tough choice: work for the RIAA, or herpes?

The other night, I was sifting around the net, listening to one of my personal favorite online radio stations, Digitally Imported. While poking around their site, I came across this.

Don't want to read? Fine - it's an announcement of a new price increase on internet radio stations. For the most part, these stations are free, run completely on donations or the funds of the owners themselves (there are some memberships, but come on. They're not that expensive.) The price increases are as follows:

• $.0008 per play for 2006
• $.0011 per play for 2007
• $.0014 per play for 2008
• $.0018 per play for 2009
• $.0019 per play for 2010

Yeah, doesn't seem like much, does it? Check this out, from SaveTheStreams.org's site. For the average station (most have several thousand listeners per channel,) costs are jumping to $2 million or more in the next few years. The best part? These costs are retroactive, according to the stations complaining about this rate hike (i.e., all of them.) That's right Einstein, stations are going to be paying for the music they've played for the last year or so.

Well, what does this have to do with the RIAA? According to several sites, blogs, etc., the increase in royalties was lobbied in no small part by the RIAA. I wouldn't be surprised in the least bit if they were completely behind it.

Personally, I want to continue listening to stations like DI for membership fees of less than $500 a year. If you do too, check out some of the related links below.

Related:

Want to sign a petition? We all know what good they do, but it's at least worth a shot. SaveTheStream's got one up.

Want to do more than just sign the petition? Check this out to find your state rep and send him a form letter, or one of your own.

EDIT: As a side note, I highly, highly encourage anyone else with a blog to use these links and information freely. (My information is free anyways, but I really want to stress it here.) Check this stuff out for yourself, and get anyone you can to help out. Read my note for inspiration, you penniless hippies.

beep beep, i'm a phone!

For those who don't know, I recently got a new phone (same number.) Since it has a metric shitton more possibilities than my last phone, I thought it'd be nice if I shared what I had found in the last day I've owned it.

First - custom ringtones. Almost any new phone has mp3 support in some form or another, and there are always sites and services that will sell you ringtones for whatever phone you have. If you're like me though, you don't feel like spending cash on what some jackass felt was a decent song, filtered down to 60kbps or so. That's where Audacity steps in. You can cut clips from your own mp3s, at your own bitrate, then move them to your phone as you see fit.

Also, if you like pre-cut clips without the price, check out Blackberry MP3s. Great site that has some low-bitrate clips from a ton of songs.

Second- video clips. Some phones can play them, some can't. If yours can't, skip this and read on. I personally use imToo to convert files to 3GP format (most phones on the market will use this format unless a carrier changes it.) I managed to pop an entire movie into a 150MB file pretty quickly. Music videos and the like would probably go much faster. Or, once again, if you want to check out some pre-made clips, go to Blackberry Movies.

The third thing that isn't for the feint of heart would be flashing your phone. You can change the startup screens, icons, pretty much everything that the carrier usually puts on your phone (I'm sure you've gotten sick of the U.S. Cellular and Verizon crap by now.) It also runs the risk of bricking your phone, so take my advice at face value and proceed with caution. A good site for Motorola phones (they seem to be easier to break into since many carriers provide them) is The Moto Guide. They deal mostly with Razrs, but the same principles apply to almost all Motorola phones.

Anyways, good luck with your phones, and don't pay for crap you don't need to. Larr-Bear has commanded it.

cloak and dagger for dummies

So, since it has surfaced yet again (and pretty much daily in our society) I figured I would do a post about the IT Security field, something I've got a personal interest in.

I'm sure by now that anyone who reads tech boards, news, etc. will know about the recent Wal-Mart tech scandal where an employee was fired for intercepting text messages from between a New York Times reporter and Wal-Mart employees. An even earlier reminder of this type of espionage can be found in the HP scandal a few months back; the CFO resigned and a prominent lawyer associated with HP was disgraced as a result.

Despite all of this, I constantly see technology progressing in the wrong direction. While technology becomes stronger and harder to break, the people who use it are no more educated about its perks and utility than they were five years ago.

The weak point in all of this, as any decent cracker can tell you, is the person who uses the system. It doesn't matter if you've got a router with a built in firewall, the latest Bluetooth devices all touting SMS message encryption, or a WAP with 128 bit encryption - if the person doesn't know how to use it, they won't. Even worse, they won't know how to stop information leaks or who they should talk to.

An example of this: I work in a campus computer shop. We're often called upon to go out on campus and service machines, pick them up for repairs, etc. Usually, unless I stay within the ITS department, the people I see couldn't tell me apart from any other student (or anyone for that matter.) I wear normal clothes and carry no sort of visible identification. However, I've never had a problem going to someone on this campus and getting access to a computer from them, or even taking the hard drive out for repairs.

"So, what's the problem, Larry? You just seem nice."

The problem is that the hard drive could contain personal information for hundreds of students. If this information was to leak, it would create obvious problems. To make matters worse, even if it was traced back to wherever the drive came from, no one would know who picked up the hard drive - no one asked for my I.D.

This might not seem important to someone who doesn't go to my campus, but think about it: what if you put on a techie sort of outfit, walked into a bank with enough information to weasel a computer away from a clerk, and walked back out with about 600 account numbers? I think those people would be pissed.

Learn to use MAC filtering on your home networks, find out how to disable Bluetooth access on your phone if you don't use it, and for the love of all that's good in this world, stop leaving your SSID as "linksys" and "hpsetup."

I know technology is intimidating to people. You don't have to know the ins and outs of it to let it protect your information though.

As a final note, I highly encourage people to check out Kevin Mitnick's book entitled "The Art of Deception." It's dated somewhat, but the principles still apply.

Related:

Want to stay in denial about how easy it is to intercept information? Read here.

Think cracking a wireless network is hard? Try Aircrack and Airsnort and tell me that.

A more humorous, helpful approach to wireless security: Bluejacking.

best buy corporate office - next stop, hell

So I read this earlier this morning on [H]ardOCP and couldn't believe it. Best Buy has apparently had a second, internal website and it displays store prices without sale, etc. Employees have been using this to weasel out of the "price match" system that Best Buy currently uses.

I'll give you an example: you found a great 30GB mp3 player for $240 on Best Buy's website. You decide you want this, print off the page, and go into your local BB store to price match the ones they have in stock. You find the exact model on the page, go to the cashier, and try to pay for it. The cashier tells you that it's the wrong price and they can't sell it to you at the sale price - you've gotta pay the store tag price. When you show them the page you got from the public website, they say that's also wrong and take you to an in-store kiosk, which proudly displays the store price on the internal-use website. Managers will even back this information up.

Even though this story as I read it is pretty recent, this type of deception has been going on for years (check out the related links below; I'll add more forum posts as I find them.) Best Buy says its a simple misunderstanding, but if this problem has been going on for this long, with this many confirmations from John Q. Pissedoffpublic, then it's a blatant lie, and the Connecticut Attorney General's Office seems to agree.

If you ever wanted another reason to never shop at Best Buy (aside from Monster Cables priced 300% above the material costs,) then look no further than this post.

Related:

Best Buy tries to play off the recent scandal, but no one's buying it.

silly rabbit, cocaine is for kids!

I've gotta tell ya, just when I thought people could get dumber, here it is: Cocaine. It's an energy drink - 280 mg of caffeine per can (compared to an 8 oz. cup of coffee, averaging around 50-100 mg.,) not to mention all sorts of other goodies - guarana, B vitamins, etc.

This new drink strikes me as a perfect marketing ploy - name it something slightly taboo in our culture, but something popular that's associated with high-energy, nonstop fun. And who will we market this stuff to? Teenagers, of course. Who else will be intrigued by this as much as them?

So, what's the problem, you ask? Well, the prude and all-knowing parents decided that because this energy drink is labeled "cocaine" then it would make kids jump straight to the real stuff for a larger kick. Can't make the obvious connection? Neither can I.

Look, no one here is saying kids should be sold cocaine (the actual drug.) Any self-respecting drug dealer who wants to stay in business won't sell shit to kids - it's frowned upon in those circles and is just plain bad business practice, as this woman shows. However, to be so stupid as to say that an energy drink will cause someone to take up an actual drug (oh noes!) is moronic and pointless at best.

Kids (read: teenagers) will be intrigued by this - it's a legal product that refers to something illegal in this country. Tongue-in-cheek "naughty" things are incredibly popular in America. On top of this, the product is designed to burn your throat and sinuses a bit, making it "replicate the real thing," to paraphrase the owner of Cocaine. To a teenager, that's risque enough to warrant trying it.

I've met people that were addicted to various things, and I don't remember any of them saying "well, it all started with a provocatively-named energy drink." Granted, I didn't ask them if the addiction started with the drink, but I'm assuming I wouldn't need to. If an addiction started with something that ridiculous, I'd tell everyone I know about it.

Worried about your kids not knowing the difference between a drink and a drug? Be an actual parent, teach them that the drug exists, why you feel they should / shouldn't do it, and stop giving me reasons to call you an asshat.

I have the slight feeling I'm going to draw a lot of fire for this one.

*stands up for applause*

And the crowd goes silent.

Related:

Cocaine Removed From 7-11 Stores

Cocaine Removed From School

Cocaine Banned In Australia