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Filesharing Unstoppable ?

Despite the new court orders on file-sharing, the amount of file-sharing hasn’t reduced one bit .

The level of file-sharing has remained the same for two years despite 20,000 legal cases in 17 countries. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) said it was ‘containing” the problem and more people were connecting to broadband.

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Security patch for Vista!

The security patch for Windows Vista has been released to Beta Testers and developer subscribers .
This patch is specifically designed for the CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Vista released in December.

This fix also deals with how Vista handles the Windows Metafile format since those files could essentially force a machine to run other code. If by chance the WMF files are opened, they could allow code to download and run malicious software.

Full story here

Google in for Radio advertising

Just days after Microsoft announced its online advertising entry, Google has announced their entry into the radio industry. Google announced today that it has signed a deal to purchase dMarc Broadcasting Inc. for a cool $102 million. The deal will allow Google to enhance its presence in the advertising industry over to the radio industry. What’s even more interesting is that Google says it plans to integrate its highly successful AdSense program with those from dMarc. The Google and dMarc deal is expected to close at the end of the first quarter, 2006

Full story here

Spying Lawsuits

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU both recently filed lawsuits, in New York and Detroit respectively, claiming that President Bush’s electronic eavsdropping program is illegal and exceeds his constitutional powers. From the article: ‘The Detroit [ACLU] lawsuit, which names the National Security Agency and its director, said the program has impaired plaintiffs’ ability to gather information from sources abroad as they try to locate witnesses, represent clients, do research or engage in advoca

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Firefox’s Ping!

The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses ‘ping’ attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a ‘ping’ attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new “feature” allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it.

Check it out here Full Story

Apple fanboys, get over yourselves, please

Look, I love Apple. Seriously - I own an iPod, and if I had the money to invest in a second computer, I’d buy a Mac. All the reasons Apple fanboys (and girls) love Apple are the reasons why I love Apple. Their UI design is brilliant. OS X is an amazing combination of it’s incredible user experience and UNIX power underneath the hood.

But seriously, you people need to lighten up. I’m sorry, but OS X is NOT the be all end all of operating systems. No OS is. If I can admit that Window XP is flawed (and trust me, it is) then why can’t you do the same with OS X?

Why am I even writing this? Because after I seeded the “No XP on new Intel Macs” story here , some people just didn’t get the picture.

“Also why would you want to…. Name one app that runs on XP that you use and I can show you a better, more stabler equivalent in Mac or Linux (AutoCAD users look for Sketch or Sketchup).”

“Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good dual core computer by installing Windows. Just buy a slower computer for a similar effect!”

I’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. Want software that runs on XP that doesn’t run on Mac or Linux? Try nearly all gaming titles. Doesn’t matter if you don’t care about gaming; the point is that it’s a huge industry and that it matters. If OS X was the god of OSes it would be the one we’re all using. I have little love for Windows XP, but you have to be a fool to say one OS can do everything.

In the end, it’s about choice. I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows because I care about the power and open source apps that Linux provides me, as well as you know, the ability to play games. Or run Solidworks. I hope that the majority of Mac users aren’t this obstinate when it comes to OS X and Macs, but I’m beginning to wonder.

Choice is a good thing. Why do you think PCs dominated Apples for so long? That’s another story for another day, though - for now, all I ask is for the hardcore Apple fanboys to stop for a moment, take the wool off of their eyes, and consider how silly you must seem to the rest of the computing world. Yeah… if you could just do that… that’d be great… mmmkay?

Written by - Brian Shih