In a hasty move to try and head off a mountain of bad publicity, the RIAA settled out of court with the mother of the 12 year old girl they sued. The mother now has to pay $2000 in damages, for her daughters’ copyright infringements (and, I guess, promise never to do it again).

Personally, I think it should’ve been dropped all together…

The RIAA is sueing a 12 year old girl, for “massive copyright infringements through file-swapping”. Under legislation, this could mean her paying “damages” of upto $150,000 per song.

Just when you thought they could go now lower, they pull this one… I hope they get seriously nailed to the wall for it. Surely it can’t be long now before they get investigated by the feds, for what they’re doing?

Either that, or people should wake up and Boycott the RIAA.

…and my home-rolled Linux build is still building…

Compiled the kernel OK (I think), now I just gotta do the graphical UI stuff. I think I may have borked this bit :S

Looks like it’s gonna be another nigth with the machine running while I try to get to sleep over the noise the fan makes…

Bah.

Italian hackers are trying to hack into my works’ servers…
Apparently they’ve been at it for a week now (I guess that’s a good sign?). Unfortunately, all their scanning and probing, etc, means that our bandwidth for getting in/out on the net is virtually non-existant.

Bastards. :S

We’ve notified our ISP, but apparently there’s very little that can be done… Which sucks ass.

Can someone explain to me, what the point in it all is? At most, they’re gonna get a few project reports. Nothing that can make them money. Nothing that will make them infamous or l33t.

Bah. Probably nothing more than a bunch of fscking script-kiddies…

What’s up wit’ dat? 🙂

Another thing that I forgot to mention, that I actually meant to post last night (but w.bloggar was playing up on my desktop) – found a kickass program for doing CG (Computer Generated) artwork.

OpenCanvas (http://www.portalgraphics.net) combines some really wonderful natural media type brushes, with some basic photoshop functionality (layers, et al). This may not sound very different to, Painter, for example… well that’s cos it isn’t. However, I found Painter quite hard to get to grips with and hard to understand. Plus, it costs a bomb. OpenCanvas may not have as many options or features, but it’s simple, fast (takes up next to no space), intuitive and above all, it’s cheap. If you hunt around, you can still find the v1.1 release, which is free. Current official version is 2.24e. Interesting features include network co-operative work (multiple people can work on a piece at the same time) and the ability to record your progress for later playback. Handy for creating tutorails, etc.

So if you like CGing and were looking for a tool to add that natural look that you were after, give it a try 🙂

(I sound like a salesman…)

A few days ago, version 0.2 of Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/) was released to the public.

It’s miles faster, takes up less space (physical + RAM) and has a few new features and visual tweaks.

I use it and I highly recommend it! The junk mail filters alone make it miles beyond any other mail software I’ve used!

House move went a-ok, I am happy to report.

Got my ADSL activated on Thursday. Took a bit of configuring, but I got the wireless bit working as sweet as, as they say. Surfing the net from a comfy seat in the living room is so much better than at a hard desk…

The only problem is that I’m stuck to find things to download! All this bandwidth and nothing to take it up!

BTW, thanks to Onelotus Creative for the return link. Much appreciated 🙂

Other links for today: