Archive for January, 2008
Internets 1, Scientology and Humanity 0
Over the past hours, news has spread over the interweb regarding a group of hackers and ’security experts’ declaring war on the cult of Scientology.
Well, this is a toughie. Specifically targeting one religion, race, class or any kind of group with hate attacks such as these is horrible and I cannot condone it whatsoever — but after hearing stories of the kind of things hardcore Scientologists are doing I can kind of see the reason in it. This is a fuzzy issue with me. Much like as I could see reason in the Iraq war and can understand the views of those in support of it, I can quite easily comprehend why hacker group “Anonymous” are running a smear campaign across the net; dropping phat DoS attacks on their asses and, as the attached image shows, spreading propaganda through social news websites such as Digg (also probably highlighting a flaw in Digg’s security). A few, now nowhere to be found, YouTube messages from the group declare this ‘war’. I’ll post them if I can find them but I’m sure lots of blogs will be reporting on this soon.
However, sympathy or not this still classifies in my eyes as a hate crime. While I do not agree with the Church of Scientology whatsoever (I will keep my actual religious views to myself for now), they are free to do and believe whatever they want as long as they aren’t violating anyone else’s rights. By all means, ‘Anonymous’, if you do not agree with their alleged cult make your point heard — there are better ways of doing this.
On another flipside, it is pretty cool to see the effects of a determined malicious group. If only the target wasn’t religious discrimination…
Spor & Chris Renegade @ Garagem
Khal at DubplateDigest has always done a great job of letting the world know of any new top-quality D’n'B sets, and I spotted this little gem on his blog — the recording of Spor & Chris Renegade at Garagem, Portugal earlier this year. The MC is pretty good, in my opinion, but it would have been good to get his mic feed off the recording for non-club listening. Plenty of dubs and a tight blend, see full post for tracklist…
Download:
Right Click, Save As… (114MB MP3 @ 128kbps)
Other Mirrors: Here
DRM is Okay
I feel pretty dirty after typing that title, but it’s the truth. DRM (or Digital Rights Management) is a term thrown about a lot these days, used to describe the locks and restrictions media authors place on digital copies of their work in order to stop it being illegally propagated around the ‘net. The idea of DRM has been receiving a lot of hate from the Internet community, stating that the practice of placing these restrictions is unethical, violating ‘my’ rights as a consumer — but I fear in the same way that stoners support Ron Paul. They don’t seem to care about the overlaying ethical concerns, they just like to throw about “DRM sux” to make their piracy seem just.
I would just like to say: no, DRM does not suck. The draconian restrictions imposed on media through various DRM methods suck, but people seem to be getting angry when any restriction on their purchased titles exist at all; even in the case of rentals — namely movies from the the iTunes movie rental service launched yesterday. Commentary surfacing from some bloggers suggest people are starting to “freak out” at just the mention of DRM on the stuff they download.
What Apple have shrewdly done is not opt for a “delete it yourself after watching it” honour system, but have imposed DRM rules on your damn files. How dare they! I implore of the media consuming public, don’t just knee-jerk, learn about the serious issue of what I am terming DRM abuse and direct your anger towards those unnecessarily restricting your rightful use; not a method of controlling media that could prove to work very well — as we have seen in the case of iTunes Movie Rentals.
