Adobe Acrobat Reader Sucks

I'm sorry. I just have to come out and say it. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a crummy piece of software. Now don't get me wrong: PDFs are a good idea--I'm very happy that we have a cross-platform way to specify exactly what a document should look like. And Adobe's professional PDF making tools are, in all probability, the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas and all that. But Acrobat Reader isn't. It's a bloated piece of software, with millions of features that absolutely no one uses. It takes 30 seconds to load in a tab in Firefox, and, while it's loading, I kick myself for being so dumb as to click on yet another PDF link, and frantically yet unsuccessfully try to abort loading the program. Part of the reason that Acrobat Reader takes so long to load is that, whenever I start it, it has to phone home to Adobe, and then, just when I've started reading the document that took 30 seconds to load, it tells me how important it is that I update from version 7.0 to 7.0.1, and install the Yahoo!® Toolbar® and some kind of trial of Photoshop®. Every. Single. Time. I. View. A. PDF. I don't want to waste my time downloading the 30 megabyte new and improved version (how many of those bytes are '®'?) when the old one is viewing a PDF perfectly fine, and all I wanted to do in the first place was read the stupid document.

Enter Foxit Software's Foxit Reader.

A two megabyte download (compared to a whopping 30.7 MB for Acrobat Reader, including the Photoshop trial that comes with it by default), Foxit Reader is an alternative PDF viewer which has, so far, perfectly handled any PDF I've thrown at it. It loads in about a second, and, while it doesn't integrate into Fifefox tabs, it does one essential thing that Adobe Acrobat Reader does not do: it gets out of your dang way and lets you actually read documents.

You can get the miraculous Foxit Reader here. You'll thank me later.

MSNBC is Staffed by Idiots

I bring you a couple of choice quotes, from an article with the headline "Game piracy runs rampant on the Internet". If that's your idea of news, you need to come out of your cave.
On game console modding:

Early on, enterprising hackers also figured out how to modify consoles, disabling the copyright protection in the hardware and then reselling the machines with pre-loaded, pirated software. This process is called “modding.”

Apparently, there's no such thing as Xbox Linux.

A quote used from "Ron Teixeira of the National Cyber Security Alliance":

“A hacker needs only to find a way to get a malicious program into a computer and use it as a network,” he says.

I guess he misspoke, but, what? That quote didn't make any sense at all, yet it managed to find its way into a news article.

Mod Chips Illegal?

Apparently, Federal agents are going on anti-mod-chip raids. Mod chips--small pieces of circuitry that can be attached to gaming consoles in order to convince them to run games that they would not otherwise run--are apparently barred under the DMCA as copyright circumvention devices. While it is true that installing a mod chip will cause a console to play home-burned copies of commercial games, it is also the only way to cause the console to run non-official, unsigned games, known as "homebrew" software. This second use of mod chips-running unofficial software, or even copies of the Linux operating system, constitutes a "substantial non-infringing use" for mod chips, and that anyone fighting a case in court over mod chips would probably win--assuming they have a decent lawyer.

Maybe someone should talk to the EFF?

Dugg: Drunk Guy Kills Internet

At least, that's what Digg says about this post on a blog called Valleywag, which tells us that, quite recently, a drunk employee at 365 Main, a datacenter in San Francisco, has knocked out a whole bunch of web sites, including Craigslist, Technorati, anything that ever came out of Six Apart, and a site called Yelp that I've never heard of. What's more, the whole city seems to be having power problems in general, which is probably why Second Life is down as well.

The data center in question is, apparently, also being mobbed by angry customers.

It's amazing what happens to the Internet when there isn't any power to run it on.

I think the datacenter may be back online now, but Six Apart's stuff is still down, so the issues may not be completely resolved.

Monk: The Randy Disher Project

In the latest episode of Monk, one of the characters dropped a URL--therandydisherproject.com--which is supposed to be the web site for his (fictional) self-promoting rock band. Lo and behold, therandydisherproject.com actually exists. Currently, it serves up a web page that looks quickly smacked together using some sort of site builder, promising the following:

This site will be dedicated to the greatest rock band in the world. THE RANDY DISHER PROJECT. News, photos, gossip, tour dates and much, much more. so stay tuned everyone!

Favorite Band Member: randy disher
Favorite song: don't need a badge

The domain was registered on June 27 to a company called Weeny Entertainment Ltd. (which, according to Google, doesn't exist), and (here's the interesting part) to one "Jason Gray-Stanford," the actor playing the fictional Randy Disher who dropped the name of the site. The admin contact looks to be an ISP standard mailbox from Adelphia.

Could there be a Monk ARG in the works? Someone should try the e-mail addresses and phone numbers in the whois info.

Media Rights Technologies Needs to Get a Business Model

Media Rights Technologies needs a new business model. Their current model, which appears to consist of threatening legal action against people who don't pay them money, probably isn't working all that well. A while ago, MRT threatened to sue media player manufacturers for not including their streaming media DRM technology, which supposedly amounted to condoning "stream-ripping"--recording a digital media stream for later playback. Now, they're going after the other end of the stream, asking the Library of Congress to revoke the statutory licenses of major Internet Radio broadcasters for streaming non-DRM'ed music, despite the fact that they are perfectly allowed to stream said music without DRM, and that the broadcasters pay royalties to boot.

From their letter to the LoC:

MRT developed and disclosed to the Subject Webcasters a technical measure that protects copyrighted material from being downloaded and copied. That technical measure is known as the X1 SeCure Sound Controller. MRT's X1 was investigated and found by the R.I.A.A. to be 100% effective in preventing stream ripping and protecting the rights of copyright owners without the slightest degradation of sound integrity. The Subject Webcasters have refused to accommodate the X1, and some of them have affirmatively interfered with the X1 by designing their new systems in such a way as to disable it, all of which constitutes a violation of a statutory licensee's duty under the Act.

So, because webcasters don't use their "100% effective" solution, they shouldn't be allowed to broadcast. Like I said, I don't think that that business model will get them very far. And, what's more, stream riping, like recording radio to cassette tape, is perfectly fine. It's not immoral, and, if it's illegal, the law needs changing.

Given that today is Fair Use Day, I say that we should all go out and, in spite of Media Rights Technologies' protests to the contrary, rip some streams. No amount of angry letters can change what is right and wrong, and people are certainly less--rather than more--inclined to pay you money when you try to bring the force of law to bear against them.

AjaxLife

Ok. I'm a little late with this one. ;)
Katharine Berry's AjaxLife is, quite possibly, the coolest thing ever from anyone on the TG. It serves as a web-based interface to Second Life, and although functionality is limited right now (as Katharine is trying to stop her server from imploding), a more complete interface is coming soon. It's already been written about over at Second Life Insider, New World Notes, and, most recently, 3pointD. I advise you to head on over and check it out--it's quite cool, although it's been under heavy load lately.