Archive for the ‘tech’ Category
Mullvad is run by Amagicom AB, owned by Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson. They accept bitcoin for payment, FTW!
“Our goal is to make internet censorship and surveillance ineffective.”
via About | Mullvad.
Sign Into Your Google Account on Public Computers Without Typing Anything
via Lifehacker.
Essentially, load accounts.google.com/sesame in the public browser, then use a smart phone which is connected to your google account, with a QR reader – this will enable access on the public terminal, without having to enter in any sensitive information. Voila!
The end of 2011 brought us the latest in attempted Internet censorship by the corporate masters,with the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. This handy list of corporations who support SOPA can give one a glimpse of just who and what is pushing this awful bill. A quick perusal of the list shows many legal firms and law enforcement agencies, along side media conglomerates. Lawyers, cops and CEOs - assuredly a casustic mix.
One of the current top stories on Reddit.com (the ‘frontpage of the internet’ as they refer to themselves) is titled:
GoDaddy’s Response to the Boycott: “Go Daddy has received some emails that appear to stem from the boycott prompt, but we have not seen any impact to our business.” Reddit, Lets make them feel the impact and move your domains! Spread the word!
GoDaddy issues challenge, geeks accept. Less than 24 hours later, GoDaddy flip-flops.
One redditor summed up GoDaddy’s interesting response in the Internet parlance of ‘too long, didn’t read’ as such: “tl;dr: Come at me bro.” Another replied with the standard, “Challenge Accepted” meme.
GoDaddy even has a dedicated page in its community support forums addressing the topic, with some very tersely worded responses.
While I only operate a few personal domains, I will be moving them elsewhere. The support of SOPA is baffling enough but the response that basically said “We know people are upset, we just don’t care because we are stacking the papers, yo.” is what convinced me.
Competing domain registration firm (and all around GoodGuyGreg) namecheap.com did Internet denizens a solid by promoting an exodus from GoDaddy with a few clever coupon codes – “SOPASucks” is one, another is “BYEBYEGD” – these coupon codes both work to save a bit on any domain transfers to namecheap.
December 29th has been declared the official domain exodus day, with cynical internet peeps predicting there will be an issue with GoDaddy’s services on that day, in order to prevent such a mass, coordinated movement from occuring.
After the GoDaddy elephant hunt/massacre by GoDaddy’s founder and former CEO Bob Parsons in the spring of 2011 – namecheap and GoElly.com ran similar promotions, aimed at the animal-rights conscious consumer who was offended by Bob Parsons’ elephant slaying. PETA honored Parsons with its first ever, “Scummiest CEO award” to which Parsons replied, “I understand PETA has an agenda, but I refuse to go along with their extortion-style practice.” He continued to defend his killing of the “problem elephant” and refuses to even acknowledge other proven non-lethal ways of keeping elephants away from food crops. The final solution apparently is his only method.
After having already moved about a dozen domains from GoDaddy this week, still more work is left to do – it was embarrassing enough using such an openly misogynistic company. They offered domain registrations as a loss leader, at times under $2 each, when the market rate was about 10x that amount, so one could argue there was once a financial incentive to use this trashy company – but no more. Quite the opposite, for supporting SOPA (or even formerly supporting it), as currently written, just may kill the Internet as we have come to know it.
It would be most interesting to see the stats on godaddy’s domain transfer requests for the end of 2011. Vote with your domains, get outta there. Another post at reddit, titled, “Today I Learned Wikipedia.org is registered at SOPA supporter GoDaddy” challenges not just Wikipedia, but any/all domains registered at godaddy,
Why just wikipedia? Why not contact everyone who’s registered at GoDaddy?
I noticed RedLetterMedia –who just released their Indy 4 review– are also registered at GoDaddy.
Also Blip.tv, WordPress, explosm.net, direct2drive, Penny-Arcade. Why not start emailing them as well?
May this catch fire – off to move more domains!
Well, that didn’t take too long! GoDaddy changes it’s tune: “Victory! Boycott forces GoDaddy to drop its support for SOPA” GoDaddy’s statement is available here.
However, all one needs to do, is visit GoDaddy CEO’s homepage blog, at: BobParsons.ME and ask yourself, “Is this a company I wish to patronize?” There are plenty of reasons to not use the services of a company such as GoDaddy. Their flip-flop on SOPA is interesting, for it shows the power of these movements – it also exposes the dickish move they pulled with their smarmy initial rebuff of the movement. By completely invalidating their statements from less than a day sooner, we can see this company is flailing.
Why go with a host like namecheap? Well, they have a blatant anti-SOPA position, ‘cuz they understand the internets: Why we are against SOPA and why it is so important to us, read our stance here. Unlike GoDaddy, who funds a Nascar team with cheerleaders, and who’s founder and former CEO seems like some sort of crazed ego maniac.
A commenter on a GoDaddy forum said it very nicely:
Far too little and much too late. If GoDaddy had cared about the openness of the Internet and the 4th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States they would have invested their efforts in opposing this wretched legislation from the very beginning, not flip-flopping when it became unpopular or financially disadvantageous. I and all of my MANY domains are moving elsewhere and not one cent of mine will ever find its way back to GoDaddy. I hope I am not alone and that THOUSANDS of freedom-loving people around the world join me.
Well said, you are most definitely not alone. If you have a problem elephant, call Parsons of GoDaddy – if you need domains registered, consider namecheap.
Programming a slider for wordpress 3.3 – from intermarketing.merkados.com/programming-a-slider-for-wordpress-3-3 give some helpful tips on getting the featured image edit back into your wordpress after updating to version 3.3.
Essentially, if you just need the featured image box back (and don’t need to go threw the process of adding a slider to your site) you simply need to edit your theme’s functions.php file (located in your theme’s folder) and add the following lines to inlcude the feature – for whatever reason, the featured image function was removed from the core in v3.3, and now needs to be enabled by your theme.
// adds support for the thumbnails / featured images.
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
It is best to insert the new function call inside the if {} statement which sees if the function exists, eg:
// to use wp_nav_menu() in WordPress3.0
if (function_exists('add_theme_support')) { add_theme_support( 'nav-menus' );
// adds support for the thumbnails / featured images.
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
};
and then voila, featured image is back.
All about the UDP ports (plural) – wasn’t receiving party invites and just general XBL oddness until it was noticed that the router wasn’t passing UDP traffic on port 88.
To enable proper XBL connectedness, both UDP ports 88 & 3074, and TCP port 3074 must all be forwarded to the Xbox 360 via your router.
The ports needed for a proper Xbox live setup (open NAT)
With the Priv3 plugin: priv3.icsi.berkeley.edu/
Software’s rather brief commercial history, as even if extremely loosely defined, is only a hundred years or so old at most. This short run seems to be rapidly evolving into the oft-theorized brave new world: an end-state of medialess-ness. Most people and companies who have been involved in software development, up until very recently, have pushed their “soft” product in an oxymoronic “hard” shrink-wrapped box of some sort – all to generate traceable revenue at the cash register. Even the mighty (and once-mightier) Microsoft still sells physical license key cards for its software products, all the while clinging to whatever other shrink-wrapped products they can continue to push on their customers, even as they pivot and shift to the digital economy and distribution methods with their Xbox live services and others.
With the 21st century advent of the iOS platform & OSX app Store, and the Chrome apps and Firefox addons, Blackberry apps, & app ad nauseum now – the days of shrink-wrapped physical “soft” products, seems to be coming to an end. The “Apps-revolution” is nothing more than the realization of a fully digital distribution economy, known now as “The Cloud”. This seems to be a fairly huge development, as technology and humanity are evolving before our very eyes – looking back, for the past 4o years or so (ever since the 8-track took over from the LP) – humanity has spent an untold amount of resources consuming products, which were completely and literally intangible & ethereal. This mostly magnetic-based technology was something of magic – for only with the appropriate interfacing technologies, would these devices and items be of any use. (Say, I have this great item you just have to experience, on this 5.25″ floppy disk…)
An example of how past media becomes only useful as art components.
All too often the objects consumed become waste and recycled into art projects and more, as they lose their utility with each new technological wave and become something the next generation disposes of. The physical items themselves which were obtained were essentially all the same – some sort of flimsy, silver, or brown-ish “plastic” in some kind of container, be it a flat, found disc, or a long ribbon, or something else we couldn’t make heads or tails of with any of our human senses. The technologies, mostly some kind of magnetic media based formats, be they analog or digital, all replaced prior technologies which were physical – punch cards had holes in cards we could see and hold and read, in our hands. The LP was a disk of vinyl, which had an audio groove on it we could see – yes it’s tiny, but it’s there.
All of the new media replacements were not of our physical world – we could only see their containers, but not truly see the content itself. We could hold the intangible in our hands, in an almost cellular format, each of us being sold our own “copy” of whatever item we desired – be it Beethoven symphonies or WordPerfect floppies. Bach on an 8-track tape really looks not much different than a floppy disk drive media’s disc full of data – both are a brown, plastic based, nearly 2 dimensional piece of magnetic media. Or to put it another way, all CDs or DVDs are 5″ plastic discs – which for the most part – the actual contents contained within via optics wizardry, are essentially indistinguishable with our human senses.
The Intangible becomes Tangible – There’s always been a type of cognitive dissonance associated with the experience of buying a cardboard box, shrink-wrapped in plastic, inside of which was a media container – for soft-ware of any sort. In the mid ’90s music companies did away with the large CD box supposedly in an effort to be more environmentally conscious – consumers were simply being slowly weened from this “stuff”. Music, Movies & Software seem to be rather ethereal, existing only inside the transistors of our computers, and only useful in an electronic device. (Antikythera mechanism not withstanding.) Now that we have a worldwide inter-connected network, and with it, a global digital distribution model, the era of purchasing the intangible, on tangible media, seems to be coming to a most welcome twilight.
Examine the history of audio commercialization evolution:
Wax cylinders -> Phonographs -> LP Records -> 8-track-cassette -> cassette tapes -> [|| digital revolution ||] CDs -> Digital Storage Media -> CLOUD
Software Sales:
(Digital by definition) Shrink-wrap boxes (floppies) ->Shrink-wrapped boxes (CDs) ->Shrink-wrapped boxes (DVDs) -> CLOUD
A distribution model which passes the savings onto the consumer, and enables direct to producer sales, without ever having to physically render their software product to get paid. Software remains soft, as it should. In the late 80s, there were whole industries of software sellers and re-sellers – the middle-men in the distribution network who are no longer needed. They were slowly replaced by big box stores and other online retailers (I always found it so odd to buy software in a “box”, especially in recent years & over the internet where i would have to wait for the product to be mailed to me). The cloud usurps all. It seems somewhat ironic that the undoing of software’s physical manifestation is committed by something itself so ethereal it’s called “The Cloud.”
By Carl Holm for ABC Science Online
Updated Fri Apr 15, 2011 12:13pm AEST
Researchers from Australia and Japan have successfully teleported wave packets of light, potentially revolutionising quantum communications and computing.
The team, led by researchers at the University of Tokyo, say this is the first-ever teleportation, or transfer, of a particular complex set of quantum information from one point to another.
They say it will make possible high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via communications networks.
The research appears today in the journal Science.
April 11, 2011 | 6 Last week saw another flurry of attention about the Rossi Focardi Cold Fusion apparatus with a new demonstration in Italy. This time the eminent observers came from Sweden’s Skeptics Society (This link is to the English translated page and is a worthwhile read).
via Rossi Cold Fusion Update With a Confirmation | New Energy and Fuel.
