Seagate Fights Its Downhill Slide with Litigation

Another company that is slowly going downhill has decided to deal with it by litigation, rather than by improving its products and diversifying.

I’ve long used Seagate’s hard disks, among others, both as portables as well as internal drives. However, the newer portable hard disks are definitely of poorer quality than the ones I bought a long time ago. On the old portables, when they were plugged in, the drive was always available. On the new ones, if I use an application to access the drive after a long hiatus, the drive, which was on and spinning, will suddenly switch off, spin down, and then re-switch on again. All by itself. It’s very irritating, and adds two or three noticeable seconds to the initial time needed to access the drive.

With solid state drives on the ascendant, Seagate probably also sees the writing on the wall for its hard drives. Instead of innovating and perhaps buying into the technology, it has decided to use its patent arsenal as weapons against others manufacturing solid state drives. Their first target is the very small STEC, an SSD manufacturer.

I guess this spells the beginning of the end of another company. When companies try to fight the future in this way, instead of embracing it, it can’t be good.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Monster Cables vs Blue Jeans Cables

Monster Cables, a company supposedly delighting in sending litigation letters to competitors, sent one to Blue Jeans Cables, only to find that Blue Jeans was no pushover. Its president was a former lawyer, who quickly saw through what he saw as spurious claims designed to get companies who didn’t know better to quickly settle. According to the president’s letter, none of the Monster Cables patents even applied to Blue Jeans’ stuff - and some of the patents they cited were mutually incompatible with each other so that a cable violating all these patents at the same time was impossible to make. The claims made were also very vague - they didn’t even specify which of the cables violated which patent, and so on.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

WordPress.com Problems

This new version of WordPress on WordPress.com has introduced some problems:

• After I had posted, over a day or so, it added “ggRIAA” to “RIAA” in my post title for RIAA Lets Its Lap Dog MediaSentry Break the Law. You can see from its URL that the original post did not have ggRIAA, neither did my backup of that post. PS: I’ve since fixed the title that WordPress mangled.
• While posting, I tried to use the word “differentiate” but the software just refused to let me use it, deleting it at every turn. In the end, I had to substitute “different”. Stupid software. Funny, the word “differentiate” works now.
• Hiding the categories section below the post box instead of at the right side is really not a good idea. I have already accidentally posted a number of posts into the “Uncategorized” category by mistake. Categories and tags are something that I regularly use to organize my posts. Putting the “Save” and “Publish” buttons beside my post makes me hit it earlier than I should.

Why do software go downhill over a period of time? Maybe it’s because the developers find that they have added all the useful features they can think of, and then they start reorganizing things because they can’t think of anything else.

Anyway, YUCKS to the new version of WordPress.com.

Filed in Opinion, WordPress.

RIAA Lets Its Lap Dog MediaSentry Break the Law

MediaSentry continues to flout the law, operating illegally, despite a cease and desist order from a court. This is no surprise to me, since RIAA and MediaSentry have garnered reputations of being the hoodlums of the Internet. The news has been around for a while, and the latest site to report it is Ars Technica, but I only just got fed up enough to post my opinion of it.

I think I said it before. If you want others to respect your rights, you have to respect their rights too. Otherwise what makes you different than a thug?

Filed in Outraged, Entertainment, Opinion.

Network Solutions Hijacks Your Sub-Domains Too

Not content with stealing domain names from people who search, and being sued for it no less, Network Solutions has now been found to hijack their customers’ sub-domains as well. TechCrunch revealed that if you’re using Network Solution’s web hosting or DNS, Network Solutions will direct visitors to any unassigned sub-domains to a page loaded with their advertisements.

Why does anyone even use Network Solutions? Together with eNom and GoDaddy, they are probably the worst registrars in the world.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Sony Sued for Software Piracy: Hypocrisy Again

Remember when there was some scandal involving one of Warner’s top management where it was found that the guy’s daughter pirates music at home? Well, now we have another hypocrite, and this time it’s Sony, the one that tried to plant a root kit onto your computer, making it open to all manner of viruses and spyware, just to protect their own music. The latest news is that Sony BMG is now being sued for software piracy, and its assets have been seized.

Maybe BSA should make a raid on all of the recording studios and movie production offices. You know, to find out if this is just the tip of the iceberg. RIAA and MPAA should also raid BSA offices too - who knows what sort of music and movies that may be pirated there? After all, these people are talking and thinking about piracy all the time. That’s pretty suspicious isn’t it? The rest of us ordinary folk don’t even think about such things until either the RIAA, MPAA or BSA bring it up.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Humor.

Creative Takes Down Third Party for Fixing their Broken Vista Audigy Drivers

Creative probably made a major tactical error. Apparently the drivers for their sound cards do not work well under Vista, with many features crippled. A developer named Daniel K created fixed drivers that allowed Audigy and X-Fi (?) users to use their cards on Vista the way they could on XP. Now Creative has issued a notice to the modder to take down his drivers. This has led to a major hue and cry in all the major forums, including Creative’s own, as well as many tech news sites.

I have a feeling that Creative is disallowing the fixes because they want users to buy a new sound card for Vista, as well as pay for some add-on software pack called Alchemy so that their sound card will work in Vista as advertised.

There are probably at least 2 parties at fault here:

• Microsoft - for releasing a Vista that has disabled so many things that came with XP and causing so many driver problems. The Vista developers obviously don’t believe in backward-compatiblity.
• Creative - too money grubbing about the whole matter. Good grief, customers have already paid for your card. And you didn’t even have to fix the software, someone did it for you. You destroy your goodwill when you take him down without providing your own fixes.

Update: see the latest news on this, as well as the URL where you can get the modded drivers in Creative on the Defensive over X-Fi/Audigy Drivers Fiasco.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, Windows.

The Champion of Horrible Domain Registrars Strikes Again: GoDaddy Takes Down RateMyCop.com

GoDaddy, long-time champion of taking down domains of websites it doesn’t like, has struck again. This time it has taken down a police watchdog site, RateMyCop.com. As is its usual policy, there is no warning, and the owner wasn’t even informed. The domain is simply redirected to a page on GoDaddy.

GoDaddy is notorious for taking down sites whenever it receives the slightest complaint against it, and has a a long history of acting in this way. Maybe it was jealous that eNom was hogging all the bad publicity and wanted to return to the limelight slimelight.

If your domain is with GoDaddy, or you’re hosted there, better start thinking of alternatives. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to find a good registrar anywhere. But GoDaddy has proven itself to be the bottom of the barrel, with eNom competing to win that distinction as well.

Filed in Outraged, News, Web Hosting, Opinion.

New Wikileaks Exposé: eNom’s Domain Privacy Protection is a Sham

Wikileaks has revealed that eNom’s domain Privacy Protection “is a sham”. eNom’s lawyer was quoted as saying:

When complaints are received, we have a very low threshold for turning over the underlying information of the party. Basically anybody mentioning the word copyright or trademark or bought or anything can be sent the underlying contact information…

It gets worse than that - “Wikileaks has discovered a previously unreported eNom proposal from last year to bulk-release customer records to government agencies”. The quote below comes from Wikileaks:

eNom’s idea is to encrypt registrant’s confidential information and attach it to every public “whois” record. This would allow law enforcement, or anyone else with a decryption key, to obtain all confidential records automatically.

Readers of this blog may remember that eNom is the registrar that voluntarily killed a foreign company’s domain for doing something that was legal in their country and many parts of the world, without even a court order.

Wikileaks is calling for a boycott of this domain registrar. The registrar has also recently killed the wikileaks.info domain.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Foreign Company’s Domain Disabled for Allowing Foreigners Legal Access to Cuba

The domain name registrar eNom has apparently disabled access to Steve Marshall’s travel agency website at the US Treasury Dept’s behest. Marshall is an English travel agent catering to European travelers. The US Treasury didn’t like that he allowed travelers access to Cuba, so they requested eNom to shut down his website by taking his domain off the map. Which they did.

This move reminds me of the attempt of the Julius Baer Bank (of the money laundering scandal and censorship notoriety) to censor Wikileaks by taking the domain off the map. In this case, I fail to see how the US Treasury can have the authority to take out the domain name of a foreign company doing what is legal in his country. And they didn’t even go through a court and eNom just caved in.

Is it even legal for a domain registrar to do something like that? Isn’t this is breach of contract or something? Can anyone trust domain registrars situated in US anymore if any Tom, Dick or Harry can simply waltz in and disable a domain even if it’s of a foreign company doing legal things?

I’m disgusted at the registrar. But I don’t think the other registrars are any better. They cave in at the first sign of trouble. No, that’s not right - they cave in if you even look at them funny.

Anyway, according to NY Times, some of his sites are still accessible, such as cuba-guantanamo.com.

Filed in Outraged, News, Opinion.

Sanity Strikes: Microsoft Decides to Support Standards for IE8’s Standards Mode

My post title may seem like a “duh” statement if you don’t know the story of IE8’s dubious new meta tag, where Microsoft intended not to support the standards in IE8 but required web developers to add a special tag in their web pages to opt into the standards.

It looks now like Microsoft has reversed its decision, thankfully, so that those who want the non-standard IE7 rendering have to specifically opt for it. Developers who simply create pages to comply with web standards will automatically have IE8 render those pages correctly. Sanity at last. This style is in keeping with the web browser and standards traditions that have been established since the dawn of the Internet - where browsers automatically opt to render the page as compliant with the standards as it can. This sane method is also in line with the IE detection code that Microsoft developed in IE6 and later, where developers can target code designed for specific IE versions. Now you can target code for IE6 and IE7, and know that the standard compliant code of the rest of the page will be used in IE8. That’s the way it’s meant to be.

Filed in Web Design, News, Opinion.

Incompetence of DivX Owners Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg: Stage6

There seems to be more than meets the eye behind the Stage6 closure than I had assumed in my previous two posts.

Far from a money-losing concern, Stage6 was apparently making DivX millions of dollars. Stage6 required the installation of a player, and along with the installation, users were offered the option of installing a Yahoo toolbar. Apparently, DivX was earning millions from their deal with Yahoo for this. However, infighting among the DivX owners over what to do with Stage6 led to the resignation of the key people running Stage6. Left without anyone competent to take the reins, the site had to be closed down.

The DivX Inc stock has also taken a nosedive. And it’s a pretty dramatic plunge too.

Filed in Opinion, Software.

Stage6 Closure Shows that Many People Feel the World Owes Them a Living

I previously mentioned that Stage 6 was going to close at the end of February. When I moseyed along to their blog, I expected to see a lot of people mourning the death of a great site the way I did. Instead, I saw a lot of vulgar language cursing Stage 6 for closing.

I don’t understand these people. They got the services Stage6 provided for free. They didn’t pay a cent. As far as I know, Stage6 had no paid subscription scheme or anything like that. Why are they cursing and swearing at Stage 6? The behavior is like that of people who believe that the world owes them a living.

I’m still mourning Stage 6’s closure, for the reasons I gave in my previous post.

Upate: more info about the closure in my follow-up post Incompetence of DivX Owners Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg: Stage6.

Filed in Opinion, Outraged.

Hurray! Network Solutions is Sued - Bad Domain Registrars Should Be Punished

Chris McElroy has filed a class-action lawsuit against Network Solutions for its unsavory practice of secretly buying up domains that visitors to its site search for. The suit says that the “fraudulent and deceptive” practice is intended to “trap consumers into paying its grossly inflated domain name registration fees”.

I’m glad someone is fed up enough to take up a lawsuit against unscrupulous registrars like this. If no action is taken, other registrars will soon start doing the same thing, and it will no longer be safe to check domain names at registrar sites.

Filed in Web Design, Opinion, News.

Pakistan and the YouTube Blackout Debacle

News about Pakistan banning YouTube beccause of content that it deemed offensive to Islam, and then accidentally blocking YouTube from the world as a result of the use of erroneous internet protocols is probably old hat by now.

The thing that puzzles me is that such a thing is actually possible. That is, it is possible for an ISP to hijack the address of a website located in some server not located in its country, and block that entire server from the Internet. Wasn’t the Internet designed to be more robust than that? Wasn’t it created initially as a sort of defence network for the US or something? So much for the fabled routing abilities of the Internet.

So what’s to stop one country at war with another from taking out the other country’s entire Internet infrastructure? Without access to the Internet, can they even hope to repair the damage?

Actually, these are just questions. I don’t know the answers [sheepish grin].

Filed in News, Opinion.