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May 31, 2006
Whistleblowers
Via the BBC
The US Supreme court has limited the rights of government whistle-blowers by ruling that they will not be protected under the First Amendment.The ruling, which was passed by a 5-4 vote, means employees are not protected by free speech laws when speaking out during the course of their duties.
The decision will affect all of the nation's 20 million public employees.
But it was criticised by civil rights groups, who said it would discourage employees from exposing misconduct.
In practice, it will strengthen the government's ability to discipline public employees who make allegations of official misconduct.
Right, because our government has been acting so transparently, without graft, corruption, bribery, kickbacks, or collusion of late. *sigh*
Posted by griffjon at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 15, 2006
More spamusement
It's times like these that I really wish I could actually contact the advertiser.
I am happy with your visiting today Sir,I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (link removed) are bad.
Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..
My dog and I are still alive :)
Posted by griffjon at 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Spying on the media?
ABC News is reporting that they've gotten a leak (heh) that the record of their phone calls is being monitored to... try and stop leaks.
Posted by griffjon at 08:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 07, 2006
PlayListCopy
So, I don't own an iPod. I do own a USB memory stick, and I am an OCD winamp playlist maker.
My frustration is this: I have an EXCELLENT winamp playlist for x. I want to take this playlist to a party, or work, or whatever, using my USB stick. I am left with not many good options. I can go through, find each file by looking at Winamp's metadata and manually copy each one over (most of my music is labeled and in folders, but still, this takes lots of time for non-artist/genre related music).
Or I can use a winamp plugin to write it out to wav files and re-encode these. That's a lot of machine and processor time.
OR, I can write a little perl program that parses m3u files and copies them to the current Windows user's desktop into a directory named after the playlist, and share this code with The World. It's GPL, and available at
Posted by griffjon at 01:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 06, 2006
Privacy and Piracy
In working on a short final paper dealing with the US/EU privacy debate, I had some thoughts about the current state of the music and movie industry's approach to piracy.
The EU/US disconnect on privacy has the band-aid of the Safe Harbor Act, which allows the US market to self-regulate and use privacy seal programs (remember TrustE?) which can then be linked to acceptable practices under the privacy directive. Now, these self-certification systems are ... dubious at best. For TrustE, you basically wrote your privacy statement and proved to them that you did what you said. It was OK to say "I take all my customer data and credit card numbers and send them to business associates in Russia" -- as long as that accurately portrayed your business processes, you win a seal! This didn't really catch on, but remains the trust model.
I want this market-regulated system for piracy! I want to present media producers with my media consumption practices, and they can choose whether or not to sell media to me.
e.g.
With this media, I will:
Listen to it.
Copy it to a portable music device
Burn it to CDs to listen to in my car
Share with my friends, so as to introduce them to new artists.
I will not share it with anonymous users.
I will not upload it to the Internet in a public forum, download site, or p2p network
etc.
Of course, this would require two-directional negotiation and data flow, instead of the one-directional "You can't do anything" approach of DRM.
Posted by griffjon at 02:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack