ThePirateBay sells out?

090219piratebay Just read an alternative way of seeing the deal between Global Gaming Factory and ThePirateBay (the worldwide largest BitTorrent tracker). While everybody is criticizing the deal, J.J. King of TorrentFreak puts it into a more positive light:
Big != Good

Let’s face it: The Pirate Bay itself had become a huge focus of attention for those trying to preserve the old copy-restriction model of the culture industries. By some accounts TPB’s tracker has been responsible for 50% of all Internet traffic, and its founders have been looming larger and larger, waving their pirate flags more and more visibly, for quite a few years. They are international celebrities and, love them as we might, that made them and TPB targets. It’s not a secret that quite a few peers on the TPB trackers today are ’spies’, there to gather data on legitimate peers — a real danger to Bittorrent users. And as well being feted, Brokep, Anakata and Tiamo have been followed, spied on, raided, arrested, maligned, sentenced and, now live under a real threat of imprisonment.

The bigger we get, the more of a target we are. Mininova, isoHunt and TPB have all been under siege these last years. We need to stop thinking about ‘one stop shops’ for our media. Distribution and aggregation point the way: think ’separation of powers’. Clients like Miro can aggregate feeds from a variety of sources according to the needs of the user. TPB may have represented the needs of the community for half a decade or more, but we don’t need them. We are our own media infrastructure!

Also the other points he cites are certainly well founded. He managed to convince me that the TPB Community won’t die when the Site is sold: let’s face it, it’s nothing more than the domain name. No Client data, no user information will be in possession of GGF!

[via TorrentFreak]

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Windows Stickers!

designed-for-linux

Do you have a notebook? Then probably you’ll have one of those incredibly annoying Windows stickers on it, even if you never had Windows running on it.

Far from being useful they are pretty annoying, first they lose all their colors, which then stick to your screen, instead of the shiny surface they are supposed to. Then the sticker itself starts to move around under the daily use, exposing its sticky underside.

Finally when you got fed up with your wrist being glued to the notebook, and decide to remove the sticker completely, the glue sticks to the notebook, and heavily fights off any attempt of removal.

That’s what happened to me, and now I’m wondering how to remove. Dammit Windows, even without you, you annoy me…

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Megavideo still not working

Apparently I’m not the only one complaining about MegaVideo.
I’m starting to get huge amounts of traffic from search engines, suggesting that others are experiencing those issues too.
I’m pretty disappointed in their deceiving marketing strategies, promising high rewards, but then not tracking them (wether intentionally or not).
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Firefox 3.5b4 twice as fast as 3.0.6

I just had a test run of the Sun Spider benchmark with my “old” Firefox 3.0.6 against Firefox (well more likely Swiftfox) 3.5b4 and the results are stunning:
=============================================================================

** TOTAL **:           *2.04x as slow*   1886.4ms +/- 7.3%   3854.4ms +/- 4.9%     significant

=============================================================================

  3d:                  *1.34x as slow*    272.4ms +/- 22.0%    365.8ms +/- 8.9%     significant
    cube:              *1.54x as slow*     87.8ms +/- 45.5%    135.6ms +/- 13.6%     significant
    morph:             *1.56x as slow*     77.4ms +/- 42.9%    120.8ms +/- 17.7%     significant
    raytrace:          ??                 107.2ms +/- 27.0%    109.4ms +/- 6.3%     not conclusive: might be *1.02x as slow*

  access:              *2.19x as slow*    244.4ms +/- 22.9%    535.4ms +/- 13.5%     significant
    binary-trees:      ??                  66.8ms +/- 18.6%     72.8ms +/- 48.7%     not conclusive: might be *1.09x as slow*
    fannkuch:          *2.17x as slow*     99.0ms +/- 37.2%    214.6ms +/- 5.6%     significant
    nbody:             *2.90x as slow*     53.4ms +/- 46.2%    154.6ms +/- 13.3%     significant
    nsieve:            *3.71x as slow*     25.2ms +/- 46.6%     93.4ms +/- 25.3%     significant

  bitops:              *4.76x as slow*     92.4ms +/- 21.0%    440.0ms +/- 5.5%     significant
    3bit-bits-in-byte: *17.0x as slow*      4.8ms +/- 59.1%     81.4ms +/- 19.2%     significant
    bits-in-byte:      *4.62x as slow*     26.0ms +/- 9.6%    120.2ms +/- 5.9%     significant
    bitwise-and:       *16.0x as slow*      7.4ms +/- 48.4%    118.4ms +/- 2.4%     significant
    nsieve-bits:       *2.21x as slow*     54.2ms +/- 24.4%    120.0ms +/- 1.9%     significant

  controlflow:         ??                  54.2ms +/- 52.1%     72.6ms +/- 6.5%     not conclusive: might be *1.34x as slow*
    recursive:         ??                  54.2ms +/- 52.1%     72.6ms +/- 6.5%     not conclusive: might be *1.34x as slow*

  crypto:              *2.31x as slow*    132.4ms +/- 23.0%    306.4ms +/- 4.0%     significant
    aes:               *1.21x as slow*     87.0ms +/- 9.4%    105.0ms +/- 26.3%     significant
    md5:               *3.01x as slow*     29.8ms +/- 75.2%     89.6ms +/- 6.8%     significant
    sha1:              *7.17x as slow*     15.6ms +/- 60.9%    111.8ms +/- 25.8%     significant

  date:                *1.65x as slow*    235.8ms +/- 13.5%    389.2ms +/- 2.8%     significant
    format-tofte:      *1.78x as slow*    137.0ms +/- 20.7%    244.0ms +/- 9.2%     significant
    format-xparb:      *1.47x as slow*     98.8ms +/- 14.8%    145.2ms +/- 16.1%     significant

  math:                *2.49x as slow*    158.4ms +/- 6.3%    394.6ms +/- 7.1%     significant
    cordic:            *2.47x as slow*     69.6ms +/- 8.6%    172.0ms +/- 8.3%     significant
    partial-sums:      *1.99x as slow*     68.6ms +/- 1.0%    136.4ms +/- 7.9%     significant
    spectral-norm:     *4.27x as slow*     20.2ms +/- 45.9%     86.2ms +/- 45.3%     significant

  regexp:              *2.18x as slow*    128.8ms +/- 12.1%    280.2ms +/- 5.9%     significant
    dna:               *2.18x as slow*    128.8ms +/- 12.1%    280.2ms +/- 5.9%     significant

  string:              *1.89x as slow*    567.6ms +/- 6.4%   1070.2ms +/- 13.1%     significant
    base64:            *2.81x as slow*     40.8ms +/- 33.9%    114.8ms +/- 15.6%     significant
    fasta:             *1.52x as slow*    123.8ms +/- 29.1%    188.4ms +/- 27.7%     significant
    tagcloud:          *1.21x as slow*    154.0ms +/- 20.7%    186.0ms +/- 7.4%     significant
    unpack-code:       *2.56x as slow*    175.4ms +/- 13.2%    449.2ms +/- 27.8%     significant
    validate-input:    *1.79x as slow*     73.6ms +/- 22.4%    131.8ms +/- 13.7%     significant
And I was expecting an improvement in the range of 2-5%, not 100% :D
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Are macs more insecure than Windows / GNU/Linux?

While I am not a big Mac OS fan, I think unbiased analysis of its advantages and downsides is fundamental, to build a personal opinion. This article is a little biased against Mac OS, but I think it got the main point right:
I have developed this analogy of someone who wants to buy a nuclear reactor. There are two organizations interested in providing you with their nuclear reactor.
  • Provider # 1 gives you the reactor plus all the design information, all blue prints, everything but the kitchen sink!
  • Provider # 2 gives you the reactor and doesn’t give you a clue as to how it is built inside. It’s a black box (or a massive gray one). All you have is the control panels and the documentation that this provider is kind enough to provide with (you know…. they can’t give you everything for security reasons).
Given those two choices… which would you consider to be more secure/stable/reliable? Which one would you choose? I’d personally go for Provider 1. At least I know what I’m getting. And the guys are so comfortable with their design that they even give it away to buyers. Perhaps the guys at Chernobyl chose provider # 2.

Great analogy, but the same is true for Windows :D

[via Technology FLOSS]
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