Kevin Rose posted on his website over yonder, a quaint little list of products that he thinks that he couldn’t go without, or it’s absence would adversely affect his life, as of right now, in 2010. And it really got me thinking to what kind of things would I say the same thing about. So I made my own.

Apple Computers / OS X

Logic Studio

Microsoft’s Xbox

Gmail

Gibson Guitars

Marshall Amplifiers

Clearvision Contact Lenses

Korg Legacy Collection

Korg Kontrol49

Translink’s Skytrain

Shaw Canada Broadband

iPhone 3G

Twitter

Foursquare

The bit I really liked about this idea was to compare and see how many of these products or services were digital or virtual in comparison. It’s probably more than you expected.

Man, the RIAA are really barking up the wrong tree, it would seem. Yes, mininova has gone legitimate but that doesn’t mean that this will affect download numbers between casual music listeners.
If you want to see CD or iTunes sales pick up, you have to take down P2P networks that the clear majority of music theives use, or at least their widely known clients such as Kazzaa, LimeWire, so on, so forth.
Why do I say that? well.. because bootlegging has become TOO easy, now. And it shouldn’t be. Finding rare, and unknown works from obscure artists should be a task that consumes more than a 10 minute index search and it should have an element of risk in it.
Once single moms and grandparents get on a specific file-sharing bandwagon, you know it’s time to move on to something new.

Some large discussion has been happening lately on the fact The Pirate Bay sold last week to a company called Global Gaming Factory X. This is pretty big news as the icons of file-sharing on the web seemed to give in to the force of financial woes related to their recent trial. With The Pirate Bay seeming to pull a Napster and legit media sales on the horizon, the open source community of The ‘Bay are furious. Demands for a system to deactivate accounts and separate all ties to The Pirate Bay are coming at the site admin in large numbers, unrelenting. To the average person, it would seem that the good ol’ days are over and the sun might actually be setting over at The ‘Bay. 

But I have a different take on the whole situation. Yes, this could be the end of www.thepiratebay.org as we know it… but in a recent interview Rasmus Fleischer points out a very interesting fact: 

The web site that the visitor of the domain is directed to could be said to be ownable, in the sense that any new owner can change its contents. But it is also copyable, meaning that the “original” version can pop up again at another domain name. Actually, it is very simple to copy. You can fit all of The Pirate Bay, including the software and every torrent, on a USB stick.

A single USB stick, you say? that’s small. that’s really small. In fact, I’d say it’s small enough to easily be made into a .torrent file and put up on the web to be distributed at whim. So, with that in mind, I get the sneaking suspicion that a backup of the site will flood the internet if the previous owners aren’t happy with the way the new owners are running it. That’s if they don’t just let the dog off the chain right off the bat. 

Just imagine that after all this strife and struggle and law to put a leash & collar on The Pirate Bay…  All the money, effort and controversy that’s lead up to this point when the IFPI, MPAA and RIAA have thrown resources at it like the world was about to end and struggled to emerge victorious and start to feel the relief that The Pirate Bay is about to close it’s doors?  Imagine that overnight, 5 to 50 to 500 to 5000 more Pirate Bay Clones show up, every last one of them identical in capacity and functionality to the original Pirate Bay, all sharing the same trackers and databases. 

Copy & Paste. Such a simple concept, but so infinitely versatile when put into practice. People need to realize that once you let something loose into the web, it’s going to exist and migrate from user to user in an organic and unstoppable way that I don’t think that the world has actually realized is possible, yet.

So now not only France but Spain has struck down the “3 Strikes” proposition for file sharers that’s been circulating throughout western Europe. ISPs have stated that it’s ludicrous to demand that they punish their customers without a viable, legal alternative to use. And I have to agree with them, because it simply is ridiculous to demand such a thing.

It’s kind of sad to see it when groups of people who think that they have some kind of authoritative position trying to come to grips with a situation that they do not understand in any remote capacity. I mean, it’s as simple as this: hen people see a problem and they understand what is happening and what can be done about it to fix or modify things to turn it into a positive event, they simply test and implement what needs to be done whereas people who have no idea what’s wrong with their business model or how to go about fixing it, they simply start barking orders and issuing stiff ultimatums at staff as well as customers.

I have to wonder if the entertainment industry knows that they don’t have all the time in the world to come to grips with the reality they’re facing and develop new models for distribution and generating revenue. Because if they don’t get their heads out of their asses, someone is going to beat them to the punch and that will be the final nail in the coffin.

Germany is on the verge of possibly censoring it’s internet access for all german citizens this coming week. This is a touchy slope as the main intent of the movement is to block out access to child pornography from reaching the hard drives inside Germany, witch is a worthy cause to get behind, but the problem I have with censoring the web is that the unavoidable bottom line is that censoring the only free publishing medium that the public can use is a dangerous thing and the only way to really avoid the risk of having the line of ‘what can be forcefully censored’ being pushed further into people freedoms of expression and free speech is to not censor at all.

This is a sticky situation. But I’m against it.

There was never really any interest for me to get into political views on this blog. I made an internal decision that I would stray from that world and try to focus on media and technology and how the common person interacts with it. But I guess that is really hard to do, if not impossible, in today’s world. Especially when you’re like me and part of a minority who’s numbers are only now starting to show enough to where mainstream media is now recognizing that it even exists without putting a negative  tone on having to even talk about it. 

Atheism in this slice of time is a wavering tightrope to walk, suspended over an amazon of razor wire, barbs and jagged glass that’s continually fed and cared for by a macabre battalion of bigots and hateful minds. Men and women marching as a willing and able militia, bent on serving dogmatic phrasing it’s prophesied shame by proclaiming people of different colours, creeds, sexes and sexualities unfit to even be allowed to live for the simple fact that they are different and they exist. I have read and watched as people living in what once was the cradle of humanity tear each other apart over millennia-old declarations, made by wretched versions of what we would today consider people, over who holds precedence  over a small slice of land on a far coast in the middle east. 

The struggle of Israel was always disappointing to me by that people who seemed to be very passionate and sometimes smart, so quickly rally to arms over who’s divine right was worth more, even under the cost of human life while things like civility, tolerance and compromise were somehow deemed incapable to solve a problem of these proportions. I also never really thought I’d see the day when someone on the continent I live on go out of their way to proclaim that murder, even genocide was not only an acceptable option but the only option capable of bringing peace to an unstable middle east.

Yitz Greenberg is a Rabbi living in the United States who, this past month was quoted in an article for the religious magazine In The Moment, that seems like every other armchair peer into the details of someone’s dedication to a belief at a glance, until you reach down to the section of the article named Chabad, where Greenberg makes his appearance: 

“I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.

The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).

The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East. First, the Arabs will stop using children as shields. Second, they will stop taking hostages knowing that we will not be intimidated. Third, with their holy sites destroyed, they will stop believing that G-d is on their side. Result: no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.

Zero tolerance for stone throwing, for rockets, for kidnapping will mean that the state has achieved sovereignty. Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.”

The Rabbi has since released a statement where he proclaims that he was quoted out of context and the original question was asking what his views were on the topic of the treatment of hostile neighbours, according to his religions dogma. Although, I can see his concern about the way his statement was presented but if I were him I wouldn’t be so worried about the tentative way his words were made public but more concerned with the fact that he was staking the claim that religion is reason enough to kill men, women, children and livestock over nothing more than ideological differences. There is no misinterpreting this statement and the man’s views are as clear as day: peace in the middle east can only be achieved by the complete, unanimous victory of one side in this conflict; a victory that can only be achieved by the complete eradication of it’s opponents. The man is talking about genocide and that magazine is fine with printing it.

Despite my appearance and attitude, I am often an optimist and opportunist in the face of adversity or despair but seeing people with convictions like these in the same corner of the world where I live can be a weight and a shame on people who try to live a peaceful and free life as the ones who fought to allow us that chance intended. A weight and a shame, like a splinter at the top of my spine.

The Pirate Bay  seems to be down right now. Could the torrent megasite finally have been brought to it’s knees?

updates as they happen!

Apparently, according to various sources on the net, Apple is pretty hard-set to buy Twitter and has offered in the area of $700 million dollars to sweeten the deal. Personally, I’m on the fence about the idea. On one hand, it would be pretty cool to see what kind of crazy OS and peripheral integration would develop from that. I’m sure the iPhone would see the biggest benefit from that… but… I really have to admit that I don’t think an online service like Twitter would get any better from being acquired by a large company like, Apple. 

I guess we’ll see where that ones goes, in the future.

Okay, so here it is: my newest foray into building a somewhat regular place on the web. I’m going to try and treat this like a somewhat legitimate weekly publication with as many quality updates as I can coherently scribe out into this Wordpress control panel as much as I can. I’ve built this, obviously, on Wordpress and used a hack-n-slash version of Pixeled I mutilated for the theme and shoved in some graphics I had made in Photoshop behind the whole thing to make it look a little on the cool side. This blog is graciously hosted by Pixelghetto Design Studios so if you like what I ramble on about here and figure you can build yourself a blog and do something similar you would be doing yourself a favour and have them host, design and even build your future website. They do good work. 

But visit often! this blog is updated every Saturday and will generally post live when breaking tech & media news breaks. I have a feeling you’ll like reading it.