Apple and Pepsi iTunes campaign

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Apple | 0 Comments 

Pepsi and Apple are starting tonight during the SuperBowl a capaign that will grive away 100 million free songs downloadable from iTunes. The songs are hidden in Pepsi caps. To kick off the promotion, Apple has created a very "nice" commercial, kind of giving a hint to our beloved anti-piracy american friends Enjoy the add (QT required):
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Btw, is the girl appearing in the ad really one of the persons being sued by the RIAA?

More info on this from this article from the BBC.

Spyware removal software, installing more spyware?

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Privacy | 0 Comments 

That the Internet is a jungle, we all knew that... But how about this now? Spyware cures may cause more harm than good.

Apparently there was a piece of software called SpyBan which advertised as a tool to remove unwanted spyware software from one's computer. Instead, what it was really doing was removing the competitor's spyware software and installing its own... I can't believe that. I mean, couldn't that be made illegal? Isn't my computer my own private property? If somebody installed a hidden camera in my place without my consent and monitored what I do at every moment, wouldn't be that considered illegal? If so, why are all these companies that monitor people's browser usage left untouched, without punishment?

Two comments: if all software was open, this wouldn't happen. And second, I might not have as many games as PC-Windows users have (both before in Linux and now in OS X) but the feeling of security that I have is priceless (well, perhaps not in the case of OS X ) Linux is more than ever a serious alternative to Windows and if I would really consider it for things like web browsing, email and text processing. It does all that (and more!) in a even better way.

Moblogging with a Nokia 7610 via Atom

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Blogging | 0 Comments 

I managed to get my hands on a loaned Nokia 7610 terminal, since I decided to join the beta-testing program of the Lifeblog tool, which will be provided for free by Nokia. The goog thing about Lifeblog is that it makes very very easy to take pictures with the camera and post them to your blog, all via Atom. Nokia also provided the beta-testers with a 3-month free account in TypePad, SixApart's blogging service based on MovableType. At the moment my plans are as follows: I have to help test this cute little tool (there's nothing like having your company pay your bills ) but my bigger plans include developing an Atom layer for our beloved pLog, the tool that powers this site and many more out there (last version was downloaded over 8000 times!) For those of you interested, Atom is an XML-based protocol that uses the REST paradigm to build web-enabled applications. Sort of web service, but instead of only relying on POST requests, it uses all the request modes as provided by the HTTP specification: POST, GET, PUT and DELETE. There is lots more information in the Atom wiki and webpage so please take a look!
The target is to have everything ready before I leave to Spain in 2 weeks (it's about f*cking time I had holidays!) so that I can use Lifeblog from there to photoblog my holidays for all of you Atom is not a very easy API to implement but I'll do my best... I can't miss this chance now that I have a testing terminal, which I will only be enjoying until the end of August (as I said, it's just a loan )
My TypePad blog is http://oscar.typepad.com so during the first few days I'll be posting things there. I'm quite excited about moblogging, it might be the solution for people like me who still would like to share their thoughts (or pictures ) with the rest of the world but do not have so much time to write! Stay tuned

Rediscover the web with a different browser: Firefox

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments 

The Mozilla project launched a couple of days ago the newest version of its browser Firefox (formerly known as Firebird). It's fast as hell (way faster than IE, and it's not just my own perception of it), provides pop-up blocking, tabbed-browsing, which is a thing I can't live without and has awesome add-ons such as AdBlock.

About the browser, I can't really recommend it enough... specially because of its amazing rendering speed, not to mention that its memory footprint is lower than its bigger brother Mozilla, and that it's way more secure than IE to use. Also, about AdBlock, I don't see any more flash adds, annoying animated ads and so on. It takes a while to configure it since you have to manually tell what content you'd like to block and from which servers, but once you've done that, browsing feels soooo much better!

Firefox also runs in Mac OS X if anybody's interested, even though its speed is not as fast as its Windows counterpart. It feels a little faster than Safari 1.2, though.

Windows NT4 and 2000 code leaked to the Internet

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments 

Several sources have reported (this was the first) that part of the source code of both Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 was leaked a few days ago from Microsoft to the Internet. Some analysts have acknowledged the source code as the real one though they have confirmed that very little could be done with it since some parts are missing. The code seems to have come from MainSoft, according to this other article. MainSoft is a partner of Microsoft and they are one of the two partners that have access to the source code of Windows. MainSoft specializes in porting Windows software to Unix platforms, and for example they ported IE and Windows Media Player 6.x to Unix. The code was stored in a Linux machine but it is still unclear how that machine was compromised.

The consequences are plentyful: the easiest thing one can derive from this is that more bugs that could help to spawn more deadly and dangerous worms than ever. That'd be cool (ok, maybe not), but let's not forget that the MyDoom worm and its variants (the fastest spreading Internet worm ever) were developed without needing to even look at such source code. Also, this proves that security through obscurity is not the way... Let's look at the success of the Linux operating systems and other successful open-source projects: the more eyes looking at it, the better and faster bugs can be fixed and new features can be added. Perhaps Microsoft is ashamed that the whole world will be able to clearly see how things are done in there, and why Microsoft Windows has such bad track of security holes and bugs.

There are more consequences that can even do good to Microsoft in the not so distant future. Now that everybody has been able to peek at the code, any notorious improvement in projects such as WINE (a Windows emulation layer for Linux), Samba (free and better implementation of Microsoft's file-transfer protocol) or even ReactOS (an OS trying to achieve binary compatibility with Windows 2000), could be stopped by Microsoft alleging that they have made use of copyrighted technology. If they can in any way prove that any of those projects used the stolen code, even if only for "inspiration", they would be able to completely stop the project. And *that* is really the scary part. To tell you the truth, I don't give dog shit about any new worm targetted at Windows system: after all, people have it well deserved for being so unconscious and for helping a company like Microsoft to dominate the market. I for one am glad that left the world of Windows many years ago...

Anyway, people believe that Windows is the cheapest alternative out there because let's face it, for most of them it costs nothing. As some of you know, I work for quite a big company and they are standardized on Windows 2000 but just this week we received an urgent email from the IT service letting us know that our machines were going to be remotely and automatically updated before two days unless we manually did it ourselves. Can you imagine how many man hours the service desk guys had to work to download the patches, test them, make sure that they work in all the possible configurations of laptops that we all have? And then, they must have had lots of fun seeing the remote installation servers crawl to its knees when thousands, literally, thousands of people tried to pull those patches (the update was about 140Mb) Believe me, the premium price you pay in money for OS X of the premium price you pay as a little bit more of your time for configuring Linux is later on worth the effort...

And now, let me briefly show you the safest and more secure to run Windows XP in a computer: in an emulated sandbox in my PowerBook G4, running OS X 10.3.2. Look below:

Yes, that's really Windows XP running in a Mac. The speed is of course not as fast as when it runs natively but it works and it is usable. And even if I get a worm, I don't care that much

The funny game: part 2

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments 

Remember that really successful flash game where you had to smack the penguin to make it fly (and slide!!) as far as possible? The second part is here! It's much more trickier than the other one, and it has nothing to do with it, actually. Feel free to share your scores with us