Etikettarkiv: internet

English

Swedish Intellectual Property law cuts Internet Traffic in Half

The recent enactment of the intellectual property law sometimes referred to as the ”IPRED-law” based on a European Union directive had an immediate effect on the Internet traffic. Hours after the law was put into effect the traffic load on the Swedish core network netnod was cut around 30%. A couple of days later it is down to 50% of what it was before the IPRED was put into effect.

ipred
Several political factions opposed the IPRED law, here is a mock image created by the green party, the original is called Ipren and is a over the counter drug for aches and inflammation called Ipren. On the box we can also read "Unintelligence 400 mg" and "stops technical development and spreading of culture. Integrity breaking." and at the bottom "for politicians that are not rooted in reality."

The new law makes it possible for intellectual property owners to directly go to court to get who owns a certain IP at a certain time. This means that they may then prepare a law suit against the person that had the IP at the time of the copyright infringement and this has already been put into effect.

Only hours after the law was active several authors handed over a demand to the court in Solna to get who was using certain IP’s to download audio books from a server. This server has been pointed out as a main source for distributing copyrighted audio book material.

The anti-piracy lobby is clapping their hands. Personally I think that their victory will be a short one, traffic is already moving on to more secure systems such as OneSwarm or using anonymizers.

The Pirate Bay guys, recently also in court proceedings, have already set up a service where someone for about €5 can use their non-logging anonymizer in order to access material on the Internet in a fashion that makes it much more difficult for people to track.

They call the service the IPREDator. I’m pretty happy the Internet is fast again with the currently low traffic in and out of Sweden surfing is once again a rather pleasureable experience of course…

In some ways I don’t really see the great movement against it, I mean there is no human right to have access to pirated material on the Internet. I am personally much more worried about the current ongoing work to extend the copyright time to 95 years after the artists death which would once again – just like at the last extension when it was extended to 75 years – put severa open works once again under the yoke of being copyright.

Movements such as Project Gutenberg and Project Runeberg suffers because some of their works already published and allowed to be published ar suddenly not  longer available because the extension of the copyright time works retroactively.

That’s madness. But we don’t see a hughe political movement against this madness…

English

Danny Cowan Band

It was probably in 2002 or so when I first heard their music. I was listening to an internet radio station from Texas – the radio station has since long gone defunct, it was an underground radio station anyway with bad sound but good music.

All of a sudden they start playing a tune that really catches my attention and I really love the beat and the style not to mention the song, I frantically start trying to find out what the band is called and so I end up mailing the guy running the ShoutCast radio station and he actually came back to me and said ”They are called ’Danny Cowan Band’ and they are from just ’round the corner here.” The song that caught my attention was The Whip. Now go listen to it.

you know the whip’s coming down
coming down on you
we’re down in Texas land
you know heat’s on the rise
100 days of summer

So I set out to find their music on the net to hear more if possible and to buy their record. Turns out they got a small home page where you can listen to their tunes as MP3’s.

And then you can buy their record very cheaply paying through PayPal. Go buy it now. If you feel like some real texas blues you’ve come to the right place!

Drivin Back to TEXAS album cover
Drivin' Back to TEXAS album cover

Danny Cowan Group
Danny Cowan Group
English

Internet Silverback

Image linked from msnbc article, click for reference.
Image linked from msnbc article, click for reference.

I just received an email from an old friend calling me one of the ”Internet Silverbacks” that he knows. I felt quite flattered and I started thinking about what kind of feelings that epithet set off inside me and I kind of like the label and I will actively start using it.

Of course the name is a comparison with the Silverback Gorillas of the jungles of Rwanda and similar places in Africa. I have heard people being called that before on the net, always with affection and always about someone who has been around for a while. I have had my domain up for more than eight years and when I started it the web was certainly different from now but even before I had that I had a home page (it’s defunct but some remains are still to be seen there) located at one of the really early swedish ISPs called Algonet. This ISP was later bought by Telenor who kept it running much as business as usual and then Glocalnet took over and they did not have the competence it seems to keep it running properly. These days most of the services of the online shell accounts you could get there are broken and with no fix in sight.

Used to spend lots of money on my 14k4 and later 56k modem dialing up their modem pool and the monthly fee was pretty high for someone then back in the early nineties. The web wasn’t really around yet, but there were other things such as Usenet news (kind of like forums but all text based and much sleeker designed than any web based fora you see today) and IRC for chatting with people in real time all over the word. IRC is still going strong but it’s not widely known and used mainly amongst geeks, oldtimers and people controlling botnets unfortunately.

I remember Gopher. That’s a precursor to the web, only text based and used port 70 instead of port 80 that the http protocol used for the web is defaulting to. Before gohpher there were several off-line hypertext file systems such as AmigaInfo that could be used to make ”pages” and then transmit them using UUCP (Unixt to Unix Copy Program).

I used to run a Fidonet enabled BBS back in the days when Internet was only for people on universities and really large corporations, I had two modem lines and the fido address was 2:205/309 it was located in the south end of Dalarna here in Sweden. We had great fun then, started a computer club called MoosE-NET and played lots of games, did some serious hacking, played poker and went hiking together in the strange areas around Ludvika…

I guess I might be an Internet Silverback or just very nostalgic or both.

Here is my humoristic definition of an Internet Silverback

  • Knew the Internet before the web and regarded the www with suspiction as a great bandwidh hog.
  • Can hand-craft old style HTML from the earliest versions and remember when every home page out there had animated gif pictures of hampsters or something equally ridiculous. Just because it was possible.
  • Used Netscape with the built-in editor.
  • Has been a channel admin of some channel in IRC and knows what the ”big split” in the IRC was.
  • Remembers when Iceland ran their full Internet transmission over two 9600 baud modems to Scotland and Norway.
  • Remembers when the RIP protocol was widely used all the way down to the endpoints and that you could set up your own machine to listen to it and find out about the best route to Australia  on the net.
  • Remember the spat between Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum
  • Used to write own tools in both sh and C just to get things done
  • Have at least a rudimentary understanding of Lisp and an appreciation of its beauty

More?

English

MOO.COM

Are you looking for some nice business cards or would like to make some cool postcards with your own design and pictures? This site moo.com can grab your Flickr images and then make business cards, mini cards, post cards and other stuff straight off with your own design.

You can even have each card be a complete individual with a different unique picture on each of your business cards.

I just placed and order for a stack, I will tell you more when it arrives in the mail in a few days…

[Update 2008-10-15]

I got my cards a long time ago but have neglected to update this page, sorry for that. Here it is anyway! Iam thrilled with the service from moo.com, they are excellent. My package was sent using New Zealand mail and therefore the Swedish customs charged me import toll fees, even though the package was actually sent from the UK. Moo.com gave me the money back for that and then some immediately and had a talk with their courier to make sure this would not happen again.

The quality is excellent and I really love the look and feel of these!

English

Google Chrome

I have now tested the new browser from Google and although I kind of like many things with it there are also a few things that makes me hesitant to swith from Firefox and this is mainly photo related.

Chrome has some advantages, first of all the rendering engine is very fast so for normal surfing it is great. Even more so if there are pages that are heavily loaded with Javascript, that’s really when Chrome shines. It also runs the scripts in a sandbox making it impossible for one script to find out what your other windows are doing and if one page crashes only that tab is destroyed, the other onese keep working well. That’s brilliant stuff all of it.

The down side is that while running an individual sandbox for each tab is efficient from a security standpoint it is also very inefficient as far as system resources goes. I frequently have 20-30 tabs open and that just does not work well on my system, probably memory constraints that is the biggest problem here. This makes me have to change the way I use tabs and that gets in the way for me.

Another thing is that I use quite a few Greasemonkey scripts in Firefox to enhance my Flickr experience among other things. They do not work in Chrome out of the box. There is a Greasemonkey replacement called Greasemetal for Chrome but it does not run all the scripts yet and the problems are somewhat strange so I’d rather not use it.

Google has changed the user licence for Chrome, they no longer claim the rights to the material posted through the web browser, which I gather was never the intention in the first place but the way some people and online journalists construed things.

So all in all, while a promising alternative I will be sticking to my Firefox for the foreseable future.

English

Flickr Scripts

Here are some of my favourite GreaseMonkey scripts for Flickr that I use almost daily:

Flickr Refer Comment
This script allows you to put a small signature when commenting pictures that tells the people where you found the picture. It is a very nice feature and tells people where you are finding their pictures when you comment them – which group, if you are reading through RSS aggregator, in your friends and family collections and so on.
Flickr Buddy Icon Reply
This script allows you to reply with a buddy icon and / or name so that people know who you are responding to when making a follow up comment. Lovely script!
Flickr – Multi Group Sender
This script allows you to pick from a list all the groups you wish to send a photo to. Normally you have to pick one group at a time and from the organiser you can only send a nuber of photos to one group at a time but with this you can send one photo to several groups at the same time.

In order to use any of them you must first install Greasmonkey, a scripting add-on for Firefox that also can be gotten to work with Internet Explorer.