This was played at the radio and television correspondence dinner. I don't know exactly why but it tickles my soul. Do the full screen, it's brilliant.

If you have a mac it's up, no seeds yet they're "doing some final checks"

PwnageTool_3.0.dmg (download torrent) - TPB

Check here for quickpwn or windows versions I guess, which will probably be posted shortly.
iphonedev - TPB

I literally just looked and there are suddenly 2000+ seeders soon to be 5000, and more than 3000 downloads already. I wonder if this will break some kind of torrenting record.. or what the current record is.. probably held by Ubuntu and I know more people have iPhones than use Ubuntu. Wait no I don't I just made that up. But searching for torrent record just brings up torrents themselves and not records so..

**Edit**

It looks like Iran has limited news networks to one story per day and banned them from the country. The #CNNFail hashtag on twitter and my own comments below criticizing the network for their near complete lack of coverage, even in that one story per day that they're currently allowed, may not be fair.

In CNN's defence if they did report more on the issue than asked by the Iranian higher-ups, it would only validate their claims that western media and interests are puppeting the Iranian people to protest and fuel the propaganda. That's the only rationalle I can conceive of for their odd behavior but then again back on the other hand there have been world events like geonocide, political turmoil, widespread disease, and mass refugee camps in recent history that CNN didn't cover that much either instead favouring things like planes landing successfully and celebrity deaths.

**Edit**

originally posted june 19, 2009 @ 2:35am

It's phenomenal to see that when reporters are banned, cell phones and internet disconnected, the two places to get news of Iran is the Comedy Network's Daily Show with John Stewart who 'accidentally' left one of their correspondents in Iran(episodes available online) and the internet ie: Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, etc., where are the news agencies? Where are the field agents broadcasting from a secure location?

So to compare, you have a news blog The Huffington Post, it's updated by the minute, all of what must be hundreds of thousands of readers are helping submit material and scour the internet for the voices of Iranians, it's full of video content, with deep and meaningful commentary. Then you have CNN who post an article about once a day on the subject, it's shorter than one of the Huffingtons liveblog updates which are happening constantly, they link to some of the Youtube videos as well, they link to images taken from other sites as well, and at the bottom there's a button to load blogs posts that linked to or talked about the article which tells you after clicking "hold on, while we get the good stuff".

The 20 blog posts it fetches aren't even organized and may have nothing to do with the elections. Judge for yourself, TV news is a dead horse, and they're incapable of keeping up with the evolution of the social web. As they try to they loose credibility. There aren't news anchors even, everyone on TV news is a pundit. You can't be a pundit and do what the Huffington Post is doing, you can't be an elitist character pundit and have your finger on the pulse without breaking character. They don't get that the internet isn't about the face of the person presenting the information it's about the meeting place. They don't get that it's organic and untied from Nielson ratings. TV news is like the Microsoft of news. They're trying to do a weird mix and compromise between their old business model and faking their participance in this internet revolution thing. This open sourcing of everything. A world where it's not the familiar names, or business deals, it's the quality that gets you viewers. Just because you're CNN doesn't mean you're anything special here on the web.

This is the reason why Net Neutrality is SO important. It levels the playing field. If Net Neutrality was not enforced, then even though a site like The Huffington Post was better at reporting on Iran they would have a slower connection and CNN would have a better connection just because they're CNN. Support Net Neutrality the future of the web depends on it, this is just one of many examples of it's necessity.

Here are the links to the latest from CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/18/iran.mourning.protest/index.html

and The Huffington Post liveblog which is already about 20 posts ahead and updating every 10 minutes: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html

Here's a couple of excerpts on the same topic for comparison:

CNN (One sentance)

Voices shouted "God is great!" from rooftops, from faces hidden in the dark.

Huffington (One update)

3:40 PM ET -- Allah o Akbar! It's just past 11PM in Iran right now, so one can imagine the chorus of chanting that's being sent through the night air. Take a listen, and then read the email I received last night from reader Nicholas.

I cannot in any way claim to know what people are thinking or meaning on the ground, but for centuries, 'Allahu Akbar' has been in the Muslim world a battlefield of meaning and ultimately of political legitimacy. They are five syllables pregnant in meaning, mutability and richness, not simply a ritualistic or fundamentalist dogmatic trope. Nor is 'Allahu Akbar' simply a prayer. In fact, despite all its negative, violent connotations in the West, 'Allahu Akbar' has been uttered by Muslims throughout history as a cry against oppression, against kings and monarchs, against tyrannical and despotic rule, reminding people that in the end, the disposer of affairs and ultimate holder of legitimacy is not any man, not any king or queen, not even any supreme leader, but ultimately a divine force out and above directing, caring and fighting for a more peaceful, rule-based, just and free world for people to live in. God is the one who is greatest, above each and every mortal human being whose station it is to pass away.

The fact that 'Allahu Akbar' is echoing through the Iranian night is not only an indication of the longing of people there to find a peaceful and just solution to this crisis. It also points to how deep the erosion of legitimacy is in whosoever acts against the will of the people, in whosoever claims to act on God's behalf to oppress his fellow human, including in this case some of the 'supreme' Islamic jurists themselves. This all goes to show that Islam, far from being merely an abode of repression and retrogression, has the capacity of being a fundamentally restorative and democratic force in human affairs. In the end, so it seems, at least in the Iranian context, 'Allahu Akbar', God is greatest, is a most profoundly democratic of political slogans. So deep is this call, that what is determined out of this liminal moment may very well set the terms for (or against) a lived, democratic Islamic reality for decades to come.

Woman illegally downloads 24 songs, fined to tune of $1.9 million - CNN.com.

The RIAA has bribed yet another jury and fined a woman $1.9 million for 'illegally' downloading 24 songs. Do people still pirate individual songs? Since I discovered torrenting I find it easier to pirate by the discography. I've been busy with other stuff but this article reminds me I haven't downloaded any music recently, and I have a long list of artists I wanna listen to. Download all the music you can, spread it around, share it with your friends and family, and support artists directly by going to their shows. Buy indapendent music.

With that said how much would you have had to pay the RIAA?

Here's a screenshot of my Itunes Music folder song count:

MATH: $1,900,000 / 24 songs = $80,000 per song

I have a bunch of podcasts and my own music in there, but according to bribed juries everywhere I currently owe the RIAA about $1,136,000,000, which for the other dyslexics out there is 1.136 billion dollars.

The RIAA suing people who barely pirate obsene amounts of money that they will never actually receive. It doesn't make sense why they're not more outraged at companies that make things like ipods. The current Ipod model has 120GB capacity, that's about 30,000 songs. WHY DOESN'T AN IPOD COST 2 BILLION DOLLARS THEN? Obviously most that music is pirated, millions of people have ipods and very few people in the world have spent $30,000 at 99c/song from the itunes store to fill it up. In case I haven't said it yet in this post, FUCK the RIAA.

If you've been waiting for the latest Jailbreak[http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/124232620/big-week] you might want to check out their Twitter[http://twitter.com/iphone_dev] where they just posted their analytics showing the burst in traffic since the os release. It's not a sample of the general population, but of the kind of people who would camp out in front of stores when a new phone comes out if they weren't so lazy. Also really cool is seeing Intense Debate in action on their blog, the comment system made by Automattic(the same people behind Wordpress). Earlier today the comment system went down for a while probably from the extra 3.5 million pageviews. Anyway here's the screencaps that were posted, notice 990,000 windows users and only 340,000 IE users. Also that 200,000 of the Safari users are on their iphone, so Firefox is the dominant browser here.. Over the last day or two I've been there a bunch of times, in Firefox, Safari, and Opera.. I don't know why, I just happened to have them open and using them for different things. I wonder if I'm the only one though.

Microsoft is getting disparate and desperate, offering a chance at $10,0000 if you use their browser for a few weeks and twitter about it. Check out the contest  Ten Grand is Buried Here | Microsoft Australia. I think it's funny that they don't have anything legitimate to promote their browser so instead they say "our fastest browser yet" and "old Firefox" even though 3.5 is being release in a couple weeks and 3.0 being released a year ago is and was still faster, more secure/standards compliant, etc. than IE. At any rate, since desperation amuses me, I'm posting a bunch of screencaps too so you can see what the above link shows you if you visit it in different browsers. It's kinda sad seeing a massive corporation reduced to throwing money at user contests(instead of at their own staff to make the product better) and childish insults at the competition. But then again the company made its bones by riffing off the competition and locking in deals with oems. The ideal of which is riffing off the wii to make natal which is great,  and then there's the other darker side rearing its head in the online space where they've locked themselves into a corner where all they have is childishness and flailing jabs at the competition. The people have spoken, market share fluctuations are accelerating in their competitors favour.  As more demographics cross over the 50% market share line expect to see a lot more money and name calling from them.

Firefox

Safari

Chrome

Opera

I don't think it's gonna have much impact, just like a really ugly chick playing hard to get and then when you turn her down she tells you she'll only date you if you wear a different shirt every day and IF you're willing to do that you have a 1 in 50,000,000 chance of winning some money. Come on. Especially when there's 4 really hot chicks that put out and know what they're doing just around the corner, and soon in the case of Chrome pre-installed everywhere.

If you browse around MSN there are just tons of ads trying to get you to use their services. Silverlight is total shit, one developer I've spoken to really like it, but it's just not viable, and he was a snob, even the implementations used on live msn sites to promote their products have pixelated poorly made graphics and are slow, it just looks really unappealing. But they're pushing it becasue they want to dominate rich media. Never gonna happen. I read somewhere they're now offering free POP access to Hotmail or Windows Live Mail or whatever the hell they're calling it now(how can they build up so much resentment from their users that they have to rebrand all of their products every few months). Previously it only worked in Outlook Express and a few random email programs that had to pay for the right. But that's so behind, I've got Gmail smtp access for free for moths now, and if Gmail wasn't doing it for me anymore I could just export everything, mail-contacts-calendar-documents, to any conceivable format and move, for that reason I and anyone else that uses Google services does so because their services are awesome. My grandfather tried to leave hotmail about a year ago to gmail but had to keep the hotmail calendar cause it's just not worth retyping his entire calendar, so he's locked in and hates them for it, no matter what they call themselves. Just like enabling free pop access they will have to open up their services but it'll be too late. Even if they somehow magically build usefull open tools by the time they're forced to do it, even blind consumers who just use whatever their computer come with will just hate them so much for all the abuse. It looks like they don't understand that most of their users are from the boom from 1999-2003ish who are just locked into their services and are turning against them. They're user base just isn't growing proportionlly to the rate of internet users. And it bleeds into their other businesses. They want to be in home automation with Micorosft surface and walls covered in wallpaper that's really interactive computer screens and project natal. I personally wouldn't get natal just because it's a camera with a dedicated internet connection built by Microsoft a shady manipulating untrustworthy company that sits in your living room constantly pointed at you while you watch tv and react to commercials. You need trust to enter someone's home like that, and trust has to be earned not bought.

Firefox has silently uploaded a release candidate for their upcoming version. Get it here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5rc1/

I thought I'd run a few tests to see if it's faster than Safari 4 which from all the hype, it's supposed to be. Here are the results, if you wanna run the tests on your own systems let me know what kind of scores you get.

Sunspider is a Javascript benchmark created by WebKit, so Safari 4's Squirrelfish should be designed for the most part to do really well on this benchmark, with that said, the results I got suggest that apart from any possible bias Safari 4 is still quite a bit faster than the Firefox RC. Run the SunSpider benchmark yourself here: http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html Check out my results below.

Firefox RC - score: 1788.0ms +/- 0.6%

Safari 4  1046.4ms +/- 4.2%

Next up I ran the V8 benchmark, which is what Chrome's Javascript renderer V8 is tuned to. Try it yourself here: http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v4/run.html Every time I ran it I got different results, here are the highest for each browser, Safari again fairs much better(note a higher score on this one is better)..

Firefox 217

Safari 1215

The final benchmark I ran is the one I blogged about earlier in this post. Run it yourself here: http://people.mozilla.com/~schrep/image12.html. I got the same results, that Firefox is about 3 times faster than Safari at rendering the image contrast and brightness. So what is it that makes Safari perform so much better in the more traditional benchmarks, and Firefox perform so much better in this one?

Safari's Squirrelfish converts javascript into byte code which is interpreted by a software virtual machine, much like Adobe Flash is today. Firefox's Tracemonkey converts javascript into machine code which is interpreted by the hardware(more or less). In theory machine code runs several times faster than byte code, but machine code would take longer to compile. So traditional benchmarks which load one test after another are completed faster in Safari, on the other hand the image rendering benchmark in which the entire application is loaded before starting Firefox does better.

To put this theory to the test I loaded Google documents, I copied 500 paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum(a massive latin text designers use for general prototyping as it reflects the average word and paragraph size of typical text) into a fresh new document. I then saved it started the test by asking it to check spelling. Because it's all latin most of the words would be spelled incorrectly when using an english spell check. I used a stop watch to time it so it may be off by up to 1 second. Here are the results:

Firefox: 27.5 seconds

Safari: 13.2 seconds

The theory doesn't hold up, Safari was twice as fast at spell checking. Ok but then what is it that makes Firefox perform better than Safari in that one test? Next I tried a slightly more subjective approach by running a few chrome experiments. It's hard to get raw numbers for these, so bare with me. Also note I'm running the tests on a Macbook with integrated graphics and 2GB of memory(but all on one side, the other side is empty cause I'm an idiot).

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/lorenz-84/

Firefox: Medium - jittery,  lost frames

Safari: Fast -  realtime

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/js-fireworks/

Firefox: Fast - realtime, slows down when screwing with the gravity control

Safari: Faster  - realtime, no slowdowns at all

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/monster/

Firefox: Slow - jittery, lost frames, too slow to sit and watch the whole thing

Safari: medium - jittery, lost frames, but watchable. not smooth but ok

Still across the board Safari is faster than Firefox in some cases a lot faster, except for that one image rendering benchmark I did the other day where Firefox excels. Why? I don't know, and the Google searches I'm  doing don't know either. Perhaps it's as simple as the tests designed for Webkit just favor Webkit and the one by Mozilla favors Mozilla. What's clear is that Javascript benchmarking isn't as straightforward as commonly thought.

I was watching some of the Google I/O stuff on YouTube and  clicked over to this Google Chrome ad. It looks incredible, I've never seen anything so cool for a piece of software.

Firefox ads look like they'll be pretty awesome too and with 3.5 scheduled to hold the fastest browser title for a while they have a lot to promote. Check out the Firefox ad below, not as cool special effects as the Chrome ad but still really really cool..

And then there's IE8, targeted at the mentally unstable. As we all know those are the only people that would actually switch to IE, anyone else that uses it does so because it came with their computer,  and they haven't seen the above two ads or tried other browsers.

Twitter Users Shame CNN For Not Covering Iran Elections, Riots | NEWS JUNKIE.

Well there you have it, CNN one of the most respected news networks has hit a visible wall with its adventure into social media. They keep adding more and more shows centered around Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace comments and using blogs as sources for stories and it's come back to bite them in the ass. While a blog - the Huffington Post - is liveblogging the Iran elections with Video, images, and reports from the ground http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html. CNN who has enourmous reach and tons of actual reporters and journalists is talking to bikers and reporting on six flags. I'm glad I threw out my tv the other day, but it's not about the medium used it's about all the news shows not just CNN pandoring to advertisers and trying to boost ratings and putting those ambitions over actually reporting news and historic events. A good example of this is MSNBC and their product placement deal with Starbucks and how it's taking over one of their morning news shows. Not just talking about the coffee constantly but also interviewing the CEO about how great the coffee is, instead of the economic shithole the world is in and the thousands of people the guy just laid off.