The week ending 25/11 is the week starting for BitTorrent Bram and his new crusade.
Bram Cohen and the MPAA made a monumental announcement of absolutely nothing this week. Cohen is the man behind the popular filesharing technology, BitTorrent, so any possible context that sees him in the same room with the Motion Picture Association of America must be geared towards the betterment of the entertainment industry.
According to the announcement, Cohen will work with the MPAA to stem piracy by removing links to copyright material off BitTorrent.com. I can only assume that this move was meant to encourage those with similar torrent search engines to remove copyrighted content, because otherwise this will do little to curb piracy. BitTorrent is a community developed protocol, and there are many other possible sites to hunt for torrents.
I don’t know when Bram intends to kick on with the link removal, but I just found pages upon pages of links to the latest episode of Lost on his search engine.
On a related note, a freely downloadable film has just become Finland’s most viewed movie of all time. The flick is a Star Trek spoof called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning and its downloads are reportedly in the millions. I’ve not watched it, mainly because I don’t know what a pirkinning is, but you can check it out at: www.starwreck.com
Now, this is the kind of news I like. Browser devs had a shindig this week to look at ways to stop phishing. The boys behind IE, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror looked at ways of better highlighting the dodginess of a site, based on its authenticity with the Certification Authority. Some points up for discussion were changing the colour of the text box behind the URL and preventing windows from popping up without a URL bar.
One of the problems with sorting and serving so much information is that you need to keep the lid on tight, lest it leaks out in all the wrong places. Unfortunately for Google’s new Google Base service, this is precisely what happened when a ‘glitch’ in the SafeSearch filter turned the classified service into a porn den. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the Google devs have patched it up and stymied the flow.
Finally, one more rant on the rootkit. Security vendors are rightly being criticised for not picking up something as malicious as a rootkit. I’d prefer to have the focus stay on Sony and DRM, but this a good point. Still, I do like F-Secure’s sense of humour here: www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-112005.html#00000714
Issue: 107 | December, 2009