2004

Salon.com is still putting out quality articles, but I personally don’t think it’s worth $30/year. (I put up with their daily clickthrough advertising instead.) But my friend Dave e-mailed me about a much better deal…

Apparently, if you sign up for Salon Premium, you get 1 year subscriptions to Wired and US News & World Report. But if you don’t want the subscriptions, Wired will send you a $12 refund and US News will send you $25. So take both refunds, and earn $7 plus a free year of Salon. Or keep the Wired subscription, scoring you a year of Salon and Wired for only $5.

The original e-mail is below.

So, I’m back from a week in Sydney. The suggestions from the Ask Metafilter community were fantastic, and we kept ourselves very busy. In brief:

Five Neat Things About Sydney

1. Tim-Tams – addictive chocolate-covered cookies.
2. The Currency – bills are colorful and nicely-designed, and made of an un-rippable polymer; plus, no pennies or one-dollar bills!
3. Mandatory voting – vote or be fined. This makes so much sense.
4. The butterscotch souffle at Wildfire – the best dessert I’ve ever had, period.
5. Optional Tipping – like the encore, some gestures are meaningless when they’re mandatory

Five Not-So-Neat About Sydney:

1. Vegemite – I tried it and it’s about exactly what I expected. Blecch.
2. Stupid copyright laws – plus, the Kazaa offices were raided while we were there
3. Australian Cockroach & Huntsmen Spiders (tie) – giant roaches in the streets and giant spiders inside. Eek.
4. Television – lots of American TV, six months (or more) behind the States
5. Kylie Minogue – she’s some sort of a national treasure and completely unavoidable

I’d like to give everyone a sneak preview of my newest and greatest project, currently 19 weeks in development… With a tentative release date of June 13, I’m proud to announce Waxy v2.0!

The doctors say he’s perfectly healthy, and my wife started to feel him move actively in the last week or so. (We’ve picked out a name, but we’re still working out the spelling.) I’m joyous and terrified and wistful and optimistic, often all at once.

Mostly, I’m just excited that I’ll have someone to play video games with!

The Academy announced today that a second screener video was leaked to the Internet, after yesterday’s announcement of the “Something’s Gotta Give” appearance. I commented yesterday about how screener leaks are far more common than the Academy realizes (or acknowledges), but I decided to do some research to back it up.

I compiled a list of every likely Oscar nominee, using these popular 2004 Oscar predictions as a guide. Then, I tried to find downloadable screener copies of every film on the list.

The results might surprise the Academy. Out of 22 films, screeners for all but one were widely released on the Internet. Of those, 10 were leaked over a month ago, and five were leaked over two months ago.

Below you can find a list of the 22 films, with the date they were leaked and links to the NFO files added by the release group for each:

21 Grams (December 11, 2003)

A Mighty Wind (August 5, 2003)

American Splendor (November 3, 2003)

Big Fish (December 24, 2003)

Cold Mountain (January 3, 2004)

Finding Nemo (August 7, 2003)

Girl with a Pearl Earring (November 28, 2003)

House of Sand and Fog (December 16, 2003)

In America (December 15, 2003)

Kill Bill Volume 1 (November 24, 2003)

The Last Samurai (December 24, 2003)

Lost in Translation (December 11, 2003)

Love Actually (January 6, 2004)

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (only available as camcorder videos)

Master and Commander (December 23, 2003)

Mona Lisa Smile (December 20, 2003)

Monster (December 24, 2003)

Mystic River (December 24, 2003)

Pirates of the Caribbean (September 15, 2003)

Seabiscuit (October 6, 2003)

Something’s Gotta Give (December 25, 2003)

Thirteen (December 2, 2003)

The big question: how did the Return of the King screener avoid getting leaked? New Line carefully released screeners to voting members, but specific details about their methods are scarce. Anyone have any information about it?

At first, I thought the headline on this article was a joke: “Oscar Screener Ends Up on Internet.” It seemed about as likely as “Britney Spears Song Found Online” or “Copy of Photoshop Downloaded By Someone Who Didn’t Pay for It.”

But apparently, the Academy is stating that this is the first time ever that an Oscar screener was found on the Internet. Is that possible? Last year, DVD-ripped copies of nearly every major Oscar contender were available online, with almost all of them marked and tagged as “Screener.” The Pianist, Frida, Gangs of New York, About Schmidt and Road to Perdition, to name a few. This year, files claiming to be screeners of many potential nominees are being routinely swapped via the usual networks.

So is this just more obfuscation from an industry in denial, or is it possible that every one of those downloads originated from other sources?

Also, the liability form that Academy voters are required to sign is interesting:

I agree to ensure that I know, at all times, the whereabouts of all screeners sent to me under this agreement… I agree not to allow the screeners to circulate outside of my residence or office. I agree not to allow them to be reproduced in any fashion, and not to sell them or to give them away at any time…. I agree that a violation of this agreement will constitute grounds for my expulsion from the Academy and may also result in civil and criminal penalties.

Veteran actor Carmine Caridi now faces expulsion from the Academy, most likely for letting his grandkids borrow his copy of “Something’s Gotta Give.”

Joshua points to an unusual social networking project called Socialgrid, that bills itself as “a free dating service using Google, grid computing, P2P (Peer-to-Peer), and a file sharing program.”

The About Us section tells us that SocialGrid is the lifelong dream of one man, Chau Vuong. His main theory is that soulmates exist, and that you can beat the improbable odds of finding them with technology. Chau built SocialGrid to help him find a soulmate to meet his high expectations.

As far as I can tell, you’re assigned a lengthy identification code by the patent-pending Identification Coding System™, which you then place somewhere on your website. Other people can then use the SocialGrid web application to search Google for your coded attributes. Or you can use the patent-pending SocialGrid Search System™, a peer-to-peer Windows client, to search the codes of other people running the client. If the entire system works, you’ll find your soulmate.

No comment on the technology. For me, the entire project is summed up by the “Warning to Copycats & Clones” on the homepage:

We have retained one of the top intellectual property law firms in America. Everything is copyrighted and trademarked. The patent application claims coverage of basically all complex objects, including people, in almost every country. We will marginalize every profit margin. There is no money to made in creating another ID coding system. The world needs only one system. If necessary, we will donate SocialGrid and the patent to Google to insure one standardized coding system. Any copycats and clones will have to answer to Google. Do not compete with us. Join us and become a partner.

Take that, FOAF!

Earthstation 5, the peer-to-peer software developer that declared war on the entertainment industry and told them to “fuck off,” officially announced that they’ve hired Sex.com’s former owner Stephen Michael Cohen as a consultant. The Economist originally broke the story in the U.S., after first being discovered by German technology magazine c’t.

Cohen is a good fit for the controversial company, having built a small empire on shady business practices and evading the law. In their background story of the Sex.com domain dispute, Salon.com summed him up as a “a convicted felon with a penchant for offshore investing, porn and Internet empire-building.” After being handed a $65 million judgement in the case, he fled to Mexico to avoid paying up. Sounds like a perfect match, no?

I’ve included the entire message from ES5 president Ras Kabir below, which was found on their community message boards.

Please Take Notice
Posted by Ras, Jan 3 2004, 06:33 PM

Let me make something very clear. We offered Mr. Cohen an executive job with our company. He initially turned us down, however after several telephone calls, he finally gave in and agreed to help us in the capacity of a consultant. We now have Mr. Cohen permission to disclose his indentity.

I have read some of the transcripts in the sex.com case presented to us by Mr. Cohen’s attorney. Further, I have read everything that the current owner of Sex.com (Mr. Kremen) has published on his web site.

What I can tell you is Mr. Cohen has a judgment against him for over 80 million dollars including interest and attorney fees. The original judgment against him was for 65 million dollars and that judgment was a CIVIL Judgment, not a CRIMINAL CASE..

What I have not seen in the press to my surprise is Mr. Kremen’s deposition where he stated he had no interest in Sex.com. It seems that these issues are now coming to light in Mr. Kremen’s case with Network Solutions.

My research staff has informed me that when Mr. Cohen had Sex.com it was making in the upper hundred’s of millions of dollars annually and today under the current management (of Mr. Kremen) it is almost worthless with very few hits and almost no advertisers. That says a lot about Mr. Cohen’s skills and that is worth a lot to our company.

According to the court records, Mr. Cohen was NEVER involved in Spamming. All of the money made by SEX.COM was made through memberships and advertisement.

According to our research, between the years 1995-2000, Sex.com had several million adult customers (monthly) paying up to $4 per minute to view Sex.Com website content making it the most lucrative online website in the world. In addition, Sex.com had mass income from banner advertisement, online sex feeds, and other content.

I have read the notices that were filed with SPAMHAUS and others. Each of these notices talk about an ISP known as Sand Man Internacional that listed Mr. Cohen’s as the administrator. However, in one of the depositions on file at the SEX.COM site, it clearly states that Mr. Cohen was not running that ISP at the time.

Needless to say, Mr. Cohen is no saint by any means and yes he does have a criminal record for bankruptcy fraud while representing a client. Most people on this earth I find are staintless. I have a rule; if you born on this planet and you have a birth certificate, you are aren’t a saint either.

It is well known in the press and even Mr. Kremen admits that Mr. Cohen is worth more than 100 million dollars today, and that he has received no funds from his judgment by Mr. Cohen.

We take security of our employees, partners and the ones that help us very seriously. There are many people in Palestine that do not like the fact that we have a Jewish partner and this has caused us some serious problems here in Palestine. Mr. Cohen is not a partner of our company even though we did in the past offer him a partnership of which he turned down.

Of top of that as the press will tell you, Mr. Cohen has several homes located in the South of France and Mexico, a private jet and is the part owner of numerous casinos and several businesses throughout Europe.

Mr. Cohen of course states he has no money and is currently living on welfare in Mexico.

Whatever the case may be, he doesn’t need us; WE NEED HIM because regardless of the Sex.com issue, he is recognized worldwide as the creator of the largest and most lucrative internet site in the world.

Ras Kabir
President of Earthstationv Ltd.
A Palestinian Corporation

Nearly every episode of Computer Chronicles, the influential and long-running television series, is freely available on the Internet Archive. If you browse by year, you can find plenty of classic geek nostalgia dating back to 1984. A few of my favorites are below.

Computer Games, February 1984. Steve Kitchen demos Activision’s Space Shuttle, the most complex Atari 2600 game ever created and the only one to reprogram all of its switches. Electronic Arts’ Bill Budge shows off the classic Pinball Construction Set for the Apple II, while EA/3DO founder Trip Hawkins shows off Dr. J and Larry Go One on One, the game that paved the way for EA Sports.

Computer Games, January 1985. The authors of Sargon and Millionaire demo them on the original Mac, and talks to Pitfall creator David Crane about Ghostbusters and David Lebling discusses Zork and other text-based adventure games. The short piece on the fledgling Lucasarts (then named Lucasfilm) is great, which had just released its first two games a few months before, the groundbreaking Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer.

Software Piracy, January 1985. A spirited debate between an Activision exec against a developer of a cracking utility, a surreal interview with John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper taking an anti-piracy stance, and a demonstration by the pseudonymous “Frankie Mouse” of a pirate BBS on a 300 baud modem. (Look at that text scroll!)

Operating Systems, 1984. The big highlight is Bruce Tognazzini, then an Apple engineer, shrinking himself to give a guided tour inside an Apple IIe.

The “Random Access” news segment at the end of each show is also entertaining, if you haven’t had enough geekery. I’ve only watched a fraction of the episodes so far, so post a comment if you find any particularly good moments.