* Gearhead: CD fingerprints * Backspin: Technology for the People by the Money * Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Gearhead: CD fingerprints
Following my discussion a few weeks ago about a suite of CD/DVD tools called Virtual CD reader, Tim Cary, who hails “from out in the beautiful western part of [Massachusetts] … Easthampton,” wrote: “I was particularly intrigued by the fact that after ripping to the MP3 format in WinAmp, it would read the song info and fill in the headers.” Tim wondered how this worked so … there are two ways to figure out what is on a CD: fingerprinting and CD text.
To read this week’s Gearhead, click here.
Backspin: Technology for the People by the Money
When it comes to government technology policy making what does it mean to be “American”? You might, like an innocent child, assume it means the government supporting open competition and letting the marketplace identify and select the best solutions in the interest of the consumer. But you would, my friends, be wrong.
To read this week’s Backspin, click here.
Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Remember Echelon?
That was the super-secret NSA computer system that was sampling all of our email over a decade ago. You were to use a specific paragraph in all your email designed to flood Echelon with more data than it could handle. Each of us should use the same set of triggers, and that would force Echelon to try and correlate all email to each other — an impossible task — and get every one of us on a watch list.
Seems so quaint now: Digital’s vision for the Internet in 1994
You remember Digital, right?
Ubuntu: Taking Over the Linux World
From Matt Hartley, over at MadPenguin.org:
This just in: it’s an Ubuntu future. Think I’m nuts? Take a cold, hard look around. Even though I’m a fan of other delightful distros like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux, there are other honorable mentions, such as Fedora (a fine distro) and OpenSuSE. At the end of the day, however, Ubuntu has won the hearts of common users. And that is not my opinion, this is simply a matter of numbers.
He makes the point that no matter whether Ubuntu is the “best”, it’s all about how easy it is for new users to get up and going. Ubuntu’s motto: It Just Works.
Trying a new anti-spam module for commenting
Because of the problems listed here. Let me know if it causes any new issues, as in: You run into problems posting.
