• The CRTC finally rules on Network Neutrality. Some guidelines but lots of loopholes. Here’s a summary of the situation. Pretty disappointing really.
• The British Columbian government backs net neutrality (not that it really matters unless Canada backs more strongly)
• A Canadian wireless advertising agency says that wireless network providers are blocking its ads and is calling for wireless network neutrality.
• US military spending vs. The rest of the world in 2008.
• A study by the Journal of Information Law and Technology has found that Bill C-61 Anti-circumvention provisions is most probably unconstitutional. Take that (legally non-binding) ruling DRM!

• I recently became a member of the Pirate Party of Canada! I encourage everyone in Canada to consider joining up.
• A history of the Sweedish Pirate political party
• Open electronic access to research is become more and more critical for global research and scientific and technological progress.
• Neeber sent me this sweet anti-copying 10 minute propoganda from the 90s called Don’t Copy That Floppy.
• Finally, Eolas a company that recently sued microsoft for $585 million, is now suing 23 companies, including Apple, Google, Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Playboy, Yahoo, and YouTube for infringment of their 3rd party browser plug-in patent.

• Japanese scientists reconstruct visual images from brain data.
• How viruses work the (very educational) movie
• 2001-like nut cracking monkies
• Flying fish from the BBC’s Blue Planet
• An amazing elastic jawed fish

• Now compare that to the current state of the Internet’s undersea world vs. undersea cables from 1901
• Search Google better
• Files24 is a mashup between bittorrent and IMDB which looks pretty useful.
• There have been a bunch of shake-ups recently in the torrent community. I still stick with BtJunkie for the majority of my torrents but if you are in need of a new torrent site, check out TrackOn which tracks Trackers.

• The blackest material ever made is… well… really black… and reflects almost no light.
• Latest CERN reactor apparently won’t destroy the world… and so far hasn’t!
• Billions of anti-matter particles created in lab.
• Cool and slightly creepy high performance double pendulum.

• Just how many other cilivilations are out there? Apparently 37,964.
• Once thought irrepairable, Hubble’s main camera back and fully functional!
• The Space Elevator programs have run into potentially fatal flaw.
• More good news for the environment, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory launch fails.
• A security camera captures meteorite impacting earth.
• A funny comparison of planet distances using an easy to comprehen metaphor.

• Some highlights from recent Wimp:
  • Awesome pingpong celebration (especially because of the score in the game)
  • Fishing show host Bill Dance’s Classic Bloopers
  • Irony on film
  • One man band
  • Cool 3D street graffiti
  • Amazing household dominos
  • Dragon Illusion
  • Slow mo bullet impacts
  • Wacky psychological study
  • Facepulling World Championships
  • An oldie (and posted before) but a goodie: the treadmill song.
• The always entertaining Onion: search for self called off after 38 years
• The 90s in one picture
• The World of Today (if the internet never happened)
• And finally from Selm: this is why you’re fat.

The first payoff is privacy: modern Usenet allows for SSL connections… yes its a bit slower but with an SSL connection no one (not even your ISP) can tell what you are transfering… Well… except your Usenet provider. This means that choosing your Usenet provider is a critical decision. I use Astraweb. Why? Its cheap ($10 US a month), they keep around 400 days of usenet posts (which is a lot) and its fast (see below)… but most importantly they don’t keep any log. Combine this with SSL and you have a very fast and private service.

The second payoff is speed: I get about 1.5 MBps (thats Bps not bps) continuously downloading. Some of the most highly seeded torrents download at around 600 KBps (and this isn’t continuous). 1.5 MBps means that you can download a 15 GB file in less that 3 hours (every time, no matter who else is downloading it).

The third is that your ISP doesn’t care: 15 GB files sound great but isn’t your ISP going to be freaking out when you’re downloading 100s of GBs of movies? Nope. Why? Your ISP doesn’t care about downloads they care about uploads. Torrents are terrible for ISPs because they do a lot of uploading. Usenet does no uploading at all. This means that all that crazy traffic shaping and filtering that your ISP does, does not affect Usenet either. I’ve literally downloaded 250 GB of movies in a month and never heard a peep from my ISP.

The last is selection: almost everything that eventually gets posted to torrents first came from usenet (don’t tell the RIAA/MPAA). This means that movies, games, software, tv shows, images, music etc are all available. I use Usenet mostly for high-def movies, TV shows and games. The selection is vast but it all depends on how much your Usenet provider will store (and for how long)… this is why using your ISP’s usenet servers typically isn’t good enough. A third party Usenet provider is much much better (Astraweb keeps more than a year’s worth of posts). Thus far there has been absolutely no censorship of Usenet. None. Even in the US.

Sounds good right? So what’s the catch? Well besides the monthly fee for a Usenet provider, you’ll need Usenet reader software and you’ll need to figure out how to use it. This is a good and short introduction to how exactly usenet works.  Remember its a technology based in the 70s, so basically everything is treated as a textual post. Lots of tricks and workarounds have been employed to allow Usenet post to include data files.

I highly recommend using Newsbin as your Usenet reader software. Its pretty much a standard, has great customer support and does lots of complex stuff automatically for you. Check out the documentation to learn how to use it.  Newsbin is so good I actually paid for a copy of it!

Once you’ve got Newsbin setup with your Usenet provider, you’ll need to add groups. There are -many- groups each dedicated to different types of media. My suggestion is to use Newsbin’s sort feature to sort by number of posts, typically the more posts in a group the better the group will be: alt.binaries.hdtv.x264 is my favourite group since it contains HD quality versions of pretty much all recent movies and TV shows. It gets about 700,000 posts an hour (note that each movie can be made up of thousands of posts).

You’ll need to download all the post headers (basically the subject line of the post) before you can start downloading. This takes a while the first time but is quite quick on subsequent loads. Once you’ve got headers you can either search them or just scan through them looking for stuff of interest. Make sure you totally read the subject, for example some movies are in different languages or weird formats or have wacky subtitles.  Once you’ve found somethink you like, download it and Newsbin will do the rest.

Now that you’re actively downloading this is probably the first time that you’ve maxed out the speed of your internet connection. Bask in the unbriddled speed of Usenet. Once the download is finished Newsbin automatically unarchives the files and they should be ready for you to use/view. Your 12 GB blu-ray rip of the Dark Knight is all ready to watch.

Yes this is a bit complex to get setup initially. Yes Newsbin has a bit of a poor interface. But the payoff is well worth the learning curve. A vast selection of high quality, fast and anonymous downloads are waiting for you right now.

• Social storage seems to be a big thing on the net these days. Both Wuala and Drop.io do a good job of making online storage free, easy and fast.
• Need to figure out where an image came from? Check out Tinyeye image comparison and search.
• Are our brains being re-wired by the internet and video games? And is this a bad thing?
• There has been a ton of wacky news recently about the Pirate Bay. Apparently it is being hosted in the Ukraine now… but it doesn’t seem up today. In the mean time, here are 25 Pirate Bay alternatives. Edit: the Pirate Bay is back up!
• Finally in some great news, ICANN cuts cord to US government… this is theory means less control by the US government over the internet… but seems mostly like a talking point than a real move forward.

• http://www.atdhe.net/
• http://www.ustream.tv/
• http://www.justin.tv/
• http://www.tvunetworks.com/

• The 1980s Relationship Survival Guide. So good.
• The Best Tennis Point in History
• Metronome auotagical syncing (warning this could cause seizure!)
• Neil Degrass Tyson (from Nova Science Now) on whether you should believe in UFO’s or not
• Insane building projections. So cool.
• How to be a Geek Godess…. mmmm Geek Godesses.
• Finally, Selma sent me the Still Tasty site. Find out how long will your food last before going bad!

• A recent problem with many virus scanners is that they produce a lot of false positives. Clearly its better to be more safe than less but often times the virus scanning companies are getting paid off to make keygens and other cracks show up as virii even when they are not. Enter Virus Total a program you upload your questionable file to and it checks the file against almost all major virus scanners, then you are in a better position to make an informed decision about the file.
• Old news now but Songbird (the open-source and free iTunes replacement) has gone 1.0 and looks to be a viable alternative (if you don’t need to sync with an iPhone or iPod).
• If you download shows or movies off the internet using torrents (and why wouldn’t you?) then you should be using RSS with your torrents. Why? Because it allows you to automatically download shows and movies as soon as they are released. Check out the these tips on getting it setup.
• Also old news now but Nintendo destroyed Sony and microsoft in 2008 gaming sales
• In other cool Google news, check out Goog-411 now you can use google from any cell phone.
• Finally a very interesting sounding software made by university of washington researchers called OneSwarm which allows P2P connections (like BitTorrent) but does so in an anonymous way. Still under heavy development but looks like it has huge potential.

Having said that, I’ve used a microsoft operating system as my primary OS since DOS 3.1.1. Why? Because it has been the dominanent OS of the time (and I’m a software junkie). Some of microsoft’s releases have been amazing (DOS, Windows 95 and XP) and some have been collosal failures (Windows ME and Vista). I installed Vista twice in recent months and twice lasted less than 24 hours before deleting it. Why would I upgrade to something that is slower, had more crap built-in software -and- was more annoying to use when Windows XP was stable, fast and ran all available Windows software?

Recenetly, I noticed that Windows 7 gold (meaning this is the version that you’ll be buying a few weeks when it actually comes out) has been leaked onto the net and that a reasonably reputable (but of course there is no garuntee of that) crack was available. After reading some reviews of the beta I decided to re-partition my main drive and check it out. Since that time I’ve completely abandoned Windows XP and re-formatted my main drive on my main computer for Windows 7.

In a nutshell, after three weeks of use, I think Windows 7 will be seen as one of the great microsoft OSs. So far it seems  fast, stable and reasonbly minimal.  It certainly isn’t significantly slower than XP. While some of the annoying features of Vista (such as User Access Control) are still around in 7, it is much much easier to turn these “features” off.

Microsoft has done a good job of improving the OS by adding features while not changing the metaphors already understood by Windows users.  Right now the only reason not to upgrade (in my mind) is that driver support while generally good (since Vista drivers work for almost everything) are still spotty for some brands. However even XP drivers can be made to work through Windows 7’s built in virtualization.

• BloodyDingo is always hunting down the best and funniest stuff on the web and sent me a bunch of links:
  • GifNinja allows you to quickly and easily create animated gifs using a series of pictures. Surprisingly fun!
  • The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of All Time
  • Crazy building projections from europe
  • The hilariously scary story of a guy and girl breaking up
• Ricky Martin and the rest of Meudo in an awesome video
• A remix video of the Slap Chop ads (which made me run out and buy a slap chop… seriously).
• Create some pretty amazing songs by pressing on a binary touch board.
• Somehow I missed the Weird Al’s recent album that included the classic track White & Nerdy.
• Pretty wild dancing inmates from Korea (and a little shout out to the king of pop).
• Mostly cool because it happened near Vancouver but also just cool in general: the Sasquatch 09 imprompty dance party
• Apparently the craziest clip on Wimp.com, check out these crazy basejumpers (the video gets more and more crazy as it goes on)
• (Not) Just your average day in Vancouver
• Oh My Science is a great idea, it replaces “God” with “Science” on tweets in real time… pretty funny for a while.
• According to a recent study women are getting more beautiful. Men not so much.
• Volcom sent me this amazing video of the luckiest people on the planet
• Amazing picture and video of a lightening bolt hitting a Japanese airplane

• BloodDingo sends me a ton of great links and I’ve built up quite the list:
  • Meat Purfume from Burger King
  • Some funny and odd clips of Obama swearing while reading his book
  • Spyders on Drugs.
  • Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy
  • World First DJ Battle

• Speaking of Obama, did you know that Michelle and Barack like to fist?
• Selma sent me a link to the Onion’s (which, in video form, has gotten even better in my opinion) story on Sony’s newest technology.
• Kickin’ the cute meter up to high: Kids eating lemon. Thanks Aech.
• If you have yet to see Chad Vader. Now’s the time.
• Another video that rated high on the weird things to inspire me: a kid on drugs after a dentist visit.
• Wimp gives you 10 very good very poorly described videos each day. The videos make it worth checking it out daily. Thanks Cam.
• Everything you wanted to know about canada.
• What if pot was legal?
• Amazing beatboxing harmonica player
• A video entitled “Dave asks about the homepage“. From the staff at vimeo.
• Golf Club Fail
• Tire Win
• The Fast and the Bi-curious
• New Sasha Baron Cohen movie trailer

• Meanwhile, the canadian recording industry wants to impose a tax on ISPs for music. Obviously a bad idea and here’s why.
• An update on whats going on with the recent CRTC hearings and Canadian copyright in general.
• The free-to-download Nine Inch Nails album (I posted ages ago on IA) tops Amazon’s mp3 sales chart.
• The US FCC nixes Big Media’s attempted control of the analog outputs on devices. Big Media wanted to be able to turn off analog out whenever they wanted meaning that they’d have total control over what you do with your own media and hardware.
• The WIPO (World International Property Organiztion) in a stunningly useful move is looking at how it can help 3rd world countries to reduce their environmental impact.
• The dreaded ACTA meetings (secretive Big Content and government meetings about global copyright) in Paris have concluded and the conclusion is: nothing. At least until March 09.
• As you’ve probably heard, iTunes Plus is now (basically) DRM Free. Hell Ya! Now all we need is CD quality downloads for all tracks and I’ll start buying my tracks from Apple for sure.
• A judge in the US has ruled that breathalizer source code must be made evidence in a court case between a drunk driving defendant and the state.
• EFF and FreeYouriPhone.org launch a site to try and get a DMCA exclusion for the iPhone so that they can hack it and install what they want.
• Finally, an Anti-File-Sharing Group in the US intends to pay ISPs to police their users. These guys have way too much money on their hands.

• Speaking of throttling, why do we need to throttle if new Cable Modems have hit 300Mbps in speed. Uh oh telcos you’re in trouble because your whimpy phone lines can’t handle all that bandwidth.
• This is a pretty crazy technology from Adobe called Zeotrope - . The idea is being able to compare and view the history of data on webpages. Sounds boring but the applications are astounding!
• Google Zeitgeist 2008 is bigger and better (and broken down by country now).
• You can now page through old magazines Google Book Search. Old Playboy here I come!
• Obama’s pick for FCC chairman (much like most of his other picks) looks to be well chosen
• Finally, a cool site called Jinni that recommends movies based on the ones you like. Unfortunately it requires you to login and it also has a limited number of movies (for some weird reason).