A new program called BlogTorrent is set to bring the somewhat mysterious world of seeding torrents to anyone who is savvy enough to install a set of php scripts on a webserver.
This is a pretty nifty way of allowing people to transfer big files at speed without choking one server with all the bandwidth requirements.
On the downloaders side, the scripts provide a link to a torrent file as well as an 'easy download' button for n00bs which installs a client on your machine (windows only).
The winners of the 59th College Photographer of the Year competition have been announced. They include this fascinating photoset (winning Gold in the Documentary category) showing life behind the scenes of the California porn business…
The rest of the archive is certainly worth seeing too, although I dare say this one will get the most publicity.
Seems like the US government is about to be unleashed by the media conglomerates on to the public. They have just appointed an anti-piracy Czar to protect the corporations interests.
eventually they will realise that it cant be done unless a police-state is enforced…perhaps they would rather do it that way.
Ofcom, the telecoms regulator is going to release more of the radio frequency spectrum for use by the commercial world. This could mean public wireless access being as common place as radio, or more likely one company buying a huge spectrum and selling wireless access at about the same price as a mobile phone call…unless, of course, you sign up for an impressively complex contract for a minimum of two years…
why are some things so easy to predict…
A new startup seems to place itself between the legit and illegitimate p2p networks. It is called weed, it is a filesharing program with a difference. It allows the user to download the music (from their affiliate bands) and play it 3 times before being prompted to buy it.
It also encourages sharing of your favorite tracks through its p3p engine, giving anyone who gets it from you 3 listens too. Not only that if someone who downloaded the track from you buys it, you get 20% of the buck they payed for it…nice.
This (if you ask me) could be the future of the music industry…
This is a fascinating essay from the FT about Interlectual Property Law and how it simply isnt doing it for us. It compares it to the little known 'Database Right' in Europe which allows companies to copyright compilations of 'facts' in a database.
Imagine a process of reviewing prescription drugs which goes like this: representatives from the drug company come to the regulators and argue that their drug works well and should be approved. They have no evidence of this beyond a few anecdotes about people who want to take it and perhaps some very simple models of how the drug might affect the human body. The drug is approved. No trials, no empirical evidence of any kind, no follow-up. Or imagine a process of making environmental regulations in which there were no data, and no attempts to gather data, about the effects of the particular pollutants being studied. Even the harshest critics of drug regulation or environmental regulation would admit we generally do better than this. But this is often the way we make intellectual property policy.
A classic from the NY Times…Click to zoom
Some fantasic photography of the G-Cans project under Tokyo. What can I say, little different from the underground in New York.
Heres a great tutorial for creating a simple extension for firefox.
Everyone has a good idea at one time or another to implement a new feature in a web browser. Well, with the goodness that is Mozilla Firefox, now you can do just that. You need to have a vague understanding of XUL (XML User Interface Language) and Javascript, but you certainly don't need to be a master of either.
The tutorial was created by they guy who brought us the BugMeNot Extension allowing you to automatically bypass most sites which require online registration.
Seems the lobbyists have another possible bill to restrain their consumers. Called the Intellectual Property Protection Act, it has some far-reaching and rather scary implications.
The first is one they have been pressing for for years; to make using p2p software illegal…making the land of the free into the land of the criminals. The other part which is making people worry is the wording which will make fast-forwarding through commercials illegal.
Tivo is already wrestling with this concept, their hard disk boxes allow people to skip recorded commercials, as you would expect this is irritating the sponsors somewhat.
This is an amazing elevation of a full-size cruse ship created using vector graphics in illustrator and rasterized to a massive resolution. The page has the full image (which just keeps getting more and more detailed as you click the zoom) as well as a description as to how it was done…
Personally i would have invested the immense time and effort that has obviously gone into this into creating it in 3d; allowing for as many views as you need, rather than the single view that a flat image will produce…but thats just me 
A classic illustration about what the web can be about…humorous hindsight.
This article in wired circa 1997 describes what they think apple should do to stop going out of business. There are some absolute classics here some which are probably really poor ideas…
14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack. The original Macs stood out because of their innovative look. Repeat that. Get the folks at Porsche to design a box. Or Giorgio Giugiaro. Or Philippe Starck. We'd all feel better about shelling out the bucks for a Power Mac 9600 if we could get a tower with leopard spots.
60. Abandon the Mach operating system you just acquired and run Windows NT kernel instead. This would let Mac run existing PC programs. (Microsoft actually has Windows NT working on Mac hardware. It also has emulation of Mac programs with NT running on both Power PC and x86.)
Great stuff…
In a bizarre combination of the real world and the virtual one, some crazy japs have created human pacman.
The 'pacman' wears a pair of goggles and a wireless interface and sees the cookies to eat in the normal world, as well as ghosts to run away from…I am guessing this game isnt for the self-conscious…
