Ninjas, Not Pirates

Tagged as: Internet, Life, Music, Rant, Software Apr 23

Alright so I don’t actually know any ninjas. Pirates, though? Perhaps.

Not the pirates that say, “Arggh me matey” or have a peg leg or even have a parrot on their shoulder. That would be cool, but I actually only know pirates in the modern day sense. You know the ones that illegally consume things like music, videos, software, pictures, or any of a whole range of things. Haha I can hear the groans already.

The digital age has made it infinitely more easy to exactly duplicate other content (which is related to why digital things are superior in quality to analog). With this, people have degenerated to outright stealing while not even understanding what they’re doing. Well I hate to break it to you, but wrongs committed unintentionally are still wrong.

While I have written that I think that Music Piracy Makes People Stupid, this issue is far larger than just music. Music is the best known, probably because it’s the area that’s most often violated. It is so much more widespread, though. So let’s get down to the real issue.

Breaking Down Piracy

1. Someone creates something for a purpose
2. Somehow it’s made available to other people (whether stolen, hacked, copied, or what) outside of the realm of the original purpose
3. You (or a “friend” of yours) gets a copy of said good and utilize it

Is that pretty much how it breaks down? Seems to me like the real issue is that the creator/writer/actor/musician/whatever did not intend for those in step 3 to make use of their creation. If I were a computer programmer and wrote a program to sell. And then if someone had illegally hacked my program that I worked to create to sell and gave it away for free, I’d be piping mad. If you were a photographer and had taken a picture for someone, but someone else had taken it and used it for a totally different purpose, you’d be up in arms. If you provided services (law, medicine, therapy, teaching, what have you) and someone took your service without providing payment, you’d see that something was immediately wrong.

So basically, since the creator didn’t want it (and who hopefully created a bulletproof license or end user agreement), you’re undermining what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter that you could create a digital copy of their song without paying for it and they’ll be none the wiser. Because in actuality, it does affect them. You should have paid them for that song. And you are now a pirate. But you don’t have to be!

Dealing With This New Ninja World

Is all lost? Far from it. Once you understand what it’s like to be the one being defrauded, you’ll see that something needs to change. And there is a solution! There are all kinds of answers! Maybe watch things that are actually released by the studios (try out Hulu), actually buy music (if you’re listening to music you can probably afford to pay for it) or try Amie Street for the whole indie scene, and possibly even catch up on some of my Favorite Open Source Apps.

Or you could just become a real ninja and then you’d care about arrows, ninja stars, and ninjato rather than swiping versions of old TV shows, Adobe Photoshop, and/or the remix version of Justin Timberlake’s latest single.

Tracking Your Own Comments

Tagged as: Blog, Internet Nov 04

Commenting is a fun part of going around to different blogs. One thing that I’ve found is that it’s easy to respond to comments left on my own blog because I have a central place to access them from (namely my WordPress administration panel). It allows me to easily have conversations with people that stop by and leave comments.

Leaving Comments On Other Blogs

However I’ve found that it’s not quite as to do with comments that I’ve left on other blogs. The reason for that is because I don’t have that central place to access to see all of my comments! I’m not very well going to remember the URL of every post that I leave a comment on. That would frankly be ridiculous.

I’ve found a key to this problem. I’m sure that there are others out there, but I think that this one works decently enough. Check out co.mments.com if you want to see what I mean. In fact, you can even let other people see what you’re commenting on so that they can check it out and see if they’re interested in the same posts! Here is my public co.mments.com page.

Google’s Taking Over The World…And I Don’t Like It

Tagged as: Geek, Internet Oct 22

With Google increasing the size of Gmail to a bit less than 4 GB last week, I got to thinking about them as a company. They’re ubiquitous to anyone in a developed country because they are the de facto standard for search engines as of today. And they’re good at what they do, they’re real good.

However they’re obviously not all knowledgeable or almighty. They’re not God. Although I suppose that they could be a god to some. Anyways, not everything that they do is superior. But the fact that there is so much Fanaticism about Google that you should get an indication that something is up. And I’m not down with that. (Ha…ha…I guess that I still get amused by things like Up Or Down, Same Difference.)

Whatever the case, I know that for me they’re taking over more and more of my Internet profile. They have my e-mail with Gmail, they are starting to get some of my documents with Google Documents, they have a lot of my searching (although as of late I’ve been trying to be Winning With Blingo instead of going directly through Google), search all over the place with Google Maps, and I use Google Reader to peruse my RSS feeds. Update: I forgot about the obvious Google Analytics, Google AdSense, and the now Google-owned FeedBurner that I use for this blog. That’s a lot of Google products if you ask me.

But even more than the fact that Google is being used so often, they scare me for other reasons. The fact that they are creating portions where you are required to have a Google login (such as collaborating on documents) is understandable but at the same time rather monopolistic-leaning if you ask me. I’d wish that they’d allow create methods by which to create opportunities for people without having to create Google logins (easy as that may be). People need/want/love choice. And some people choose not to have a Google account. Arguments that they don’t need to use shared collaboration ignore the fact that they might need to. And then there are even scarier things like Google Web History (where they keep track of everything that you access from their site) and impinge on my personal life while also laying down the path to even scarier types of behavior.

I can see how as they get bigger and try to innovate, they could tread on territory that I’d much rather they stayed far away from. Somethings are more important than having perfectly relevant ads or a computer that can predict what you want to know.

Their well-known unofficial motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” I can’t help but get the feeling that the change of evil increases as corporations do. And Google is getting to be the big boy on the block. As big of a proponent as I might be for capitalism at work, that doesn’t mean that I always need to support the entities involved. I’m keeping my eye on you, Google.

Easily Blingo With Firefox

Tagged as: Contests, Internet Oct 03

Well, sorry to create a new post on the same subject (Winning With Blingo). But I just wanted to let people know about some further information about using Blingo. Besides, it’s not as if this is going to be a series or anything like that.

Well it’s worth revisiting because:

1. I got no comments on the last post. Not that I’m extremely popular but posts seem to get a fair amount of comments usually. Thus, I have no knowledge that anyone read it!
2. It’s a worthwhile thing to do because I feel like people only stand to benefit from utilizing it.
3. I’ll admit it, I want you to join through me because I wouldn’t mind getting extra chances to win things. Who wouldn’t want that?

In any case, for those of you using Firefox I have a tip for you. Now you can search Blingo in Firefox without ever having known the difference!

1. Go to “about:config”. This stores all of the configurations (sometimes hidden, sometimes available through menus) of everything in Firefox.
2. Change the keyword.enabled preference
   1. In the “Filter:” text box, search for “keyword.enabled”
   2. Right-click the entry with the Preference Name of “keyword.enabled” and click Toggle (make sure that the value is “enabled”
3. Change the keyword.URL preference
   1. In the “Filter:” text box, search for “keyword.URL”
   2. Double-click the entry with the Preference Name of “keyword.URL”. Change the value to “http://www.blingo.com/search?q=”
4. Now hit Ctrl-L (hold Control and type the letter l) or Apple-L (Mac OS X) to access the URL bar. Type something not a website that you want to search for. Try “Derek Wong” if you’re unimaginative.
5. You should be directed to the Blingo search results for “Derek Wong”!

This is something that many people could benefit from. Using the keyboard to access the url bar instead of the mouse is faster as well as minimizing ergonomic issues by using the mouse. (If you didn’t know, increased and poor mouse usage contributes to Repetitive Strain/Stress Injuries.)

Also this will allow you to search the Internet through Blingo (whose benefits I’ve expounded upon in Winning With Blingo) without having to actually go to the Blingo site each time!

Winning With Blingo

Tagged as: Contests, Internet Sep 28

If you don’t know, Blingo is a website search engine. You ask, “But there are tons of them out there, least of which Google, Yahoo!, etc.” Well this search engine is different because they give out prizes just for searching! A hoax you say? Well follow me as I take you on a picture tour of actually winning something!

So want to know more about it than just what it looks like to win? Well I’m here to explain it to you (as I understand it from reading Blingo’s website anyways).

1. Blingo takes your search query and performs and equivalent search on Google
2. Blingo receives results from Google and displays them to you
3. Blingo also displays sponsored results like Google does
4. Blingo makes money on said sponsored results
5. Blingo buys some prizes with some of the money
6. At specified times, whoever performs a search closest to the time they will be presented with the page that I was presented with. You have won!
7. Blingo doesn’t use all of the money on prizes, I’m sure. So they will make money, and you might win something

That’s basically how Blingo works. So let me just tell you that I think that it’s very reasonable to participate with them. The way to approach it, though, is to:

• Think that you would have searched Google anyways for whatever it is that you wanted.
• Don’t expect to win because the odds of actually winning are minimal.
• However, if you do win, then super!
• Don’t perform extra searches for extra entries because you’d likely be wasting unnecessary time.

So you can see why I would think that it’s worthwhile to try! And now that I won, it has solidified my use of it. They also have a neat affiliate program where you can sign up your friends. If someone that signed up through you wins, then you get the same exact prize. The winner’s prize is not diminished, but the original winner and whoever referred them will get exactly the same prize. If you’d like to sign up, then just click the button below. (I thought it looked like a man with a rifle. And I thought that was hilarious. Let’s name him Bob.) What that means is that if you win, I’ll just get a copy of what you win. So we’ll both win. Let’s win together!