Why aren't there more people like this in government?

Can u say innovative?

After a long wait the Cyborg arrives

I know more then a few of my buddies and I have been anxiously awaiting the release of the Cyborg Keyboard. Well now it seems it has finally been released (although strangely not listed on the website).

Here is the board available at Circuit City. In addition, a very detailed post with up close n personal pictures of the board.

Thanks to Mistrwebmastr for linking this one.

Geforce 9800 GX2 Released!

Check em out in all their sexy glory : )

P.S. Can you say collusion? lol, check the prices..

Benchmarks here

On Illegally Downloading Music at SSU

Since day one of living in the school dorms freshmen year I have had witnessed more than a few friends express their hesitation about downloading music and movies over the school network. They were scared to death of using programs such as Limewire or BitTorrent on the school network. They feared the school would expel them or something else completely ridiculous.

Well I am here to tell the hesitant on-campus student that you need not worry about illegally downloading music over the SSU network.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the so called record industry trade group, has been sending out numerous complaints and pre-litigation letters to individuals and universities across the nation. Some seeking damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars. A handful of the cases involved, asked for over one thousand dollars per song. The news reports on these lawsuits are enough to scare any ignorant user away from downloading.

Around 61 million people in America alone share music online, on a regular basis. The RIAA has so far managed to send out 2,423 threat letters to college students around the nation.

In the vast majority of cases the RIAA tracks what is known as an IP address. Think of this as a sort of street address for your computer. The RIAA can find out where the address is located and who the landlord is (your ISP or Internet Service Provider such as Comcast) but cannot gain any information on the individual occupying the address without going to the landlord first.

The RIAA cannot prosecute somebody as a criminal based solely off an IP address. They need to find out the individuals personal information. They need to know which individual is using the computer tied to the IP address.

This is where the Universities come in. For anybody plugged into the school network, the University is then your ISP.

Let’s say the RIAA discovers a certain IP address is sharing an episode of Grey’s Anatomy and traces the IP address back to a College University. This is when the RIAA sends out their pre-litigation letters to the University demanding that the University turn over information regarding the student operating on the said IP address. The University decides to either hand over the student’s personal information or not. As well the university can quash the subpoena ignoring it completely or forward the litigious letter to the students using the listed IP addresses.

Across the nation there have been very few instances of a university handing over a student’s confidential information to the RIAA. In nearly all of these rare instances, the Universities were private.

To say the least, if Sonoma State University handed over confidential student information to the RIAA, they would have one huge pile of shit lawsuit on their hands assuming the student was smart. This is because it is against Federal privacy laws for the university to hand over student information in such a situation.

In most cases when a University receives a RIAA threat they deal with it internally; they will send out a warning letter to the student involved, telling them to stop their activities.

In other cases the University will send the RIAA subpoena to the student, for the student to handle on their own. The average price the RIAA asks for in these subpoenas is $3,000. The subpoena basically states ‘pay this amount or face a lawsuit.’

This is the catch that the RIAA doesn’t want you to know: Even though the university forwarded the subpoena to you, the RIAA still does not know who you are. By contacting the RIAA regarding your payment for the subpoena, you have just given them the last piece of information they needed to pursue you in criminal court. This would be your name and contact information, they didn’t have prior to you coming to them.

Before you responded to the subpoena, the ONLY information they had on you was your IP address and your ISP; which would be the University. This is NOT enough grounds for them to pursue you in court!

Basically the RIAA is sending out lawsuits to a bunch of “John Doe’s” hoping they contact them back to make payment, upon which time the student just provided the RIAA with enough information for them to take the student to court in a criminal case.

This is of course, assuming the University did not reveal your credentials. However, it is fair to say students here do not have to worry about SSU turning over their information to the RIAA due to Federal privacy laws.

It is simply the moral panic created by the media which inevitably snakes its way into our TV sets that is influencing the students I met freshmen year into being petrified of downloading content on the school network.

Has you or anybody you know been sued by the RIAA? No.

The real solution to this ridiculous problem is to stay anonymous online. Nearly every one of the most popular BitTorrent clients have encryption options which will prevent anybody from seeing that you are file sharing.

If you are searching for “Don’t stop the music” on Limewire and the songs brought up have a file size of 117kb, then it is safe to say, that is NOT the song. You just have to be smart and use common sense.

With the recording industry attempting to lower the royalties artists receive for their music to eight percent of the songs wholesale revenue, how can we not be encouraged to download illegally. The RIAA claims they are protecting the copyright of the creative geniuses creating the music. When it is being proposed that only eight percent of the money we pay for the music goes to the actual songs “creative genius”, you can only laugh at the RIAA’s ‘protecting the artist’ statement.

When more than 75 percent of the money we pay for music is going to corporate interests, it proves they don’t give a rat’s ass about the actual artist; the creator of the music in the first place.

If it is any consolation to freshmen; I personally downloaded more than 75 gigabytes of games, music, movies, whatever over the school network in my dorm freshmen year and did not so much as receive a single notification from the University, RIAA or anyone telling me to stop.

For more information regarding this ongoing war between universities and the RIAA as well as information about staying anonymous online and covering your digital footprint, you can visit my blog at whisp8.blogspot.com

FOR MORE INFORMATION

This is a Blog post about covering the ongoing RIAA stories as a journalist.

A story about the music industry trying to cut down on the royalties artists receive for their music. The proposed percentage each artist would receive per sale of each song? 8% of wholesale revenue.

I highly suggest reading TorrentFreak. They break many of the stories related to torrenting or companies such as Comcast filtering their users internet traffic illegally.

Notable TorrentFreak articles-

• Stop Downloading Fakes and Junk From BitTorrent
• Video: How People Are Tracked Using BitTorrent
• How To Share Torrents With BitTorrent Illiterates
• RIAA Keeps Settlement Money, Artists May Sue
• Pirated by iTunes, Artist Turns to BitTorrent

SSU the Junior College

**********This is my most recent SSU Newspaper article, it has been out for 2 days and I am getting a buncha facebook messages about it already @_@ : ). Glad to see I am stirring the pot as it was my goal, also just a rant to make me feel better******************

There is a time and a place for everything and its called college. After hearing this from various adults during my adolescence I simply couldn’t wait to dive into all the inappropriate situations waiting for me at this lustful university of wonder. College would be the place to meet new people, do everything I was ever told not to and possibly fit an education in between my learning’s at the drunken dances. Overall you go to college to experience college life and become part of it. This is why I am so confused as to why so many students leave so often to go home?

It seems that damn near every friend I have at this university will go home at least once every three weeks? I am here to be in college and experience it to its fullest. To me this includes the weekends, but apparently I’m alone. With the enormous amount of people going home all the time, the college atmosphere and social scene slows to a dribble each and every weekend. Could you tell me exactly how many people left SSU to go to other cooler colleges last Halloween, because I lost count?

Although recently Sonoma seems to have flourished with a number of worthy parties to attend, I still feel this weekend commuting bullshit is a problem. Every single weekend at least four to five of my friends go home and I am not just talking about those whose homes are in Santa Rosa. They leave for the entire weekend for reasons that I am told are very, very important. Most of the time it’s their relatives birthday or they haven’t seen their parents in awhile (a whole month), or their grandparents are in town. The list of excuses seems just as endless as the list of justifications to exactly why “I really have to go, I can’t NOT go”. I then propose the question: “If you were going to school out of state would you still go?” The response I usually get is silence; meaning no, they wouldn’t. They simply choose to go but in reality don’t HAVE to.

I know many of you come here to attend a college close to home and I understand this. You want(need) to be able to return home regularly, but I think that once every month or two is a bit much and makes “going to college” rather pointless. So much for experiencing new and exciting things let alone independence.

I’m just going to go ahead and say it. A lot of the people who come to SSU are settling. There. The unspoken was just spoken. I’ve picked up this vibe among students AND teachers from day one and continued to have this attitude supported and reinforced by my peers throughout my stay here. The attitude that SSU is cool but not that cool. It’s a good college, but “meh”. SSU was not too many students number one college choice when a head count was done in one of my classes. As well, more than a couple people I knew were “so” going to transfer the moment they got the chance.

Maybe this is the reason people go home so much? Or because they aren’t mature enough to face new challenges, make new friends, meet new people on their own? They go back to their comfortable hometown where everything is settled and waiting for you?

Wherever the reason may lie, half the student community leaving school every weekend is seriously deteriorating my college experience. I came here to be in college, at college, among college students. I came to stay, not to visit. Am I alone in my endeavor? As for the rest of you, if next labor day you think you’re the only living student on campus, don’t feel alone as somewhere around here there will be a frustrated journalist posting on his blog about how especially dead campus is during this weekend.

Divx Stage6 Shutdown

Coming as a shock at least to myself, Stag6- the popular video sharing site geared more towards professionals and those looking for high quality streaming media has been shut down. The post on the site currently says

"The continued operation of Stage6 was a very expensive enterprise that required an enormous amount of attention and resources that we at DivX are not in a position to continue to provide."

This really, really sucks to say the least. As a gamer, it had become a standard for players to post their frag movies on Stage6 as it was much much better quality then Youtube using the divx video codec. Hopefully another high quality video sharing site will prop up. Perhaps one that will let you post videos in resolutions higher then 200x200 lol.

Stage6 you will be missed : (

Update: Veoh seems to be attempting to pickup where Stage6 left off. Although the video is still at a small resolution the quality is much, much better then Youtube.

Nvidia 9800gtx Pictures

Some pictures have surfaced of the 9800gtx, unfortunately the site is in a foreign language but the proof is in the pudding ; )