Blackhacker

Play: Work that you enjoy doing for nothing.

Evan Esar, Esar’s Comic Dictionary
American Humorist (1899 - 1995)

The saying “Getting there is half the fun” became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.

Henry J. Tillman

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Kurt Vonnegut, “Cold Turkey”, In These Times, May 10, 2004
US novelist (1922 - 2007)

BetaNews | HBO next to open its shows to the Web
Though it may be a bit late for it to enter the download market, Time Warners HBO will begin a controlled launch of HBO Broadband tomorrow, a free add-on to HBO on Demand.

Content will not be available through a browser, though, as HBO Broadband relies on its own application for Windows PCs running XP and Vista. Content is downloaded directly to the subscriber’s drive through the application and expires four weeks after the download date.

Maybe this is more about not giving Apple too much power but still acknowledging that the prevailing media business models are dinosaurs and the meteor is in the sky. It still a weak effort, I’m sure that TW will yield no fruit from sewing so sparingly, but we will see.

BetaNews | Yahoo to embrace OpenID standard for validating users
“All Yahoo IDs will be OpenIDs on January 30,” a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews late this morning, in a change-over that may elevate the whole issue of users’ online identities to a new level.Yahoo is calling its embrace of OpenID this morning a breakthrough in the field of Web user identity. Over the next few months, other Web sites that employ OpenID 2.0 validation, including all those not necessarily hosted by Yahoo, will be able to look to Yahoo as a validator of usernames.

Glad to see OpenId is really gaining traction. Its an open standard that ANY one can implement for FREE. Its a standard that is built on existing technologies, so any one who has a website already has the pieces they need to use this. And with Yahoo backing it looks like it will have the traction to be THE way authentication will be done on the Internet.

update:

I realize that I sometimes don’t explain things well, so I dug up this talk by Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain , a player and developer of openid. He does a better job than me.

Leaked memo: Time Warner Cable to trial hard bandwidth caps
Metered Internet access is a fact of life for many broadband users around the world, but has been largely a nonfactor when it comes to wired broadband in the US. That may change, according to a memo leaked to the Broadband Reports forums. If the memo is to be believed, Time Warner Cable will be rolling out what it calls “Consumption Based Billing” on a trial basis in the Beaumont, Texas area.

I’v got no problem with as long as two condtions are met:

1. SLA are stated and honored by the ISP. If I’m going to be penalized when I go over my bandwidth usage, I think it is only fare that I get some guarantee that I can get the through put that you advertise.
2. The median & the average bill should NOT change. It just like Big Media to use changing how bills are calculated as a opportunity to for a defacto price increase without the public knowing about.

BetaNews | Sun to spend $1B to acquire MySQL, will compete with Oracle, Microsoft
One of the principal products in the LAMP open source arsenal will become a Sun Microsystems product, possibly by the end of this quarter.When discussing enterprise database installations worldwide, as of today, it will be impossible not to consider Sun Microsystems along with Microsoft and Oracle. This morning, Sun announced it has reached an agreement with MySQL — which by some accounts may have become the producer of the most widely installed database, under everyone’s noses — in a deal expected to be closed as soon as this March.

This can be either very good or very bad. Anytime a major firm like Sun, is willing to invest in an OSS project its great for the project, but now they will be able to run it as well. That could be disastrous. From reading the article, Sun has big plans to use MySQL to shake up their product line. There also seems to be a disconnect between MySQL and Sun over what changes will take place for MySQL after the acquisition. It is never good when the acquired seems to be in the dark about the nature there organization after the acquisition is done. That smells like a lot of people leaving to me. I’ve been wrong before, and I hope I am again about this.

Unpaid bills lead phone companies to hang up on FBI wiretaps
A report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reveals extreme deficiencies in FBI budget and expense management procedures for surveillance. According to the OIG, phone companies have terminated FBI wiretaps and FBI surveillance phone lines as a result of unpaid bills.

Wow the FBI isn’t doing any better than some days.

Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store - New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Sony BMG, the music company, announced Thursday that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalog in the MP3 format by the end of the month.

We are apparently hearing the death nell of the scourge of fair use, DRM.

Apples got some worries, because this make Amazon the largest legitimate music down load site, in terms of catalog.

Dap: /.

Happy new year! WOW Its been a minute, but I’m back. Hopefully I will not take so long to post something new. I went the entire month of December and posted NOTHING.

I upgrades the site to WP 2.3.2 I really dig this. it has a new taxonomy, feature that integrates post categories, link categories, and tags. It made my custom tags plugin obsolete. There is even an importer migrates your old tags into the new system.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to anounce the alpha release of my plugin bh-widgets, object oriented system for building and managing widgets built on top of WP widget system. Check it out. I’m using it right now.