Terminally Incoherent

I came to a conclusion. The entertainment industry is dying. It will be done within the next few years, unless it completely restructures itself and drops the failing business models it is clinging too. And as every dying thing on earth, it is currently going through the classic 5 stages of accepting the inevitable demise: Denial, Anger/Presentiment, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

You don’t believe me? Let’s break this down:

• Denial: “There is nothing wrong with our business model! You guys just want a free ride!”
• Anger/Presentiment: “We are loosing money because of damn pirates! Let’s sue them! Let’s sue all of them! Even the 12 year olds! Let them feel our legal wrath! PH34R my L3G4L SK1LZ n00B!!
• Bargaining: “Listen, if you use DRM we will give you all the content you want! Seriously, it’s better for you. We’ll even stop suing people! Everything will be good if you only agree to use DRM! Really!”

So, we have 2 more stages to go. Depression and Acceptance. Not bad, eh? So please expect these symptoms intensify as the industry is heading toward an inevitable crash.

There will be big DRM disputes, and DRM related lawsuits. Entertainment people will loose several of them and incur heavy losses. As a result some big technology companies will get locked out of content because of failure to comply with DRM requirements. People will stop buying media they can’t play in their receivers.

Allot of people will realize that their iTunes collection cannot be ported to a new computer and will drop the service. Entertainment industry will go under. Facing lawsuits, money draining DRM schemes, and lockout contracts some big studios will close the doors and go out of business…

Those who survive will accept the death of the old business models, and adjust to the new reality. We will win this war.

Ph34R the C0NSUM3R B1tCH3Z!

I don’t know who made this, but LOL!

Don’t try this at home…

Today I have found bunch of interesting entries in my firewall log. Apparently an application named б^H was trying to access the internet at various times. Now, I don’t know about you - but if I see a weird sting like that I get suspicious. So I started digging.

From the logs I figured that this thing was trying to do DNS lookups (all the hits were aiming at port 53 on the remote hosts). This is not unusuall - any piece of mallware could be doing this… But, since my anti-virus and spybot scans that run just this morning did not find anything, I started looking for legit apps that could generate port 53 traffic.

I spotted my DynDNS Updater icon in the taskbar which was red (to indicate failure to update). I did a few quick tests, enabling and disabling the rule for my mysterious application and I got it. It was the damn DynDNS updater!

Question is, why the hell does it show up in my logs as б^H? Why haven’t I noticed this before? And what the hell were they thinking?

One of the question on my Operating Systems exam today was to show two examples where multi-threaded implementation does not provide better performance than single threaded implementation. We were supposed to write some code/pseudocode to illustrate this…

Every person I asked put down something different for this question. No one was sure what the hell we were supposed to do. Some people used “hello world” as one of the examples. Others mentioned processing keyboard input in a word processor. In fact, allot of people gave purely iterative examples that could not be multi-threaded to begin with…

I’m pretty sure “hello world” was the wrong answer here. The question was worth 30 points - you usually don’t see tricky questions like that being worth so much. I scribbled some half-assed code with big loop statements in critical section so that the threads would block and have to wait on each other. I figured the same loop implemented as a single thread would execute faster because there would be no context switching overhead, thread creation and etc..

Other example was treads locking on a shared buffer object and performing some critical section while holding onto that buffer… Still, I’m only guessing that the performance would be worse with a multi-threaded implementation. There is no way to tell for sure without actually testing this.

Of course we could not ask Dr. Robila what he meant in this question because he was not there. I hope he curves or throws out this one completely…

There is this idea circulating in the minds of our lawmakers and politicians, that there should be a .xxx tld reserved for pr0n. This idea gets shot down every time, and yet it keeps coming back like a boomerang. All these people keep yelling: “think of the children” as they try to shove their prudish moral values down our throat. But this is not about children. An xxx tld does nothing to protect children from anything! Why?

Maybe because Internet != USA. If you make a law forcing all the pr0n into an xxx tld, this law will only apply in US. If you try to police it abroad many people will become very angry. Do you think UN will like that US courts have the absolute power to decide who is allowed to register .com domain? How about China? Nope, we can’t enforce US law onto foreign owned domains - even if we control the top level servers.

So you end up with all the foreign hosted pr0n still owning their .com, .net and .org domains. How does that help to keep children away from pr0n? How does that help filtering software to do anything? This is simply a jab at the porn industry. It is no secret that our government is waging a war on pornography. In fact, I think that war on pr0n, gets more resources and attention than war on terror and on drugs combined. Not mentioning that we have yet to see ANY tangible results of any of those wars… How long are we into the war on drugs? Did we win yet?

If you really want to do something for children, set up a tightly regulated .kids tld. Set it up so that only educational, and child friendly stuff would be allowed there. Problem solved. Now just set up your filter to block everything but .kids and you can let the little bastards browse till they get carpal tunnel. And you are almost guaranteed that they will never run into anything inappropriate while the filter is on.

So why are people pushing for that xxx tld so much? What is the big deal here? The sad truth is that none of these .xxx pushing maniacs gives a shit about children. This is not about protecting kids. This is about protecting you from the “evil pornography” - whether you want it or not.