11.03.05
Posted in Uncategorized, computers at 7:40 am by Haris
How far will music companies go to ‘’protect their digital rights'’?
This article describes a mechanism that SONY uses as a DRM protection scheme on its CD’s, which mechanism is particularly intrusive, and in fact is not being mentioned as such in the EULA. In effect, when you play one of the SONY CD’s protected this way, a bunch of files are installed in your computer, and then go ahead and ‘’cloak'’ themselves, in such a way that any file in the computer with name starting with $sys$ is hidden forever. So there is no way for any casual user of knowing the files are there. Why is that bad? Read the rest of this entry »
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11.02.05
Posted in Uncategorized, Mathematics at 4:32 pm by Haris
I finally found a way to exercise a little bit! What that means in my case is walking for an hour or thereabouts, as many days a week as possible. And now I found a way to get myself to do that! I like going to work in “The Coffeehouse and Deli”, a pretty descent coffee shop in Normal, IL, right next to the ISU campus. The place is exactly 30 minutes walk from my house, and a very pleasant walk at that! So this is the perfect excuse to walk for an hour. (well, ok, 30minutes+30minutes).
And it also happens to be right along the Constitution trail. It’s almost perfect!
Later
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10.19.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:18 pm by Haris
A woman in the UK was arrested and held for four hours because she was walking along a cycle path, which was apparently illegal in that particular path!!
Oh, did I mention she was arrested under the Terrorist Act?
Later
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09.26.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:52 pm by Haris
I usually try to stay away for mentioning all the absurd things that various agencies are doing in the name of security, but this time I could not resist. Here’s the story. You can also find a discussion on Bruce Schneier’s blog. Effectively, a man was arrested in London for showing what can only qualify in my world as normal behavior. He was stopped and searched because:
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09.20.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:54 pm by Haris
I’ve lately been listening a lot to the music of Madredeus, in particular the wonderful “o espirito da paz”. The music and lyrics of Pedro Ayes Magalhaes and the unique voice of Teresa Salgueiro are truly spellbinding. Though I have enjoyed all the songs in the album, most of the gentle and soft, my favorite is still the more energetic “O Pastor” with its amazing cello. The lyrics are so dreamy, that I could not resist reproducing their translations here. If you’ve never heard “O Pastor” before, I strongly suggest you do. You can get a taste of it from amazon.
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