Rockstar. Hacker. Biker.
News of the day is that the script kiddies have gotten hold of the admin passwords for Gauteng’s Department of Local Government content management system and decided to add some Arabic flavour. A message “Hacked by CeCeN Hack Team” now greets visitors to the previously unknown site. The message extends further with:
“Allahu Ekber! denmark israel asshole Americas – 45 thousand people will give account – Hooray Chechnya”.
I like the background music though – that was a nice touch! Visit the site here or a screengrab here if it gets switched off.
Elaborate hoax
Industry experts, however, are calling the hack “an elaborate hoax”. Some claim the “hack” is simply a carefully crafted “viral marketing campaign” to try and get the website its first visitor. South Africa, they say, with a mere 400 000 broadband subscribers, simply has not had the internet penetration that would see people visiting a bland local government website instead of getting their usual facebook fix, and so a drastic approach was developed to pump up the traffic to the government site.
Only time will tell if the approach works, or if the site will simply return to its previous anonymity.
MusicDNA
MusicDNA should be MusicDOA.
Why? Well firstly, (Mail and) Guardian, file formats are female, in the same way that LPs are female. They always have been, and always will be – ask any geek. So, if MusicDOA is the son of MP3, then it’s not a welcome part of the music family.
But issues of gender aside, Apple has already invented MusicDNA – they just called it the “iTunes LP“, a much nicer name. Bundling additional digital content and interweb-link-crud along with the MP3 is not the revolution. It’s not even a warning shot over the bow. It’s more like “a tribute to the zip archive”. Yet some musically challenged business-moron (Stefan Kohlmeyer, the chief executive of Bach Technology, which has developed the file) feels that *this*, a rehash of MP3, will save the record companies?
C’mon, guys, it’s already over. The music label is done. Over. Archaic. Closed. Piracy does and always will prevail. Artists will make money from performing. Additional revenue streams will open up here and there, but the giant middle-man of music has been turned away at the gates, left to wonder (and wander) at how they ended up hat-in-hand, shunned by the masses.
We simply don’t need another audio file format. MP3 / FLAC / AAC is probably good enough, until we have flying cars anyway. And we especially do not need another proprietary format that is riddled with DRM and all kinds of consumer-abusing mechanisms (think tracking cookies, spyware, behaviour profiling). And of course alongside this “MusicDNA archive” will be the potential to literally hack the shit out of the consumer who buys and uses it. No longer will viruses be delivered by email, but by iTunes (or equivalent) instead. If we ever do need another format, it will be open source, patent-free and flexible, such as Ogg Vorbis.
So here’s to MusicDOA and the millions of stupid dollars spent developing an obfuscated zip file. Well fucking done, clowns. When you’re done pissing money away, please build me my flying car.
An awesome rough-edged version of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros’ HOME. The foot-tapping contagious happiness emanating from this band is just amazing, leaving you whistling their tunes with a smile on your face for days after.
Also: Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros – 40 Day Dream
and Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros – Home, live @ kcrw
I just downloaded and installed Namebench, a new open source project that benchmarks DNS servers, with a view of seeing how well my DNS is performing these days. All of these developments stem from the recent launch of Google’s public DNS service and the sudden realisation that a large part of the reason for interweb slowness, if you’re not in Africa, is the length of time it takes for a DNS query to complete. I do most of my mobile connectivity via iBurst, so I guess I like them to be speedy, unfortunately as the results below show, my closest DNS provider, my ISP, iBurst, has really bad average DNS response times…
And it’s got fuck all to do with latency over a wireless link – the same connection shows an average DNS response time that is 217% faster from Datapro, and MTN just a little bit behind that. It’s the Windows servers iBurst is using to try run an ISP. Sad.
The world of consumer broadband is starting to turn a little cut-throat in South Africa. It’s a relief at least – I’ve been waiting for ten years for this to happen. Not to be left out in the cold, iBurst has also dropped their prices to place them on an, erm, even?, footing with the ADSL providers. And they did it not by matching the lower prices, but by splitting their single unified subscription cost into a “Subscription Fee” and a “Data Fee”, allowing the cost per gigabyte of bandwidth to appear cheaper than it actually is.
I’ve amended their pricelist with the appropriate cost-corrections:
How can the new “Subscription Fee” vary so greatly across packages? The account and equipment is exactly the same, whether you use 80Mb or 15 Gigs, yet there’s a difference of R335 between the two? Fuck you for playing me stupid, iBurst.
There has been a slight increase in the bandwidth allocation, mostly on the high-end packages, which is cool, but iBurst’s attempts to pawn this off on us as ADSL-competitive is tantamount to calling us retards.
They’ve also scrapped their “64k throttling” if you’re out of bundle – one of the original major draw-cards for me – if you want “uncapped anytime” now it’ll cost you R200+ per month, and if you don’t want to buy more bandwidth you’ll be hard-capped.
I guess what this really means for the average consumer is that broadband providers are now going to try trick customers using any marketing tactic in the book, and are going to play the numbers to try and convince you their service is cheapest and best.
Let the buyer beware – the spin doctors are in the house…
mail: az.oc.yrrebwed@nuahs
gsm: +27 83 415 5201.
