I’ve long turned to CNET’s Bandwidth Meter and McAfee’s Internet Connection Speedometer to test my internet bandwidth upload and download speeds. But Speedtest.net’s new Ookla Speed Test offers a fresh new interface and stores your 10 most recent tests for comparison purposes.
In one corner we have Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig speaking to LinuxWorld attendees about the Creative Commons license, and in the other we have a political party in Sweden called the Pirate Party establish a commercial darknet that lets anybody send and receive files (including copyrighted material) anonymously without being tracked or traced.
I’ve met some of the folks over at Creative Commons and fully support their effort to create a new type of copyright law that allows content creators to share their original work with others and for others to legally use our build upon those works with a Creative Commons license.
I like the idea so much that all of the content on this site as well as nearly 8,100 of my photos has a Creative Commons license.
In summary, Creative Commons is good.
Earlier this year (January 2006), The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) became a new political party in Sweden. The party strives to reform laws regarding intellectual property, including copyright, patent and the protection of design. The party also wants to strengthen the right to privacy.
On Tuesday, the Pirate Party created Relakks, a Swedish broadband subscription service that has the potential to become a large scale commercial darknet.
Typically, a Darknet is a private virtual network where users only connect to people they trust, usually containing fewer than 10 users each. Darknets are file sharing networks where users can share files with each other — sometimes copyrighted files such as mp3s and movies.
The folks over at Relakks think they have developed a secure and legal way for users to communicate with other users anonymously. They do this by giving you a new IP address over a 128-bit encrypted VPN connection between your computer and Internet.
Using Relakks would prevent your existing ISP from intercepting or tracking the applications you use to access the internet or the communication/traffic they create. In short, your ISP wouldn’t know if you were simply checking your email or file swapping Metallica’s songs via Kazaa.
In summary, it just got easier to switch over to the dark side of copyright law.
When Internet Explorer fails, troubleshooting can be difficult. Because it is well integrated with the operating system, it is difficult to uninstall and reinstall.
Today, one machine kept displaying the following error:
iexplore.exe - Application Error
The instruction at “0×30cb0a4f” referenced memory at “0×00000000″. The memory could not be “written”. Click on OK to terminate the program.
While I was tempted to simply upgrade the user to IE7, I decided to first try Microsoft’s System File Checker.
System File Checker scans all protected files to verify their versions. If System File Checker discovers that a protected file has been overwritten, it retrieves the correct version of the file from the cache folder (%Systemroot%\System32\Dllcache) or the Windows installation source files, and then replaces the incorrect file.
To run the system file checker, press Start, Run, and then type in SFC followed by its options.
The most common usage of SFC are:
Once SFC is done, reboot. In my case, SFC didn’t fix the unwanted iexplore.exe error I was receiving. So I installed IE7 beta and then uninstalled IE7 beta, which did solve the problem.
On Saturday, August 5, 2006, a blog called “Little Green Footballs” posted a story entitled “Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut?” that revealed Reuters’ freelance photographer Adnan Hajj manipulated some photos he submitted from Iraq. Reuters eventually admitted Hajj’s wrongdoing and pulled all of his photos. But the blogging and television fallout continues.
In March, I was using the Associated Press’ AP Images World Wide Photos website when an image I downloaded and purchased appeared to have been digitally altered.
When I reported the problem to my AP Images photo sales representative and requested that I receive the original image instead, he accused me of making the changes. When I directed him the photo’s URL on the AP’s website, he admitted no wrongdoing and said that he cannot confirm or deny that he sees any evidence that the image was (or was not) altered, saying he is not trained to recognize photo imperfections.
I even blew up the image and drew arrows to help his untraied eye recognize that the image was altered:
Instead of taking the high road the way Reuters did by admitting the photo was altered and then promptly removing it, the AP Images denied any wrongdoing. My repeated emails and phone calls asking for them to replace the altered image they sold me with the original unaltered one went unanswered, saying that they have already credited my account and that the issue was resolved.
I eventually gave up. It wasn’t until a few months later that I noticed that AP Images removed the photo from their website and my Lightbox (a favorites tool on AP Images’ website) without ever apologizing or admitting they made a mistake.