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Anti-Sony manifesto

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So, Sony installs a rootkit in your PC when you buy a CD from them, in order to implement his DRM.

This was discovered by Mark Russinovich in October (highly technical post). In my personal opinion, this an unacceptable behavior, and I'm not alone: Frederico Oliveira wrote what I consider to be the first anti-Sony manifesto, which I totally subscribe.

Happy birthday Firefox

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One year later, Firefox turns into a baby with 11.51% market share.

Update: these guys are serious about changing from IE to Firefox

Network neutrality II

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The discussion continues, and it reached the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the US.

I'm really interested in this issue, since I work in an ISP, being a free Internet advocate, so you can imagine the duality I'm feeling these days.

Shaw Cable, a Canadian company, is limiting P2P bandwidth using technology from Ellacoya, so we can now say it already started. The technology is out there, and telcos are ready to start using it in large scale. This is a very important question, that goes from freedom to innovation, trough economics and technology.

I understand the economics of launching a broadband network, but I also understand (and agree) with Vint Cerf words. I'm waiting, and listening to the live hearing webcast.

Update: this issue has been digged

Security toons

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8 years ago I gave my first presentation on network security. It's a hard topic, and the worst parts were explaining how cryptography works, and explaining software bugs as the buffer overflow or a race condition. Meanwhile, Wired as made an amazing job explaining the formers with an animation. You don't get the cryptography how to (guess prime numbers theory is really hard to draw) but instead you can have a glance at some moments of really bad software.

Update: NSA's site for CryptoKids.

Feed fishing

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Due to the lack of time, today's menu is about grilled feeds:

  • Microsoft keeps surprising, and is offering Visual Studio and SQL Server. It's free, even for comercial usage, but it's only a Express Edition;
  • An excelent how-to implement your own helpdesk company, using UltraVNC and some webservices. Requires heavy geekary;
  • Joined the Morfik Pioneers program. A very interesting application that will allow building web applications (AJAX) with a graphical user interface;
  • Finnaly, follow-me phoning, or how to implement bluetooth proximity detection with Asterisk.