aphexddb.com

Lets begin this exercise in hilarity by covering this little gem of a tagline:

Encryption Chip Will End Piracy, Says Atari Founder

The problem here is that another attempt at draconian DRM enforcement (at the hardware level) is totally worthless. While this might stop a casual pirate, the same people who are currently successfully pirating media will continue to do, regardless of security efforts. The time-rich and cash-poor will always find a way to bypass TPM, DRM and whatever is the current fad in copy-protection. I’m sure some Brazillan kids in a favella already have this particular hardware issue figured out. After all, people don’t need to break the encryption (hard), just find a weakness in the system to exploit (easy).

The DRM failure world tour – “uncrackable” systems that have been bypassed:

• PS2 – 2001
• DVD – 2002 (DVD Jon)
• XBOX -2002 (Team Xecuter)
• iTunes – 2003 (DVD Jon)
• XBOX 360 – 2006 (TheSpecialist)
• HD-DVD -2006 (muslix64)
• Blu-Ray -2007 (muslix64)
• iPhone -2007 (DVD Jon ?)

• Most computer software: id Software / Blizzard / Adobe / Autodesk / Microsoft / etc. – 1990′s to today

The thing about TPM chips is that you give up all rights and lose control of the hardware that you purchased. An example to drive this point home is that it’s exactly like buying a new BMW, only if you decide to get service at the local shop instead of the dealership the car will turn around and drive you home. Not only does this mean you don’t really own your technology but someone else is making your choices for you. Cory Doctorow’s fantastic new book Little Brother covers some of these issues (read it, it’s free).

This draconian type of security is really a problem since 95% of the general public does not understand the consequences of losing ownership in their technology. Unfortunely that means that same public will blindly go along with the DRM people and end up shocked when they can no longer use the data they purchased.

via ShackNews

This wouldn’t have been as funny if it wasn’t so true. I know a bunch of people who date exclusively online via Facebook, etc.

Work from 9 to 5 on a typical day
From 5 to 9 is when I start to play
Without hesitation, head to my station
Pull up my homepage, give into temptation
Crap loada invitations

BLAM

There’s a poop loada notifications
I got females across 50 states
Who I monitor frequently by their status updates

via Laughing Squid

I’ve switched back to the default theme and am going to try and debug things. In the meantime please make do with the ghetto-tastic setup.

Also, anyone know why WordPress 2.5.1 non-stop submits ajax rquests to save the current post? As I write this, Firebug is showing maybe 2-3 requests POSTS per second to:

http://www.aphexddb.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.

Also, Media Temple (gs) service is terrible.

So very awesome. Grab The Slip here.

as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options – all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

via DiggNation

Oddly different benchmarking results from speedtest.net and dslreports.com.

Charter just offered a new package and I upgraded high speed internet to 16Mb down / 2Mb up. It’s also now $44.95, cheaper than the old 10/1. I think this should barely hold me over until FIOS is available in St. Louis.

However Charter is still resetting about 15-25% of P2P traffic according to the Network Status Monitor plugin for Azureus.

The future of social media is a subscription to humanity.

Not a radical proposition- social media offers a way for people to connect along varied information channels that have never existed before. How do you explain the purpose of data-mining to someone who punches a time clock? Or location-based contextual data to someone who has never used GPS? There is simply no frame of reference for this emerging sector other than the ever-perversive shine that “cool factor” casts on such things. I consider myself hip in this area but in truth I don’t have a clear enough picture of the long term benefits. I am knowledgeable enough to guess at those benefits and understand the need for a solid, flexible and open foundation for what will be the most highly connected time in human history.

As I twittered yesterday in excitement, we as a community are finally equipped with the technology to create this system. Some of the current paradigms such as polling are old and busted. We know how to serve web content, do cloud computing and make pretty designs. We can now move forward and kick some ass.

The title I wear in my day job is “architect”, so in the interests of meaningful post content lets take a quick look at the needs for Connected Humanity 1.0:

1. Must be locationally and contextually aware, humans tend to move around.
   Location without relevant contextual information is GPS. If I am in the office, what floor? On a college campus what building? Campus buildings tend to not have street addresses. Even better, am I at my favorite cafe where (more importantly) I have been 10 times this week?
   Most phones being sold from the latest generation have GPS or cell tower triangulation, manual updates are also easily accomplished ala brightkite: “@work”
2. Must put people in touch, possibly make assumptions.
   If my close friends, acquaintances or neighbors are nearby (and are advertising their presence) I want to know. In fact, I want to know if they are busy, free, or are meeting clients and should not be disturbed. If someone visits the same cafe in the previous example and we have friends and interests in common, should we know about it?
3. Micro-blogging works.
   Conceptually a new way of expressing and broadcasting content with the addition of conciseness. If you can’t express a feeling, location or idea in 140 characters, get with the program.
4. Must be scalable and reliable.
   Cloud based services = reliable, cheap, and scalable computing resources. Most people have a website/blog, some of us are bigger geeks and run an OpenID server. Language holy wars aside, there isn’t much you can’t do with literate programming and Google App Engine / Amazon S3 these days. Get over it
5. Must be distributed.
   Authentication mechanisms such as OpenID and messenging protocols such as XMPP (Jabber) can assist with this. Twitter is great, but I need to be able to run my own Connected Humanity 1.0 system the same way I run an OpenID server. The Twitter’s of the world provide value from their unique features and services.
6. Must support privacy / trust model.
   Facebook has a decent model in the context of configuring the Twitter application to only show updates to certain groups, with exceptions for people. This is important.
   Distributed trust frameworks are a different discussion but might play a role. Haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this aspect as it relates to social media.
7. Standards must be open, cross platform, and community accepted.
   Standards folks, they are important. “Java” will never be the right answer to this item. However things like JSON, XML, and OpenID will all be parts of the answer.
8. There is more to this than technology.
   The technically inclined can really grok this, but it will be the end-users who shape the future here. There are soccer moms out there today who don’t know this yet, but one day will pick up a 3rd gen iPhone and create new world of interaction. The IT crowd will never think comprehensively enough.
9. There is a business case for social media.
   Not talking about Minority Report eyeball scanning advertisements (although suits would argue for this one). Productivity has been creeping upward by leaps and bounds since the industrial revolution. In the information age relationships and context are the currency of connectivity. This kind of connectivity will enable the post-iPod generations to kick some serious ass.

Cases in point:

Last month there was a last minute “Twitter flash mob” in STL. About 10 people some friends, some strangers starting pinging back and forth on Twitter and we ended up at happy hour at The Dubliner and discussed Twitter and social media. I met a few new friends and just got a Bright Kite beta invite from one of them (Thanks CosmosGirl!).

At the Gateway to Innovation conference I heard a great little talk on infusing entrepreneurial ideas into your organization from boblozano. He mentioned Twitter and I posted a tweet (referencing a previous session on EHR) on my Blackberry 8800 via the Google Talk application.  The Twitter application on Facebook posted this to my Facebook news feed. A girl I went school with saw my status update on Facebook and emailed me a question about EHR. This loop is incredible:

Human -> Mobile device -> Google Talk Servers -> XMPP -> Twitter -> HTTP -> Facebook App -> Status Feed -> Email -> Human

The free exchange of ideas and conversation between similarly minded people would never have happened without social media! Much to come in the next few years. I welcome all feedback, please hammer away

We did this one day during work hours, while drinking. We are a company called Revision3 and were inspired by a company called Connected Ventures. And we kind of rock. Hard. BRING IT!!

I hate those guys. (OK, Jealous.)

via Valleywag

A comment on the video reminds us that this video necessitates the importance of building EMP grenades when we are overtaken by robot overlords. Luckily the internet has all the knowledge we need on explosively pumped flux compression generators.

I’ve been outside. It’s overrrated.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of “now what?”

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

…. awesome!

via Metafilter

The new title notwithstanding, things are looking promising. The title is from a short story in Ian Fleming’s anthology “For Your Eyes Only”. Thankfully the film should appear as gritty and real as Casino Royale (94% on Rotten Tomatoes) with the news that Dan Bradley was hired on as second unit director because of his work on the Jason Bourne films.

‘Quantum of Solace’ continues the high octane adventures of James Bond (Daniel Craig) in ‘Casino Royale.’ Betrayed by Vesper, the woman he loved, 007 fights the urge to make his latest mission personal.

Pursuing his determination to uncover the truth, Bond and M (Judi Dench) interrogate Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who reveals the organization which blackmailed Vesper is far more complex and dangerous than anyone had imagined. Forensic intelligence links an MI6 traitor to a bank account in Haiti where a case of mistaken identity introduces Bond to the beautiful but feisty Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a woman who has her own vendetta.

Camille leads Bond straight to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a ruthless business man and major force within the mysterious organization. On a mission that leads him to Austria, Italy and South America, Bond discovers that Greene, conspiring to take total control of one of the world’s most important natural resources, is forging a deal with the exiled General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio). Using his associates in the organization, and manipulating his powerful contacts within the CIA and the British government, Greene promises to overthrow the existing regime in a Latin American country giving the General control of the country in exchange for a seemingly barren piece of land.

In a minefield of treachery, murder and deceit, Bond allies with old friends in a battle to uncover the truth. As he gets closer to finding the man responsible for the betrayal of Vesper, 007 must keep one step ahead of the CIA, the terrorists and even M, to unravel Greene’s sinister plan and stop his organization.

I’ll be first in line on opening day. Woo!