Blag

I got sent this little gem by a friend of mine. Start seems to be pro-RIAA/MPAA, but the punch line hits you half way in

Enjoy.

Do these look the same to you?

Well, that’s the only conclusion I can draw after Apple’s latest round of lawsuits in Australia.

Apparently Apple doesn’t want Woolworths to use their new fresh food logo any more, as it infringes upon the Apple trademark. So that means re-branding all their stores, staff uniforms, trucks, advertisements, product labels and so on. Apple is pissed as Woolworths filed for a blanket trademark, which could in theory allows it to use its stylised ‘w’ on electrical goods and computers, putting them in competition with each other. Given that Woolworths has already followed their US and UK counterparts in offering mobile phone plans, MP3 download credit and phones, I guess Apple might be worried.

But really – is that what Apple’s legal department comes up with, after 14 months of deliberation? “Uh, your logo is a ripoff of ours.”

*snort*

In other news, Apple is also suing Poison Apple, a music festival promoter who’s trademark is a bitten apple atop crossed bones, and Foxtel, as their new pornography channel’s “Adults Only” logo is an apple with an arrow and devil’s tail.

What else will they come up with next? Banning the Granny Smith Festival? Commission on any fresh produce store that sells apples? The local fruit market manager is quaking in fear…

Some moron with a jackhammer managed to cut through 400mm of concrete, straight through fibre optics and copper cables, knocking out internet, telephones, and mobile connectivity for thousands in the CBD. The repair bill is estimated to be $1,000,000 + probable compensation for homeowners and businesses. It will take over a week to pull and re-splice new fibre, and then longer to re-patch 10, 000 copper pairs.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/318725/thousands_lose_phone_internet_services_sydney_cbd

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/cables-cut-cbd-phone-and-internet-services-lost-20090916-fq4h.html

But that got me thinking – all the western countries are all hyped up over the threat of terrorism. We have extra tight security at airports (or none, in some cases -.- ), anti-terrorism laws, warning speakers installed in the city, ASIO/FBI/M1X bla bla bla.

But what’s to stop a terrorist wreaking havoc just by taking an axe to a few telecommunications and power cables? Last time I checked, the telecomms ducts could be accessed relatively easily by a single person with a screw driver, nor are any of the vital cables physically shielded or hardened in any way.

I could cut internet and phone access to the (North Ryde) Business Park down the road from my house, just from being over-enthusiastic with a backhoe and digging a 50cm hole in my front yard.

Poof! There goes the 10G metro fibre rings. Goodbye, thousands of copper pairs. *Throws rope across street* Sayonara Telstra, Optus and Foxtel HFC networks. There’s so much fibre/hfc/copper running through my street it’s not funny.

If I remember correctly a similar case happened in the US to AT&Ts network. A disgruntled employee came along one night, lifted the hatch to a fibre duct, and went snippety-snip. Half the city lost internet access, phones stopped working and 911 calls disappeared into a black hole.

Sure, I’d get screwed by the AFP because willfully tampering with telecommunications is a federal offense but hey, I get my share of the limelight in the media! Now what was the number for Kennard’s Hire again…

GG to these asstards for making everyone’s lives better: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/155993,parking-rangers-add-to-telstra-outage-woes.aspx

Oh me, oh my.

A break in the blag update drought.

Actually bothered to create a new post just for this.

Microsoft has been granted IP patent # 7536726 (filed in 2005) for technology used in the crippling of operating systems.

“making selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to the user or by limiting the user’s ability to add software applications or device drivers to the computer’ until an ‘agreed upon sum of money’ is paid to ‘unlock or otherwise make available the restricted functionality”

Oh, when will the fun ever stop.

Meanwhile, Sophos has developed an Anti-Virus program for members of the Klingon Empire!

I’m not even going to bother trying to comprehend what type of shrooms they were smoking when their designers created this, but it’s damn good marketing regardless – it’s made headlines all over the interwebs.

Copied verbatim from their blog post:

As always, check back at http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/ and Torrent Freak for the latest news.

Today is a sad day for Internet users, torrent trackers, ISPs and network operators worldwide.

The Pirate Bay 4 – Guilty.

1 Year jail term, and $905000 fines each.

The Pirate Bay will stay running of course – the trial was never about the tracker, just the 4 admins who ran the website behind the scenes. They do have 2 courts (or opportunities) to appeal their sentences though, the first of which must be lodge by the 9th of May 2009. It may be years before an outcome is reached though.

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/ is the most accurate and constantly updated source. (Torrent Freak is the de facto site when it comes to file sharing news.) Check back constantly.

The outcome will be very interesting though as this is a landmark case, and it could mean that ISPs may become responsible for policing their users download habits. The outcome of this case LITERALLY could halt the development of broadband worldwide. Let’s face it, with P2P file sharing accounting for 2/3 (and growing) of the data transmitted over the Internet, the ripple effect from these legal proceedings could make 4 companies VERY rich, many companies very broke and land millions of citizens in jail (or at least considerably lighten their wallets anyway).

Speaking of which, iinet vs. AFACT isn’t going too well either… I’m sure Senator Cuntroy is happy, but every Australian ISP is on the edge of their seat watching the drama unfold.

This story is from a few days ago, as I waited to see if anything else would unfold. As it turns out, nothing did, probably as all the journalists got threatened with anal penetration if they reported anything unfavorable about the FBI. (No, I do not like the FBI if that isn’t already apparent.)

The FBI went nuts over in America. In their scramble to kiss Hollywood’s arse (and find the perpetrators of the leaked copy of the movie Wolverine), their search led to a datacenter in Dallas. Apparently the company who had leaked the movie was a client of Core IP Networks, several years ago, but that didn’t stop the FBI from walking in unwarranted, telling all the security guards to piss off, and ripping out indiscriminately every server they could find over 2 floors.

Problem – the servers belonged to many major corporate businesses, ISPs, telcos, web hosting providers and telephone network operators.

Result – several hundred thousand websites offline, people without Internet, e911 calls failing to connect, businesses losing millions by the day and telephone and cable TV services cut to the suburbs in the surrounding 10km radius.

Corporate clients heading to the datacenter to find why all their hardware had gone offline got told by the FBI to literally “fuck off, or you’ll be arrested”. The owner of Core IP Networks (one of the businesses in the  datacenter) got served with an arrest warrant, for doing absolutely nothing wrong. In his words (truncated):

Today at 6:00am, the FBI conducted an unwarranted early morning raid of our 2323 Bryan Street Datacenters, on the 7th and 24th floors.

I received a phone call at 6:05am from our NOC that the entire network was powered off. I called Capstar Commercial and TELX, our landlord, and was told that the FBI was in the datacenter with a search and seizure warrant. I asked that the agent in charge call me immediately.

I received a call 15 minutes later from FBI Agent Allyn Lynd. Mr. Lynd would not tell me why he raided our datacenter or what he was looking for. He also accused me of hiding inside my house in Ovilla, Texas. I was actually in Phoenix, Arizona when this happened. I told him that, and he told me that he was “getting the dogs” after me, and hung up on me. I found out from an employee that there were 15 police cars and a SWAT team at my home in Ovilla.

The FBI has seized all equipment belonging to our customers. Many customers went to the data center to try and retrieve their equipment, but were threatened with arrest.

If you run a datacenter, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason.

In conclusion, the FBI are idiots, Allyn Lynd needs to stop watching B grade action films at 3 am and all the affected businesses and citizens should sue the FBI for damages. There probably is some obscure clause in the US Patriot Act that makes claiming compensation from government entities a threat to humanity.

Edit: The morons are now going through server by server, looking through several petabytes of data for the non-existent traces of a movie.

Seeing as none of these snippets really warrant their own separate post, and partially because I’m lazy, here is a conglomerate of several random issues… thing… news items or whatever…

1) Remember that little ass Alfie Patten? The backwards little midget who claims he is the father of his knocked up 15 year old girlfriend?

As it turns out after DNS testing, he’s isn’t the father but he plans to stick around with his loose “girlfriend”. For what? Perhaps he has a hidden fetish for adopting babies. Either that or he worships Madonna.

The British pollies are all up in arms as usual, going on about the declining morals of modern society, unruly kids, “back in my day…” old douchebaggery comments. It’s not like anyone in the UK gives a f*** (well they do ), but it’ll take a lot of work to change the fact that Britain is the most promiscuous Western culture.

In any case, this picture made a lot of people feel like beating him upside the head.

2) There needs to be a clause put into the UN charter of Human Rights forbidding Lady Gaga from wearing bikinis and one-pieces, especially in her music videos. I’m surprised she hasn’t already been sued by parents worldwide for psychological damage done to their kids.

3) Speaking of unflattering people, Trinny and Susannah are back at it again – http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,28383,25245028-5007192,00.html Anyone else wish these two try hards would just give up?

4) I do feel kinda sorry for Nick D’Arcy. He got kicked out of the Beijing Olympics team after his bar brawl with Cowley (who provoked him intentionally, BTW). Now after making the team for the World Swimming Championships, he was dumped by Swimming Australia as he had a criminal record because of some obscure rule in their charter.

His team mates are kinda pissed at SA for it, and the major sponsors are annoyed to say the least. While it’s nice to see the law applied equally to both citizens AND sports stars (eh, rugby and football?), 4-8 years of work has been ruined for Nick, and he’ll probably never have a swimming career at all unless he moves to the US/UK and competes for them.

Part 2 coming soon… and by that I mean within the next 24 hours.

The amount of licensing models available for open-source software is ridiculous. Why can’t the OSS zealots standardize on a few licensing models, instead of creating a new iteration every time they fix a spelling mistake in previous license?

For starters, there’s the all too familiar GNU GPL and LGPL licenses… which come in version 1, 2, 2.1 and 3. Version 4 is on its way soon.

Now head over to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical and cock a snook at the variety available:

• Academic Free License 3.0 (AFL 3.0)
• Affero GNU Public License
• Adaptive Public License
• Apache License, 2.0
• Apple Public Source License
• Artistic license 2.0
• Attribution Assurance Licenses
• New and Simplified BSD licenses
• Boost Software License (BSL1.0)
• Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License 1.1
• Common Development and Distribution License
• Common Public Attribution License 1.0 (CPAL)
• Common Public License 1.0
• CUA Office Public License Version 1.0
• EU DataGrid Software License
• Eclipse Public License
• Educational Community License, Version 2.0
• Eiffel Forum License V2.0
• Entessa Public License
• European Union Public License (link to every language’s version on their site)
• Fair License
• Frameworx License
• GNU General Public License (GPL)
• GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3)
• GNU Library or “Lesser” General Public License (LGPL)
• GNU Library or “Lesser” General Public License version 3.0 (LGPLv3)
• Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer
• IBM Public License
• IPA Font License
• ISC License
• Lucent Public License Version 1.02
• Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)
• Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL)
• MIT license
• Motosoto License
• Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)
• Multics License
• NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3
• NTP License
• Naumen Public License
• Nethack General Public License
• Nokia Open Source License
• Non-Profit Open Software License 3.0 (Non-Profit OSL 3.0)
• OCLC Research Public License 2.0
• Open Font License 1.1 (OFL 1.1)
• Open Group Test Suite License
• Open Software License 3.0 (OSL 3.0)
• PHP License
• Python license (CNRI Python License)
• Python Software Foundation License
• Qt Public License (QPL)
• RealNetworks Public Source License V1.0
• Reciprocal Public License 1.5 (RPL1.5)
• Ricoh Source Code Public License
• Simple Public License 2.0
• Sleepycat License
• Sun Public License
• Sybase Open Watcom Public License 1.0
• University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License
• Vovida Software License v. 1.0
• W3C License
• wxWindows Library License
• X.Net License
• Zope Public License
• zlib/libpng license

I like the close source world much better. OSS makes redistributing, or basing your application on the work of others a royal pain in the arse.

I did come across the WTFPL though – “Do What The Fuck You Want To public License.” The entire license is:

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
  14 rue de Plaisance, 75014 Paris, France
 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

Aka, do whatever you like, modify the license however you like, and best of all, it’s a legally recognized license which will hold up in court

Read more about it here: http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/