I don’t know how they get away with calling these non-profit. The Consumerist calculates that the interest being paid by their example case is still at 252%. Tags: Scams - Ripoffs - Dirty Tricks

Leaving comments that are short and irrelevant to the conversation is a spammer trick for getting bloggers to approve their comment (which usually has a link attached to a site they want to drive traffic to). However, I got three such comments with no links so I wasn’t sure if they were spam or not at first. However, I solved that pretty fast. Do a simple google search for “Dakota Bolkestein” and you’ll see that everywhere there is a commenter with this name, the comment is the same; “Thank you”. Yesterday, I got two more ambiguous comments so I looked them up too: It’s clear that these are not comments by real people, but I wonder what the point is if there’s no link associated with them. Either way, I’ve now deleted those comments and will be watching the given article for more of the same.

The results of this case are signifigant because the RIAA didn’t have to prove that the defendants actually shared anything. They won their suit because they were able to prove that the defendants made the songs available in their shared folder which, to the RIAA, is the same as distributing whether or not anyone actually downloads it.

Whenever you get something like this, always go to the source, never respond to the e-mail. Tags: Scams - Ripoffs - Dirty Tricks

From the Washington Post, a fairly concise description of what the CSPC is, where it came from, why it's necessary, and why it's almost completely irrelivant today. JTAG ERROR: No consumerist_ht index defined

So he's finally gone. He didn't get prosecuted yet, but will he? That's the question. On this, all I have to say is that the rats are leaving… hopefully that means we'll see a sinking ship soon. Tags: Congress, George Bush

It's so nice that our spy chief slipped up and released this information. If it helps the lawsuits against AT&T and the like go forward, all the better. One comment about something McConnell said: …. Your point? Typicall of the Bush administration to cite allowing lawbreakers to continue in their positions because, gosh, it would be bad to have consequences for illegal actions. Tags: George Bush

Here’s a neat thought. Drug test the sewage to determine the drug usage of whole cities or neighborhoods. This would be a great tool for determinining safe places to live, though there are certainly some privacy implications if this were used to narrow down to individuals.

Microsoft uses the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool, a piece of DRM software with a catchy marketing slogan, to spy on your computer and then make a decision whether or not your version of Windows is valid. Assuming that it decides it's not (even if it is), it will disable your computer. The best part of the deal is that on Windows XP machines, they slipped the "tool" into the list of critical system updates so that anyone who didn't bother to look over the list of installs on the last update (or just has fully automatic updating turned on), would get the software without knowing about it. Well, it turns out that problems with the WGA server can shut down a lot of computers, very fast. It's nice to know that DRM works isn't it? Tags: Microsoft

There's been buzz that the new game, Bioshock, comes installed with a rootkit. It turns out that it's rootkit free… sort of. The point here is that people were worried that there's inappropriate software secretly installed with the game, and that much is true, it's just DRM, not an actual rootkit. As Ars Technica puts it: