Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

A Gamer’s Manifesto

David Wong of Pointlesswasteoftime.com looks at the impend­ing arrival of the next line of games con­soles — the PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Revolution — and asks, “what do gamers want from this sev­enth gen­er­a­tion of con­soles,” as he presents “A Gamers’ Manifesto”.
Twenty very amus­ing points that really need to be addressed.

“The Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost $465.00.

In the des­ol­ate eco­nomic cli­mate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I’m think­ing that’s going to be a lot of money. Now, it’s true that at E3 Sony was boast­ing the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 tril­lion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assum­ing each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them.”

Systm — New Project from TheBroken Crew

Dan Huard and Kevin Rose, the dynamic duo behind the superb three-part videoz­ine dubbed “TheBroken”, have star­ted up a new videoz­ine pro­ject called Systm. The first epis­ode was released Monday, and is all about build­ing a “warspy­ing” box, a mobile scan­ner designed to search for sig­nals from wire­less cameras.

With the WMV ver­sion clock­ing in at around 150mb, the video has been released in sev­eral ver­sions, for which there are a mul­ti­tude of torrents.

Large Format

• Xvid
• Windows Media
• Theora
• h.264 quick­time 7 (Mac Only)

Small Format

• Xvid
• Windows Media
• Theora
• PSP
• h.264 quick­time 7 (Mac Only)

If you enjoyed any of the releases from TheBroken, you’ll love this. Rose and Huard are now appar­ently work­ing full time on it, so stay tuned for more videos soon.

Trimming the MSN Messenger Fat

If you’ve recently upgraded to the latest ver­sion of MSN Messenger, ver­sion 7, you may have noticed the huge amount of new bull­shit fea­tures that have been packed into this most recent release.

Even Patchou, developer of Messenger Plus!, has wussed out and removed the most basic of annoyance-removal fea­tures from his product — the tweak that removes the MSN ad ban­ner at the bot­tom of the main MSNM win­dow. The ad ban­ner wasn’t enough, how­ever, and Microsoft have seen fit to add even more bloat that few will use, includ­ing even more tabs in the main win­dow; emoticon “packs” (for when your poorly enun­ci­ated SMS-speak just isn’t enough); and “winks” and “nudges” — at your dis­posal to “enhance your conversation”.

Thank you, MS, for not trust­ing me to be able to con­vey my mean­ing on my own, and provid­ing me with these ridicu­lously child­ish fea­tures to annoy the fuck out of my con­tacts. Contact not respond­ing? Have they dared to look at another win­dow for a few seconds? No mat­ter, in MSNM 7, you can spam them with sound and light until they are forced to open your win­dow again.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of MSNMSGR Ghost, a most excel­lent little pro­gram which mod­i­fies the MSN Messenger execut­able, and allows you remove as much annoy­ing garbage as you wish.

Tick the boxes as you desire, then click the Go but­ton; select the dir­ect­ory in which your MSNM pro­gram resides (usu­ally \Program Files\MSN Messenger) and voila. The bull­shit is con­veni­ently swept under the rug. Until the next Messenger update of course. Sigh.

Covering Your Ass With PeerGuardian

I was intro­duced to this little pro­gram not long ago — PeerGuardian. In short, it’s a little pro­gram that sits in your sys­tem tray, and pre­vents com­mu­nic­a­tion with any hosts that hap­pen to be on cer­tain blocklists.

You define which block­lists are used — you can select from blocklist.org’s pleth­ora, includ­ing lists of known “bad” IPs from P2P net­works, gov­ern­ment IP space, music industry IP space and so on. You can also cre­ate your own lists.

The idea behind the pro­gram is to offer a little more pro­tec­tion to net users, more spe­cific­ally P2P net­work users, from evilly-inclined P2P users, spy­ware serv­ers, the RIAA, The Man, etc. No sub­sti­tute for a proper firewall/AV setup, but a help­ful tool nonetheless.

I’ve been using it for a few days, using only the “Spyware”, “P2P” and “Government” block­lists, and it seems to per­form pretty well. On Limewire I got a bunch of hits lis­ted as “Fake file sharer,” a file from which did indeed turn out to be sev­eral minutes of silence, and it does pick up the odd BitTorrent hit even when my cli­ent isn’t running.

For the truly para­noid, an exten­ded block­list has been com­piled which pur­ports to block “74% of the Internet” — I tried it out, and while it did leave me with a lovely fuzzy feel­ing of being cut off, I found that MSN wouldn’t con­nect, and so on, so I stopped using it.

Overall it’s a pleas­ing applic­a­tion. Auto-updates, unob­trus­ive oper­a­tion, pretty icons. And geek power.

Freenet Not So Dark

The Register runs an art­icle today on poten­tial insec­ur­it­ies of The Freenet Project.

Freenet is designed to be a fairly anonym­ous P2P net­work, where each node can relay data for oth­ers as well as receiv­ing for itself. Data is cached loc­ally in an encryp­ted file, and, sup­posedly, it is not pos­sible to tell the dif­fer­ence between data that has been relayed to other nodes, and data that has been reques­ted by the local cli­ent. This is sup­posed to offer deni­ab­il­ity to users found to have naughty files in their caches.

However, The Register found that using a com­bin­a­tion of pub­licly avail­able node uptime data and file requests, it was pos­sible to determ­ine whether a file had been down­loaded by a node, or just par­tially relayed. Bye-bye deniability.

True, in order to be effect­ive, the per­son doing the detect­ive work has to have phys­ical access to your machine, but in Patriot Act–crazy America, that’s not such a remote pos­sib­il­ity from a law enforce­ment point of view.

The issue is set to be remedied in the next release of Freenet, sched­uled for later this year. The Freenet News page also men­tions The Register’s piece.