Archive for May, 2006

ThePirateBay servers raided

You knew it was coming.

The seizure of ThePirateBay.org’s entire server farm will guarantee this BitTorrent tracker will remain offline until the police complete their investigation. The uncertainty on the part of the police may stem from the fact ThePirateBay.org’s servers only host .torrent files, not actual copyrighted material. As a tracker, ThePirateBay.org’s function is to [...]

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The Truth (With Jokes)

See the rest of this year’s listings • What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
34
Title: The Truth (With Jokes) [$]
Author: Al Franken
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Year: 2005
Pages: 352
I’ve read this book before. At the time, although I liked it, it failed to impress me as much as Lies and the Lying Liars…, and I was principally [...]

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Give it up, Bram Cohen

I’ll give all due credit to Bram Cohen for his creation of the BitTorrent protocol, but it seems that every time I turn around, he’s saying something stupid.
First, his Mainline version is quickly developed, but lacks much of the lustre of full-featured clients like Azureus or μTorrent. Second, he recently signed a deal with [...]

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Memory lane paved with silicon bones

PCWorld is running an article entitled “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time“, and I have to agree with their #1 pick: AOL, the dreaded monstrosity of an internet provider (if you can call it that).
Second up is RealPlayer, mostly for its long and sordid history of disrespecting user privacy and creating bad [...]

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Forgent’s JPEG patent ruled invalid

It’s about damn time, too.

This is amazing. Do you remember that the Public Patent Foundation asked the US Patent Office to take another look at the JPEG patent? Yesterday, the reexamination proceeding initiated by PubPat bore fruit: the USPTO has rejected the broadest claims Forgent Networks is asserting against the JPEG standard on the basis [...]

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Britney Spears, closet poet

From a silly article about her marriage to a hobo Kevin Federline, here is her “poem.”

No more chains
That you gave me
Enough of pain
Manipulation is the key [...]
They screw it in
Because you’re naïve
You come to me now
Why do you bother?
Remember the Bible
The sins of the father
What you do
You pass down
No wonder why
I lost my crown
You don’t [...]

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Friday Random Ten LXV

The “Falling behind in blogging” edition.

Gardenian • Deserted
Brendan Benson • Biggest Fan
Nightwish • Dead Boy’s Poem
Fly Pan Am • Bibi A Nice, 1921
Mar de Grises • Onirica
Vast • Free
Vast • Goodbye
The Tea Party • Luxuria
Emperor • The Source of Icon E
Fifths of Seven • Echoes from the Wandered Path

And then there were (friday random) [...]

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Opera 9.0 beta 2

The second public beta of the latest incarnation of the Opera browser has been released. Get yours if you’re interested. Platform-agnostic (I think!) changelog below the fold.

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Some changes in blog architecture

The last two days have seen a couple of changes under the hood here, none of which are staggering but all of which I’m rather pleased with.
Akismet
Akismet is nothing new, of course, having debuted last year as a centralized spam-catching service for Wordpress blogs (and now MT, too, and a growing number of other services), [...]

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