In more interesting news, they’ve also unearthed the original memo from Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis about the foundation of Usenet. It begins:

Invitation
A group of UNIX systems at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have established a uucp-based computer communication network. Admission to the net is open to all UNIX licensees. In addition to providing the “uu” services available in the Seventh Edition of UNIX (remote mail, file transfer, job execution), it will provide a network news service. A prospective node must have a call in facility, call out facility, or some other means of communication with another UNIX net system. The node must have, or be able to legitimately obtain, uucp and related software..
Systems which do not call-out to the net must be polled occasionally. We will poll any system that so requests, and will bill the polled system for phone costs. The phone costs are expected to be $10-20/month. Requests for an application should be sent to
James Ellis
Department of Computer Science
Duke University
Durham, NC 27706

They also have a great little interview with some of the greats of Usenet. Check it out.

I know that there’s a certain of percentage of people who want nothing to do with Modern Warfare 2. It’s all meatheads and explosions, right? I’m inclined to agree to a degree—Opie and Anthony were talking about the game this morning, and a real life member of the military called in and complained, “If you want to play war, why not join the Army?”—but no matter. There’s plenty of things to do today that have nothing to do with the game. Let’s take a look!

• Real Madrid attempt to overcome a 5-0 deficit against Segunda Dvivisión B team Alcorcón in the Copa del Rey. It airs this afternoon on GolTV and your friendly neighborhood Internet stream.

• Maybe you want to see a good movie? Star-Trek is now out on Blu-ray, and you can find—wink, wink!—a Blu-ray rip of Public Enemies online. Pretty good movie, and it totally makes you want to rob a bank. That was the point, right? Also keep your eyes peeled for the movie Moon, which has a very Solyaris feel to it.

• Do you read books still, either of the paper variety or using one of those new-fangled e-book devices? I’ll go ahead and recommend Viral Loop by my old professor Adam Penenberg. It’s about how businesses grow on the Internet. If you read TechCrunch for pleasure then you’ll probably like it. If you’re into sports at all, you may want to track down a copy of Brett Hart’s autobiography, My Life Inside The Cartoon World of Wrestling. The paperback version came out a few days ago, and I’m waiting for the UPS man to deliver it. I’m very excited.

• Sort of on the same topic of books, download the game Fatale for $7. It’s an interactive version of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.

• Start making appointments for CES. Oh, wait, that’s us~!

• Download and watch every single Fedor Emelianenko fight from Usenet. (Thank God for alt.binaries.mma!) I recommend his fights with Antônio Rodrigo Noguiera and Mirko Cro Cop. Oh, Pride, how I miss thee.

• Fire up Silent Hill 2 and lament to yourself, “Why hasn’t a game been able to convey sheer and utter hopelessness like this game did eight years ago?”

• Download Microsoft COFEE for the sole reason of saying to your friends, “Dude, I just downloaded Microsoft COFEE. I have no idea what it does, and I have no idea how to use it, but it’s so great.”

• Download the Sirius XM App for the iPhone (and iPod touch), then leave it on channel 202 The Virus. Let’s face it: Opie & Anthony and Ron & Fez are the only reason to pay for Sirius XM these days.

• Take the push-up challenge, and become a reasonable facsimile of a fit person.

• Do some Christmas ( or whatever holiday you celebrate) shopping. Only a couple of weeks left!

• Write my Razer Naga review for me, so I can concentrate on farming for Honor in Arathi Basin. (I think I won six matches last night. It rocked.)

• Read the latest issue of Figure 4 Weekly, or read an exciting back issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

See, there’s plenty of stuff to do today if you want nothing to do with Modern Warfare 2. It’s a big world out there, tiger, and it’s up to you to make the most of it. Unlike me~!

Before I get started, I think we should break out protocols that one uses intentionally, and those ancillary protocols that get used in the normal execution of your other protocols. For example, every time I visit a web page I intentionally use the HTTP protocol. But unless I’m manually keying in IP addresses, there’s an awful lot of DNS traffic taking place, too. I don’t intentionally use the DNS protocol: it happens behind the scenes as I’m using my web browser. So with that out of the way, here are the protocols I intentionally choose to use on a regular basis:

HTTP
No surprise here. I write for CrunchGear, so I use HTTP (TCP port 80) to access the WordPress back-end to compose stories. I visit product web pages. I watch videos at YouTube and Hulu. I compose email at GMail. HTTP is the king of protocols.

SSH
As a systems administrator, I use the Secure Shell protocol (TCP port 22) daily to access the variety of Linux systems I maintain. Whether for my day job, or my personal web server, I’d be dead in the water without SSH. I also use SSH as a SOCKS proxy so that I can access a variety of resources using my home IP address. This is particularly useful when I’m using an untrusted wireless network: the link from my laptop to my proxy server is encrypted, shielding my traffic from anyone snooping that wireless network.

IRC
I use Internet Relay Chat to communicate and collaborate on a number of projects. It’s also a terrific way to get ad hoc support on open source programs that I use. I’m usually idling in one or two channels. I prefer IRC over IM, usually, but can’t really give a good explanation as to why.

X
As a Linux user, I use the X Window protocol all the time. Sometimes it’s to display applications running on my local machine; and sometimes it’s to display applications running from one of the server I maintain.

Some of the lesser used, but still important, protocols I use include

• DNS: as mentioned above, the Domain Name System is a supporting protocol that makes our use of the Internet vastly easier. It’s really the backbone of the modern Internet, if you think about it. It uses TCP and UDP ports 53.
• SMTP: like DNS, Simple Mail Transport Protocol is one of those things that keeps the Internet alive without being in-your-face all the time. Every time you send an email — whether you use Thunderbird, or Outlook, or GMail, or Hotmail — the messages travel back and forth using SMTP. It uses TCP port 25.
• ICMP: the Internet Control Message Protocol is one of those protocols people use without even thinking about it. Every time you ping a host to see if your Internet connection is working, you’re using ICMP.
• BitTorrent: I don’t use it too much, but I know a lot of people who do. BitTorrent easily accounts for a large percentage of daily Internet traffic today.
• FTP: the File Transfer Protocol is still heavily used today. Downloading drivers and patches is the dominant use, but it’s still a handy tool for getting any kind of file transferred.
• Telnet is something I still use when I must, though I try hard to avoid it since it has basically no security at all. I use telnet to manage some Ethernet switches at my day job.
• NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol, is used for accessing Usenet. I’ve never dipped my toes into the dark waters of Usenet, though John and Nicholas have. I envy their bravery.

But these are all modern — or at least currently utilized — protocols. What about the stuff from yesteryear? As I mentioned in my Gopher post yesterday, I started using the Internet by way of a SLIP, and later PPP, connection. Prior to accessing the Internet, I was using Bulletin Board Systems, which had their own suite of protocols:

• ZMODEM was the very first piece of software I ever bought. I paid for a license for the shareware file transfer protocol so that I could download files from the various BBSes faster.
• Before ZMODEM, I was using XMODEM to download files. Surprisingly, I still occasionally use XMODEM to transfer switch firmware to an Ethernet switch I manage!
• A dabbled with BiModem for a bit, in order to streamline the simultaneous sending and receiving of files.
• FidoNet is one of those supporting protocols from which I benefited, but never really used directly. It allowed the BBSes I used to communicate with other BBSes, thereby increasing the number of people with whom I could connect. I spent most of my time on systems running WWIV, which had it’s own protocol for inter-board communication called WWIVnet.

So how about you? What protocols do you use regularly? Which protocols from days of yore do you miss?

To repeat, do not upgrade your Apple TV to 3.0 if you’re running hacked ATV plugins like XBox Media Center or Boxee. I’m sure this will be fixed in a matter of days – if not hours – but as of right now it means a ride on the Failboat to Sad Trombone Town. That’s right: this update destroys the only thing that makes Apple TV usable and good.

Also, as an added bonus, Apple TV firmware 3.0 is insignificant. It adds Internet radio to the package and improves the UI. It also adds Genius playlists. My cup, as they say, runneth over.

I started to really like the Apple TV recently because I built an entire infrastructure for watching TV and movies using shell scripts, RSS feeds, and spit. Apple’s ham-fisted hegemony has destroyed all that.

But I do have Internet radio! Welcome to 2001, Apple TV! When I’m old and bitter I can listen to AM talk radio from all over the world!

Yipeee!

That said, you can easily hack any 2.x AppleTV with the ATVUSB Creator, a Windows or OS X app that takes the hard work out of hacking. You just run it and insert the resulting USB key into the Apple TV. A few minutes later you have Boxee and XMBC installed. We also have an older How-To here.

For now, keep your eye on this and this for updates. I’ll do the same. Together, we can fight this menace.

If you accidentally update to 3.0, run ATVPatchstick on your 3.0 machine, ssh into it using frontrow@appletv.local password: frontrow. Then enter these commands, ideally one at a type:

wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-6242.20090624.Aq20P/2Z694-5660-029.dmg
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/EFI/009-7567.20080212.Vc45T/LOCKED_ATV11_00DA_00B.scap
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/EFI/061-3046.20080212.U7tgG/AppleCapsule.efi
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/694-5484.20080708.hnji4/irrxfw-0x0244.irrxfw
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/061-3045.20080708.Aq12D/IRReceiverUpdaterTool2
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/SI/061-3618.20080212.Pk8Bn/hdmiutil
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/SI/061-3617.20080212.Qvh6u/FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex
mv {2Z694-5660-029.dmg,LOCKED_ATV11_00DA_00B.scap,AppleCapsule.efi,irrxfw-0x0244.irrxfw,IRReceiverUpdaterTool2,hdmiutil,FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex} /Users/frontrow/Updates/
wget -c http://ericiii.net/sa/appletv/osupdate
chmod 755 osupdate
sudo chown root:wheel osupdate
sudo ./osupdate

This will downgrade your system to 2.4 without touching your content.

UPDATE – If your remote stops working after loading 2.4, you can either factory restore or:

1. Allow the normal 3.0 update to download but do not install it. A screen will appear asking you if you want to update later. This will place a set of files, including the 3.0 firmware, into /Users/frontrow/Updates/ (these files will include IR updates as well)
2. Remove the .dmg file containing the 3.0 firmware.
3. Download the 2Z694-5660-029.dmg from here and place it into /Users/frontrow/Updates.
4. Follow the last part of the above update:
wget -c http://ericiii.net/sa/appletv/osupdate
chmod 755 osupdate
sudo chown root:wheel osupdate
sudo ./osupdate

As a corollary to Biggs’ “cable companies are doomed” article from earlier today, I thought I’d demonstrate how easy it is to accomplish what he was threatening. That is, live a happy and successful life without having to pay $100+ a month to Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV, or whomever. (Note: I’m neither happy nor successful, so this advice is spurious at best.) Here, I’ll teach you a pretty basic method of automatically downloading things like TV shows, and movies, and whatnot from Usenet. Yes, this breaks the first rule of Usenet; sorry.

What? Today we’ll be setting up our Usenet software to look at an RSS feed. (You can also accomplish pretty much the same thing using BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is so plebeian.) This RSS feed will carry NZB files that, magically, point your Usenet software to the actual files you’ll be viewing in VLC or MPlayer or whatever. In English, that means when you come home from work or class you’ll have the latest episode of The Ultimate Fighter all ready to be watched.

You’ll need:

• A Usenet provider. The big ones, off the top of my head, are Giganews, Newsdemon, Astraweb, and Supernews. You’ll be spending around $10-$20 a month for access, but that gives you access to all the riches that Usenet provides. In my experience all these services are more or less the same, so feel free to shop around. I have no favorites.

• Usenet software. The easiest to use for our purposes here today, once you’ve set it up, is SABnzbd+. It’s free as in freedom and free as in beer.

• An NZB site that provides an RSS feed. I’ll be using Newzleech.com as my example, but pretty much every NZB site out there should do this. Maybe, I don’t know.

• No qualms with any of this. Yeah, Americans can go to Hulu to watch some shows, but my overseas friends aren’t so lucky. Maybe if Hollywood got its act together we wouldn’t have to resort to this. (Incidentally, I’m right now removing the copy protection of a bunch of DVDs I bought in the UK this past week. All I want to do is see Top Gear! Is that a crime?)

OK!

1. With your Usenet account in hand, go ahead and download and set up SABnzbd+. It’s not hard, but I’m not about to hold your hand here. It basically involves launching the application, putting in your Usenet account info, then pointing the application to a few folders. If you can’t figure this out then the rest is probably too much for you to handle anyway.

2. Set up the RSS feed! I’ll be using the TV show The Ultimate Fighter as an example. For newzleech.com, the RSS feed you make looks like this:

http://www.newzleech.com/rss/php?n=50&g=alt.binaries.multimedia&s=the+ultimate+fighter+s10

That’s your RSS feed. What that does is comb the Usenet group alt.binaries.multimedia (that’s the “g” in the URL) for the last 50 posts (that’s the “n”) containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” (for season 10 episodes; that’s the “s”). The RSS feed is updated every 20 minutes.

3. Go to SABnzbd+’s settings (Config:RSS) and input that URL. Then set the RSS checking interval (Config:RSS checking interval) to something reasonable, like once every 60 minutes. Under no circumstances should you set it for anything more frequent than every 20 minutes, since that’s considered uncouth, and your IP address is likely to be banned by Newzleech. You don’t want that.

That’s pretty much it.

Now what you’d do, I guess, is launch SABnzbd+ Wednesday morning before you leave your house. If it’s set up like we set it up here, SABnzbd+ will check alt.binaries.multimedia for news posts containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” via the Newzleech RSS feed. When SABnzbd+ finds the new posts, it’ll download the appropriate NZB file, then start doing its magic.

In other words, as soon as the latest episode hits Usenet, it’ll automatically be downloaded to your computer, Internet connection speed notwithstanding.

Of course, you can add as many RSS feeds as you want, with whatever parameters you want. Maybe you like 30 Rock, or want to see Louis CK on Parks and Recreation? Or maybe you like Curb Your Enthusiasm? To quote that Nas song, the world is yours.

The purpose of this here article was strictly educational blah blah.

Now I’m off to rip the copy protection off a DVD I BOUGHT FROM HMV WITH MY OWN MONEY! What a pain.

Six months ago, Giganews announced that it would expand its server capacity to 365 days of retention. It passed that barrier some time ago, and just yesterday reached the magical 400-day mark. In plain English, that means if someone posted Some File to alt.binaries.boneless back in July, 2008, you should be able to find it on Giganews’ servers. And to think, back in my early days of Usenet use (2001ish), I was putting up with two days retention.

And of course, it’s not just files on Usenet; there’s a great deal of discussion on there, some of which is actually useful! (Note: Reading anything in the alt.politics.* hierarchy may well drive you crazy.) I used to read comp.sys.mac back in high school to better understand the operating system that I was just beginning to use.

Discussion groups aside, yeah, you can “find things” on Usenet before you find them anywhere else. I’m currently using SABnzbd, and it completely maxes out my Internet connection, which, you’ll recall, is pretty fast!

So congrats to the guys and gals at Giganews for crossing the 400-day mark. I’ve also been told that they’re not going to arbitrarily stop at 400 days, either, so keep your eyes on their Web site to see the day’s current retention.

There’s a very good chance that on September 8, 1999, I was on IGN thinking to myself, “Man, I wish I had $199 to buy a Dreamcast tomorrow.” In truth, I only had $40, and that went toward a copy of Final Fantasy VIII, a game I had desperately wanted to play. I don’t know, I was 13 years old and weird; today I’m merely crazy, so three cheers for emotional development. It goes without saying that I missed out on Sega’s big launch day extravaganza on 9/9/99.

I had to wait an entire year before I got a Dreamcast, which, when you’re 14, might as well be 20 years. We (my younger brother and I) got the limited edition sports bundle Dreamcast. It was black, and came with NBA 2K and NFL 2K. This, despite the fact that I didn’t, and still don’t, know the difference between a touchdown and tornado DDT. (I prefer the other football, thank you very much.) We first played through games like Soulcalibur, Tony Hawk (still popular in 2000), and Grandia 2, but it really wasn’t until the launch of Phantasy Star Online and, yes, Unreal Tournament that we truly appreciated the system.

See, we never really had the kind of money required to keep up-to-date with a gaming-worthy PC, so we stuck to the consoles. Not that we were destitute, of course, but there’s a bit of a difference between buying a $200 Dreamcast and shelling out $4,000 on a PC with a 3DFX card or whatever.

Back to the games, then. Man was Phantasy Star Online good! I even bought the Dreamcast keyboard, so I could more effectively talk to my teammates. My first character was merely a HUmar, which is equivalent to a Warrior in World of Warcraft: sort of an introductory class, well-rounded with no particular strengths or weaknesses. His name was Olympic Hero, a reference to WWE (well, WWF at the time) wrestler Kurt Angle. Oh, it’s true. It’s damn true.

The only problem with PSO was that, at the time, we didn’t have any sort of broadband to speak of. It simply wasn’t available in our area. (How times have changed!) So, I had to snake an extraordinarily long telephone wire from my bedroom to the kitchen telephone. Of course, when we would play the game we wouldn’t be able to receive any phone calls, so it wasn’t uncommon to stop playing, hook the telephone back up, then find out that we had a number of messages from my father: “Jesus, Nicholas, get off the Dreamcast, I need to speak to your mother.” You punk kids need to understand that this (2001-ish) was still before everyone and their dog had a cellphone.

Unreal Tournament was similarly great, even though, looking back on it, it probably wasn’t the best port. Still, I had never played an online shooter before, so it was very much a new and exciting experience for me. (I got much more mileage out of Unreal Championship for the Xbox1. Yes, I bought Xbox Live on Day One, thank you very much.)

I’m trying to remember how I felt when Sega announced the cessation of Dreamcast production in 2001, which I first read about on Daily Radar. Remember that site? I don’t think I was oh my God, how could they?!, but more like, “well that stinks. Now what?”

Let me see… what did I do with my Dreamcast?

•Figured out how to burn and play emulators. This was on a Mac, so the toolsets for putting together such discs were all primitive at best. Not a GUI in sight.

• Played Half-Life the day it was leaked onto the Internet. Man, I remember that day like it was, well, not yesterday, but recent. I read on Daily Radar or IGN that the gold version of the recently cancelled Half-Life had been leaked onto the Internet. So, I hopped onto Usenet using Thoth for OS X—can you believe I knew how to use Usenet for my own ends at age 15?—downloaded the ISO, then burned it on the family PC. For whatever dumb reason it was released as a Nero image, and not the standard Disc Juggler image, which could be burned in Toast on OS X after some Terminal-assisted magic.

• Used some DIVX player to watch old episodes of The Adventures of Pete and Pete that I had downloaded from eDonkey. Thanks, mlDonkey (wasn’t it mlnet back then?)!

• Used the Web browser to visit the same dumb sites that I’d visit on the computer, including, and well likely limited to, IGN and WrestleZone.com.

• Ran Linux! Yes, I downloaded and ran Linux for Dreamcast. Not that it did much, but I ran it, all right!

• Used Bleem to play Gran Turismo 2. That’s right: I bought, with American dollars, Bleem for the Dreamcast.

Of course, any and all comments related to the Dreamcast are welcome.

Flickr

Come September 30, Verizon will completely drop Usenet access. (It had already been limiting access for some time now.) To that end, a number of Usenet providers, including Giganews and NewsDemon, have special deals set up for Verizon users to make the hurting stop.

First up, Giganews. Verizon users get 50 percent off the Diamond Plan for three months. (The regular price is $29.95 per month.) The Diamond Plan includes 50 simultaneous connections, unlimited monthly bandwidth, and SSL encryption. Or, if you don’t want Diamond, you can have any other Plan for three months at 20 percent off. There’s also a 14-day free trial for you to test the waters. All Plans come with 391 days of retention, which is plenty. Giganews is working toward 400 days of retention.

Next we have NewsDemon, which I use. It’s giving Verizon customers 20 percent off its service, which includes unlimited bandwidth and 20 connections. The top price for NewsDemon is $22.99 per month.

Then there’s always Astraweb, which is $15 per month for unlimited bandwidth, 20 connections, and no download rate limit. (The popular $10 per month service limits you to 1 Mbit/s.) I’ve never used Astraweb, so I can’t speak to it reliability. That said, I hear good things on various message boards.

So, plenty of options for Verizon folks. Happy trails.

It seems to scan for only OSX.RSPlug and OSX.Iservice and then only scans files from Safari, Mail, and a few web browsers. Usenet and Bittorrent clients are unaffected. It doesn’t even actively scan the Downloads folder.

So it’s basically like someone at Apple wrote an anti-virus program and just snuck it into Snow Leopard. You can just imagine some grizzled old programmer who has been working on this since 1994 finally getting his chance to shine.

Apple stuck the anti-malware software into Snow Leopard without actually announcing it. The software is invisible – it just kind of hangs out – and the only thing I see this doing is encouraging anti-virus software vendors to try to upsell their paltry OS X offerings. While Macs aren’t totally impervious to virii and trojanii, there is always the off chance that a piece of rogue software could fall into the mix. This could be a simple solution to preventing Snow Leopard Macs from falling into a botnet.

Here’s a tip: this isn’t 1998, and you shouldn’t go around making “Web pages” that are filled with Nintendo ROMs. If you do, you could end up like the Japanese guy who’s now facing two years in prison and a $96,000 fine.

The man, one Yoshiaki Asagiri, had set up a Web site that had more than 1,000 Nintendo DS ROMs available for download, à la a site you’d find in the early days of MAME. (You’re better off getting your ROMs from Usenet, or from a “trusted” BitTorrent source, in my professional opinion.) In any event, yeah, The Man found out, and now the Kyoto District Court has ordered the 38-year-old to prison, plus a nice fine to go along with his sentence.

And apparently the presiding judge said the guy’s piratical actions had “trample[d]” all over anti-piracy efforts, including, but not limited to, time and money.

Makes me wonder how much “people I know” would owe, when they have entire system sets (NES, SNES, Genesis, etc.) sitting on various hard drives.

Too funny! Someone (iND) actually pred a copy of Windows 98 SE today.

The release, which comes in at 560.11MB all rar’d up, has been “available” for a few hours now. According to one NZB site, it’s been on Usenet for a good six hours.

Again, no direct links; that would be silly.

I can’t wait till the year 2019 when a group releases Snow Leopard.

Jealous of the likes of CNET and Scobilizer getting to play with Microsoft Office 2010? Well don’t be! You, too, can edit spreadsheets and send e-mail if you’re willing to fire up your newsreader or BitTorrent client.

Right, so the file you’re looking for is “MICROSOFT.OFFICE.2010.v14.0.4302.1000.BETA.1.VOLUME.X86-64.ENGLISH-WZT.” I see that it’s on at least one popular, private BitTorrent site that I’ve mentioned in the past.

Or, if you use Usenet, you can find the file on your favorite NZB download site.

Direct links, of course, are out of the question. It’s already probably in bad taste to note the exact file name, but such things really don’t concern me.

The file’s about 1.58GB. It’s a beta, so I wouldn’t switch over to it full-time just yet.

Never has typing business letters been so fun.

Ladies and germs! If you’re an AT&T Broadband customer you should know that your ISP is shutting off access to Usenet at the end of the month. Why? Yup, it’s related to that whole smear campaign from last year. Some nonsense about illegal content that may or may not be there. Anyway, Giganews has a little sale for you guys: 50 percent off three months of the Diamond Plan and 20 percent off other Giganews plans.

The Diamond Plan, which includes 20 connections (plus SSL, which is sorta unnecessary, but whatever) and unlimited monthly bandwidth. That’s usually $30 per month.

Giganews is sorta the Ric Flair of Usenet access, which is sorta weird since it’s only 11 years old. (Usenet itself predates the Bronze Age.)

For the record, I use Newdemon. I pretty much live in alt.binaries.hdtv.x264. True story!

Alert the media! LucasArts’ official Twitter feed has been tweeting non-stop about… something! It looks like the company is poised to announce a new game based on an old game/franchise tomorrow, July 6.

Can we guess? Is it Sam and Max, or maybe Monkey Island? LucasArts surely can’t go to the Star Wars well again, can it? Enough about the Star Wars!

It’s sort of exciting, yes. Not as exciting as waiting for part two of Marca’s interview with Cristiano Ronaldo to show up on Usenet, but exciting nonetheless.

via Kotaku

eBay: Piece of chicken shaped like Ocarina of Time
Video: Man transforms Fiat oldtimer into awesome mini bulldozer
Boston Acoustics introduces tiny, tiny 5.1 speaker set
Hide your drinking intentions with the Timbuk2 Dolores Cooler
Time to panic? RIAA wins suit against Usenet.com

It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is a premium Usenet provider.

The court case, in the Southern District of New York, found usenet.com guilty of “direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement.” And perhaps more worrying is that usenet.com cannot defend itself using the ol’ Sony Betamax decision. In a nutshell that says that so long as there is a significant, non-infringing use of a device/service you can’t sue it into oblivion.

For those not in the know, Usenet, which is as old as the dinosaurs, can be described, in a very dumbed-down way, as a big, decentralized message board, but one where you can attach files. I’ll leave it at that.

Of course, this is “only” a district court’s opinion, so make of it what you will. And it’s worth stressing, of course, that usenet.com != Usenet. (For the record, I use newsdemon.com, and my brother uses giganews.com. They’re pretty comparable based on our unscientific “let’s see how long it takes to download SomeFile” tests.)

The second rule of Usenet…

via Slashdot

• Which is better: Chipotle or Qdoba?
• Pirate Bay… sold! Also, Usenet.com sued by RIAA
• CrunchGear raises ~$5000 for charity at Wiimbledon
• Is HD video recording necessary on cell phones?
• Devin discovers that the letters in CAPS LOCK can be rearranged to spell something mildly amusing

LISTEN: Show Link | RSS Feed | iTunes Link

It’s been about a month since I subscribed to Optimum Online Ultra, the fastest Internet service in the country—sorry, Peter. Consider this a predictable, rubbish explanation of how my Internet habits—nay, my life!—have changed as a result of having a 101 megabits-down/15 megabits-up connection.

In so many words, nothing has changed all that much. My What.cd and HDBits ratios have improved, but that’s to be expected when you’re in BitTorrent swarms with lowly Comcast and Time Warner users. Having a 101 megabits at my disposal does make it easer to grab new releases quite speedily—I can’t wait till Entourage comes out, hello ratio boost!—but that’s about it.

So it’s safe to say Optimum Online Ultra is great for heavy BitTorrent users. Plus, no bandwidth caps!

Usenet becomes dangerous with Optimum Online Ultra. “Yeah, that movie sure would be nice to add to my collection.” Four minutes later, bam!

As far as legitimate uses go, ha! YouTube, used for watching reruns of Supermarket Sweep, is still a piece of garbage. Nothing loads any faster than it did when I had regular Optimum Online. (Of course, videos play while they load, so it’s not a huge deal.) Is that because Flash for Mac OS X is 100 percent dross, constantly causing Safari (and Firefox for that matter) to crash? Maybe; I’m not a scientist. The point is, I was expecting to click a YouTube link and have the video load instantly. That simply doesn’t happen. Same thing with Hulu: it’s still dog-slow, even though it plays as its loading. Like the Cablevision tech explained to me when he installed the service, my home connection is now faster than what what Web sites can provide. Until YouTube, Hulu and whomever else upgrade their infrastructure, I’ll be waiting for video to load just like everyone else.

So yeah, unless you’re a heavy P2P user, you really won’t see much of a difference between Optimum Online Ultra and the average broadband connection.

Such is my experience.

Score one for the good guys! The Federal Trade Commission has shut down the company that ran the Triple Fiber Network, a service that helped evildoers put verboten content online. Such content included viruses and child pornography.

The Triple Fiber Network, which was run out of Belize by a company called Pricewert LLC, provided servers and bandwidth to Internet criminals and troublemakers.

Apparently Triple Fiber Network was advertised in—and here come some square quotes—in the “darkest corners” of the Internet. I’m guessing that means IRC or Usenet or something. (Anything that’s not a Wordpress blog is scary, I would imagine.)

In any event, let us celebrate by making smores, which I’m about to do IRL.