FatDave’s Guide to BitTorrent

Lately I’ve been explaining BitTorrent to a lot of different people. Finally, I decided to write up a guide to it, in my own inimitable style. You can read it here.

This may be the first in a series of guides. Then again it may not be.

So Long DVD Decrypter

So suppose some of your fondest childhood memories are saturday mornings spent with Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester, Wyle E. and Marvin. Now let’s also say that you (somehwat reluctantly) grew up (or at least aged a bit) and now you’ve got 3 kids, ages 5, 3, and 2. You want them to enjoy the same animated violence you grew up on, so you go out and buy The Golden Collection on DVD.

Trouble is, kids and DVD’s just don’t fucking mix. Doesn’t matter how well you think you’ve locked them up, a shiny DVD is better than the most expensive thing the toy store has to offer. Trust me, I once found a two year old surrounded by DVD’s, and which one was he banging against the entertainment center? The special edition of Fight Club which had gone out of print almost exactly one week prior. Thankfully, there’s this thing called eBay.

So anyway, you figure you bought the DVD, it is yours now to do what you want with. In fact, it has long been considered fair use to make an archival copy of copyrighted material that you have purchased, provided you don’t sell or give said copy to anybody else.

Of course the entertainment companies had a problem with that, so they came up with all kinds of copy potection schemes. Macrovision for VHS, the Content Scrambling System (aka CSS) for DVD. Oh and what the hell, why not throw Macrovision onto DVD’s as well, so you can’t tape them.

Now, let’s digress for a moment and travel way back in time to about 1984. Many of you were probably not using computers circa 1984, but I was. For me it was all about the Apple //e and the Commodore 64. Software piracy was then, as it is now, running rampant. The software companies had a cow, and came up with countless ways to fuck up a 5-1/4 inch floppy disk so it couldn’t be copied. Of course they never denied that a user was legally allowed to make a backup copy of the software for personal use, but they set out to make it as hard as possible. An entire industry of high-grade disk copying programs sprang up. If you were there, you surely remember Copy ][ Plus and Locksmith. Every time a company came up with a new copy protection method, the copying programs would put out an update to bypass it. Apple never used copy protection on their own software, not even Appleworks which was easily the best selling software of the time. By the late 80’s the software publishers realized they were fighting a useless battle, and copy protection on computer software became a thing of the past. Iit remains so to this day. For example, Microsoft couldn’t give a rat’s ass how many copies of Windows XP you make, provided you buy a license for each one.

OK, back to the present, or at least the more recent past. It wasn’t long after the introduction of DVD that the CSS copy protection was shown to be laughably easy to break. However, not to let a little thing like fair use get in its way, the entertainment publishing industry managed to get a US law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed by congress. The DMCA is full of odious stuff (agreeing to an unread license agreement by opening a software package, outlawing reverse engineering) but perhaps its foulest offense is making it a bonafide crime to circumvent copy protection. There was a huge battle over the above linked DeCSS code, many websites were shut down, and for awhile it was actually argued that it was illegal to even link to the source code. It was ruled that source code is not protected speech. In the most beautiful of ironies, the DeCSS source code was submitted as evidence in one of the trials, and thus became a matter of public record. Last year the publishers gave up and dropped their case.

So anyway, back where we came in, suppose a person bought The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, didn’t want their kids to destroy it, and had a legal right to make a copy for their own use. Well, there was still the issue of that pesky CSS to get around. Thankfully, a nice person made an incredibly easy-to-use DVD Decrypter, which he called DVD Decrypter. It was a nice one-click affair, put in a DVD, click a button and it was unscrambled and saved to your hard drive, or if you prefer burned to a blank DVD.

Could this software be used for piracy? Of course, but it also had legitimate uses. It’s a favorite argument of the gun lobby that, sure, you can use a gun to commit crime, but they must be kept legal since they have so many other legitimate uses. Seems to work for them, but not for the evil bastards who allow people to back up their DVD’s.

Well, anyway they just shut him down. He’s no longer allowed to update or distribute the program, and his domain name has been taken over by whatever company decided to crack down on him. Here’s a copy of his farewell message. All this thanks to the fact that it is now against the law to circumvent copy protection, even though you and I have a right to make copies of media we purchased for our own personal use.

But you know what I say? Fuck them. And you know what else? A lot of other people say that too. I advise everyone to check their favorite P2P network for DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0, which will be the final version. Do they not know that they’re fighting a losing battle? Does the phrase “363 seeders” mean anything to you? Fuck. Them. Hard.

Fuck iTunes

OK, so the last time I wanted to watch a movie trailer online, I had to upgrade my QuickTime installation. No biggie right? But interestingly, this time it forced me to install iTunes. I would think Apple, who has always been a pretty cool company (despite losing their genius-in-charge way back when), would try to distance themselves from Microsoftian tactics like forcing users to install software completely unrelated to the task at hand simply because they want it to become ubiquitous. But still no biggie, because I keep finding free downloads under bottle caps and shit, and I figure I’ll probably use it eventually. Every time I open task manager though, I see it there hiding in the background processes, sucking at my precious system processes like a giant quantum tit.

Anyway, today I find out about a free iTunes download for a musician my brother just turned me onto, so I figure I’ll see how this iTunes shit works, what the big deal is, why it was so important that I was forced to install it along with QuickTime. I immediately came to the realization that I had to go through some setup.

The first thing it asked me (I think, I’m writing this from memory after all) was if I wanted to scan my hard drive for .mp3 and .aac files. I didn’t see a button labeled “Abso-fucking-lutely Not!”, so I unchecked the little checkbox. You see, Apple, having still never broken even on the Macintosh (yes, I’m exagerating), has found a new gold mine in digital audio distribution, and they are hell-bent on becoming the defacto standard. Apple would like it very much if all digital music was purchased through them, and this might make them somewhat interested in what other .mp3’s I have in my possession and whether or not I actually have the legal right to have said .mp3’s. Caveat fur!

The other thing it asked me, I think in the same dialog, was if I wanted it to automatically rearrange all my audio files. Well no, thank you, I tend put my files where I do for a reason, and when I look for them I tend to look for them where I put them. Also, if iTunes moves them, how then will all my P2P clients find all the (completely legal) recordings (of bands who allow their live recordings to be freely distributed) that I share? (Seriously, I’d never consider infringing a copyright, even though I’ve bought countless CD’s at full price to get a single song or two, even though they told us CD’s were indestructible and would last forever, even though the RIAA routinely fucks the artists whose backs they ride all the way to the bank.)

All that ugliness aside, I was still onboard with the iTunes at this point. I mean hey, I was going to get a free song and not even have to look over my shoulder or find an open proxy server (not that I know anything about such matters). So eventually I see my song, with the price listed as “free”, so I click the download button. Oh boy, now I get to create an account. Yay! Nothing like one more password to have to remember, but what the fuck. I’ve got email addresses that serve no other purpose than to hand out to likely spammers, so I can create an account without fear.

But then the thing that drove me to declare “Fuck iTunes” from my godforsaken blog happened. It asked for my credit card info.

Now there’s so many ways this pissed me off. First and most obviously, why the fuck should I have to give up my credit card info to download a free song? I mean, the chances of me buying music through iTunes is pretty god-damned slim. Not that I wouldn’t pay for online music, but I’m not about to pay $.99 a song for music in a lossy format like 128K mp3, or in some format that restricts what I can and can’t do with the product that I fucking paid for. They wanna sell me flac files at that price, we’ll talk. Of course, they figure if they can get me to give up my numbers now, it’ll be easier to get me to buy in the future. Not bloody likely.

Another thing is, even if I were to buy music through their little service, I’d much rather enter my credit card info each time I make a purchase. Now maybe most users don’t want to be bothered with this, but if I’m spending money I want to be reminded I’m spending money. I also don’t want one of my kids getting in my office and buying a bunch of what passes for music these days because they thought it would be fun to bang on daddy’s keyboard. Or hell, cats sometimes get shut in here. I don’t want a cat buying Hilary Duff tracks by walking across my desk (and quit chewing through cables you stupid little shit, because if 120VAC doesn’t kill you, I will). And most importantly of all, I don’t want my credit card info stored on some computer at Apple.

So fuck iTunes. I don’t like being forced to install software I don’t want, I don’t like giving up my credit card number for something I’m not buying, and I sure as fuck don’t like Digital Rights Management. And fuck the iPod, because you have to transfer music to it through iTunes. If I’m gonna be carrying gigabytes of digital audio processing in my pocket, I’d like to be able to plug in a mic and record anyway.

It’s great that the digital music revolution is fucking up the RIAA, believe me, I’m all for that. But Jesus H. Christ, are we gonna replace it with something worse? Not if I can help it.

OLGA

OK, I think I just found my favorite file on OLGA, the On-Line Guitar Archive (or as us old-timers like to remember it, ftp.uwp.edu).

God’s Underwear

Hypertext is dangerous stuff.

In a prehistoric article from 1989 titled Hypertext: Beyond the Hype, the author says the following:

Another criticism of hypertext is that users are presented with so much information that their human circuits burst with cognitive overload. While reading through a document, choices must constantly be made about which links to follow and which to ignore. […] Although this problem is not new with hypertext, computerized access does add a sometimes overwhelming dimension to it.

The same article mentions that prototype hypertext applications are in development at several educational institutions, but they are not yet commercially available. At this point in my little story (which is growing longer and more bloated by the keystroke) I’d like to ask all of my readers (ie. both of you) to grovel at the feet of Tim Berners-Lee, not just for creating the HTTP protocol, but for giving it to the world free of charge. Other people, I dunno, Bill Gates for instance, might have tried to profit from their invention and we wouldn’t have the internet we do today.

So what was I saying? Oh yes, hypertext is dangerous stuff.

Sometimes I’m amazed at the journeys the web takes me on. And on some nights I do find my human circuits bursting with cognitive overload. Tonight was one of those nights.

It started innocently enough. I was kinda bored with the web. I’d read all my usual sites (over there on the right, below the archive) and didn’t know where to go. Then I remembered I hadn’t read Robot Johnny in awhile. So I went there, and he just mentioned kind of offhand that he had a new favorite Wikipedia entry. It was the entry for undergarment.

Now as I’ve said twice already, hypertext is dangerous stuff, and possibly it’s most concentrated form is Wikipedia. If plain hypertext has a danger level analogous to, say, drinking beer, then Wikipedia is like smoking a mixture of hashish and crack while mainlining heroin and getting a blowjob. I’ve learned that if I want to be productive, it’s best not to follow a link to Wikipedia, because once there I’m pretty much done for the day.

So I read all about underwear. I learned its varieties, nicknames, and history through the ages. But most interesting to me was the link regarding the Mormon temple garment variety. This just in: Them Mormons is some goofy fuckers.

Unfortunately for me, that article referred to the Judeo-Christian God by name, and before I knew it I was not just knee-deep in the etymology of the tetragrammaton (and learning fancy big words to boot). Of course as close as anybody can figure, His name is Yahweh (pronounced ee-ah-oo-ay), but the real pronunciation may have been lost due to strict adherance to the “name in vain” commandment and the general lax rules regarding vowels in early Hebrew.

This led me to my theory (which is mine) that the original, lost pronunciation of the name of God is “Oy Vey“.

It was just one innocent link. Now it’s 3 hours later, my eyes are bloodshot, my head aches, and I know way too much about underwear and ancient Hebrew texts. Is there such thing as hypertext detox?

New Design

I was never really happy using a ready-made Blogger template, given that I supposedly make websites for a living and all. Anyway, I decided to do something about it and came up with a new design. This will prompt at least one friend to say “oh, you’ve got time to work on your website but when the fuck are you gonna make the one you promised me?” What can I say, I’m a cock,

So anyway, now I have a design that’s completely my own. I’m not sure if it’s any better than the one I was using (probably not) but at least it’s unique. I think maybe it’s a little too blue and I worry about the readability somewhat.

Let me know what you think (like anybody reads this shit) and I’ll change the color scheme if you think it sucks.

Fry’s is Cool

My house is on what must be the most shitty, antiquated piece of the power grid in the country. My power’s always cutting out at the strangest times. We could be having an ice storm with 80 mph winds and everything will be fine. The next day will be calm but a bird will land on a power line somewhere and take down the whole fucking neighborhood. This apparent randomness ensures that my computer will be on whenever the power goes out.

It happened again a couple weeks ago, just like I described. Power stayed on through the snow, ice and wind, but the next day it went down. It didn’t just suddenly switch off either, no that would have been nice. Instead it took its time deciding whether or not it wanted to go completely out. The lights dimmed, came back up and finally went out. Before I could reach the power switch on my computer it had cycled power three times in quick succession. Guess I should have set that “system restart on power failure” CMOS setting differently.

Anyway, I always thought I was safe having my shit on surge protectors, but when ComEd finally got us back up 3 hours later I discovered that every few minutes the signal to my monitor would disappear and not come back without a reboot. I’d try to do a clean shutdown blindly (Alt-F4, Alt-F4, Alt-F4….) but it didn’t seem to work. Eventually through trial and error I figured out that as long as I was running without the nVidia drivers and using windows default VGA settings my computer would work. I could go clear up to 32-bit color at 1280 x 1024, but my refresh rate sucked stanky ass. Sure acted like a video card problem, and eventually by trying different drivers I was able to get my computer to not boot at all and give me an informative beep code confirming it. It was really annoying having my display suck so badly, but for some reason (oh yeah, I had no money!) I put up with it for a week or two.

So anyway, once I had it budgeted I knew I needed a new video card and a UPS so it wouldn’t happen again. Well, I didn’t feel like waiting for delivery and we all know that Best Buy completely sucks, so hey, perfect opportunity to check out the new Fry’s Electronics in Downers Grove.

Now Fry’s has been around for awhile in California and in the southwest, but I’d heard of them on slashdot and other places. Now they’ve come to Illinois in what I hope is the beginning of the nationwide slaughtering of Best Buy and CompUSA. I hate monopolies as much as the next guy, probably more, but I really hate Best Buy and CompUSA.

Overall I’m pretty impressed. Imagine if Best Buy was bigger, geared more towards computer stuff, had a really good selection, decent prices, and was decorated like a Barnes and Noble. That’s Fry’s, or at least the one in Downers Grove. They seemed to have everything a computer geek could want. It was not nearly as warehousey as I expected. In fact it wasn’t warehousey at all (yes, I said warehousey again…and again!). Think they even had a coffee shop. Kind of a shame, because I imagine without all the fancy architecture and shit they could lower prices, but god forbid a stupid yuppie cock would have to shop without sipping a fucking latte.

As I mentioned, I was on this quest for a video card. A cheap one. I’ve got no illusions of my computer ever being able to run Doom III and I’ve got a Playstation2 for gaming, so as long as it can render Windows apps and porn I’m happy. I found a decent nVidia-based Leadtek card for $50. Looked it up online and found it for $46. Not bad if you consider shipping would’ve been $1.50 minimum. I’m willing to fork over the remaining $2.50 to have it now instead of now-plus-one-week. And you know what else? You can’t get a $50 video card at Best Buy.

The other thing I needed was a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply for those lacking the geek gene). Found a decent Belkin one with shutdown software for $35. Same one is available online for $33, but they weigh a ton, so with shipping considered I actually came out ahead on that one. When was the last time you saved money by not shopping online?

So in summary, Fry’s is cool.