Latest posts

Howard’s mad-hax0ring skillz almost get his site canned

scaredpoet

MobiTV

Better be careful, fellow bloggers and website proprietors. According to mobile television provider mobiTV, if one of your users happens to post incredibly easy methods to get free content from them, you could be labeled a 1337 H4x0R and your site potentially taken down by their crack legal team. At least that’s what the owner of HowardForums, the premier geek site for wireless phone enthusiasts, has learned. HowardForums has been the go-to-site for years now if you want to, say, hack or unlock your iPhone, or aren’t happy with the restrictive interface on your Verizon-branded Motorola phone and want to remove it.

But recently, one site member turned his sights on mobiTV’s awesome, incircumventable DRM and authentication security, and were shocked… utterly shocked! When he managed to penetrate it.

What, pray tell, does their awesome DRM and site security consist of? A simple plaintext file, with the extension renamed, that’s what. A Howardforums member posted details on how to download and crack the encryption of this plaintext file (read: open it up on the same web browser you’re viewing this site with). Soon after the shit hit the fan, MobiTV’s legal department tried to put the smackdown on site owner Howard Chui, alleging among other things, that:
Continue reading →

Pix Plox 2007, Part 3: New York Ren Faire, and the unwashed masses

scaredpoet

New York Ren Faire

Although I might not have the uber-long hair, wear leather, or speak ultra-dramatically, I have to confess that deep down, I’m a Ren Faire geek. Sure, the real Renaisance was probably hellish to live in, but there’s a general vibe at the reenactments that glosses over the bad stuff and emphasizes the fun. I mean really, where else in present civilization will parents gladly leave their children in the hands of a sweaty, burly unshowered guy with dreadlocks as he hurls them around in a wooden tub labeled the “Barrel of Bedlam,” and actually pay him for the privilege? Where else in modern times can guys wear tights and women wear what some derisively call “gravy boats,” the package goods of both sexes blatantly out there for everyone to gawk at, without so much as the bat of an eye?

The Ren Faire, that’s where!

Thankfully, one of the best Ren Fairs around, the New York Ren Fair, isn’t too far away from me. If you want a vibrant photo opportunity, this is the place to go.

Photos of the last weekend of NY Ren Fair 2007 are below the cut. Enjoy!
Continue reading →

Pix Plox 2007, Part 2: The Toronto Trip

scaredpoet

yonge street

Yeah, I know. It’s 2008. I’m still slogging through the photos taken during my 2007 photo trips. What can I say? Digital Cameras and big memory cards equals taking lots and lots of pictures. Multiple gigabytes worth, in fact. Of course that means there’s a lot of crap to sort through and remove, hence the lengthy period involved in getting them online.

Anyway! Toronto, June 2007. Ahhh what a memorable trip that was. My main reason for going was to attend the Joint Technical Symposium for Audiovisual Archivists. It was an extremely informative conference, actually, and I gleaned a lot of info.

However, there was a funny thing about the timing of the event. It took place immediately after Pride Week in Toronto, and clearly not everyone got the memo that Pride Week was over. Combine this with the fact that the conference hotel was situated in Toronto’s Gay Mecca, and conference-goers had to wade through the center of Yonge Street to get to a number of conference events, the die was cast for a week of hijinks and hilarity.

Picture if you will, a bunch of moving image archivists. Some are a bunch of curmudgeonly old salts; having been in the business for decades and who take their jobs (and life itself) very seriously. Then there were the young’uns, like myself.

Now picture, those same crusty old salts colliding with post-Pride-Week Toronto. Hilarity ensued amongst us young’uns as exclamations were heard like:

“Hey, that’s not the Canadian Flag!“

“Why are those two young men holding hands?!”

“Open till 4 am? What could they possibly be doing in that business so late?!”

“What’s that boy doing wearing buttshorts out in public?!”

Now, when you hear stuff like that, and you happen to carry a camera around with you on every trip you go, is it wrong to take photos of the madness? I didn’t think so.

I’ll be adding captions as time permits. In the meantime, enjoy the randomness…

Click the “more” link to view photos:
Continue reading →

Sprint’s merger failure

scaredpoet

So a couple weeks back, an anonymous troll in Canada took issue with my railing on Sprint for its utter, dismal failure as of late, saying that he “Never even knew there was SO much deception on the internet.”

Well, I hate to burst his innocent little bubble, but there’s PLENTY of deception on the internet. You just won’t find it here.

Proof? Sprint just gave up on the Nextel merger, and wrote down the Nextel merger and posted a loss of $29.5 billion.

In response, [CEO Dan] Hesse said Sprint is taking steps to bolster its financial flexibility, by saying it won’t declare any dividends in the forseeable future and letting its $6 billion stock buyback plan expire. But the business is in such disarray that he’s taking his time to consider what needs to be done. “Internally, we have rolled out a unified company culture focused on accountability and on providing a superior customer experience,” he said Thursday. “We plan to share some of our initiatives for improving the customer experience and operations next quarter.” But, he cautions, “Strategic assessments and changes may take longer to complete.”

The problem with this “taking longer” is that Sprint has been in what it claims to be turnaround mode for years now. There’s a limit, and then you hit bottom. At this point, I don’t believe there’s ANY way for Sprint to get out of its mess other than to be bought out or liquidated. It’s just taken too long, an frankly, I don’t know of anyone in the know – customer, investor, or tech guru – who has real confidence in Sprint.

Anyway, I think this is vindication for me. Though it is sad to see a company I admired a while back to be in such a sad state.