Kodo’s Blog

Crazy 3 minute video of a home that features a dazzling Christmas light show with spectacular grand finale. What would you do if this were YOUR neighbor?!

Best Christmas light show ever. The music kicks ass and is Trans Siberian Orchestra - Wizards In Winter. Check a few links down the page for a URL for the video. I have it on my mac and may post it on my .mac account if people are interested.

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Impressive pics of the Aurora phenomenon. All shot with a canon digital rebel with 17-40L lens.

Some very awesome shots here, well worth a look.

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In addition, Sony will offer exchanges for consumers who purchased the discs with a copy that does not contain the XCP DRM.

The fallout from this exercise is going to prove expensive for Sony or is it? The costs of re-pressing 4 million CD’s probably won’t hurt them too much but their reputation is taking a hammering. It is a start but is it too little too late?

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Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Friday that it will suspend production of CDs with copy-protection technology that has been exploited by virus writers to try to hide their malicious code on PCs.

They have bitten the bullet and are stopping production of CD copy protection that installs rootkits. Won’t be long before they try some other stunt to get around it but for now it is a start.

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Interesting little read about George Dubya being a little bit pissed about claims that he lied about the war. As shown by the links in the below article there is plenty of support for those claims.

War Marketing:

Today Mr. Bush has excoriated his opponents for claiming that he lied them into war. The President said: “Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war.” Well I’m neither a Democrat nor really anti-war, but yep, that’s the claim. (By the way, he’s being fact-checked.) That claim is pretty convincing, particularly to anyone who’s actually read the 521-page Senate Report on Intelligence Failures (highlights here), or the Downing Street Memo. If you want a more scholarly version of Mr. Bush’s complaint, check out Norman Podhoretz in Commentary; he is convincingly demolished by Kevin Drum. Why am I so upset about this? Because I thought that taking out Saddam was a moral act, something worth doing for its own sake, a chance to prove that Arabs don’t have to live in dictatorships where there are torturers in the jails, that Western Civilization is capable of moral action. Instead, the war was sold based on conventional marketing wisdom: pick a couple of simple messages and stay on them. I was watching TV and reading the papers, and all the war marketers were saying, over and over, was “He’ll have nukes soon!” and “He’s Osama’s buddy!” Both false; and there are still torturers in the jails. I’m sufficiently irritated that I don’t mind saying “I told you so”, which I did in February and March of 2003. Feh. I hate lies.

Everyone has heard of Pat Robertson, even us Aussies. He is a US TV Evangelist who not so long ago called for the assassination of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez because he is a vocal opponent to George W Bush.

Well now he has come out and told the town of Dover, Pennsylvania that if you have a disaster in your area you better not ask for God’s help or guidance because they have voted against the teaching of Intelligent Design in the their local school district.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city,” Mr Robertson said on The 700 Club.

“God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger in His eye forever,” Mr Robertson said.
“If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them.”

Supporters of Intelligent Design claim that the universe to complex to have occurred over time and must have had assistance from a higher being.

I for one don’t believe that and neither do the people of Dover it seems. The opposite is true in Kansas where their school district have approved the teaching of Intelligent Design.

Isn’t America a wonderful place to live?

Well, Sony is on the hot plate now, sued by the state of California for having the DRM Root Kit. It seems that it violates several California laws. If this goes through, they may not be able to sell these CD’s in California at all.

Well seems California has filed and Ney Nork will soon file suits against Sony?BMG for the installation of rootkits on to Windows machines.

The EFF (Electronic frontier Foundation) is also investigating on whether a class action suit can be filed.

If I was a Sony artist I might be getting concerned about now and looking to jump ship.

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I figured out how to burn as many CD’s as I wanted with DRM installed. Rename your burning program with $sys$ in front of it.

If you have been following the Sony DRM issues recently you would know that the rootkit that is installed hides file with $sys$ in front of it. This person says that he did that with his favourite burning software and can therefore get around the DRM that restrict CD burning.

Some have said it dosen’t work and some do. may depend on software and machine setup but if it does work Sony are just causing more hassles for themselves. I for one am not sorry.

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Court Finds For Student In Web FOS Case:

An anonymous reader writes “A student who brought a suit against his middle school has been awarded a settlement after two years of legal battles. USAToday reports that the suit was brought after the school leveled harsh disciplinary measures against the student, based entirely on comments made to his website guestbook.� From the article: “Grayson Barber, who handled the case on behalf of the ACLU, said the school presented no evidence that Dwyer’s comments were threatening or disruptive of school activities. ‘Our schools should encourage debate and political engagement rather than punishing students who provide a forum for free expression.’�

Apparently the NJ Board of Education had to pay-out $117,500USD to this kid for what they did to him. Apparently he had been suspended, benched in his baseball team and banned him from a class trip. They accused him of having Anti-Sematic postings in his guest-book which is what other people use to send messages to the author of the site. He denies the comments were there. The school have also never given an explanation of what rule or policy he apparently broke. The weirdest thing is that this a blog he ran himself, not hosted by the school, on his own time and on his own home computer.

The school deserves everything it got in this case and should make other schools think twice about censoring students on the net instead of offering free speech and collaborating in discussion groups and classes.

“I hope this is the week that everyone in the world finds out what a root kit is. And I hope it’s a week we look back on in amazement, as we consider just how far Sony was willing to go to criminalize consumers in its efforts to preserve control over its product.

Another excellent article on the Sony DRM issue. This one is written a little bit easier for the non-tech savvy person to understand. If you have time read both articles.

BOYCOTT SONY!!!!!

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