DygiScape

If you actively listen to streaming music online, you might recall hearing audio PSA’s about Saving Net Radio. Internet radio is on its way of being axed thanks to the Copyright Royalty Board. We all need to stand up and fight for the right to listen to independent online radio. Luckily, there is a glimpse of hope.

In a nutshell, the Copyright Royalty Board raised royalty fees [pdf] that an online radio station must pay to be permitted to rebroadcast copyrighted material. The staggering raise on the fees will put all internet radio out. This is not a solution to piracy, it does not compensate the artists, it accomplishes nothing! Further, when thousands of users and internet broadcasters appealed, they were denied a hearing. It only exemplifies the corruption in decisions like this.

One has to really anticipate how people will react to this, you know the average person. What has historically happened, when a method to disrupt someone’s ability to enjoy something online, they will just go for it overseas. This has happened with KaZaA when their software was deemed illegal on US territory. This also happened with The Pirate Bay, when they were raided (with a country who enforces copyright infringement). They’re about to be back up standing stronger than ever.

I’ll say it again — Silencing Internet broadcasters does not and will not cease copyright infringement.

For every step they make to halt downloading of music or video, I’ll download three. If you are ‘leet, then you know that sound similar to Maddox and his approach to vegetarians. This isn’t about compensating the artists, is the fact that people are relying on our government to regulate the Internet. This is only just the tip of the iceberg, I encourage anyone who values their right to privacy online to question authority on this one.

Luckily, there is a bill (H.R. 2060, “Internet Radio Equality Act”) that will nullify this. The only thing though, you need to get your congressman to help sponsor it. Go to SaveNetRadio.org and follow the steps. It’s easy, and it may make the difference if we hear silence on May 15th.

[tags]Radio, Music, Internet, SaveNetRadio, Equality, Copyright, CRB, Piracy, Users, Shoutcast[/tags]

Blogging, Geeky, Personal, Politics Government, internet, music

This morning I had my first taste of driving into the District. It’s one thing to casually drive on a Sunday to sightsee, but during rush hour it’s a whole other ballgame.

Here’s my take-aways from today:

• Toll Roads are not faster
• If the speed limit is 65MPH, 80MPH is the acceptable speed.
• When the great state of VA reminds you that the speed limit is “RADAR ENFORCED,” the acceptable speed limit is 78 MPH.
• Despite the sale and use of Radar Detectors are illegal in District of Columbia and Virginia land, you are presented with signs reminding you.
• Keeping a “safe distance” from the vehicle in front of you is not an option.
• Everyone hates Maryland drivers for good reason.
• Maryland drivers hate Virginia drivers.
• DC drivers hate Virginia and Maryland drivers.
• When merging lanes, you must always compete for the #1 spot, otherwise you’ll be #5.
• When traffic is moving at 80MPH, stopping short to cut across five lanes is not uncommon.
• With all the money people invest in their luxury vehicles, somehow everyone is reading a paper, on a conference call, or checking their Blackberry all at once.
• No one is caught for speeding. Seriously — despite the bad reputation state police have here.
• The Outer Loop and Inner Loop are merely axises of confusion.
• When passing someone, you don’t actually advance further than a few inches past someone, as you want a photo finish.
• LOL, Electric Cars. You’re kidding right?
• If miss your exit, rest assured you’ll find it as you complete your lap again.
• Lane markings are just suggestions drive wherever the hell you want.
• If your light changes to yellow, go full throttle because it’ll be 8 minutes until you can go again.
• Pull over to the left if you need to take that necessary cell phone call. (WTF?)
• Flat tire? Call AAA. (Seriously, I saw this guy turning his lug wrench the wrong way on his flat tire on his BMW).
• If you don’t have GPS, you’re screwed. With no sense of boundary or direction, you’ll be lost in minutes.

Well that’s my observations. Whether they are legal or not (or politically correct) is up to you. I made it in and out of DC, but damn, you have to be crazy to actually take that commute daily. If you do, I feel for you. All these references were made in humor so see it as that. In contrast, this is a considerably accurate description of Phoenix, Arizona traffic.

[tags]Washington DC, Traffic, I395, I495, Virginia, VA, MD, Driving, Toll Roads, Humor[/tags]

Personal I-395, I-495, I-95, internet, Lists, memes

Firefox is an awesome Web browser that supports third-party extensions. These add-ons add even more power and control to the popular browser. I use the Internet more than 8 hours daily, so I’ve tried and kept many extensions, and I’ll share my insight on them, here.

What are extensions? … Add-ons?
Extensions are enhancements for Firefox, serving a purpose of adding on features that aren’t natively available in the current Firefox release. For the sake of user-friendliness, Mozilla grouped the category of “extensions” and “themes” into Add-ons. Simply put, extensions add features and themes change the interface (colors, buttons, etc…)

I use the Internet a lot. Trust me, with a full time job that primarily exists online and a geeky life I need to support … I can say I’m probably using Firefox more than 8 hours daily. That said, I maximize my productivity with Firefox extensions and without them, I’d be pretty darn upset.

Extensions I Can’t Live Without:

1. Adblock Plus — With this extensions, I can speed up Web browsing by filtering out ads. This increases speed by about 25% when browsing. Adblock Plus instructs Firefox not to render any addresses that are in it’s blocklist, and works wonders when blocking ads. An extension that self-updates, lets me add custom strings, and even shows stats, is a keeper for me and many other users!
2. Fasterfox — This speeds up Web surfing by tweaking the internals of how Firefox retrieves web pages. It’s pretty straightforward. I also like to see how long a Web site took to load. Fasterfox also functions as a stopwatch to view the length of time to load a site. Powerful little tool for Webmasters, and helps speed things along for all users alike.
3. Forecastfox Enhanced — This extension delivers Weather alerts and forecast, all from Accuweather.com. This version is “enhanced,” adding a higher resolution RADAR picture for your area. I love it. It updates automatically and conveniently alerts you, but doesn’t bother you that a storm is coming. All you need to do is enter your ZIP code, and you’re done. No spyware, no BS. When you’re done, go ahead and uninstall Weatherbug.
4. Del.icio.us Bookmarks — The popular bookmarking service has their Firefox extension to help you synchronize bookmarks. It lets me tag sites right from my navigation bar, in seconds. I use this to access my bookmarks from anywhere, cross browser/OS. With tagging, it’s even easier to organize my bookmarks.
5. Colorful Tabs – If you’ve used tabbed browsing, you can understand how challenging it is to keep ‘tabs’ on your favorite Web sites. This extension colors the tabs so you can easily identify tabs by color. It know it sounds silly, but it’s awesome. I have about 5 tabs open any given time, so this definitely helps!

Bonus: When I’m performing Web development or SEO work, these extensions are invaluable for working with Web development and analyzing existing Web sites: Web Developer for viewing and changing pages on-the-fly and SearchStatus for performing SEO functions and viewing Google PageRank and Alexa Rank. Ideally, this isn’t for the masses, but is very useful for Web developers.

That’s the best of the best extensions that I use. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of useful extensions available for Mozilla products such as Firefox and Thunderbird. It all depends on how you use the Internet and what you want to accomplish. You can check out the Mozilla Add-ons site and see what suits you best.

Do you have a favorite extensions? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Blogging, Geeky, Tips firefox, internet, mozilla, Software

There was a time long ago when I didn’t have debt. I get to revisit that time again — partially. Two weeks ago, I completely paid off Chase and Orchard Bank.

Coincidentally, both of these were a considerably low balance ($200 or less) on them, but I looked at my interest rate and I was stunned. They were charging me 28% interest (Ouch!) on them and I paid little attention to it. Well, high interest can’t hurt me if there’s no balance, right?

My only question is do I keep the account open to have it reflect some (good) remarks on my credit history? Right now that matters to me, since I made some awful mistakes and still will be mending the financial damage I’ve done to myself.

I’d like to know what some financial pro’s think about me retaining a zero-balance credit account. Let me know in the comments!

Blogging, Personal Personal

So lately, I’ve been browsing some interesting blogs in the ’sphere and My Money Blog caught my attention. I’ve been reading it over the past few weeks, and got me thinking.

Here’s this guy who is just a regular person, blogging about saving money and shares his genius with others, collecting feedback and tips on the way. He openly sets out his goals and is pretty straightforward about it, too. He isn’t some self-hyped financial guru who talks about getting rich quick. He speaks to the heart of Financial America, I’d like to label as the middle class. So, I keep reading, and I learn he isn’t much older than me, and is simply applying common sense in managing his money — in the form of a blog.

Everyday, I’m learning awesome tips and gaining valuable insight. It’s almost better than reading a [boring] money or finance page on the big three. His unique style, combined with his straightforward tutorials, can help almost anyone learn to grapple their financial woes to the ground and remain in control. Seriously, this country rewards the rich, so the rich stay richer. The key is managing your money now, so you can manage it later.

Here are some helpful blog entries I’ve come across on his blog. I visit them a few times a week to refresh myself and begin to soak up the advice, you should too!

• My Rough Guide To Saving and Investing
• Earn 5%+ APY in a Savings Account
• Making Money From Balance Transfers - What Happens After The First Year?
• Big List of Free Budgeting Tools and Software
• How To Make Money From 0% APR Balance Transfers

I’ll talk about my money in a bit and I’ll see what you think in my next entry. For now, enjoy the link lovin’ above.

Blogging, Tips internet

I’d like to extend my warmest wishes to the families that were affected by this tragedy. I’m okay, I live approximately 280 miles from Blacksburg, VA; but this massacre affects all of us.
Media Coverage:

• Campus rampage is deadliest in U.S. history
• HE LINED STUDENTS AGAINST A WALL, THEN EXECUTIONS BEGAN…
• Witness: Gunman ‘didn’t say a single word’
• VIRGINIA TECH SHOOTING: Deadliest Campus Shootings in United States History
• Va Tech Massacre: Cops Still Trying to Tie Shootings Together
• AP: Questions Raised on Va. Tech Security

Social News:

• Wikipedia: Virginia Tech Massacre
• Digg: Massacre at Virginia Tech: 25 Confirmed Dead
• Netscape: Police: 32 Dead After Virginia Tech University Shooting
• Newsvine: Gunman Kills 32 in Virginia Tech Rampage
• Reddit: BREAKING: Gunman kills 20 at Virginia Tech
• Shoutwire: Breaking News: 32 People Killed in Shootings at Virginia…
• Tailrank: At least 20 dead in campus shootings

An interesting twist to this — is the social networking/media effect this has. In 1999, when Columbine happened, blogs were just starting up and it blogs weren’t a real effective form of communication. Today, things are different — bloggers are the citizen journalists. Whether that is with their personal accounts, their cellphone cameras or cell phone audio. People can instantly communicate. Let’s just say that some students had a BlackBerry or Sidekick, they could potentially IM their friends with something like “call the police — gunman on campus” This would be using social-technology for a purpose. Though, nothing is confirming or denying if any students used their phones for this.

Now, the blame is shed into the social networks themselves. Everyone always wants to know why Myspace or Facebook didn’t see this happening? The ironic part is that everyone wants privacy, and those networks do a considerable job protecting it. The question then becomes what boundaries (and responsibilities) do social networks have in addressing social issues? Should social networks apply Bayesian filtering for anything that resembles homicidal or suicidal tendencies? How do you quantify that? These are all questions that will be coming up as time progresses in the story. Personally, I don’t want a computer bot looking at my messages deciding if I’m going to go on a rampage … because I know it is prone to error. The last thing we need is search warrants being granted because Myspace says you’re going to kill someone.

Blogging, Social Networking News, social media, Social Networking, social news, virginia

In my previous entry discussing why I’ve switched to Ubuntu, a pro-Windows user, Zotok, suggests that Microsoft [creates] the most secure Operating System[s] to date. While some will shake their head in disagreement, let’s look at the facts and find out OS is the most secure.

Zotok, an avid user of Windows who intends on eventually switching to Mac, cites his source of information to an Inquirer article, Symantec tells world that Windows is most secure OS, states that Symantec ranks Windows Vista first, Red Hat second, and Apple third. I find this report rather interesting because Symantec typically spits agenda along the lines of political scare-tactics with PC users to make sure they’ve purchased Norton. As the world turn, not even Norton can protect you any more. Further, he suggests that Microsoft has over 40,000 security engineers who make certain our favorite OS isn’t plagued with hacks.

Ubuntu, which is a community developed spawn of Debian, was only issued 213 Secunia advisories since 2005. A majority of those problems were minor to medium risk and all of them — yes, 100% — have been fixed by the vendor. Secunia is an independent computer security firm who assesses security risks in the IT industry.

Microsoft, which produces popular operating systems such as Windows XP and Vista, has 183 advisories for Windows XP and eight Windows Vista advisories dated from 2003. The average risk of the issues is “Medium/High,” so the severity of these issues and the impact is significantly higher than Ubuntu. However, there is still a current unpatched 16-25% of all advisories that currently exist.

For completeness of this entry, I decided to take a look at OpenBSD, a free Unix-based operating system. Since 2003, there have been a total of 81 advisories related to OpenBSD, and 100% of those have been successfully patched. Those advisories have been rated “Less to Moderate” in terms of criticalness of the issue. OpenBSD prides itself on security and it is clearly evident by those statistics.

So the lesson learned here today, is that is not how many vulnerabilities you have or how many security engineers you throw at them — but the overall impact on what the vulnerabilities have to users and how a vendor patches them. Microsoft which is historically the most insecure operating system, is always playing catch-up in terms of security and the facts are quite clear they still have more to go.

You could potentially have 100 vulnerabiltiies, but they won’t do one bit of damage of 100 are patched. By that rule, Linux and Unix are the obvious winners in this comparison.

What do you think about the suggestion that Windows is the Most Secure OS ever? Share you thoughts (and facts) in the comments!

[tags]Windows, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Linux, Security, Comparison, WTF, OpenBSD[/tags]

Blogging, Geeky debate, Linux, microsoft, Security

In my quest for the ideal computing experience, Ubuntu is the winner. I’ve been switching between Windows XP, Windows Vista and Ubuntu [Feisty Fawn]; all in all, Ubuntu takes the cake for many reasons. If you are interesting in learning more about Linux then continue reading.

Why doesn’t Windows suit my needs? Performance and reliability. I am absolutely sick and tired of waiting for things to open. Windows is a self-mutilating operating system that has an inefficient. After many times fixing Windows Media hassles, I am done with Windows.

I tried Windows Vista Ultimate for about two weeks. Honestly, it isn’t much different, except it asks you for permission to do anything. Being annoyed beyond all belief, I disabled User Account Control — thereby defeating the “secure” advantages within Vista. It seemed the only real benefit was a few little aesthetics that only slow down the computing experience. Much like its predecessor, I have to reinstall everything all over again. From AIM to Word — I had to do it. Hours later, it was evident that Vista wasn’t much faster or improved anything.

I tried Ubuntu as well about a few weeks ago to test out and tinker with what it’s all about. The usability is by far competitive with Windows and Mac; and depending on your needs, exceeds all expectations. It does what I want, it makes the right about of recommendations for me, it is completely customizable, and comes pre-loaded with tons of free applications.

Here are my 6 reasons why Ubuntu is Better than Windows:

1. Licensing - All software “out of the box” is GNU Public License (GPL) compliant. This means you do not have to pay a dime for any program. No activation, no hassle and fully legitimate. Whether you want to use Ubuntu for yourself, a friend, or a business — you’re encouraged to.
2. No Viruses, Spyware, Adware. Zilch, nada, nothing. Windows pretty much requires you to install third party software such as Spybot, Adaware and also an anti-virus suite. Some of these applications take away from your computer’s resources.
3. Firefox is built right in. Not that it’s necessarily hard to download and install, but the safest and most secure Web browser is pre-installed and makes it easy to use.
4. Simple Installation Process. I’m willing to say that installing Ubuntu is as simple as Windows.
5. Everything you need included for free. Everything you could want — a full-featured office suite, a multi-network chat client, e-mail, video, music, graphics, and even games. If it isn’t there, the built in Synaptic software manager quickly downloads and installs software.
6. It works. Those two words couldn’t explain it any better. If you’ve got a problem (which you won’t) you can consult the Ubuntu Forums. This is a great source of information and getting fairly quick help when you need it.

And that’s it. It’s a relief to not have to deal with any more problems that Redmond sends my way. I recommend to anyone who is remotely interested to download Ubuntu and give it shot. You don’t even have to install it to use it. The “Live CD” lets you try it without any changes to your computer.

If you’re still on Windows, what hold you back from switching?

Geeky Linux, Lists, microsoft, Ubuntu

O Rly? MySpace is now letting users know they’ve been phished. The only problem, is that their detection is wrong. I left a comment on my friend’s profile that included an image. It was pretty clear cut. If that is all it takes for number one social network to restrict your account, then we have a problem.

[UPDATE]  Learn how to prevent your MySpace account from being hacked, in this follow-up!

Here is what the “You’ve Got Phished” notice looks like:

I understand that false-positives might happen. Perhaps this slipped past their QA. Not having a means to verify this or submit feedback, is a real shame. You’d think that MySpace would have a corporate blog to communicate changes and collect feedback, but they don’t. Rest assured, you can contact them if you want to advertise on there. Why not let users know (in the form of a blog) about upcoming changes. Bulletins and account notices like the above are weak, misleading, and feel like ads.

Has spam and phishing on MySpace finally hit a breaking point? All my messages and friend invites in the past year have all been spam. Frankly, this annoyed me because it adversely impacted my experience and coined mistrust in connecting with people on the network. I think that they are scrambling to find a solution and honestly, many users will be affected.

Before any pro-MySpacers claim they have an “aggressive” stance against spam — Prove it. Besides only having poor communication to solicit user feedback, I just received another invite from a woman in NY who is apparently ‘on cam right now’. Their apathetic and ignorant approach to resolving problems early (such as spam) is why users are turning to other social networks.

What are your thoughts on MySpace phishing and spam?

Blogging, Geeky, Social Networking Help, myspace, Phishing, Security

I briefly created this picture above as a means of stating that the same propaganda that Tim O’Rielly is marching around conferences with is almost on the same terms as Senator Ted Steven’s Internet is a series of tubes gibberish.

From the words of the great Web guru, “Web 2.0 is about controlling data.”

No, it isn’t. If understanding and embracing Web 2.0 attitudes came down the optimizing the infrastructure of storing, transmitting and displaying data; then companies like Omniture, AOL Transit Data Network, Akamai, and of course — big brother himself, Google are all “masters” of Web 2.0. These companies are phenomenal at transmitting and caching data but I disagree that they are masters of Web 2.0.

First, before you can understand what “Web 2.0″ is, you must understand what Web 1.0 was. In all honesty, a lot of these conferences do a poor job of looking back and like to hype up the monetization factor of the Web. Traditionally, consumers would access a Web site where content providers gave it to them. Users had very little in choice, they just got what they received. This also when Dial-Up was at it’s peak or breaking point.

Well, you can call Web 1.5 the “Syndication” era. Providers understood that users wanted variety. Yahoo was one of the first providers to really embrace these challenges, letting users customize their “My Yahoo” service to aggregate news from a user’s choice of providers. Whether you call this “controlling data,” may vary on your interpretation — but it actually focuses on listening and adapting to your users needs.

Listening to your users needs is probably the key to Web 2.0 success. I mean, if a Web 2.0 startup doesn’t listen to their users, how will they get off the ground? MySpace is the exception to the rule. They grew excessively large to the point of allowing spammers to exploit their network. Look at Flickr, Digg, Google Maps, MapQuest: They understand the bottom line with customers, they are ultimately the one that is in control.

Web 2.0 is not about controlling data, it is about handling it responsibly, and enabling users to control the data, not you. I rest my case.

What do you think?

Blogging, Geeky OpEd, Rants, web 2.0