Geocities is not your only Krull infostop, either. You can find cheats for the game, an online RPG, someone who has made a replica of the Glaive, a loving review, and even a video clip. Amazon will ship Krull on DVD to you in 24 hours for $18, but alas Liam Neeson didn’t choose to participate in the special features.

The British government was caught plagiarising 12 year old student papers to justify the war in February. Downing Street defended the report anyway, but now Blair can’t escape charges the report was hyped.

The story is also falling apart in the US. The Marine commander in Iraq says intelligence about chemical weapons on the battlefield was “simply wrong”. CIA insiders are breaking ranks, shifting blame from analysts to policy makers. Colin Powell himself reportedly thought the weapons argument was “bullshit”. Wolfowitz admits that the weapons issue was used because it was bureaucratically expedient.

And the story of Jessica Lynch, rescued POW, has been overblown, probably deliberately. Her family is forbidden to talk about it. So far Jessica is keeping her head down, but reports that she has amnesia are false.

The pressure is on to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The US has refused access to Iraq for UN arms inspectors, so it probably won’t be long before the US “finds” something on its own.

The political situation in the US is so bad that my friends (pro and anti-Bush) have an unspoken agreement just not to talk about it. Silence = Death.

I did a survey from three sites of dubious legality: torrentfiles.com, animetorrents.com, and torrents.co.uk. In 870 .torrent files I found 32 different trackers. The top 4 trackers accounted for 75% of all the files. Not a lot of diversity. Of course, my sample is biased.

I was also interested in how folks use the BitTorrent metainfo. About 80% of all files use a piece length of 256k, followed in popularity by 512k and 1024k. I also found a bunch of unofficial tags: path.utf-8, creation date, comment, and md5sum.

I’d like to do a more formal survey with a wider sample; this torrent search engine claims 8200+ files.

info                
  length          41470132
  piece length    262144
  name            Halo2_E3.wmv
  pieces          [159 SHA-1 values]
announce        http://news.gametab.com:6969/announce

But it’s easy to criticize; BitTorrent is still awfully cool.

I’m trying to watch Red vs. Blue. So I download the DivX (encoded to 84 kbytes/sec), set it up to watch full screen, then sit back from the monitor. Ugh! Blurry, blocky, smeared. I’m watching the watery reflection of a movie. It looks better if I don’t play full screen, but what’s the point?

I’m beginning to think MPEG-2 set the right limits on encoding. My experiments with DVD ripping left me thinking the 5:1 disk space savings of DivX wasn’t worth the quality loss.

My favourite glitch group is Autechre. Their Tri Repetae++ is brilliant, but it was Chiastic Slide I first noticed. I picked it up cold at a record store because of the beauty of the Designer’s Republic cover art.

The new album is Draft 7.30. So far it’s a bit rhythm-heavy for me, I prefer the lushness of Amber. But I’ve hardly listened it yet.

More Autechre: discography (with cover art), Warp Records site for Draft 7.30 with some RealAudio samples, and the Amazon search leads to albums with lots of samples.

BitTorrent is pregnant hackerware - it works great but is still poorly documented. And the apps aren’t well integrated. Someone could build a killer tech company out of it. Some extra info is available in Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and the BitTorrent Wiki.

Me, I started downloading by doing

Facial muscle modelling allows them to do dynamic expressions and lip-sync, in-game and in realtime. Physics modelling not only gives each object mass and inertia, but also complex surfaces to tumble against and flexible shapes to bend. It’s harder to judge the AI, but if what they say in the voiceover is true it’s pretty amazing. It’s like cutting edge movie CGI five years ago, but realtime on your PC.

All this technology will make for a beautifully immersive experience. I hope the story will match - not much in the trailer, but the modelling of the locations was so beautiful I’m willing to bet they’ve got a good backstory.

Between Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Deus Ex: Invisible War it’s going to be a good year for first person shooters.

Boy I hate Perl. Why do I have to type ;, $, and @? Ugh. Python rulez!!1@!

What I don’t understand is the diversity of source IP addresses. Are they really users of www.gevasys.de, www.mod.gov.sk, and cair.res.in? Do they 0wnz0r those systems? Can they spoof source IP? Update: Todd, who was hit too, says that the hosts that accessed us were running open HTTP proxies.

I found a pattern to detect the spam, so for now I’m ok. Won’t last though.

Nevermind, that was last season. Wrong annoying character.

SpaceMonger is good software. It tells you where your disk space is going using a two dimensional TreeMap layout. MarketMap is another interesting use of this visualization technique. (Java, caveat browsor).

I think SpaceMonger replaces my favourite disk visualizer, the ten year old xdu (née xdiskusage).

Please tell me if you see any caching weirdness.

The issue is that mod_gzip includes the following header in all responses:

Unfortunately it also triggers a bug in MSIE - the browser won’t cache any document with that header! So with mod_gzip 95% of the world’s browsers won’t cache any pages from the server. Some bandwidth savings.

It’d be nice if mod_gzip was smart enough not to add the Vary: header if it didn’t compress the file, but it’s not. A partial workaround is to turn mod_gzip off for files it won’t be compressing anyway, like images.

Part of the problem with the most recent flaw is that it had been there for months and Microsoft has no way of telling how many accounts were compromised. Nice.

Centralized authority is dangerous.

First I need to get the bits. RealAudio streams are deliberately difficult to copy. Thanks to a friend I found Streambox VCR, outlaw software that is able to download a stream to a local .rm file. Don’t miss Flying Raichu’s story_of_crack.txt where he splices code from an old beta into this version to make it work again.

Now to convert the RealMedia bits to MP3. A search for rm mp3 convert is heavily spammed. The best option seems to be to play the audio through RealPlayer and capture the waveform at the audio driver level. There are zillions of Windows programs that capture audio. I settled on Total Recorder because it was the most popular on KaZaA. (No, I didn’t steal it - $12). It creates a fake sound driver in front of the real one to capture the sound. It also does a cool thing where it tricks Real into playing faster than realtime so the conversion doesn’t take so long.

Total Recorder captures the waveform and can push it through LAME to get MP3. But you can’t easily download a LAME binary, you have to go to France to find it.

The resulting MP3 is too quiet; MP3Gain fixes it.

This is a lot of work to tape a song off the radio. DRM doesn’t stop you if you’re persistent, but it’s enough to stop most people. And just like the way Macrovision prevents you from plugging your DVD in through your VCR, the restrictions on Internet audio and video prevent you from replaying them the way you want.

With Palladium what I did will be impossible. I won’t be able to install Streambox or Total Recorder on my own computer, or if I do I will be locked out of using RealMedia.

I have a big smile on my face now remembering the song “Warm Leatherette”.

I finally figured out how to get Vice City to work with Alcohol 120% - have to rip with DPM turned on to defeat SecuROM 4.8.

Why do I have to have a $50 program just to use the $50 game I bought? At this rate I’m tempted to steal the games off of a P2P network: at least those versions don’t have copy protection.

I believe that Microsoft’s Palladium is going to make all this a moot point as we lose control over the very software running on our computers. We are doomed to DRM hell.

The only real fix is his Rule #8: Trust in the server is everything in a client-server game. He left out the corollary: only build client/server games and make sure the server is a trusted computer.

Even then it’s not going to be perfect, as noted here with the cheats in Diablo II. Unless the server is perfect the hackers will find server bugs to make bad things happen. The whole problem is fascinating. It reduces to the same problem of distributed systems consistency in the face of Byzantine failure. Or copy protection, or DRM. This is what Microsoft’s Palladium is all about.

The game works pretty well so far, much better than the mess that was GTA3 on the PC. Some annoyances: it installed DirectX 9 without asking my permission, there’s a silly off-by-one display glitch in the cutframe letterboxing, and I can’t get Alcohol 120% to emulate their crappy copy protection. But the framerates are good and the graphics are beautiful. Even the intro is cool, retro C64 load screen.

Lots of laugh out loud moments. My favourite so far, the little putt-putt moped called the “Faggio”.

There’s CP1252, the almost-but-not-quite ISO-Latin-1 that is responsible for the evil breakage of “smart quotes” by encouraging web publishers to act like 0x93 is a valid way to represent a left double quote. At least it encodes É in a sensible place, 0xc9.

But why stop at one codepage? There’s also CP437, an ancient DOS codepage that is nothing like Latin-1 but contains Latin-1 characters like É at 0x90. Yes, that’s a different place than CP1252.

Apparently both of these evil 19th century codepages are still coexisting on my 21st century Windows XP system. I just dumped a bunch of MP3 files from my WinXP box to Linux and found the filenames hopelessly garbled. I finally guessed they’re in CP437. I’m a bit surprised Samba didn’t take care of it for me.

Python to the rescue:

Online games have always been victim to hacks, made even worse by the real world market on eBay for characters, items, and cheats. Blizzard was clever and went to a server based model to prevent hacks. Apparently it’s not good enough, because the game is awash with superpowerful obviously hacked items.

I found a good article analyzing the motivation and sources for these cheats. The motive is tens of thousands of dollars (real dollars). The source? Harder to say, because software and virtual property gets passed from hand to hand before it hits eBay. The author of the article above fingers a student at Tsinghua University.

From Beijing to the Bay Area, mediated by a virtual world.

The marketing strategy with Animatrix is great. Build excitement for The Matrix: Reloaded by giving away related content, then sell the giveaway too. You can preorder it on Amazon now, but it doesn’t ship until June 3.

May there be mercy on man and machine for their sins.

Bugs like this are incredibly common, usually not worth reporting. But Passport is different. Passport wants to be the single trusted repository of personal data, all your eggs in one basket. I worry they don’t have a fundamental systems security model to make that safe.

This isn’t the first time Passport has been hacked, either.

The protocol design is very clever. It’s as low level as it gets. The hardware device accepts commands like “write this MP3 data into memory” or “stick this byte on the I2C bus”. All the hard work is done in the server.

That means functionality can be added without hacking the device. Streaming Internet audio, Ogg Vorbis files? Have the server do the hard work and send MP3 to the device. Menus work by sending IR codes to the server, so you can add new functions. Some nut has added a calculator.

The server may be the barrier to the SLIMP3 becoming common. Anyone into MP3s has a PC in their house and may even have a network. But do they have a stable server machine? It’d suck if mom’s relaxing music in the parlour is interrupted because junior is playing SimCity.

I live in a quiet suburban neighbourhood of San Francisco, not the kind of place where you’d expect this kind of petty crime. And I always lock my car door. Did I forget?

I love movies like this, they remind me of my melodramatic Texas heritage. Baby Jane was difficult to watch again. 134 minutes is too long and the performances aren’t as good as I remembered. The most surprising thing on second viewing was the strong role of Elvira, the loyal maid, played by Maidie Norman. Complicated class and race relations.

The most astonishing thing for me about Baby Jane is that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would agree to make the film. They are both so sad and Bette Davis is so hideously ugly. It comes across now as camp rather than horror.

I hadn’t realized there was a series of older actress exploitation films.

I was really hoping to find a wireless MP3 component. There are a couple, but none seem as good as the SLIMP3 with a wireless/ethernet bridge. The cd3o has a voice interface that sounds like a terrible idea. The Exstreamer sounds cool but doesn’t have any interface at all. Gloolabs’ Homepod is still vapourware.

What really sold me is the SLIMP3 is hacker friendly. You have to love a company that makes developer resources available via SourceForge. They remind me of Empeg.

I imagine SLIMP3 will be acquired by someone. I wonder if they can remain hacker-friendly while producing a product simple enough for the average consumer?

Foveon has a sensor technology called X3 that works around this problem by stacking several translucent sensors in a single pixel. In theory this should give sharper pictures. So far the Sigma SD9 is the only camera out there with the Foveon sensor ($1500). Alas, the reviews suggest this first camera isn’t quite up to the sensor.

We’ve killed around 2500 Iraqi civilians. That’s roughly World Trade Center numbers. No one has an estimate of how many soldiers we killed. Given that we’ve liberated Iraq, shouldn’t we care about the dead soldiers? They were victims as well.

The US is deeply into the arrogance of power. It’s wonderful that only 132 Americans have died in this war. But it is dangerous that our power is so disproportionate. We lash out across the globe without feeling consequence. The rest of the world is horrified at our violence, and in the US we are ignorant.

But the UI in the firmware is crummy. Enter RockBox, an open source firmware that was built by hacking the Archos. Works great: better UI, better music buffering for skip protection and battery life, and I think it even sounds better. iPod owners - it may be great design, but you’ll never be able to hack it.

Hardware companies should encourage this kind of thing.

And she’s going to move out of her boyfriend’s house at 5am? The boyfriend who lost his legs because of her? Cold.