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One of the few times I’ve actually hand-written a letter to my MP was a few years ago to complain about food labeling. I can’t believe how badly labeled our food is here. I didn’t hear much back at the time so I was happy to get an e-mail from Greenpeace about a new bill going through the house.  Bill C-517 would make it mandatory for food makers to note which ingredients in their products were GMO. This is a step in the right direction, but in my mind all food should have its country of origin clearly marked also… Anyway, please send a quick note to your MP and ask them to support this bill! It takes like 5 minutes.

• Why is proper labeling important? GMO foods are not extensively (or longitudinally) tested, Shinanigoat sent this unconfirmed reports of a GMO related disease. Scary shit.
• Everyday environmentalism, 14 ways you can help from Nature.
• BloodyDingo sent this interesting assessment of the impact of deleting e-mail on your footprint. Crazy!
• Eric sent me a link to Zenn Cars: zero emmissions, no noise, looks not too bad. Sounds great but not yet available in Canada.
• Its possible to see the scar of the Alberta Tar Sands from google earth… looks really… environmentally friendly… *cough*.

• Michael Geist (law prof from University of Ottawa) has created a site called ioptout which supposedly allows you opt out of e-mail and phone spam. Does it work? I’m not sure yet. Certainly it will only apply to advertisers from Canada… but certainly a good idea and worth signing up for!
• Why do we have to sign-up for a non-government created list? Because Bell got the contract for the Canadian Do-Not-Call list and hasn’t done anything useful to implement it yet. Isn’t it just a database? I could set it up for them in about 10 minutes!
• Speaking of spam, the canadian Red Dot Campaign aims to reduce your junk snail mail. Get a sticker, put it on your mailbox and voila you shouldn’t get any more anonymous junk mail. Saves a few trees too!
• Bubble and Laser printers all print secret watermarks onto the paper they print which allows print outs to be traced back to their owners (well in theory, in practice this is probably close to impossible). Recent finds have concluded that these secret watermarks probably break EU privacy laws (and really they should break everyone’s privacy laws!).
• A new program called BTGuard routes your P2P traffic through Canada to protect your privacy. This service probably slows down your BT traffic and Canada’s laws are only slightly better than US laws but pretty interesting none-the-less.
• I’ve often been a bit freaked out typing in my password in an internet cafe while traveling. Its sooo easy to have a completely hidden keyboard scanner recording all input and who knows what the security of that machine is (usually not very good I’d guess). Here is a nice little article on 5 tips for internet security while traveling. I’ve got another tip, change your password when you get back to your home computer… couldn’t hurt.

• There has been quite a bit of talk recently (especially in conservative circles) about creating a second internet, one that doesn’t have all the bad stuff on the current one. Ars explores whether a second, safer internet is even possible.
• Speaking of a safer net, a Utah ISP is the world’s first G reated ISP. They’ll filter all the good stuff from the net so you get the pure, unadulterated commercialized crap! You only have to pay a small fee.
• If you lean the other way and want everything unfiltered, you could check out TorrentFreedom. They offer 100% anonymous and unrestricted Torrents through their own proxy servers. Seems like a very good service.
• The venerable but still occasionally awesome CBC is releasing all their shows for free on BitTorrent… too bad JPod is already cancelled!
• Net Neutrality debate is everywhere these days but, of course, Canada is lagging way behind, so its good to hear that Canadian Net Neutrality is being debated.
• It started with a bang and ended with a faint rumble, the 700mhz auction is finished: Verizon and AT&T big winners. We probably won’t see much in the way of actual usage of this spectrum for at least a couple of years.
• A few people have talked about this recently, is the internet running out of bandwidth? Short answer: nope!

• Looking for a small program that will give you detailed information about your CPU and motherboard? Look no further than Cpuz, great if you can’t remember what processor you are running.
• I haven’t used it extensively but so far Libra looks like a great PC program to maintain your DVD, CD, games and book collection. The UI looks just like the amazingly awesome Delicious Library (for Mac only) plus it has way more features than DL. Highly recommended if you have a big DVD collection!
• For some time now, drive based encryption was kind of a PC panacea of security. Why? Because (provided the computer was turned off first), it made it almost impossible for a hacker to get into the data stored on the computer. Recent research has shown that it fails miserably if power is not turned off to the computer first however.  Clearly no one solution is perfect for security!
• Adobe is releasing Photoshop Express as a downloadable and free photo management tool! Sounds pretty interesting if it works well and quickly!
• I’ve used PeerSpider a bit recently, its a free tool that allows you to search pretty much all the public torrent sites on the net in one click It works well and has a nice simple interface… the problem is that it uses IE to render the pages, so any pop-ups are going to pop-up normally (and a few of the sites have these). Personally I haven’t seen better results through this tool than I usually do through btjunkie.org but your results may vary.
• Somewhat surprisingly LimeWire has topped the most used P2P list based on a recent study. I find these results a bit hard to take seriously… there is no way that BitTorrent isn’t higher but because of the diverse number of BT clients… LimeWire wins out.

• BloodyDingo sent this funny but very well done Legend of Zelda trailer spoof.
• If you dig your Battle Star Galatica (and why wouldn’t you!) check out this cool Last Supper pic with the entire cast.
• Not awesome enough to have a wikipedia page for yourself? Never fear, BiographIcon is the new wikipedia for biography for the masses .
• Dreamworks has bought the rights to Ghost-in-the-Shell (probably the second best anime ever made) and intends to make a live action Ghost-in-the-Shell.
• Corey sent this ad for Folgers Coffee from back in the day… doesn’t get more sexist than this!

The Alt Media topic really hasn’t been getting enough love on IA recently (well, even less love than the rest of the topics). Finally an update!

• Some people question my judgment that the US has become a police state. If you need more evidence how about the fact that domestic survelliance continues in the US despite the fact that Patriot Act has officially ended. Or that Dubbah has vetoed a law that would prevent US intelligence agencies from torturing prisoners… cause thats how he rolls. How long does the asshole have left again?

• The top 100 mercenary contracting companies in Iraq and Afganisan by US government payout. Blackwater is 12th (waaay lower than I’d have expected) on the list.
• Mysteriously deleting e-mails seems to have become a real problem in the US lately. A US Special Investigator rids himself of “virus” with seven-level hard drive wipe.
• The Ohio e-voting review of Diebold voting machines is a mockery of democracy. The big question now is whether this fiasco of technological bumbling will get fixed before the upcoming presidential elections.
• Wikileaks has released a diff of the Guantonamo operations manual for 2003 and 2004, showing the differences between the older guide and the newer one. Interesting reading for sure.

• Stem-cells are the holy grail of a lot of genetic works, according to this story common skin-cells have been transformed into stem-cell like cells.
• A company called 23andme has recently opened selling $999 DNA tests that can tell you about your ancestry and pre-disposition to certain diseases.
• Now you too can own your very own glow in the dark cat. Seriously.
• This is a subject I’ve often wondered about: are humans still evolving? Is our amazing health system stopping or slowing human evolution? According to a recent study, humans are evolving 100 times faster than ever before!
• For those that live in BC, there are new rules for organ donors and in order to maintain your status as an organ donor you’ll need to re-sign-up at the Transplant BC website.

• A new canadian group called the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright (BCBC) includes Google, Yahoo, Rogers, Telus, and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and is fighting against draconian copyright laws proposed by the likes of CRIA and others.
• On the other side of the fense, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (aka the IIPA) have slammed Canada for our lax copyright laws.
• Ironically the current Canadian copyright laws are not giving money back to the original creators… as usual the money is going to others who leach off of the creators.
• A world leader in movie releases known as “maVen” has fled the Mounties.
• Amie Street is a new music distribution site that has an amazingly good business model and tons of independent artists are flocking to it.

• For those of you who think of yourselves as true geeks, you really have to check out the documentary entitled The King of Kong. BloodyDingo gave me a copy and its super good. All about the quest to be the best Donkey Kong player on the planet. Check out the Twin Galaxies website (mentioned in the movie) they have top accredited scores for all the big arcade games. If you wanted to download the movie, you might find it here.
• Corey sent me this classic D&D personal ad, no creepy goth stuff though… sorry ladies.
• Selma sent me this article on the worlds smallest weightlifter.
• Speaking of D&D and not funny at all, Gary Gygax (the creator of D&D and generally creative guy) dies at 69. Wired has a great background and history of all Gary’s amazing accomplishments and ideas.
• BloodyDingo sent in a Mormon article on Overcoming Masturbation , its only 20 steps! Number 17. “Avoid people, situations, pictures or websites that create sexual excitement”. So basically no TV, movies, internet or going outside for me.
• Finally, check out this amazing picture entitled Skywalker’s Last Supper.

• I don’t want to go on a rant about how evil Facebook is… but I will point out that Facebook’s Beacon just the tip of the privacy iceberg.
• The US Feds have access to cellphone tracking on request. No privacy for you.
• Speaking of the Police State to the south, every single entrant into the US is now tracked through a terrorist risk profile.
• Bruce Schneier (a very smart guy and security expert) answers questions about security, privacy and the future of technology.
• We get several automated telemarketing calls a day… which begs the question: what the hell is going on with the Canadian Do-Not-Call list? Not much it seems, despite the fact its been in law for at least a year now.
• Dick Cheney obviously promised the US Teleco’s that they would get immunity for helping him spy on the American population, now he wants telecom immunity laws badly.

• I had seen this before somewhere but had lost the link, its a mashup Housing Rental Maps from Google and Craigslist.
• If you’re interesting in finding out more about the news and background of BitTorrent and file sharing world, check out the P2P Life website.
• A somewhat wacky story of Google vs. Wikipedia and the Knowl (a proposed unit for knowledge)
• The always interesting Cringley’s 2007 wrap-up and 2008 predictions.
• Fearful of loosing their dominance in the search market Google is working on a new and improved search. Ars looks in detail at the new features and they do look impressive.
• I’ve been following this story for a while, ICANN has made a case for freedom from US oversight. Will the US actually do it? Unlikely.

We all know the US DMCA has done nothing good and lots bad for the citizens of the US. Well now the pressure is on for Canada to adopt a similar law. The only thing stopping it being put through government is the lack of majority. Michael Geist has a wrap-up of all the sordid details of the Canadian DMCA to-date.

• Canadian songwriters propose $5 fee to Broadband internet to compensate artists for downloaded songs which seems extremely weird considering that they were recently trying to remove the same fee on digital music players because it was allowing for legal P2P sharing.
• Don’t think copyright is out of control? Here’s a nice story of a charity forced to pay copyright fees so children can sing christmas carols.
• Here’s some terrific quotes from the CMCC (Canadian Music Creators Coalition): “According to Nielsen, Canadian sales of digital tracks in Canada increased 73%, well ahead of the 45% growth rate posted in the US. Digital album sales are up 93% in Canada while in the US they are up only 53%.” and “Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against artists’ will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in artists’ names” and “Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice”. Fuck yeah!
• A new US college funding act sails through congress even though it forces colleges to filter music and video sharing. Nice.
• The US Patent Reform Act of 2007 seems good generally but also gives safe harbour to approved patents.
• The proposed US Pro-IP act vastly increases fines for copying music and video. Copy a CD, owe a mere $1.5 million.

Radio posted mublinder in a comment thread but i thought it deserved a post of its own. Mublinder allows you to update your Windows without a valid license. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and it seems quite good. As I found out a few months ago, anything that you grant access to modify the deepest levels of your system contains potential risks… especially when its clearly pirate software… so know the risk before using this.

• While poking around the net, I found InterfaceLift it contains a great collection of icons and themes for the mac but also a fantastic collection of desktop backgrounds for all systems
• The Pirate’s Bay has a bunch of useful BitTorrent guides.
  • Everything you want to know about The Scene.
  • A better guide to improving BitTorrent speeds
  • Lots more guides and tutorials

• Aech sent me a link to the Hamachi VPN system. Its a free VPN that seems to work through most firewalls.
• The first thing I do on most people’s PCs that I use is check to see when the last time Spyware Search & Destroy was run. Most times it was the last time I ran it on their PC. So I thought I’d post this little guide on scheduling Spyware Search & Destroy to run automatically.
• The Gartner Group says that 80% of commercial software will include open-source components by 2012.
• In a very interesting case of a defendant in a criminal case using digital technology against his accusers, the defendant in a DWI case wants to see the source-code of the breathalizer that is being used convict him. Interesting stuff.

I think not. However its time for more updates on IA and thats close enough these days. Sorry to all my loyal readers… its been a bit of a crazy few months for me: evicted from our house, a ridiculous amount of work and nothing overly motivational in the news in the last few weeks have combined for little time or effort on my part for IA. I hope that this series of posts will be a new beginning for the site.

• Eric sent me this funny ad for english as a second language training.
• Classy story of a drunk who drove his lawn mower down street during snow storm to buy wine.
• A Germany airline has announced the country (and I assume the world’s?!) first nudist airline.
• Univalve sent me this great video of games rejected for Wii Sports.
• The prolific BloodyDingo sent this video of QuestLove (from the Hip-Hop group The Roots) watching the 2 Girls 1 Cup video. If you haven’t seen the 2 Girls 1 Cup video, do yourself a favour and don’t bother searching for it. There’s a very good reason I’m not linking to it.
• If you missed the ads at the SuperBowl, BloodyDingo sent a link to the trailer for Will Farrell’s new movie Semi-Pro which looks great. If you want to check out some of the other Superbowl ads they are all available.
• Did you know that Jean Claud Van Damme’s first movie appearance was in the classic break dancing movie Breakin’… who knew he was a ‘great’ dancer?
• A defendant in a DWI case wants to see the source-code of the breathalizer that is being used convict him.

Recent environmental reports note that the world is in desperate need of more electronics recycling. We recently moved and I was forced to go through my stuff and get rid of a bunch of old hardware. I was shocked (and honestly a bit disappointed in myself) about how much old electronics I had laying around. We did some serious research and found a few great places to do electronics recycling in Vancouver: for computers and peripherials check out FreeGeek. For other electronics check out TechnoTrash. Don’t live in Vancouver? Do a few searches in google and on your local municipality’s website… these places are out there… they just aren’t well known.

• Do you feel bad yet about Global Warming? I can’t tell if that is photoshoped or not but its both funny and sad at the same time.
• BC becomes first Canadian provice to put emissions legislation into law. Fucking finally. In a province that gets most of its income from natural resources and tourism, you’d think we’d be leading not only the country but also the world in this kind of thing!
• I’m not sure it even warrants a bullet point, the unmitigated clusterfuck that was the UN Bali environmental meetings have concluded without doing much of anything useful. As some guy said on the CBC the other day, nothing is going to get done on the environment until George W is out of office… and even then… with the US in decline… its hard to see anything meaningful happening for years.
• With that in mind, its up to each of us to do our part. Here’s 10 easy ways to help the environment.

• Here’s an interesting list to peruse: the first 100 .coms ever registered (interesting fact: it took two years to register the first 100 .coms!).
• Seems like the world’s government (and spy agencies) have finally figured out that hacking other governments computers is a cheaper and more effective way of spying that actually having people on the ground in other countries… and because of this government sponsored cyber attacks are on the rise.
• Don’t you hate when you download a torrent and it stops at 98.5% Why does this happen? Its torrent poisoning. The copyright holders (or those companies paid by the holders) are putting up fake torrents, making them look real and heavily seeded and then assuming that once you try once to download… you’ll never try again. Here is a good guide to determining bad torrents.
• Another annoying torrent problem occurs when you download a video torrent and the quality is super crappy (I simply refuse to watch anything cammed). Check out the VCDQualtiy website which ranks the quality of the vast majority of torrents.
• Inane, stupid and dumb… the Jackass franchise is still really really fun to watch. Jackass 2.5 the most recent release is the first major theatrical release to be only available on the net. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes over.
• The Erowid drug archive (in my university days one of my favourite resources on the net) is now a non-profit charitable foundation and its still the best resource of the net for unbiased, scientifically founded research into all the drugs the government doesn’t want you to use.
• At long last, iTunes movies and TV comes (finally) to Canada including CBC and CTV shows. I’ll never use it or buy anything from it… but is good to see that we at least have the option!

• Here’s a good idea (and one that should come to Canada), its Congresspedia. Free open-source information about candidates for the US election.
• I love the idea of free, video lectures from the best universities in the world. Although I’ve never found the time to actually watch even a single episode. Anyway, the classically left-wing UC Berkley has put the majority of their undergrad lectures onto YouTube. Awesomeness.
• A recent poll of Canadians find that we strongly support Net Neutrality. Wow, who’d have thought that people would even care! Here is a petition you can sign if you are interesting in supporting this idea in Canada.
• Why should you care about Net Neutrality? Perfect example, Rogers (the Canadian ISP) has recently started testing injecting code/content into web pages on their network. Check out that screenshot! Now thats some scary shit… what evil genius is thinking this crap up!?
• Concern from many different countries about the US control of the internet at the UN summit on the internet. As the US continues to move towards a totalitarian police-state… you’ve got to start to worry about the state of the net.
• Speaking of the US decline, they have recently passed the SAFE Act through the house which includes rules such as “anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000.” Yeah I’m sure thats really going to happen.

• Wired has released their 300+ products tested just in time for christmas.
• For some reason I have an unhealthy obsession with hard drive enclosures. Don’t ask me why. Check out this cool and geeky enclosure that allows you to plug in bare drives and swap them at will.
• The 2007 Ars Gift Guide is a great (and well tested) guide for anyone geeky on your list.
• All my long-time readers know that I love anything open-source (mostly because its free and I’m Scottish) but I especially like the idea of open-source hardware, check out the Open-source hardware gift guide. Only ulti-geeks need apply.
• Tivo -finally- really comes to Canada (well English Canada that is). I can’t say enough about how awesome Tivo is. Its literally saved me hundreds of hours of painful ads. The downside is the exorbitant monthly cost. Or if you are feeling feisty (and have a fair bit of time and energy on your hands) you could check out the Tivo in Canada forums for ways of getting around the monthly service fee.

As we’re away on holiday over christmas this is probably the last IA update for this year. I hope everyone has a good christmas holdiay and for the love of god… don’t buy too much crap. Your friends and family don’t need it and the environment certainly doesn’t either.

• You know there are just some things that must be done in order for the universe to continue to expand and the earth to continue to spin. We already have Wii… it only makes sense that we’d need to have a video of topless women playing said Wii. That being accomplished, the universe can continue to function normally.
• Check out this great fake ad for upcoming video game Action Circle from Funny or Die.
• Corey sent me this link to a few Star Wars toys that never made it to store shelves.
• Radio Raheem would be proud to own any of these monster 80s boomboxes.
• Check out this JetPack with 10 mile range for sale soon… a mere drop in the bucket at $215,000.
• And finally a shout out to Christmas (my least favourite holiday), the Bill Gates “I’m Riiich Biotch!” Snow Globe brings some holiday cheer to IA.

I always tell people these days that virii are much less of a threat to your security than Spyware… and I still stand-by that statement. However, I mistaken distributed a virus to all of you! If you downloaded the WGA patch that I posted last week and installed it, please do yourself a favour and update and run a full scan of your virus software. Don’t have virus software, Grisoft’s Free Scanner finds and can remove the virus. In my defense, I did scan this software before installing/sharing it… I think this new variant (Trojan Horse BackDoor.VB.QL) must have been newly added to the virus database in the past few days. The good news is that the patch itself still works… so once you’ve healed the file you should be good to go. I’ll try and find a non-virus laden version for everyone else. Sorry about that… I believe this is only the second time in my life when I’ve ever actually contracted a virus! To be extra secure, if you did install it… might be a good idea to change some of your more critical passwords!