Broadcast Flag Again?

HOW can this be true what Mike Ferguson says below? It is ncessary to protect the music industry from the threat of piracy? There hasn’t been a broadcast flag on any radios up until now, has this caused an outbreak of piracy?

Once again here is an un-informed Government figure trying to push something that is seemingly self serving. Why make more laws for copyright infringment? If the market will bear an industry putting DRM in equipment without LAWs, go ahead. BUT this just CHAPS me to no end to shove this DRM crap down my NECK! I don’t want to file share media that I collect, I want to use it as I want to in my home.
Take a Stand against DRM, don’t let them take your fair-use rights away! Contact your Congressmen… I am.

Congress raises broadcast flag for audio | CNET News.com
Digital radio receivers without government-approved copy-prevention technology likely would become illegal to sell in the future, according to new federal legislation announced Thursday.

Rep. Mike Ferguson, a New Jersey Republican, said his bill–which would enforce a so-called “broadcast flag” for digital and satellite audio receivers–was necessary to protect the music industry from the threat of piracy.

Later in the article…

At a breakfast roundtable with reporters on Thursday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said some sort of legislation is necessary to prevent Americans from saving high-quality music from digital broadcasts, assembling a “personal music library” of their own, and redistributing “recorded songs over the Internet or on removable media.”

They assume you and me are thieves. (BTW…The RIAA bought the Reporters Breakfast…how nice)

Gmail and Chat using SSL now?

Originally the Google Chat interface in gmail didn’t work when you visited gmail in ssl mode…well over the weekend I opened my gmail with https and Bingo…there was Gmail Chat in all it’s glory.

I read that they were going to have encryption on the gtalk client and support SSL in the gmail interface at some point so I guess now is that time.

Cool.

Ultraman and DVD

I read today that it is possible that Ultraman might be coming to DVD this year! I would probably jump on that…I used to love watching Ultraman. It was one of those after school shows that I would watch along with The Monkeys!

It seemed like there were a lot of episodes but alas there is only 39 according to tv.com.

BTW if you subscribe to my feed, and don’t normally visit the site itself, come and check it out. Ultraman is gracing the top of my blog.
Spyndle.com

** Update **: Stupid me should have put a link to the Ultraman DVD Tip

MyStickies

If you are a fan of del.icio.us you will really like this. MyStickies is a free service that allows you to put a Sticky note on a webpage, and add tags. Visit the link below to see what it is all about…

This link goes to the developers blog explaining the service.

Jac Wright » MyStickies Goes Live

iTunes and WordPress Funkiness

I think that I have found a bug in iTunes!

My buddy Victor Cajiao over at the Typical PC User Podcast had some funkiness going on with his feed. On Saturday he posted a show (See “Before” image) once iTunes downloaded it, iTunes would change the subscribed to feed from his feedburner address to the last enclosure URL (See “After” image). This was a problem because you would not get anymore updates from him because the URL for the MP3 was not a valid XML file! (See “After-After” image) …and therefore a bunch of iTunes users were not subscribed any longer.

I tried several fixes including upgrading his WordPress to 2.0 and a lot of other hair-brained fixes..the problem was there was an open link tag in a previous posts show notes (Kudos to Blaine McDonnell for catching that). Of course this is not right…but I think that this kicked off a bug in iTunes that changed the subscription URL.

There is a directive that you can put in your feed to point everyone to a new feed…but it shouldn’t do that unless it explicitly sees it. So podcasters be aware! Close all the tags in your Show Notes! (Which is good advice for anything really)

*Update* Apparently the podcast guys at Apple got back to us and said that they had seen this before as a rare problem…and are looking to fix that…Awesome!

Continue reading “iTunes and WordPress Funkiness”