It’s a Piracy Vs Anti-Piracy War

The Jolly Roger raised in an illustration for Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

Few years ago Microsoft silently released a Tool via ‘Automatic Updates’ to check and notify the Windows user about the genuineness of the Operating System, an attempt to fight against piracy. It indeed created a chaos for Windows Users and as a result, numerous patches were available to get rid of the nagging notification within no time. The surprising thing is that the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Validation Tool is so poorly constructed or should i call it “lame” that any user can block and remove it with the help of tiny patching applications and even by manual efforts. I don’t know how many Windows users Microsoft has been able to scare enough and make them actually buy a original copy of Windows OS, it is indeed interesting to know the number.

I live in India and few weeks ago I was standing in a que to renew my railway pass. We have a TV screen installed on the top of the railway ticket counter. It wasn’t for entertainment purposes but was actually an ad slot. What caught my attention was unusual and shocking! The commercials were setup to play from a computer using Windows XP and which was pirated too! During one of the commercials, a WGA window popped in and stated that ‘the installed copy of Windows is illegal and the user should buy an legitimate one.’ (These are not the actual words but something that i perceived). This proved to me that Microsoft or any other company in it’s pursuit to fight against piracy is way too far from killing the root of it.

Lars Ulrich form Metallica

Piracy has become like a uncontrollable pandemic disease. Remember the shutting down of Napster? Lars Ulrich, a drummer from a heavy metal band – Metallica,  filed a suit and brought down Napster, because one of their studio recordings they were working on was already available for free download on Napster P2P. Yeah, I am a hardcore Metallica fan and am proud of what Metallica did. But, what was the result? Thousands of fans protested against Metallica for their action and majority of them were users of Napster P2P. But, this did not scare the pirates at all and numerous other P2P sharing portals were established, soon after Napster was successfully shut down. Even the renowned P2P sharing portals like Demonoid and PirateBay have also “suffered and survived” form major law suits and recently, thirteen Hollywood production companies have filed a new lawsuit to try to get PirateBay.org shut down.

Practically, there is no end to the war and the best way to put an end to it is by doing what smart enemies would do. Teaming up and re-framing the strategies that they have been following. (Reminds me of the recent Microsoft-Yahoo deal) This is the smartest way to make things more productive for everyone. But, who knows what is brewing in the minds of the “big guys” ?

(Post updated as on 14th Aug, 2009)

Using Gmail Notifier With HTTPs Authentication

Google is well known for it’s “privacy policies” and also for it’s honest “Sophistication, with simplicity”. Gmail Notifier, a Google product, is a tiny freeware application which provides an instant notification regarding new email.

Almost all the Gmail users are aware that Google has introduced an option to access Gmail with more security i.e users can login to their mailbox with https://gmail.com rather than with the regular http://gmail.com. Now, Gmail Notifier users have noticed that after setting the Gmail access through https, they were no longer able to get new notification through Gmail Notifier. The obvious reason is that Gmail Notifier, by default, is designed to access the mailbox through basic http authentication and as a result Gmail Notifier fails to provide you new email notifications.

To make the Gmail Notifier work with the new HTTPS setting, you’ll need to install a small registry patch available on the following link:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9429

If you have any questions, your answer is just a comment away.

The distribution of certain gamma-rays in the galaxy is peculiar

This is the European satellite INTEGRAL

Many astronomers have speculated that the peculiar distribution of certain forms of gamma-rays in our galaxy, the Milky Way, may be evidence to support the presence of some form of undetectable “dark matter,” which influences its spread patterns. But these theories are disproved by two new scientific papers, one of which appears in the July 10th issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. Experts confirm that the weird disposition is caused by the path that “antimatter positrons” take through the galaxy, as they are propelled at high speeds.

These positrons are generated when massive stars in the galaxy explode into supernovas, or collapse into black holes. The elements that are created during these times of cosmic unrest naturally decay at certain rates, which is the main production process for this peculiar type of particles. Additionally, the researchers say, this line of reasoning is not exactly the most intuitive one, but explaining a phenomenon by attributing it to something that no one has ever detected is not exactly good science. Dark matter may be the possible explanation for the framework in which galaxies interact, but it does not explain gamma-ray fluctuations in our own galaxy.

“There is no great mystery. The observed distribution of gamma rays is in fact quite consistent with the standard picture,” University of California in San Diego (UCSD) Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences researcher Richard Lingenfelter explains. For the new studies, the expert cooperated with fellow UCSD research scientist Richard Rothschild, as well as with Claremont Colleges Physics Professor James Higdon. The largest part of the measurements that created the previous theories about the radiation distribution came over the past five years from the European satellite .

“These positrons are born at nearly the speed of light, and travel thousands of light years before they slow down enough in dense clouds of gas to have a chance of joining with an electron to annihilate in a dance of death. Their slowing down occurs from the drag of other particles during their journey through space. Their journey is also impeded by the many fluctuations in the galactic magnetic field that scatter them back and forth as they move along. All of this must be taken into account in calculating the average distance the positrons would travel from their birthplaces in supernova explosions,” Higdon explains.

“Some positrons head towards the center of the Galaxy, some towards the outer reaches of the Milky Way known as the galactic halo, and some are caught in the spiral arms. While calculating this in detail is still far beyond the fastest supercomputers, we were able to use what we know about how electrons travel throughout the solar system and what can be inferred about their travel elsewhere to estimate how their anti-matter counterparts permeate the galaxy,” Rothschild adds.

“The observed distribution of gamma rays is consistent with the standard picture where the source of positrons is the radioactive decay of isotopes of nickel, titanium and aluminum produced in supernova explosions of stars more massive than the Sun,” he concludes.

Source: Softpedia News