Archive for December, 2006

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Top Villain of 2006

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

And the top villain of 2006, according to the Associated Press poll is:

Top Villain of 2006 Poll
found @ crooksandliars.com

George Dubya!

It’s funny how he beats the combined score of Osama, Saddam, Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong and Satan himself.

In related news, South Park joke becomes eerily prophetic:

Satan and Saddam in Bed

What does Saddam’s execution mean in global scope? Absolutely nothing. Saddam was irrelevant since the day he was captured in 2003. The execution was just some theatrics designed to appease the masses look as if the Bush administration actually achieved something. But it didn’t.

Nothing has changed. We are still at war, Iraq is still fucked up beyond recognition (even more than usual now, seeing as certain groups did not want Saddam to be executed), and our president still sucks.

What can be the impact of this execution if American public considers Bush to be a bigger crook than Saddam?

Update 01/01/2007 03:23:22 PM

If you feel that you need to see it, here is a full, uncensored shakycam video of the hanging.

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Posted in politics | 10 Comments »

Torrentspy is monitored by Copyright Thoughtpolice

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

My coworker just got a nasty letter from his ISP (optonline) accusing him of copyright infringement. It turns out that his kid got caught downloading some warez from one of the trackers indexed by Torrentspy.

Conclusions are simple: someone is monitoring Torrentspy network. I don’t know if they do this by setting up decoys, or if they actually connect to legitimate torrents and log the IP’s in the swarm. But either way, they are out there and if you are not careful you might get caught.

The ISP my coworker is using seems to be doing the right thing. They notified him about the complaint, and warned him that future complaints may lead to termination of his account. It doesn’t seem that they were willing to cough up his personal data so far, so he might get lucky and avoid being slapped with one of those frivolous lawsuits.

The poor kid is not allowed to use BitTottent anymore. He got a stern talking to from his pop for using these new-fangled, easily trackable p2p technologies instead of leaching from Usenet the way internet Gods intended it. :P

Sigh… I really liked TorrentSpy – it had lots of content, and large community behind it. But I guess it’s time to move on…

Update 12/30/2006 05:25:04 PM

As many people mentioned in the comments, my assumption that Torrentspy itself is being monitored might not be correct. It’s possible that one or more trackers indexed by Torrentspy are monitored, but not necessarily the whole site.

In either case, IP blocking software such as PeerGuardian, or the SafePeer Azureus Plugin may drastically lower your chances of being caught.

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Posted in copyfight, p2p | 66 Comments »

Bash Lotto Lookup

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

My dad likes to play the NJ Lottery. He usually buys Mega Million tickets, and then forgets to check if he won anything. So every once in a while, he asks me to look up the numbers for a certain date. After doing this couple of times for him, I ended up hacking this simple bash script to automate the process:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then echo "usage lotto [ mm/dd/yyyy ]" ; exit; fi
lynx -dump "http://www.state.nj.us/lottery/games/1-1-3_mega_history.shtml" | grep "$1"

Note that since I’m using grep, I can do all sorts of fancy regexp stuff when calling this script. For example:, to get all the drawings from Jan-May 2006 I can simply do:

lotto 12/../.*

will find all the results from December

lotto 0[1-5]/../...6

will find all the results from the Jan-May 2006 period

Note that I can also use this for searching other fields – not just the date. For example, if I want to see all the winning number combinations that are archived on the page I can simply do:

lotto ,0

Alternatively I can do:

lotto [^0]0.00$

to see all the numbers that did not win. And of course, I can just search directly for the number sequence to see if a given number won.

I don’t know how useful is this to anyone, but I figured that I might as well put it out there, since I have been using it for a while now.

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Posted in linux, technology | No Comments »

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