Some artists are running their own recall programs:

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Sony BMG’s attempts to protect its CDs against piracy continued to be a source of woe for the company in early December: Soon after recalling 5 million discs that contained the intrusive copy-protection software XCP, Sony BMG acknowledged that as many as 5.7 million more CDs posed a security risk for consumers. Those discs contain another form of copy protection, SunComm’s MediaMax (version five), which could allow hackers to break into users’ computers. Among the affected titles were Santana’s All That I Am, My Morning Jacket’s Z, Alicia Keys’ Unplugged and Maroon 5′s live album.

The company released a software patch (available at sonybmg.com/mediamax) intended to fix the problem. “We take the security issues very, very seriously,” says Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG president of global digital business. But Hesse adds that the company has no plans to recall the CDs or offer refunds: “At this point, this is pretty much it.”

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Artist managers have been vocal in their opposition to the use of copy-protection software. “I just don’t think that this is the answer to the problem that they think exists,” says the manager of one veteran artist affected by the XCP software. Mike Martinovich, manager for My Morning Jacket, says that even before the revelation of MediaMax’s security problems, his company had been mailing burned, unprotected copies of MMJ’s new album Z to fans who complained that MediaMax prevented them from transferring songs to their iPods. “It should have been enough that fans are annoyed,” he says. “But this should be the final reason.”

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Steve received a frantic call from client management, begging him to help fix their largest client’s order entry system. In production for less than a year, the system was running as fast as a crippled tortoise and, short of upgrading to Blue Gene, they had maxed out hardware options. But none of this surprised Steve; this was, after all, a jProject.

jProjects, as they are known throughout the company, are projects destined to fail or turn into an unmaintainable mess. jProjects are, consequently, lead-up by the company’s star developer, Jay. In addition to being wildly innovative, Jay manages to discover architectural flaws in programming, database, and other third-party tools when developing his own architecture.

On the order-entry system, the slowdown was a result of Microsoft SQL Server improperly indexing table pages. Jay’s design was brilliant: each order had its own table. This way, any new changes to the table template won’t affect the old orders.

After spending a few days of combining the ungodly amount of order tables, Steve was able to increase performance by a few magnitudes and reduce the database size from 80GB to 2GB. Jay, still the star-developer, scoffed at the “hack” and said he will be evaluating different database systems for future projects.

(take your time reading through the comments, they’re funny as well!

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Russell Lee is either a slick film pirate or an unwitting victim of someone who fits that description.

Paramount, which distributes “Coach Carter,” presents an unflattering picture of him, saying he not only obtained the movie illegally, but that he uploaded it to an online system called eDonkey so others could steal it, too.

“I don’t even know what they’re talking about,” Lee said. “I didn’t do it.”

Paramount has looked at all four computers in Lee’s home, alleging he had one of them cleaned to erase evidence. The company has filed a federal lawsuit against the Blue Ash man.

So movie companies have the right to look at all the computers in your house, because you allegedly commited copyright infringement. Welcome to the Corporate States of America.

The article is just about devoid of any facts. This is typical of the big media companies now, just like the Mafia: shake down the little people and get the word out that you should toe the line and pay your protection money, or we’ll get you.

Finally, someone is combining the best things on Earth:

… Microsoft’s quality software and MTV’s quality music!

Now, if only they could toss Wal*mart and McDonald’s into the mix!

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Dark red circles indicate oil spills and gray-shaded areasindicate sea pollution and land pollution from chemical fertilizers. Shown is only a small part of the entire pollution spectrum in 1988. At an average of every three months this globe becomes obsolete due to yet another major oil spill.

Many more globes at the ling

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STRAATSBURG – Telecom- en internetbedrijven moeten vanaf juli 2007 in de 25 EU-lidstaten gegevens bijhouden over alle gesprekken via telefoon of gsm en communicatie via het wereldwijde web. Het Europees Parlement stemde woensdag in met een voorstel van het Britse voorzitterschap van de Europese Unie om massaal gegevens op te slaan in de strijd tegen terrorisme.

Het gaat daarbij niet om de inhoud van gesprekken of web-chats, maar wel om een controle op met wie is gecommuniceerd. EU-lidstaten krijgen de vrijheid zelf te bepalen of zij minimaal zes maanden of maximaal twee jaar gegevens op willen laten slaan door de telecomsector.

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De discussie over de gegevensopslag zorgde dinsdag nog voor een heftige discussie in Straatsburg. De Griekse onafhankelijke afgevaardigde Karatzaferis stelde dat “Hitler nog meer dan zes miljoen joden had kunnen doden als hij dit soort mogelijkheden had gehad”. “De stalinisten zouden daardoor nu zelfs nog aan de macht zijn geweest.”

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If carrying one into another room, carefully plan the route you will be taking. Computers & monitors will be affected in an entire room. Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly considerable distances – and at great speed – to attach themselves to this magnet. If you get caught in between the two, you can get injured.
Two of these magnets close together can create an almost unbelievable magnetic field that can be very dangerous. Of all the unique items we offer for sale, we consider these two items the most dangerous of all. Our normal packing & shipping personnel refuse to package these magnets – our engineers have to do it. This is no joke and we cannot stress it strongly enough – that you must be extremely careful – and know what you’re doing with these magnets. Take Note: Two of the 3″ x 1″ disc magnets can very easily break your arm if they get out of control.

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When I buy a CD, I look forward to having the lyrics printed in the liner notes. That’s part of what I expect in exchange for my money. If the record label omits the lyrics, I feel I’m entirely within my fair use rights to listen closely to the recording and copy down the lyrics. Similarly, I’m within my fair use rights when I use a search engine to find the lyrics of the music I’ve legitimately purchased. And thanks to Apple’s iTunes software, I now can add those lyrics to the digital copies of the music I’ve purchased and have them appear when the song plays on my iPod.

Apparently, at least one music publisher thinks that makes me a music pirate. Yes, annotating music I’ve legitimately purchased with lyrics makes me a pirate, according to music publishing giant Warner/Chappell.

Warner/Chappell sent a cease & desist letter last week to the developer of pearLyrics, a piece of software that automates the process of adding lyrics to iTunes tracks. (For more details, see the MacWorld review.) The developer is apparently located in Austria, and I cannot comment on how Austrian law might apply.

But Warner/Chappell doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on here in the U.S., and EFF is sending an open letter to them today to caution them from using their legal threats to chill American software developers and music fans.

(Text of the letter in the article.)

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Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

The tanker was seized in the evening by agents with the American-trained border protection force at the Iraqi town of Badra, after crossing at Munthirya on the Iraqi border, the official said. According to the Iraqi official, the border police found several thousand partly completed ballots inside.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border.

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No fewer than four Republican members of Congress in “vulnerable” seats have received recent internal polling data that shows “a Tom DeLay effect” that appears to give “any Democrat” on the ballot question an average of 10 percentage points against the incumbent. If this information isn’t troubling enough, consider the fact that these four Republicans are of the “cut and run” variety, and in no way loyal to Republican leadership to begin with.

In one such district, Tom DeLay has name identification over 75% and more than half of those respondents view him unfavorably. These data swim against the conventional wisdom among Republican strategists in Washington, which heretofore had held that the DeLay problems were little more than “inside baseball” and would have little impact out there in the hinterlands.

And what’s the number one reason why Independents who were polled react negatively to Tom DeLay? “The culture of corruption”

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Due to contractual non-performance and security design issues, Leon County (Florida) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho has announced that he will never again use Diebold in an election. He has requested funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. On Tuesday, the most serious “hack” demonstration to date took place in Leon County. The Diebold machines succumbed quickly to alteration of the votes.

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At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A “zero report” was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied “ender card” was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.

Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6

However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1

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The Hursti Hack requires a moderate level of inside access. It is, however, accomplished without being given any password and with the same level of access given thousands of poll workers across the USA. It is a particularly dangerous exploit, because it changes votes in a one-step process that will not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure, it requires only a single a credit-card sized memory card, any single individual with access to the memory cards can do it, and it requires only a small piece of equipment which can be purchased off the Internet for a few hundred dollars.

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This utterly stunning panorama of Paris by night (WARNING! 15000×520 image, 1.8mb) is almost too good to be true. You can see so many landmarks it’s ridiculous – this version has them labelled for your convenience. I traced it back to Arnaud Friche’s gallery of panoramic photographs of Paris, churches and cathedrals, and other cities. There are so many beautiful hi-res photographs here that I won’t waste any more of your time talking about them.

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Bound for Glory: America in Color is the first major exhibition of the little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. These vivid scenes and portraits capture the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations, the nation’s subsequent economic recovery and industrial growth, and the country’s great mobilization for World War II.

here is the full index.

An ostrich jockey rides a two-year old male ostrich during a training at a Ostrich farm in Kitengela, Kenya. (AFP/Simon Maina)

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It’s O.K. to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.