by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 29, 2004 | Usefull Things
A lot of news sites is covering allofmp3.com‘s 1Mb / 1 US cent download service. I subscribed and spent $10 and have been happily downloading music since. They are suffering under a bit of load with lots of server busy messages, but it’s understandable given the attention they are receiving.
The story was first carried by the Sydney Morning Herald who spoke to a legal type that had the following to say:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: “There’s probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?” Even if allofmp3.com’s asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, “the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn’t liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again.”
First thing I got was the Wolfsheim that I had issues with earlier followed by some rare Einsturzende Neubauten that I am finding hard to even find in the usual basements in Camden.
The quality is great, they keep the files in WAV format on their servers and you get to choose mp3, mp4, ogg or wma and the desired bitrate. Higher bitrate = bigger files = pay more. This means you get to wait a bit for your downloads to be ready, but you can easily feed it into wget or something like that to fetch once they notify you by email its all ready for the taking.
Here’s hoping it lasts.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 25, 2004 | Usefull Things
Microsoft is getting into the RSS thing it seems, they are providing a feed with their latest security alerts, you can subscribe to it here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 25, 2004 | Uncategorized
I purchased the Casting Shadows CD by Wolfsheim. I did not look at it properly in the shop and it turns out its a copy protected CD.
I never listen to my CDs directly, I rip them as soon as I can and then put them away for save keeping, listening to the MP3s on my iPod or Laptop via the radio if I have to. I don’t pirate music all my MP3s are from CDs I actually own and I don’t share any music.
Now with this Wolfsheim CD I had no choice but to resort to asking someone to look on P2P networks for me since it does not work in my PC and for most does not work in my 1999 Sony Surround system. He found an excellent 192k bit rate copy, now at least I can listen to the music I bought the way I want. I do not know how a small band like Wolfsheim (they are big in Germany) would sell out to the big record labels like this but it is definately giving me second thoughts about buying any more music of theirs and I am now definately not going to the live show that is here next month.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 23, 2004 | Photography Equipment
I purchased a Nikkor 70-300mm G lens for my D70 this week. I have never had a zoom lens before and was not sure if I would use it much so I opted for the cheapest on the market – £115 – once I know I like it I will get the real thing.
I was not expecting much from the lens since the usual know-it-all’s on the forums were having nothing but bad to say about its clarity around the 300mm mark, well I am glad to say I am absolutely very happy with the lens.
It does fantastic long distance shots which in combination with my 18-70mm gives me an amasing 16x magnification, it also does great with the kinds of shots where the background needs to be distorted.
Click on the image for some more flower shots which demonstrate the depth of field you get out of a long lens nicely.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 16, 2004 | Front Page
I always look at my web server logs, I find the various log spammers, bots and RSS readers really interesting. About a week ago I noticed a lot of log spamming all in a short period of time and thought something must be going on but waited till it happened again.
Today again I got 5 log spam attempts in a very short interval from different IP addresses. As this is the 2nd time this happens I can only imagine this is 5 machines that is acting in a coordinated fashion.
64.69.172.9 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:29:46 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://www.nudecelebblogs.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
201.128.123.11 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:33:09 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
212.163.30.100 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:34:15 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://www.shatteredreality.net” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
217.219.165.3 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:34:46 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 32861 “http://britneyspearsnude.blogspot.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
80.58.35.46 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:37:23 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://www.amateurxpass.com” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
The IP addresses are in US, MX, ES, IR and ES and interestingly enough have exactly the same user agent. 2 of the machines are running mail servers and may also be NAT/Masquarading machines I am guessing.
Eitherway, I think someone is controlling a bunch of bot machines and using them to spam logs. I wonder if I contact the hosting companies of these sites if they will shut them down?
