A guy shoehorned an MP3 player into an old NES controller.
This comment was better than the article:
Switching the keylock on and off gets a little cumbersome, up up down down left right left right B A start.
What is that key sequence from, anybody remember? I distinctly remember doing something with that. Friend suggested a Mortal Kombat fatality and it might be, but I don’t remember playing MK on NES–only arcade. Hmm.
Good one. A smarter phone indeed!
(disclaimer: I did a minor photoshop moving the Plam box to the left to fit into my little blog theme)
As some of you know, we’ve had a lot of changes to the Psi website lately. I finally moved the whole thing to a new server (psi-im.org) a bit over a week ago. I decided not to resurrect the old forum, based on Invision Power Board. A very old version, I might say. Instead, I went ahead with what was in the website roadmap anyway which was to migrate to Unclassified Newsboard.
The migration went pretty well, but it was a lot of work. The database migration script needed some hand holding, then I had a lot of configuration and theming to do. I swapped out the new Psi logo for the UNB logo and it didn’t look good at all, so I put a few hours into sliding things around. The end result is quite pretty, but most of the credit does go to Yves, the UNB author. My changes from his default theme were not drastic–yet.
So please do check it out; and maybe stay for a while. The new Psi Forum! Oh, here’s a poll where you can let me know what you think.
Here are some statistics you might find interesting. This set is just since the forum change:
This set is all-time, or at least since we had been using IPB:
I’m just now catching up on some stories from Slashdot and digg about this and oh my God this is insane.
The best and most detailed writeup you will find is on Sysinternals. I’ll paste their summarization, then you go read up.
Man, I’m glad I stopped buying CDs a long time ago. But my wife still does occasionally. Now we’ll have to filter out anything with Sony on it. Jeez!
For those readers that are coming up to speed with the story, here’s a summary of important developments so far:
The DRM software Sony has been shipping on many CDs since April is cloaked with rootkit technology:
* Sony denies that the rootkit poses a security or reliability threat despite the obvious risks of both
* Sony claims that users don’t care about rootkits because they don’t know what a rootkit is
* The installation provides no way to safely uninstall the software
* Without obtaining consent from the user Sony’s player informs Sony every time it plays a “protected” CD
Sony has told the press that they’ve made a decloaking patch and uninstaller available to customers, however this still leaves the following problems:
* There is no way for customers to find the patch from Sony BMG’s main web page
* The patch decloaks in an unsafe manner that can crash Windows, despite my warning to the First 4 Internet developers
* Access to the uninstaller is gated by two forms and an ActiveX control
* The uninstaller is locked to a single computer, preventing deployment in a corporation
Consumers and antivirus companies are responding:
* F-Secure independently identified the rootkit and provides information on its site
* Computer Associates has labeled the Sony software “spyware”
* A lawfirm has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of California consumers against Sony
* ALCEI-EFI, an Italian digital-rights advocacy group, has formally asked the Italian government to investigate Sony for possible Italian law violations
I received a nice comment to my earlier post on JEP-0070. Oh cool, I’m #2 on google for that search. Anyway, as you may recall, this JEP is about using Jabber as an out-of-band authentication mechanism for web, i.e. HTTP based applications. If you don’t mind, I’ll just paste the whole comment.
John Doe (wow, someone actually is named that?) said, and I quote:
I think that Mozilla needs to implement an integrated and hidden Jabber client, rather than have Mozilla speak to your Jabber client.
The reason is that in this way the user would be able to maintain seperate Jabber identities for chatting and for logging into sites (thus avoiding SPAM on his chat IM account). Also it would be easier for a user to retain anonymity in this way, by selecting a different Jabber identity for each site he visits. I believe that this is easier and more practical if the Jabber client is implemented in Mozilla.
Now I don’t know about it being necessary to have multiple jabber accounts to acheive this anonymity, but jabber embedded within Mozilla? Genius! My opinion would be not a full jabber client, but more of a middleware thing. It just sits there handling some extra communication duties that fall outside of the predominately one-way (downlink) transfer that HTTP already handles.
What do y’all think? (I’m from Georgia, “y’all” is allowed here.)
## update
Hmm, looks like #3 on that google search shows that Gajim now has JEP-0070 support. Way to go for them, now Psi needs it.
Quoth the Kev on the mailing list
Ok people, we have test3 available featuring assorted bugfixes an
improvements from test2. I think we’ve addressed all known issues
now, so if no-one finds more we’ll go gold in a week or so.
Downloads available at Sourceforge