Category: Life

I profess a huge love for the anime series Cowboy Bebop. That said, I must concede that Full Metal Alchemist, a series that I am currently watching, is absolutely phenomenal. I have deep respect for its plot, as it defeats all the corny clich&eaccute; that we’ve come to expect from the great majority of television shows today: things “do not return to normal” at the conclusion of each show. Characters are well developped, and their progression through time is visible. Devastating events do occur to the characters, and the ensuing strain that is placed on the protagonists must be dealt with for the rest of the series. Another thing that makes me enjoy this series so very much is that it is just saturated with some of the greatest humour ever to have surfaced in animated form.

Full Metal Alchemist: A must-see for any anime fan.

On of the most memorable pranks I remember involved accessing a Business Xerox Printer/Server that was online. You could upload your own documents to the printing queue, which would then be printed off automatically by the printer. So we uploaded a few pictures of male buttocks to the printer. And by “a few” I mean a few hundred copies.

Anywho it turns out that that printer was not the only thing online that should not have been: thousands of security cameras are apparently accessible through simple google searches due to lack of foresight by the web administrators. I say lack of foresight as a simple robots.txt file will cause the search crawlers to ignore the sensitive pages being hosted online.

The article refers to one such example, which is found by getting Google to match all pages that have a URL that is created uniquely by a Japanese networked remote camera server system. Click here to see the example in action. It’s a clever way to locate such cameras, and this technique can theoretically be applied to find pretty much anything else as seemingly all device-oriented servers place a common string in their URL.

“Exeem” was officially announced by the Suprnova teem today, and will supposedly be a decentralised P2P take on Bittorrent. It will not use the Bittorrent protocol, and will use an external link system similar to ed2k:// urls. Sounds alot like eDonkey to be honest.

Some claim that in fact it isn’t decentralised at all (much like eDonkey/eMule/overnet network relies on master servers), and there is an anonymous corporate donor backing the whole project. Interesting development to say the least.

NovaStream.org radio on 30th December around 10 PM CET (9 PM GMT, 4 PM EST). Got that?

By Tony Smith
Published Friday 17th December 2004 09:53 GMT

The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) has filed a further 754 lawsuits against named and unnamed individuals it claims have infringed its members’ copyrights.

The latest round of court filings brings the total number of lawsuits the organisation has issued to 7706. However, there seems little sign that the RIAA’s aggressive, highly public legal proceedings have had any real result.

According to market watcher BigChampagne, cited by Reuters, around 7.5m computer users were running P2P software in November – 70.5 per cent more than the 4.4m who did so in November 2003.

The RIAA last filed complaints against alleged music-sharers in November. Then, it targeted 761 people, including a number in US universities and colleges. It issued 750 lawsuits in October.