Blrg

Can you tell if it's day or night?

Kudos to you if you can figure out the approximate time, too.

Vito Pilieci from The Ottawa Citizen states in a Canada.com article titled "Copyright board OKs levy on iPods, MP3 players":

The Copyright Board of Canada is again backing a tax on Apple Inc.'s iPod and other MP3 music players that could boost the price of the devices by almost 30 per cent.

This is truly unfortunate and ridiculous. It's becoming into some odd fight against the innocent consumer, the computer-illiterate consumer that has no way to do anything about this. Those who're pirating aren't going to care about this (and computer-literate users are going to see this "tax" as an encouragement that says "Oh, don't buy it from the store - buy it from Ebay.ca") since they likely already have portable audio players or they don't have nor want one and only use their computer for music anyway.

Despite all that, it doesn't surprise me in the least: Big Suit types never want to research anything, they just want a quick fix and they want it now. Anything they can do to justify their salaries and make it seem like they're actually doing something productive. The sad part is, it'll injure them in the long run.

And since when are recording devices taxed, anyway? Were tape decks ever taxed this way? Ghetto-blasters? Stereos? And what's next - CD/DVD recorders get taxed since they're "recording mediums"? Copyright is an outdated system for outdated governments (and don't get me started on patents) - I realised the futility of it as a child, and I realised the ridiculousness of it when a teacher at college copyrighted a code skeleton file, and I now realise the obsolescence of it as it lacks any real structure or system.

Experts exchange, a website where some people go to resolve IT-related problems, used to show web visitors the solution to the problem being viewed. That is, they let you see the first one, and then set a cookie that wouldn't let you see the next ones you visited without registering first. Naturally, there was a simple work-around to this: Just block all cookies from their site, and you could view anything.

It seems, though, that they've recently changed this: Now the solution can't be seen at all - instead, a block saying "View this solution in just 30 seconds!" shows up - and the other comments to the problem are obfuscated in a few ways:

1. All text is encoded with ROT13, meaning that even if you viewed the source, you'd have to, uh... use Leet-key or something like.
2. A grid-like image is placed on top of the text, making it hard to read even if it weren't encoded.
3. When you hover over the comment, the text is replaced with a block that says "You must sign-up to view this comment".

This, however, is just what you see at first glance. Paying attention, you'd notice the solution is actually still there, oddly enough. The site used to be laid out in such a way that you'd see the question/problem, with a button at the end of it offering to show you the solution (which would then bring you to a registration/log-in page), followed by a list of categories for questions and answers (or problems and solutions, whichever you prefer), and then the comments given by others (including the solution itself).

The new layout, however, has the question, a short ad, the "encrypted" comments and hidden solution, then the categories, and finally the comments and solution in plain view. Very bizarre.

Well, at least they're not doing stupid things like trying to restrict the right mouse button (easy to circumvent, is amateurish, and often also blocks the middle button and other buttons too). I don't understand why sites continue to think they can hide their HTML (no, obfuscation by Javascript doesn't work - What, don't you realise all someone has to do is RUN it?).

Time flies. I really don't know what it is, but it seems I've little time for anything these days. I guess it's more a matter of prioritising things, and I haven't been doing that; Problem is, that's a task on it's own. I figure, though, people deserve an update, especially a certain someone out there who doesn't seem to be fairing too well and probably doesn't have the time to contact my directly. My heart goes out to you and I hope things get better... and yes, I'm na?vely thinking they will.

Well, let's see - my posts have been far and few between, as well as rather bare. I'm going to take what is probably going to be a few hours, and try to give some detail on what's going on. Knowing myself, though, I'm probably going to get tired of it halfway through or forget things I wanted to mention.

Continue reading "It's... been a while."