We all know that major corporations at time are really hard to deal with being your average common man. That when you try to take on a company of big size to get something fixed, or just a comment on something is a task that seems a bit like climbing Mount Everest. This is something a guy named Adrian found out lately, when his Playstation 3 needed service. So what was the problem you ask?

Well, Adrian got his Playstation 3 as a Christmas gift, and for this reason he never got a receipt to go with it. So when he called Sony to have his Playstation 3 serviced, they of course asked his receipt, as to where he told them he had none as he got it for Christmas and the ones that bought it to him had lost their receipt. But there was a way to prove that his unit was still under warranty, as the sticker on the back that tells when the unit was manufactured clearly said that it was made “July 2007″.

This was not proof good enough for Sony, who still refused to accept the unit for repairs. Adrian was at a loss for what to do next, so he of course resorted to what many people do in this time and age; the internet. He was instructed to have the people that bought the unit to get their credit card company to deal with the matter, as they have much more weight in dealing with such a matters. Fair enough, but I find it hugely disturbing that companies fail to see the logic in such cases. When the customer can prove without the shadow of a doubt that a unit is still under warranty, the company should accept that proof. Yes, I know the rules are there for a reason, but for godness sake use your head and common sense!

Sony, I sincerely hope that you get this issue sorted you big brute!

The other day, a XBox 360 user by the name of Grant was banned from using XBox Live after his gamer tag “theGAYERgamer” was reported as being offensive by fellow gamers. Grant of course was somewhat stunned about this decision, so he tried to get in contact with Microsoft XBox Live customer support to inquire on the matter. There he got in contact with a customer representative by the name of Roxy, who could tell Grant that the greater XBox community found his tag offensive, but she herself admitted that she didn’t find it offensive.

We all know from online gaming that we at times find offensive and downright abusive players, and most games and servers has the ability to filter these elements out. If a player is offensive over voice comms, many games gives you the ability to mute the player in question. If a player continues to be abusive, most servers have server administrators that take the necessary steps to get rid of the unwanted elements. Unfortunately, there will always be disturbing elements as long as you have human players. Humans are per definition self destructive and abusive, but not everyone. And then comes the question of tolerance.

In the civilized world that we live in, being gay has become socially acceptable. People don’t look down upon gay people and frown upon their existence, at least not most people. When I look at a gamer tag like “theGAYERgamer”, I assume that the person behind the tag meant to be humorous and not offensive. Would people find tags like “theHAPPYgamer”, ‘”theHETROgamer”, “theSADgamer” or “theLONELYgamer” offensive? I rerckon not, and I find it sad that people have to be so petty as to report tags like ‘theGAYERgamer’. Seriously, don’t you people have better things to do?

I’ve seen far worse gamer tags than that, that are both discriminative, racist and offensive that are allowed and which are still allowed to use XBox Live. This is just plain stupid, let Grant play! And people, get a life! Remember, it’s only a game!

Today I was made aware of something that’s been pestering the Internet for ages. A trend that the pornography industry started ages ago, and has fooled more than one innocent web user. We all know how easy it is to make typos, both in letters, e-mails and when we enter the web address of the site we want to go to. This of course is really annoying, especially when we’re at work when we try to make this office friendly. So what is this method that so many use to fool innocent Internet users? Well, the technique is as easy as it is in terms ingenious. What companies do, is that they register a domain name with very similar spelling to a popular web site. For instance, it might be gooogle.com, googel.com, gogle.com etc. All possible misspellings of the word Google, that might get you to a site you didn’t ask for. So what happens when you misspell the domain name? Well, you’re taken to a page which in effect redirects your request to another site. This is something that porn industry has done for ages, and has gained them millions upon millions of unjustified hits.

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Piracy has always been a problem for software publishers and game makers, but over the years other parties has been struck with the same problem. We have the music industry fighting the spread of illegally copied music with formats such as MP3, WMA and OGG. One of the organizations fighting this battle is RIAA, the leading organ for music artists in the US. RIAA has during the years intensified their efforts to minimize online piracy. There has been new technology that has been developed to make sure people aren’t able to spread their legally downloaded music with DRM, and intensified efforts and co-operation with ISP’s to catch huge contenders in the piracy scene.

Not only that, but the spreading of big Hollywood blockbusters before they hit the movie screens has increased vastly the last years, and the MPAA is fighting this battle with claws, scissors and what not. Even though Kazaa and other pirate resources has been removed, it is still easy to find and download illegal material. Just before Christmas, there was a huge raid against pirate sites that hosted bit torrents. One of the internet’s most visited pirate sites, Suprnova was shut down along with well over 200 other sites. This was made possible with the co-operation with people from RIAA, MPAA and ISP’s all over the world. A majority of the bandwidth used on the internet is not used for web surfing, e-mail downloads or other legal activities. It’s used for online piracy. Of course, this has huge economical impact on the firms involved and it’s in their best interest to get rid of this growing problem.

Just recently, a unofficial program was made available for users of iTunes to download their music without the content being tagged with DRM information. Thus, the users were able to copy their legally downloaded content to other sources, such as other pc’s or to other users. I can understand the record industry’s need for the implementation of DRM, but it severely limits the end user’s ability to handle their content in the way they want. If I download some music from say iTunes, that I’ve paid for, I want this music to be available to me everywhere. That be on my desktop, my laptop or my portable MP3 player. With current DRM implementations, this is not possible. I would really wish for a world without the need for such.

But what about the fight against piracy, will it ever be won? In short, I have to say; “No way in hell!”. It’s a battle that can’t be won, there will aways be ways to limit it in some ways, but every technology made by man can be broken by man. Nothing is unbreakable, everything can be tampered with. And by that I mean, everything. Given enough time and resources, computer nerds across the world will find ways to avoid copy protections and other similar technologies. I’m not saying software publishers, record companies and Hollywood should stop the battle, but they have to face the fact that the problem will always be there. The key to this issue is to make it possible for everyone to co-exist in the same sphere, and develop solutions that works for the average consumer. By that, I mean a more versatile and flexible DRM system, and make downloadable music and movies cheaper. They have to set a price line that will be very competitive with buying the actual CD or DVD. The fact is that buying music or movies over the internet, means that you suffer a quality loss from buying the real deal. This is a sacrifice I sure as hell don’t want to pay extra for, I want a discount. Thus the price line has to be much keener than the real deal. If the big boys and their lawyers will listen to me, well, hell no. They’ve probably never heard of me. But spread the word, say your opinion. Start the revolution! Make us be heard! Only if they listen will they be able to minimize their problem with online piracy.

It’s seems like Apple has a few bad apples in their ranks. Just the other day, a blow to the freedom of speech was forced upon a few bloggers that was given some unrevealed information from an inside source from within Apple. The information they got was for an up and coming product from Apple, and of course, Apple was not to happy about this. Instead of actually trying to pin down the source on their own, making a minimal fuzz to finding their own rotten apple, they instead opted for the option to go into court and have the courts flush him/her out. Of course, this process doesn’t really cost a multi billion dollar corporation like Apple much, for them this is a mere case of lunch money. But what about Joe Average? Joe Average doesn’t have as deep pockets as Apple.

But this is really not what concerns me, what worries me is the fact that it limits our right to freedom of speech. Granted, I do not live in the United States, but in Norway where I live we have the same right to freedom of speech. It’s a right that not everyone has, unfortunately, but given the fact that we are blessed with this privilege one should cherish it and make use of it whenever possible. As any journalist or blogger would say, if they were given a chance to a big scoop on the terms that their sources would have to remain anonymous, both parties would agree to this. It’s all based on the freedom of speech. But what Apple has done here, is to take away that right. And that scares me.

Ok, I can admit as much as this. If I was Apple, or any other company no matter the size, I would also be angry at the fact that someone leaked information about an up and coming product. It’s like a game of poker, you give away some aspects of your game, but you never give away everything. A good poker player doesn’t only know how to count cards, but a good poker player also knows to do a good bluff and to get away with it. This is pretty much the same when you are working in product development, you look at the market and give out indicators of what you might and might not develop, but you never reveal everything. When someone leaks information of this sort, that does damage of various degrees. And I perfectly understand Apple for wanting to find this source. But what I do not understand is their method of finding this source.

I do not approve of leaking disclosed information to the public, but I do not approve of people/corporations trying to limit anyone’s ability to perform our right of freedom of speech either. I feel like it’s taking steps backwards in evolution. It is entirely up to corporations to have good internal routines for the handling of confidential material, and to make sure that their employees know the consequences of mishandling of confidential material. There are many ways with today’s technology to ensure this, and a high tech company such as Apple should be able to implement such features. The question of whether or not these bloggers made the right call to publish this material is for me, not really an issue in this case. They just exercised their right to freedom of speech.

As a result of this, we might end up with people not coming to the media with information. Information that you would not be able to do anything with on your own, but would have a much higher impact given to the media that knows how to work it. How many political scandals would never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for freedom of speech, and the ability to remain anonymous. What Apple has done with its crusade to find their own sinner, their own rotten apple, is to scare off future ’squealers’ from approaching the media in the fear that their own identity might be revealed and thus their own safety be jeopardized.

And that my friends is what freedom is all about, freedom to be who you are, to do what you want, and to say what you want. As a wise man once said;

A free society is a place where it is safe to be unpopular

Yes, you’ve heard me. And it’s a phrase being used on the net more and more often, and with a good reason. Not only are we being spammed via e-mail, but spammers have found other ways to spam us as well. You’ve had spam on IRC for ages too, but it’s not that often you read about IRC in the press. But recently, you’ve been getting spam over the instant messaging service from Microsoft, MSN. The new trend for spam sent over instant messaging services is called SPIM. But the spam that is really getting on my nerves these days, is blog spam. Over the last years, blogging has become a wide spread phenomena all over the glob. The usage of blogs has become so widely used, that it has become an influence on politics and the media. You only need to look back to what happened last year, with Dan Rather from CBS who was fired after having been slightly trigger happy with announcing a piece of information that turned out to be false. The case was blown wide open by a blogger, that could prove with simple methods that the case documents Dan Rather had based the case on was falsified. But to get back on track, spam!

As I said, lately I’ve been getting an insane amount of so called comment spam to my blog. This means, it’s spam disguised as comments to articles posted on my blog. Of course, all these comments are bogus and contains nothing else than advertisements to online gambling sites. Ok, I gotta hand it to them. They’ve found an area where it is easy to spam, and exploited that weakness for all it’s worth. But for goodness sake, who really likes spam, other than those that gain revenue from them!? NO ONE! I’m getting fed up with deleting comment spam daily, so today I’ve implemented a solution in the form of a WordPress plug-in to rid my blog of this problem. The plug-in is called Spam-Karma, and is written by Dr. Dave. So far it seems to be working quite well, and I will have my eyes fixed on what it does and how well it works. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

And to all you spammers:

May you all die a slow and painful death, and roast on an open fire for all eternity. (reference)

I read in the news today that the Russian web page AllOfMP3.com was getting heat from the Russian government for their alleged crimes towards copyright laws. Allofmp3.com is a music site that offers the end user the possibility to download from a vast music library at a very low cost. The current price is two cents per downloaded megabyte, so for a full dollar you are able to download 50 megabytes of music, which roughly amounts to a full CD at a decent bit rate quality. They also offer you the music in the most commonly used formats, and at variable bit rates. Which means you as the end user choose what quality you want.

The situation in Russia has always been that the government has been quite liberal to what goes on at Russian web sites. They have never really bothered with strict laws, and the laws that were close to strict were really never governed. But given Allofmp3’s price line and their recent media coverage, I have a strong suspicion that not only the music industry has laid pressure on the Russian government, but that the likes of iTunes has a finger in this “game”. Because one of the many features Allofmp3 has to offer, is the fact that the material you download from Allofmp3 is not DRM protected. Which means you are free to do whatever you want with the music you download. One of the dreaded things about DRM is the fact that you are forced into limiting the playback of your downloaded content to the machine you downloaded it to. So that means that when you buy a new PC, you have to get all the music all over again. And as a end user, having paid for your music you for sure want to continue playing your content. I wish that DRM never emerged as a technology, and I’m happy that you have alternatives such as Allofmp3. But for how long!? I’m afraid not for much longer.

I smell conspiracy all the way!

I’ve had quite a few problems connecting to the net via my cell phone, the Sony Ericsson T630. It connected nicely to the net, got its IP address from the DHCP server and right DNS settings. But it seemed that the requests didn’t go any further than the gateway, and stopped there. So all settings seemed ok, but the packets just met the wall.

After doing some research I finally found out why. Under the account settings for GPRS, the access point was meant to be ‘internet’ instead of ‘wap‘. After making that change, everything worked without a problem. Ok, I have to admit the speeds were terrible! Abysmal to say the least, but what else can you expect when you’re used to broadband on a daily basis. It’s not like speed are important anyway, the only reason you do connect via wireless is because you need to. You might be expecting an important e-mail, or you’re waiting to settle an important bid on an ongoing auction. The reasons could be many, and it’s nice to be able to do your stuff wherever you are, as long as you have your laptop and cell phone handy.

Oh how I hate the net from time to time. On second thought, that’s not entirely fair. I do though hate some online businesses. I just recently bought a web hosting account to host a few new domains that I had acquired, and with the account there was also a domain name that came with it for a small price, so I thought what the heck. I signed up, and I was now the proud owner of yet another hosting account and a new domain name. All was fine and dandy.

But things were about to change, I found the control features of the hosting provider to be abysmal and horrid to say the least. I was not at all happy, but things were only to become worse. After having tried to getting used to the new account, I decided it wasn’t worth it and came to terms that it was about time to use the 30 day cash refund option. I canceled the account and got my money back. But what about my new domain name that I get with the account, that I paid for? The domain that is registered in my name. Of course I wanted to take this with my and transfer over to my main registrar.

Well, I logged into my account on Dotster to proceed with the transfer. As the owner of the domain, I got a mail asking me to confirm the move. Of course, I agreed and confirmed and just waited for the confirmation mail. Well guess what, the domain had been registered with a registrar-lock, which makes it impossible to transfer a domain even with the consent of the domain owner. This of course pisses me off, so I contact the registrar the domain was registered with and ask them to remove it. They tell me I have to contact the hosting provider to have them make the change. HELLO!? You can’t do changes to your own systems? That’s just great!

Well, I contact my former hosting provider to have them do the work, but guess what!? THEY WON’T, THEY CAN’T, THEY ARE INCOMPETENT! The only thing they can tell me, is that I have to wait until 60 days after the account with them was registered until I can do changes myself. What a load of shite!!! So I’ve now written an e-mail to the registrar they do business with (yet again!), and told them in short plain terms that;

• It is my domain
• I paid for it
• I want full control over it
• Stop tossing me around, I’m no freakin’ ball
• It’s your systems, your databases. Get it done!

If not, I’ll contact my .ro friends and have them hack them from here until oblivion!

Update:
In retrospect, I understand my frustration and aggression. But in this case, there was nothing I could do, nor the hosting company. After a domain has been registered, it can’t be transferred over to a new registrar for a period of 60 days. This is in compliance with the regulations set by ICANN, the governing authority on domain names. But it still pisses me off though! :) It’s still MY domain!

Even though I have quite a decent solution running on my mail server to catch spam, some spam mails still evade my spam filter. Quite often I find the spam mails I get to be quite entertaining, and outright amazing. The stuff you get offered would be a rater long list, but for those of you that don’t get much spam, here are a few of them

• Cheap Viagra
  Keeps you going and going and going. Pretty much like Duracell batteries.
• Penis enlarger/extensions
  Increase your penis to the size of an elephant’s penis.
• Get your hair back pills
  Got a bald spot? Fear not, these pills will get you hair which even the most hardcore black metal artist would envy.
• Refinance your mortgage
  Yeah by doing this you will save thousands of $$$’s, we’ll even throw in a free Ceiko digital sportswatch. (they were out of Seiko)
• Want to lose weight; just click here
  We’ll give you a range of pills which will get you slim in no time, when the package arrives on your doorstep it’s just a text book that tells you to get off your fat arse and get out to enjoy nature.

Wanna help out a poor fella; “man, I just lost all my money” or “I know this guy that lives down in XXXXXX who seriously needs some money” or some other really sad story that urges you to donate as much money as possible to help them out. Yeah right! You’re broke, but you still afford internet access do you? Hah, pull the other one.

But recently spammers have been offering stuff that I never thought possible. Spammers actually spamming trying to sell you anti spam software. Oh my, what nerve! I hope they burn slowly on an open fire when they get in hell for all eternity. Just today I received two of those.

When I thought I had seen it all, I get a mail asking me if I wanted to be a minister. If I enrolled to their engenious program I could become a minister within two weeks, and after passing an online exam I would be able to perform weddings, funerals, baptisms, forgive people their sins and what made me laugh so hard I almost wet my pants; visit correctional facilities. Now, just getting the privilege to visit correctional facilities almost made me get my credit card out and enroll to this great course. Just think of that, skip years and years of theology schooling and be able to skip to the fun part. Oh my, I’m sooo thrilled! Really, I am! NOT!

But here is where it starts to get funny, just the other day I registered a domain name for a friend of mine, as a gift. Just a couple of days after I had registered this domain, I receive a mail from a spammer asking me if I wanted to make money of my newly registered domain. As he so nicely put it; “I noticed through my searches that you had registered the domain ‘pumpingirony.net’ and I was wondering if you wanted to make some money on your domain”. I was going all like “what the fuck!”. Given the number of domains that are registered daily, no person is able to check up which domains were newly registered. So my bet is that the fuckers (read: the registrar) I used to register the domain leaked information to a spammer, which then again contacted me. This pisses me off. Spammers are the scum of the earth. If you are a spammer, and read this post I want you to know this. If I ever get my hands on one of you twats, I’ll cut off your balls and roast them on an open fire. That’s the least I could do.