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was a dream come true for the world at large. A site in gorgeous flash encoding, that served up Heroes, Prison Break, The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, American Heroes, Prison Dad, and Family Break, as well as thousands of old films (and even the entire Doogie Howser back-catalogue if you’re that way inclined) for one and all to watch in streaming HD. No clogged up harddrives or waiting times. Touch my face and call me Susan, it’s an internet miracle.
And the only restriction, it seemed, was the week or so delay between Terrestrial broadcast and netcast required to make the licensing between the Big Media companies who owned the shows and Hulu, their own joint venture, hold up in the stiff breeze of desperately needed TV Ad revenue streams (come on, a mixed weather metaphor is pretty sweet.)
Hulu is configured to recognise your IP address and boot you out of the site with not so much as a flicker of Jack Bauer’s tradesmile to send you on your way back to your own shitty, unilluminated life if you’re not in the US (read either “Not from round here, boy” or even “Unamerican”.)
WHAT? Watching 24 outside the US? That's Terrorism sir...
But gladly a nice free unobtrusive IP Anonymizer application called Hotspotshield allowed you to dodge that Entertainment Bullet by making your connection seem like it was in the US via a huge free VPN circuit you can simply tag into. And the cost? Nothing, HSS automatically sends banner ads your way, so you can buy a mail-order bride whilst Wahey for free US TV again!
Well you can go fuck yourself if you think THAT wasn’t going to change. Hulu caught wise to this little trick (presumably after some complete Sweaty Park Cock ratted on the rest of teh interwebz and told a technician at Hulu, or maybe they worked it out for themselves – less exciting, that one,) and has blocked HSS IP addresses, so now all of the world that isn’t Manifest Destiny has to get its fun from this sexy little image:
Yeah baby, I could look at this for hours
Already the tech bloggers are squawking angrily about “Hulu’s decision to geoblock its content” – which is half-fair, because really it’s Fox, NBC etc who are making that rule up, and Hulu has to take the flak for being contractually obliged to enforce it and thereby NOT going to prison for eight billion years and pay infinity plus $8 in fines. And read Chaucer (a less well-known but equally gruesome pubnishment for piracy these days. Look it up. DO IT.)
Of course the internet is a big angry Hydra; cut off one path and eight new ones appear in its place. Not only is the staff of HSS running around, seven dusty servers in each arm, looking for an abandoned warehouse to plug their gadgets into (and probably ironically looking for an anonymiser program of their own), but there’s already talk of other anonymising programs that might still do the trick. You won’t find the list here because reading about it online is probably one of the reasons why the bastards found out and aren’t rotting in jail. TRAITORS.
So it’s back to torrents and other even more illegal behaviours for most of the world who simply can’t be bothered to wait the 84 inexplicable months between release dates in the US and everywhere else.
Still, we DO have the BBC iPlayer in the UK, so I’m alright Jack. Which is on tonight…
Chris Morris, satirist, genius behind Brass Eye and The Day Today, as well as the darkly awesome Blue Jam radio show, broke cover recently, in the most unlikely place. Cern Labs.
Morris fans will not be surprised to hear Morris talk intelligently about particle physics. The man, a zoology graduate and all-round godbox, has always had a broad command of many areas of science and literature, as is evident from the (admittedly multi-author penned) narratives delivered in his various shows.
Morris, whose visit to CERN also has a Flickr photostream attached to it, spends no time at all on Morris’ career and goes straight to an explanation of the Hadron collider (I think. I dropped particle physics after primary school.)
Also on the link above is a podcast with Simon Munnery and Kevin Eldon, leading me to worry whether soon Carrot Top will be asked along to Cern, where he’ll whack a watermelon over some big red button…(yes I know CERN doesn’t have any dangerous radioactive explosives.)
For more on Morris and his shows, click all these links. On The Hour fans will also be thrilled to hear that the series will get a full CD release, according to an interview with Neil from Cook’d and Bomb’d and Armando Iannucci (one of the big brains behind the big face of British satire since the late 80′s.)
Google are great at many things. And April Fool jokes are a particular forte of theirs. In recent years Google has released fictional drinks, Gmail Paper (a service that prints out and delivers your emails in hard copy), Google Romance, and a slew of other insanities. And as a rule they are very funny.
Today’s excellent submission is the “Future Search” – covered by News.com.au, the site states:
Google Australia said the new beta search technology which drives the gDay search feature can accurately predict future internet content – and even future events.
The gDay technology – developed in the company’s Sydney engineering centre – uses machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques from a system called MATE, or Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.
Here’s Google’s official page on the matter. G’day Mate.
The Pirate Bay Interrogations | TorrentFreak
A while ago, I posted about how freaking hilarious the PirateBay administrators are when replying to legal threats from content owners who discover their material.
Well now TorrentFreak has posted some of the ‘skillful’ interrogations that are being conducted with the 3 guys who may or mey not be behind running The PirateBay. I love the brazen nature that these guys conduct themselves with.
$8b rogue trader ‘a genius of fraud’ | smh.com.au
Dear Mr Kerviel,
You are my ACTUAL hero. Well done. How did you do it?
So let’s cut to the chase (literally for you, I suppose.) Any bank that can lose billions and still ‘be okay’ should be robbed. All that money was insured anyway. No end users are affected – although the banks might introduce some fabulous new way of penalising people, if so, they deserve to be robbed again. As long as the guys on the street are unaffected, all you did was rob capitalism.
Steal shit, run and don’t look back. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s me holding a torch, ready to high-five you and buy you a beer (which i THINK you should pick up the tab for.)
I know you probably have absolutely no chance of escaping and you’re screwed in all probability – but her this. You rock! Your actions amount to 2 Fingers extended in the air at authority on a massive scale. More please.
Best Regards
Everyone at The Hypernation
From The Age Blogs: Noise Pollution
According to the blog post in The Age, Trent Resznor, producer of the experimental Saul Williams album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust is lamenting that after releasing the album online for free, “only” 28,322 paid the $5 fee for getting the good version, after the 150,000 free downloads had been reached.
The Age Blogger goes on to state that “once again consumer response, on the internet at least, has shown a disinclination to pay over the opportunity to get something for nothing, thus undermining the project itself. “
But of course this is complete trash.
The article itself mentions that Williams’ previous album sold 33,000 copies. A drop to 28,000 (and change) is pretty amazing, considering the album is very available for free on the net even after Williams’ site stopped giving it away. And after all, that’s $141,000 in hard cash, presumably going straight to the pair, as they work independently, thanks to the net. And no money is spent on marketing. Add to that that now there are DRM free tracks of Saul Williams circulating like none of his other albums EVER did.
Williams is not famous by any means. But he is awesome. And now more people know that.
More exposure, no marketing, no record company, as well as sales of over $100,000 in the face of the get it for free option.
I would have though Reznor had his own studio too – isn’t this enough money?
http://www.thesixtyone.com is a music discovery site with a points system. You log in, you rate music (“bumping” a song will lift its points, and hence its status in the charts they have.)
The service is free, so it’s a really awesome music discovery/internet radio site, and has been set up by two guys who quit their jobs in the hope of doing something new for the digital content distribution future. Their financing seems to come out of their own pocket, plus donations, plus a significant deal must come through advertising.
So it’s really amazing that when users complained that adverts were interrupting their music experience, TSO removed them - just like that. How refreshingly awesome is that?
Now it’s up to the users to finance their experience. Having studied the Radiohead and Tim McIntire models of ‘selling it for free’ I reckon they stand a damn good chance of survival.
On a separate note – how much do you reckon an artist actually gets from you? If let’s say, Jerry Cantrell broguht out 3 albums, if I bought them as per usual, how much would he get? 10 cents an album? More? So, If I download them for free , and send him ten dollars, wouldn’t he be better off?
Just food for thought. Anyone out there?
The first iPhone Trojan has been seen in the wild, according to security vendors.
The first warnings about the Trojan were posted on Saturday on the iPhone modification forum ModMyiFone.com, said security vendor F-Secure. When installed, the Trojan appeared to do nothing more than display the word “shoes”, according to the ModMyiFone post.
However, when a user attempted to uninstall the malicious code, the application wiped files from the /bin directory, breaking “Erica’s Utilities” such as sendfile. Erica’s Utilities are a collection of command-line utilities for the iPhone, according to security vendor Symantec, which warned on Monday that the Trojan also overwrites OpenSSH, an open-source encryption protocol. The Trojan, known as “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep”, or “113 prep”, is the first to be seen in the wild, according to Symantec researcher Orla Cox.
“This is technically the first Trojan horse seen for the iPhone; however, it does appear to be more of a prank than an actual threat,” Cox wrote in a blog post. “The impact of uninstalling the ‘Trojan’ would appear to be an unintended side effect.”
Affected users need to uninstall the Trojan and reinstall affected files, according to Symantec. The risk to users is minimal as they would have to choose to install the bogus package and the site which was hosting it has now been taken offline, wrote Cox.
A burgeoning empire like Google’s is hard to keep track of sometimes.
So it’s totally awesome when Ther Adelaider put together this burgeoning and all-encompassingly awesome cheat sheet. All Google Servcies? Sure. Company key people? Yup. Googlebot IP Addresses. Check. Easy ways to find mp3s? Sure.
This two page Google Cheat Sheet lists all Google services and tools as well as background information. The Cheat Sheet offers a great reference to grasp of basic to advance Google query building concepts and ideas.
Thanks to Norris suing the Chuck Norris Facts Book recently published, an organic search for Chuck Norris now brings up the hilarious site of the Chuck Norris Facts before it brings up the actual man.
Hurrah! Fiction wins out over real life to claim the ‘truth crown.’
Unfortunately, whilst a search for Santorum still yields the definition of “The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex” above homophobic cock Senator Rick Santorum, “Rick Santorum” however still brings up Rick Santorum, rather than the sex-lather “Santorum”.
Famously a few years ago, ‘misearble failure’ yielded the result “Biography of George W Bush, thanks to the deliberate information reference work of “Googlebombing”.
That is all.
Except we should now consider doing the same thing for Bruce Campbell, since the man is busy making fictional films whilst playing the real Bruce Campbell in them…what a legend.
