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Plan to extend copyright on pop classics
…The government wants to extend copyright laws to ensure pop songs are protected for almost twice as long as the current 50 years.

…It will mean Beatles classics such as Love Me Do and Please Please Me, released in 1963, need not automatically lose their copyright in 2013. The Rolling Stones could also benefit with songs such as Satisfaction having their copyright extended beyond 2015.

James Purnell, the new minister for creative industries, believes the change will allow record companies to generate extra revenue to look for new talent and nurture it.

This defeats the purpose of the public domain. Wheras the funds might permit some new talent to be “discovered” and leeched upon by the record industry, it will be at the expense of the very origins of that newfound talent.

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Well, I was manually adding the porn sites that had been surfed with the proxy to a ban filter.

Then it hit me. 99% of all sites visited with the proxy was porn. Over 7,000 requests to one particular porn topsite alone. Alot of it of Iranian/Persian origin.

To add insult to injury, a commentator claimed that he would completely disreguard my situation, despite this last plea, and keep abusing the service.

So whats the point of keeping it up?
Proxy is down. Permanently.

I went to purchase a copy of GTA:San Andreas today, which for those who aren’t aware is a very popular sequel in a series of blockbuster video games.

Electronic Boutique informed me that the shipment would arrive later that day. FutureShop on the other hand was more fun. The sales rep. was lying through his teeth! So I called up Futureshop with Skype to try to get him to say the same things again… and he did.

Unfortunately, the recording portion failed – only my voice was recorded, not that of the other person speaking.

But a few quotes:

GTA:San Andreas [for] PC was pushed back by XBox to tomorrow [June 8th]. The June 7th release date is the American release.

To which I replied that in the Canadian flyer, the release date was stated as June 7th. And of course, the true release date is June 7th: Its a simultaneous North American release.

That’s not to mention the fact that Microsoft/Xbox has no effect on the sales of the PC version. They aren’t the publishers. And you don’t seriously think that the other parties would miss out on THE day to sell their game now would they?

GTA:San Andreas is due out for tomorrow, not today….if you see any other stores selling it before then its illegal.

I told him about how it was advertised in PC Gamer and other publications as being a June 7th release. He just continued the same spiel.

But it isn’t his fault, because when I talked to the managers about this posing as an employee of Take-Two Interactive, they informed me that they were informed via email that the release date was to be tomorrow for Canada as well. This is a case of misinformation; one on the part of the higher-ups at FutureShop. A dissapointing one at that. Despite this, the FutureShop webstore also still claims that the product is available today.

So I was looking in my logs today. There was a new, and somewhat busy, referrer. Turns out that someone was using my Proxy service to host an explicit image on their blog.

This was rather frustrating, as I’ve made it quite clear that I don’t want this to be used to surf porn. Bandwidth is quite precious, and I don’t wish it to be wasted on some picture from a bunch of chicks from “LipstickLesbo”.

When I checked the logs, it turned out that that the porn site was visited multiple times through the proxy at different occasions (768 requests). Not to mention the other requests for “Japanese wh0res” and so forth.

I’m really tempted to take the proxy down…