dot everything

Pissed off with ICANN? Want your own tld and don’t think that you should have to be super available for it to happen? There is a different type of top level domain out there, called the gTLD. There are a few people offering them, but not all of them are very big. Of the 2 big ones, the Open Root Server Network seems too expensive at $1000,-.
Namespace gives one away for free and subsequent ones for $25,- per year. Switching is easy, all you have to do is add a few DNS servers in the root.hints list of your DNS server.

Why the RIAA is wrong and music is turning more and more to file sharing

Techdirt has two articles running pertaining to how music could use the new digital paradigm to improve there sales and services.

The article on Prince and how he exploits the new media show an interesting business model:

He also seems to realize a key point in understanding the difference between music that hasn’t yet been created (which is scarce) and music that has been created (which is abundant). As such, he has done a number of deals that getting someone to pay him upfront to create music (you can get people to pay for something that’s scarce) but then giving that content away for free. In the latest case, the newspaper is paying for the album, because it’s going to help get them a lot more attention for their newspaper. This is the same thing that’s actually happening in China as well, where piracy is rampant, but there’s plenty of new music — because sponsors are willing to pay to have it created.

The second article is on how independant record label Labrador Records has been asking (begging!) people to post a free give away MP3 of theirs on the Pirate Bay, because the demand for the MP3 is killing their servers. They don’t want to dissappoint their customers so they’re using bittorrent instead.

UK gives US access to incredibly personal information

The US not only wants to extend the amount of time it keeps EU citizen data travelling to the US from 3 to 15 years, it not also only wants to keep information on race, sex lives, credit card numbers and purchases, religion and other incredibly personal biographical data, it also wants to reserve the right to pass this data on to any third party it deems fit!
Thankfully the EU is in an outrage over this. The UK is pretending it’s nose is bleeding, even though this agreement will come into effect in the beginning of August!

Oh… and what’s the excuse? Yep, you guessed it: Terrorists!

Putin on the warpath

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has just stepped out of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE), limiting the maximal amount of conventional weaponry that is allowed by both sides. This is his reaction to the US Anti-Ballistic Missile system (ABM) sheild as well as his petulance at NATO not ratifying some changes to the CFE.

In a near-silmoutaneous way to gaurantee friendship with the west, he’s also claimed the North Pole, with all attendant exploitation rights. This because he has a team of scientists who say the the Motherland is connected to the pole by an underwater ridge.

Use your own fat to grow bigger breasts

Using fat-derived stem cells allows patients to have fat taken from the belly, the stem cells extracted and put into a cartridge and injected into the breasts. The procedure takes around an hour and costs the same as similar surgeries. After doing this, the breasts grow over a period of months. Since they are ‘real’ in every sense of the word, these are the best fakes you’re ever going to get. Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any way to choose the shape in which they’ll grow…

iPhone hacked

No lists of iPhone hacks here – there are plenty of them, there shouldn’t be any trouble at all finding them on internet. However, because the OS restore disks came in 2 flavours, part encrypted, part unencrypted, they’ve managed to hack the standard root password out of it allready:

Alpine

Have fun. I still love my Treo. When is Palm going to give me the stuff I want?!