The blender’s been at it again

The Atomic blender has been at it again in the last few days, gathering the finest news tidbits from around the Net in order to bring you a perfectly pureed blend of news goodness.

Disney recently aired an episode of

The Atomic blender has been at it again in the last few days, gathering the finest news tidbits from around the Net in order to bring you a perfectly pureed blend of news goodness.

Disney recently aired an episode of The Proud Family cartoon, entitled 'EZ Jackster'. According to Newsforge, the EZ Jackster episode touted the evilness inherent in file sharing. The cartoon featured a girl downloading free music from a website, with the resultant effect of bringing the entire music industry to its knees. Artists went broke, people lost their jobs and the music industry crashed. All due to the actions of one little girl and a few of her friends who joined in downloading free music. Incidentally, the girl was arrested and her computer was taken away by her parents.

The moral (and lack thereof on Disney's part) is obvious: file sharing in all its forms is evil. Of course, we all know this to be a load of tripe. Most of us download an Mp3 or two, and we still buy roughly the same amount (in fact, according to some studies, more) of music CDs as we did before Napster and its clones came along. (As an interesting aside, Disney is also a backer of the Security System Standards and Certification Act.)

In other news, the latest development iteration of the Linux kernel, 2.2.20pre11, has been released. While this isn't newsworthy in itself, the changelog that was posted as part of the release, is.

Line 13, bullet one: 'Security Fixes – Details censored in accordance with the US DMCA

Alan Cox, famed Linux kernel hacker, was the man responsible for this security fix and the resultant censored details. His reason for the censorship was that Unix style permissions are used as a type of Digital Rights Management, and revealing information about security flaws in the permissions system (and thus how to bypass them under certain circumstances) makes the information a circumvention device under the DMCA.