This post was in the txt of posts that never make it.
What you say?
Welllllllll
I rant and write about a ton of stuff. You never read most of it.
I write many articles that never make it on this site either due to my never finishing or by the time I do I find the topic isnt so topical anymore, I lose interest or Im just too lazy.
I usually have a txt file that has a bunch of topics going on simultaneously with reference links and such, not to mention a bunch of stuff I wrote I never put up that eventually gets deleted.

For example right now I have something on Symbian going open source and Comcast changing its name.
Both articles probably arent ever going to make it to this page. I already find its old news.

Anyways - Heres one that didnt make it... well, I guess it did.
Whatever. Have an article I didnt ever mean to post.
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Verizon probably didnt do it for teh lulz.
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So Ive gotten a few emails from people asking me to look into 4chan apparently being blocked. Honestly I didnt see the big story, but now I see there are reports of it on cnet, pcmag, the twsj, etc. Sheesh.

Ok, first off, I hate 4chan. I dont go there. I normally have better things to do.
As far as Im concerned, its at best the Mos Eisley of the Internet ("wretched hive of scum and villainy").

So anyways suddenly it seems (if 3 days ago counts as sudden - thats February 5, 2010) there are reports that Verizon Wireless is blocking access to 4chan! OH NOES!

While I could give a rats ass about 4chans existence, I DO care about an ISP blocking a website, especially when they do not have a reason. So firstly, damn you Verizon for putting me on a path to agreeing with 4chan on something.

Now then, I began to look into it briefly and dug past all the jackasses hype of "OMFG WE R SO BAD THEY BLOCK US NOW WE R MOAR AWSUM" and noticed its not even all of Verizons network thats in question here. Its Verizon Wireless. So if you have FIOS, or regular Verizon DSL service, all is well.
Ok, people are flipping out about their mobile access to 4chan. Hmmm. Ok, whatever. Still weird as far as Im concerned that it would be blocked on one network but not the other.
This was starting to sound less and less like censorship. In fact, it had a familiar ring to it.

(Flashback - not too long ago ATT blocked 4chan, for its participation in DDOS and other attacks. It presumably turns out that some folks that have some beef with 4chan (or in desperate need of "lulz") spoofed some IPs to make it appear as if these attacks were coming from the 4chan site, when in fact they were not and thusly ATT blocked traffic to 4chan in a defensive maneuver to protect its network.)

I will spare you the bull and get right to the hypothesis.
Hows this for a guess on whats going on:

Someone realized that by making it look like a DDOS was coming from 4chans IP, causing 4chan to be blocked by ATT to protect from the attack, thus making 4chan inaccessible to millions of users (ATT) - which in effect created a DDOS-like effect on 4chan itself from the ISP (also, well played imo) worked very well and decided to do it again, but this time with Verizon.
Apparently, some investigation shows that its the return route to Verizon thats being blocked.
The packets can reach 4chan from VZW but 4chan cannot respond those packets as they simply get dropped, which sounds like attack defenses to me. Unfortunately for 4chan users the way tcp/ip works relies on communication both ways. Actually in a funny side-circumstance, 4chan users trying to access the site but cannot access it are just flooding the site with requests and forcing the server to send replies that are being dropped, which can cause among other things some buffer overflows, which is kind of almost hilarious to me in this particular context.

Update:
Relax people.
You can surf 4chan again from your mobiles at the time of this post with no fear of web filters on your mobile devices.
Just wait though. Heres another free prediction.
The uproar the mobile network blockage caused shows the popularity of browsing 4chan with mobile devices.
So how long until they finally figure out posting viruses for PCs isnt the way to go, and get their new lulz from dropping mobile malware?
When it happens, just remember they arent "cutting edge" for thinking it up.

Perhaps you are have been unaware of a court case involving Australian ISP iiNet and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). Well, to bring you up to speed a bunch of movie studios were going after this ISP called iiNet because they felt that iiNet had failed to take steps/action to stop illegal file sharing by its customers.

...but guess what?
They lost. Oh snap!

Not only did they lose, they had a nice precedent set.
But wait, Im getting ahead of myself. Lets hear what the judge had to say:


and also as a bonus:


Ok, so this means that “the mere provision of access to internet is not the means to infringement” in Australia... which makes total sense, to me at least. I mean, pretty much this says that an ISP is simply a service provider, which supplies a service to a customer. They aren't responsible for what that customer does with it.
Hooray! Logic!

Now before I get a bunch of emails about this, let me put it this way:
If this IS NOT how the decision should have went, then whats next?

Could one potentially say that its ok to sue Chevy for selling the armed bank robbers in the North Hollywood shootout a Chevrolet Celebrity?

Better yet, sue the Gov't for allowing access to the road that the criminals used to both get to and escape the bank?

How about suing a hardware store for selling someone spray paint that they used for graffiti?

Maybe go after a power company for supplying the power a marijuana grower powered his light with?

Can the water company be charged for "allowing" the water in the above marijuana scenario to be used for illegal purposes?

What people choose to use a provided service for is not the responsibility of the service provider -
it is the responsibility of the end user as an individual to abide by the law! </strong emotional opinion>

Not all is roses with this ruling, however. This is what the losing side had to say about the situation:


Wait... whats that? A silver lining to that last statement?
Hmmm...maybe. Especially when you consider that in America, the sheer cost of lawsuits has forced the RIAA and MPAA to scale back their legal campaigns against individual citizens.
You need money to pay all those lawyers.
Of course fines of $1.9M for 24 songs doesn't come down to anything but extortion anyway but apparently that's another matter all together.

Further reading:
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/3 ... vour_iinet
http://www.iia.net.au/index.php/compone ... gment.html
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/3 ... t_decision

PS - yeah I totally ripped a bunch of that from lightning - who had comment #43 @ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article ... right_case
Why? Because I agree and couldn't have put it better myself. Thanks.

Ok, so here's something I thought was cool. I heard today that some scientists, particularly Dr. Mark Dennis from the University of Bristol and Professor Miles Padgett from Glasgow University tied some light into a knot.

Woa.

Seriously though, here's the idea behind it, simplified to an extreme.
There are these things called optical vortices. To reduce it to the ridiculous, its like making light kind of spiral out in a direction rather than in a straight line. I suppose you could use the analogy of a toy slinky, with the slinky rings being the light and all going in one direction. What you would see if you shone that light on something flat like a wall would be a ring of light rather than a single beam.

Ok, so these guys took this to the next level as I understand it by creating optical vortices, and then manipulating them into knots.

So for those of you who are a bit behind, to sum it up some dudes made light travel in a spiral, then tied that into knots. Yeah, that. What did you do today?

So what?
Well....
The thing about optical vortices is that they can actually induce torque from the spiraling effect, depending on how many twists the light does in one wavelength and the more spirals (higher number of twists) the faster the light is spinning around the axis so the more torque it has. They can also be used to trap, manipulate, and even transform small volumes of matter.

Lets not get it twisted, (Ha ha, see what I did there?) we aren't talking about much force. Its enough force to work on a micrometer scale. Think of micrometer scale bulldozers, or micro pumps with no moving parts, or sorting or mixing particles and stuff like that.

What else? Well, computers use electrons which have two states, zero and one. That's 1 and 0... You know, binary. That's how they work. Now you have the possibility of quantum computing that uses light to encode and store information, and optical vortices theoretically have an infinite number of states because there is no limit to the topological charge (how many twists the light does in one wavelength) so this could lead to faster data manipulation and higher bandwidth. There's even talk of using this technology on radio waves to reduce radio-frequency congestion. Im not even going to get into that right now. Long story short(er) there's a ton of cool stuff you can do with this.

Ok, I hear you now writing me emails... "Yeah Halla, but that was all doable before this whole knot tying thing. So whats the big deal?"

The big deal is the fact that tying these optical vortices in knots proves we have much more advanced optical control, and so we can now do even more with optical vortices than previously thought.

For example you can manipulate these optical vortices to project hundreds or thousands of simultaneous three dimensional configurations, each with unique characteristics and make some seriously sophisticated nano-craziness, and who only knows what else.

I thought it was cool. Hopefully you do too.
Here are some links on the topic to blow your mind and/or waste your day:


http://www.physics.nyu.edu/grierlab/hot.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... screwed-up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_vortex
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences ... t-in-knots

Later people!
(PS - H4z3, you were the tie-breaker on this post. I hope you liked it. Now build me some nanobots!)

Feel like some good old fashioned hackery?

Sick of searching through the Windows Vista (32 bit only! theres rumors of this hack crashing 64 bit versions!) or Windows 7 control panel?

Wish the control panel would just display a simple list of alphabetically sorted linked text labels to nearly all of the "administration" options the average user will ever need?

Realize you can't perform local Group Policy changes on Windows 7 Home Premium, but want to do things like restrict internet access during certain hours, Keep kids from installing stuff, etc?

Maybe something like this?



Well then, have we got a cute little trick for you!

Create a new folder and name it the following:
InformationLeak.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Simple? Hell yes!
Enjoy!

So I was reading some news today and found that the iphone app store has now hit 3 billion downloads.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10424 ... icksArea.0

That was fast.

So the app store opened on July 10, 2008.
It hit a billion downloads on April 24, 2009
It hit 2 billion downloads on Sept 28, 2009
Now today (Jan 5, 2010) its at 3 billion downloads.

What does that mean?
A lot. Hang on.

It means that this app store is wildly popular.
It also means that Apple has sold one billion apps since September 28 mark, thats only 98 days.

Perspective time! (aka excuse for math time)

1,000,000,000 app downloads in 98 days =

10,204,081 app downloads per day
425,170 app downloads per hour
7086 app downloads per minute
118 app downloads per second

Hot damn.

So whats this mean for Apple? Well...

Lets say that 95% of the apps downloaded are free.
I'll go out on a limb and call that a fair number. That means that only 5 percent of the apps downloaded are being paid for.

Now lets lowball and pretend that the average cost of each paid for downloaded app is only $1... and Apple gets 1/3rd (it does) of all apps sold (forgetting the $100/yr license fee for now)
Therefore:

5% of 10,204,081 = 510,204.05 (apps sold per day @ $1)

510,204.05 * .3 = 153,061.21 (Apples $ take per day)

$153,000 aint bad for a days work. So lets forecast a month then...

153,061 * 30 = 4,591,830 (monthly Apple profit from appstore alone)

ok, 4.5 million a month comes to about 54 million a year. (4.5 * 12)

Please note that these numbers are a bit skewed in that Im only taking into account the last 98 days, not the previous profits of the last 1 year, 2 months and 18 days since the app stores launch and the 2 billion download milestone (thats 445 days or 10,680 hours, or 640,800 minutes or 38,448,000 seconds if anyone cares.)

So congrats Apple, Im no Apple fan boy, but theres no arguing that those are some impressive numbers! Rock on!

-Feel free to check my math, I wrote this quick and on the fly. Comments Welcome as usual. You know the email. Thanks.