(PS. those who would argue that it’s he consented to the search, I wish you luck. ‘”Consent” under duress’ hardly constitutes what “consent” means here.)

“Ever since it became clear that running a P2P links site is not a crime in Spain, music anti-piracy group SGAE have threatened civil action. Yesterday the admin of two P2P sites had a home visit by members of SGAE, who took advantage of the admin’s legal naivety and conducted a search of his property without a suitable warrant.“

via Torrentfreak

http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=7&id=3

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world…

Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me…
Or feels threatened by me…
Or thinks I’m a smart ass…
Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found.
“This is it… this is where I belong…” I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

And while you’re reading that, you might be interested in reading “Hacker ethics” and this.

via Torrentfreak

Now Wooden

Download

Now Wooden icon set by Wikinerd

51 icons for 36 Apps inspired by wood-themed icons and sets by Thvg and kano89.

Wood-themed icons and sets:
Made of Wood ~by Thvg [link]
Wooden Slick Drives ~by Thvg [link]
Wooden Wall (wallpaper) ~by kano89 [link]
Wooden Finder ~by kano89 [link]
Wooden Dashboard ~by kano89 [link]
Wooden Safari ~by kano89 [link]

People who have downloaded the original set (”Now in Wood”) can just add to them; use the icons in the “New” folder. Now also in PNG.

Original set:     Now in Wood: 32 icons for 23 Apps
Current set:    Now Wooden: 19 icons for 15 Apps w/ revisions for apps in the original set

Applications:
Original:
⁃    1Password
⁃    Activity Monitor
⁃    Address Book
⁃    BBEdit
⁃    Bowtie
⁃    Burn
⁃    Caffiene
⁃    Camino
⁃    Candybar
⁃    Disk Utility
⁃    DVD Player
⁃    Firefox
⁃    Google Earth
⁃    iChat
⁃    iTunes
⁃    Mercury
⁃    Numbers
⁃    Pages
⁃    Quicksilver
⁃    System Preferences
⁃    Terminal
⁃    Transmission

New:
⁃    Airport Utility
⁃    Bluetooth File Exchange
⁃    Console
⁃    Font Book
⁃    Microsoft Entourage
⁃    Microsoft Excel
⁃    Microsoft Messenger
⁃    Microsoft PowerPoint
⁃    Microsoft Word
⁃    Opera
⁃    Pixelmator
⁃    Quicktime Player
⁃    Stuffit Dropstuff
⁃    Stuffit Expander
⁃    Time Machine

PS. Please take a look at Thvg’s and kano89’s icons, they are just as awesome.

PPS. Yes, the icon set is quite inconsistent; I’ll improve on it when I have the time. (If you’re making derivations of it just make sure that you contact me.)

PPS. Anywayz enjoy. Any comments welcome.

via Torrentfreak

Well anyways to give some credit (somehow I turned up #1 in some Google Searches), you should try Google Chrome from here, or for a compiled build, here. (Just a preview. Very buggy.)

The entertainment industry managed to convince the French government to draft a law that will make it possible to disconnect people from the Internet, if they receive more than two copyright infringement warnings. Sadly, most of the politicians who plan to sign the law into action have no clue what they’re dealing with.

From Torrentfreak

However, without Jobs in charge Apple has lost something that had proven to be quite decisive in terms of competitiveness; Jobs’s charisma. Steve’s charm is one of the reasons that Apple exists today. The company has been one of the noisiest since Jobs’s return to Apple in 1996, making one achievement after another. From the first iMac in 1998 to the iPhone 3G released last year, this company has seized the industry’s attention through highly anticipated announcements.

Now what’s the problem? After Steve Jobs took his leave, Apple has released new, totally exceptional products—but without the pomp. Just to compare, take a look at the “Let’s Rock” event that Apple hosted in September of last year. This event saw the introduction of iTunes 8 (and the Genius functionality), iPod Nano 4th Generation(”Nano-chromatic”), a new iPod Touch (2nd Generation), new earbuds, and new iPhone software. While it is quite a hefty list, it is, in comparison to products released in Q1 2008, relatively insignificant. The new Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle, for example, would already deserve their own “Special Event”. And with the new Safari 4, new iMac, Mac Pro refresh, these definitely can be grouped into an “anticipated” special event that introduces them.

Then why didn’t they?

Steve Jobs ain’t there to stir up the crowd. (Strictly my opinion…)

But then what else can it be? Tim Cook or Phil Schiller not up to it?

While Google solves their problems, Mac OS X, with it’s new 10% market share, gets it’s first malicious trojan. iServices.a came to the attention to the technological community through Intego which reports that copies of iWork ‘09 pirated through bittorrent
like this one contains a trojan that “is installed as a startup item (in /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices, a location reserved normally for Apple startup items), where it has read-write-execute permissions for root. The malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet; this means that a malicious user will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac.”

It’s x86 disassembly code can be found here. (Alternate download site)

A variation of this virus was also found in pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop CS4. This version is called iServices.b.
…Looks like it’s time for you to get Mac antiviral/security software; it’s coming.

That’s my pet peeve. IE.

It has been too long. Microsoft’s strategy of “creative inertia” regarding IE seems to be proving himself. Even people as technologically literate as B. Hung should know better (nothing against him, though). I find this unbearable; while I have no control over what people use, IE or otherwise, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a bad choice.

Why not?

1. Standards. IE is infamous in terms of upholding open, industry-wide standards. Microsoft, working as hard as they might be, are not doing a great enough job to implement these standards. Web-developers have had a hard time, because they have to write two versions of every page; an IE-compatible one and a standards-compliant one. This time could be well spent to improve and streamline their pages; in the meantime, this means that the websites that you use would not improve.
2. Security. It’s appalling. IE’s famed security concerns. There is so much to say that I should just summarize them in these links: Link 1, Link 2. IE’s shady history should tell you all you need to know to make you change.
3. Don’t support Microsoft’s actions. What Microsoft has done with Netscape is unforgivable. What they did with implementing ActiveX is even more so unforgivable. Don’t support their actions by using IE. Please.

Reasons why people use it:

1. Inertia. They didn’t bother to change. This applies to the 72% of online users who still stubbornly use this browser.

Your options:

(Just before you list browsers like Maxthon here, might I just say that browsers using the Trident layout engine should not be listed here. The trident engine is basically IE’s layout engine, so they basically share similar standards compatibility)

1. Mozilla Firefox — Free, open source browser. Uses a mostly-standards compliant engine (Gecko). Available for OS X, XP/Vista, and most Linux distributions.
2. Google Chrome — Free, open source browser. Uses one of the best engines out there (Webkit). Windows XP / Vista only.
3. Safari — Free, closed source browser. Uses the same layout engine as Chrome. Default bundled browser on Mac OS X, available for Windows XP / Vista.
4. Opera — Free, closed source browser. Uses a different engine (Presto) that is more compliant than Gecko but less so than Webkit. Available for OS X, XP/Vista, and several Linux distributions.
5. Flock (Just a Firefox ripoff.) — Firefox with another skin and plugin.
6. Camino — Lightweight Gecko- based browser

So. Please. Not IE.

(For more reading, click here)