Wikinerd'z

Excuse me, but isn’t search and seizures without warrants against the law? (even in Spain?)… That can only mean two things; SGAE’s getting desperate, or they’re going dirty. Either way, everyone suffers.

(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

One of the biggest cases in file-sharing history ended last week with The Pirate Bay Four sentenced to huge fines and jail time. Today it is revealed that far from being impartial, the judge in the case is a member of pro-copyright groups – along with Henrik Pontén, Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky. There are loud calls for a retrial.

via Torrentfreak

Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

via Torrentfreak

Woohoo! Chromium for mac!

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.)

Looks like another list to add to the list of French defeats…

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

Recently, Google had been taken down by ‘human error’. While some thought that Google was taken down by crackers, the statement released says that it was caused by an employee accidentally typing “/” into the malicious sites list. “/”, of course, expands to include every website, so any search would lead you to a “This site may harm your computer” message.

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.

While B Hung points out Google’s downtime, I noticed something else in his post. The screenshot shows him using IE

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)

Why WordPress?

WordPress is simple, easy, and most importantly, free. I used to use Drupal, but Drupal proved to be too confusing—administration is a challenge, and setting things, especially languages, is simply too complicated, and repetitive.

And finally, WordPress itself is open source. (the WordPress CMS, that is.)

PS. I need a nicer theme… and of course I’m open to suggestions..

PPS. Please can we just get extensions in WP.com?