In the latest court battles over the burden of file sharing, the courts of Belgium ruled that ISPs are responsible for illegal filesharing across their networks.
The court has confirmed that the ISPs have both a legal responsibility and the technical means to tackle piracy,” IFPI Chairman and Chief Executive John Kennedy said in a statement.
According to DVD Jon’s blog, So Sue Me, the world’s most famous code cracker has done it again, this time liberating the iPhone from AT&T’s activation process.
The iPhone’s iPod and Wifi features work without activating the phone service. The question, though, is why would you want to? Suddenly seems like a very expensive 4gb or 8gb iPod.
Despite being an Apple hater, the Hobo was quite surprised to see that the iPhone’s music navigation system did work exactly like it looks on the commercials. I’m still not buying one, though.
One of the most effective file recovery solutions that The Hobo has found over the years is GetDataBack from Runtime Software.
Multiple versions are readily available on most popular file sharing networks, and all have proven to be quite effective at recovering files from crashed and deleted hard drives.
From their website:
GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted…
If you’ve experienced a meltdown, this is one handy program to have around. Free demos available from the publisher that will show you exactly what files the software will recover. Very useful in deciding to make a purchase or not.
The Digital Hobo fully recommends buying a copy for the next time your computer crashes. Just keep the program on your USB drive. It wont do you much good if it only lives on the drive that crashed.
MarketingVox & ZeroPaid.com wrote this morning about a new faux-file sharing site launched by the MPAA to catch people in the act.
For those people dumb enough to download movies from free, open websites that you’ve never heard of, thus catching the most casual, ignorant and newbie pirates, the MPAA launched MiiVi.com.
Kids, don’t download shit from MiiVi.com. Period. And for chrissake, get yourself a copy of PeerGuardian. It wont prevent you from downloading fake files seeded by the likes of MediaDefender, but it just might save your ass if you stumble upon the copyrighted real versions.
I’ve been enjoying a wide variety of software modded to work off of a USB flash drive for a while now. Nothing new with these either…I was just grabbing the latest versions for my new stick.
Visit the official Portable Apps website to download the latest versions of free, open source software that gives you what you need wherever you go.
Tired of not having your bookmarks or favorite websites? Or your contact lists? Sure you can access them from the web, but then you leave cookies and passwords on computers that aren’t yours. Portable Apps solve these problems, and then some.
There’s free and portable versions of FileZilla (FTP), Firefox (browser), Gaim (IM), Thunderbird (email), Audacity (audio editing), VNC MediaPlayer (audio/video player), 7-Zip (compresson Zip/RAR), and ClamWin (antivirus for your USB stick), just to name a few.
OpenOffice.Org has a portable version as well, but I’m assuming that most places that have a PC have some kind of word processor, and your “real” docs probably aren’t much to worry about.
I’ve been carrying around a 1GB flash stick with those apps wherever I go. At worse, I’ve been able to connect to my FTP site with one click and grab any docs that I didn’t have with me.
Good stuff, you cheap bastard.
Today Apple released their Safari browser into a public beta.
You can download the Public Beta from Apple’s Safari site.
Pandora, one of the best streaming music sites on the web, is being hit hard due to the increased royalty rates for online broadcasters. I’m posting the letter from Tim Westergren, their founder, in hopes that anyone who enjoys free music might help their cause.
-TDH
Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,
I’m writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.
In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.
Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541
Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends – the more petitioners we can get, the better.
Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I’m no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster’s business potential.
I hope you’ll take just a few minutes to sign our petition – it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.
As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.
-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)
Forbes blogger David Ewalt thinks so. In a recent blog post, he called the studios’ efforts to protect their content “useless and annoying” at best.
I simply don’t think David is right. First, just like in the Viacom vs Google suit, copyright holders have a right to protect their content. Second, despite losing money to the pirates, their efforts really aren’t that annoying, especially when you consider the scope of the problem. So you have to watch a promo for the MPAA’s anti-piracy efforts along with the other stupid trailers that you don’t really want to watch either. So what?
Finding solutions that get around that annoyance – among others – is a quick search away. Like with most hot-button issues, people like to gripe, but aren’t going to put much effort behind it. There’s too many DVD copying suites out there for anyone to be all that disgruntled about it. Companies like Slysoft are quite clear about what their software can do.
That said, he did find this hysterical article on DVD-sniffing dogs. So thanks, David!
I’m still amazed that Prince’s performance of Purple Rain at the halftime show of the superbowl hasn’t surfaced on any of the official download sites for sale. Prince has always been kooky about his rights – look how far he went to get out of a record deal – so far be it from this Hobo to mess with the Purple One.
That said, Prince rocked the superbowl and it doesn’t take much to share audio and video these days.