great, but is it really possible to power a car solely with compressed air? Not quite, says the website.

At speeds over 35mph the Air Car uses small amounts of fuel–either gasoline, propane, ethanol or bio fuels–to heat air inside a heating chamber as it enters the engine. This process produces emissions of only 0.158lbs of CO2 per mile. That is up to 4 times less than the average vehicle and 2 times less than the cleanest vehicle available today. (Toyota Prius 07 Emissions: 0.34 lbs of CO2 per mile. Source: www.hybridcars.com)

That’s still pretty good, though. I’m impressed and amazed that this technology is so close at hand. We’re really at the cutting edge now. (Thanks to my Twitter feed [and whoever tweeted this] for the lead!)

There is something wrong with the world. Let me elaborate a little…

I was humbly minding my own business when an acquaintance posted a link to an article on Gizmodo. I like Gizmodo, so normally I wouldn’t hesitate to blindly follow a link to a Gizmodo article. This time, though, I guess I just don’t know what to think.

http://gizmodo.com/350091/cheeseburger-in-a-can-is-both-the-best-and-worst-thing-ive-ever-seen

A cheeseburger in a can. I just don’t think I could eat one of these. I wouldn’t mind ordering one though. The manufacturer is in Germany, perhaps that’s a clue as to why this “interesting” canned food was conceived.

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