While I was very pleased with the proposal the Songwriters’ Association of Canada recently put forth to legalize file sharing in Canada, I couldn’t help but slam my head against the table when reading the “what some music creators have to say” link. With the exception of the a few […]
Free Software
I read a post by Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) on software registration keys today that reminded me that I’d been meaning to write about this. Software is digital through and through, and yet there’s one unavoidable aspect of software installation that remains thoroughly analog: entering the registration key. Doesn’t that […]
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released software which it urged some of America’s largest universities to employ in order to monitor their networks for unauthorized file sharing. Not only do the universities not owe the MPAA anything, but the toolkit was found by security specialists to raise […]
I recently had a friend record a video clip of a performance and send it to me. The video turned out great, but it was a whopping 240 MB for 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Not only is that a bit of a nuisance, but it’s also beyond the upload […]
Did you know that when you’re viewing mail in your Gmail account you’re not using a secure connection by default? That means that anyone who’s sniffing traffic on your network can intercept your packets and essentially read your email or, worse yet, steal your session (ie. login to Gmail as […]
A message from Glassescrafter.com While you might not want to buy glasses online there are some aspects of online glasses shopping that are helpful. Not only can you find designer glasses that not all optometrists offer amongst their glasses varieties, you can find international styles of glasses frames online as […]
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The Green Party of Canada has become the first Canadian political party to officially support free and open source software in its election platform. The policy has both philosophical and technical motivations. The Green Party’s policy explains briefly how free and open source software is compatible with Green ideas: As […]
Microsoft clearly believes it knows better than users and system administrators of Windows computers. A few weeks ago, even users who had auto-update off received an unannounced, forced upgrade to Windows Desktop Search (WDS), whether or not WDS was even active on the computer. This, without permission from the user. […]