Another gorgeous day here in geishaland, and it’s Stay Naked Sunday too! Yay!

After an incredibly busy geekified week which saw me moving data around three different computers, getting my Linux workstation up and running, reorganizing the way content is presented here, culling the blogroll, doing a slash and burn on commercial advertisements, and then upgrading my Wordpress software to version 2.5… one could say that a day off spent naked between the sheets would be in order and well deserved – and that’s pretty much exactly what I did too. But it isn’t all fun and games today, tho mostly… there’s still things to talk about and new features to play around with with the new software, so I’m going to see how this all works out.

My geekification bender continues today with three news items which jumped out at me over the course of the weekend. The first has to be this piece here from c|net news which covered the Pwn to Own contest at CanSecWest which saw both the new MacBook Air and a Vista loaded notebook fall to clever hackers.

It held out as long as possible, but a Windows Vista laptop fell to a determined bunch of hackers Friday evening at the Pwn to Own contest at CanSecWest.

Since it was the third day of the contest, which saw a MacBook Air get hacked on Thursday, the TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative relaxed the rules even further. On the first day of the contest, only the operating system could be targeted, but on the second day that was expanded to include standard applications. An undisclosed Safari flaw led to the MacBook Air’s downfall.

The best line tho, and it completely validates my decision to use Ubuntu for managing geishaland was this:

A Sony Vaio laptop running Ubuntu remained unscathed at the end of the conference.

Now that’s what I call an endorsement. If hackers can’t break into it, then it’s good enough for me.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time railing against record industry bigwigs for trying to push subscription services onto the music loving public, and I spanked Universal CEO Doug Morris pretty hard here, but now this joker Jim Griffin, an executive of Warner Music Group, says here that he’s working on a plan to collect music fees from consumers via their ISP bills.

Is he fucking kidding me?

The controversy over whether an internet service provider should charge for music is once again coming to a boil.

Pundits, music-industry insiders and members of the public are bashing Warner Music Group exec Jim Griffin after he acknowledged in a interview that he is working on a plan to collect music fees from consumers via their ISP bills.

I don’t know what it’s going to take for the record industry to get it thru their collective heads that they’re only entitled to make x-amount of dollars on the products they sell, and all these schemes to reap these ginormous revenue streams do is alienate their customers. So, now we’re all supposed to pay an ISP tax to the record companies because they’ve got it stuck in their head that we’ve all gotten a free ride on their backs?

The bottom line is this Jim – you market a product, the consumer pays for that product. How it gets to the consumer is irrelevant. Whether we buy it in a record store, or download it from iTunes, you get what you get and no more. Other than that? Lick me you greedy music hating fascist pig.

And finally, my pet cause, net neutrality and public enemy number one Comcast was in the news here over a supposed peace treaty with BitTorrent over network management and throttling.

After months of accusations, denials and foot stomping on the part of users, cable giant Comcast and the peer-to-peer file sharing company BitTorrent have reached an agreement that supports file exchanges on the Comcast broadband network.

The issue surfaced last summer when Comcast subscribers began to notice a degradation in their BitTorrent uploads. Further investigations by individuals were later confirmed by the Associated Press: Comcast was sending out signals to disrupt the uploads of BitTorrent transfers.

The controversy expanded as Lotus Notes users realized they were also being throttled back, and other Internet service providers (ISPs) admitted that they too throttled excessive traffic use. The FCC even held hearings, and Comcast became the whipping boy among net neutrality advocates.

I think the most prudent position to take on this is; I’ll believe it when I see it. Telecoms and Cable companies have an axe to grind. I’ve never seen an industry like the phone companies, well maybe the record companies, which hate their own customers as much as these morons. What ever happened to letting market forces and supply and demand figure these things out? Why must they always work behind the scenes in some sneaky assed way to try and find new and improved ways to screw the end users? And we wonder why the rest of the world thinks we’re a joke.

Other than that it was a pleasant weekend. With Jeff working nights last week I hung out with my son Friday night, ordered some take out Chinese food and played one of his new video games with him. Tho I have to say, he’s got this amazing golf game for his PS3 that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t remember the title off hand, tho I think it’s called Everyones Golf 5, but it’s amazing. I found a video trailer online that I’m going to try and use the new Wordpress video gallery feature with, so please bear with me if it’s not right just yet, but it’s a great game!

Well then, time to slip back between the sheets… have a great week!

Okay — the file was too big, but I can use my older video plugin…