On the other hand, you got record labels that are doing everything they can to piss people off and rip them off. I created a little issue down here because the first thing I did when I got to Sydney is I walk into HMV, the week the record's out, and I see it on the rack with a bunch of other releases. And every release I see: $21.99, $22.99, $24.99. And ours doesn't have a sticker on it. I look close and 'Oh, it's $34.99'. So I walk over to see our live DVD Beside You in Time, and I see that it's also priced six, seven, eight dollars more than every other disc on there. And I can't figure out why that would be.

Q: Did you have a word to anyone?

Well, in Brisbane I end up meeting and greeting some record label people, who are pleasant enough, and one of them is a sales guy, so I say "Why is this the case?" He goes "Because your packaging is a lot more expensive". I know how much the packaging costs -- it costs me, not them, it costs me 83 cents more to have a CD with the colour-changing ink on it. I'm taking the hit on that, not them. So I said "Well, it doesn't cost $10 more". "Ah, well, you're right, it doesn't. Basically it's because we know you've got a core audience that's gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever". And I just said "That's the most insulting thing I've heard. I've garnered a core audience that you feel it's OK to rip off? F--- you'. That's also why you don't see any label people here, 'cos I said 'F--- you people. Stay out of my f---ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F--- you guys". They're thieves. I don't blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s--- that they pull off.

Q: Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?

I've have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it's done in the studio, not this "Let's wait three months" bulls---.

Reznor seems to be getting pissed off about all the right things these days...

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails | Herald Sun

Welcome to the Jersey Shore! Have a great time, but please don't dig too deeply in the sand in Surf City (you could get blown up), feed the seagulls in Ocean City (you could catch a disease), or draw dirty pictures in the sand in Belmar (it's rude).

If you have tummy trouble, don't even think of going to Sea Bright, and if you come to Spring Lake, leave your spear gun at home. Other beaches won't let you eat, pick flowers, fly a kite, gamble or ride a camel.

Many of the beach towns on Long Beach Island, one of New Jersey's most popular summer vacation spots, have laws prohibiting people from digging deeper than 12 inches in the sand. They stem from an accident several years ago in which a teenager died when a deep hole he was digging collapsed, burying him.

This year, the prohibition is for a different reason: More than 1,000 pieces of unexploded World War I-era military munitions were unwittingly pumped ashore during a winter beach replenishment project decades after being dumped at sea. Authorities say they've removed everything they could, but can't guarantee more munitions don't remain hidden.

"How can you tell a kid not to dig in the sand?" asked Faith O'Dell, who lives near the beach in Surf City, where most of the fuses were found. "It's their nature, it's what kids do. And when your kid says, `Why, Mommy, why can't I dig in the sand?' what do you tell them, that they could blow themselves up?"

N.J. beach rules target seagulls, camels, dirty pictures - CNN.com

The director and writers of this film should be forced to walk the plank.

The plot is confusing and hard to follow. I'm guessing the writers had some coked up brainstorming session, and just decided to use all the ideas they came up with, regardless of if it made a good movie of not.

Seriously, don't see this movie. I lack the words to adequately convey how much this movie sucked. Normally I don't bother to post negative reviews of things, because it seems like a waste of typing.. But in this case, I want to save as many of you as much pain and boredom as possible. Don't waste three hours of your life on this piece of crap.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Disney lawyers' heads must be spinning over this one. A movie posted on Stanford University's site called "A Fair(y) Use Tale" mashes up all your Disney favorites to humorously and effectively explain copyright law. The ten minute movie, directed by Eric Faden, came out of Stanford University's Fair Use Project Documentary Film Program. Stanford's Fair Use Project--to which Stanford Law professor, Copyright guru, Creative Commons advocate and Wired writer Lawrence Lessig contributes--was founded last year to "support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom." And, well, the movie is damn sure creative, and certainly seems to take the boundaries of fair use about as far as they can go.

The mashup cuts up and splices audio from more Disney movies than I could begin to list (or even identify) to explain the intricacies of copyright law and the fair use doctrine. It takes the works of "the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms" and flips them to argue against longer copyrights and attacks on fair use. It leads to some beautifully surreal moments, often highly recursive, with the characters of The Jungle Book and The Lion King asking questions such as "what is the public domain?" or proclaiming "fair Use is not a right; fair use is only a legally defensible position, and this is not fair...The point is if fair use actually works then movies like this one will have legal protection." Word.

This video is damn impressive.

Hijacked Disney Characters Explain Copyright

From Decius:

I learned today that SonicWall filters MemeStreams under the category "Hacking/Proxy Avoidance." While these are certainly topics that have been discussed here, Slashdot is not banned under this category, nor is Security Focus, from which live exploits can be downloaded for most disclosed vulnerabilities.

BlueCoat also filters MemeStreams as "unavailable;Hacking;Forum/Bulletin Boards." I have no idea what "unavailable" means. I agree with the "Forum/Bulletin Board" categorization, but again the "Hacking" category raises questions. It only makes sense if its applied consistently. I don't have access to a BlueCoat proxy to check.

Have you seen MemeStreams banned by a web filter? Do you know the vendor and category?

Several people have brought this to our attention. It's already clear that this is effecting users.

If anyone has advice about appealing to the companies providing filtering solutions, chime in...

MemeStreams banned by Web Filters

A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.

While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies.

Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.

"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."

Interesting. This is the first I've heard of this.

If it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another by cyber-warfare.

I'm not so sure about that part... I guess it depends on how you define cyber-warfare. I prefer to view this all as different flavors of information warfare, which very much includes espionage activity, which we have often seen.

The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks, where websites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their internet addresses - many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions.

"The cyber-attacks are from Russia. There is no question. It's political," said Merit Kopli, editor of Postimees, one of the two main newspapers in Estonia, whose website has been targeted and has been inaccessible to international visitors for a week. It was still unavailable last night.

At the moment, the big question may be if this type of attack qualifies as a military action in the same way that electronic warfare does. At this point, if only websites are being DoS'd, it's one thing. If the attacks are (or become) focused on key infrastructure, it would be more clear cut. If these attacks are driven by state conflicts, this is a dangerous grey area to play in.

Without more information, it is very hard to determine if these attacks are backed by the state, or just being done by rogue hackers that happen to be motivated by the row between Russia and Estonia.

Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia | Guardian Unlimited

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

Al Gore has a new book on the way. I like the theme.

Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

A raging forest fire, started by what authorities suspect was an errant flare from a military aircraft, burned more than 12,000 acres of Pine Barrens, forced more than 1,000 southern Ocean County residents from their homes Tuesday night, and closed parts of several highways including the Garden State Parkway.

That flare, released by a plane flying over the Warren Grove Gunnery Range, ignited a blaze that, fed by dry weather and whipped by a 30-mph southwest wind, burned close to 20 square miles of forest land and damaged about 50 homes in Barnegat's Brighton at Barnegat, an age-restricted development of prefabricated, modular homes in perhaps Barnegat's most rural neighborhood.

By 10 p.m., the fire had consumed about 19 square miles, according to Bert Plante, a division fire warden with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service.

"As of 10 p.m., we have 15 percent of the fire contained," Plante said. "We're hoping that goes up rapidly overnight. We're not going to get a very good damage estimate until daylight hours. It's a crapshoot if we can keep damage under 15,000 acres. The fire is still very active because of the wind."

Gabliks said hundreds of state forest fire workers were called in, along with 150 pieces of equipment with crews from fire companies in Ocean, Monmouth, Atlantic, Burlington and Camden counties.

"It was a usual mission, when aircraft roll in to drop practice bombs and strafe targets on the range," Garcia explained.

As part of the simulated combat, pilots "pop off" flares from ejector tubes in the tails of the aircraft. The extremely hot flares are designed as decoys to attract enemy heat-seeking missiles that otherwise would home in on the aircraft engine exhaust, he said.

The range control crew dispatched its own firefighting equipment when spotters in the range tower detected the blaze, but it got out of control in winds gusting to 27 knots, he said.

Garcia acknowledged the fire could pose problems for the Air Guard, which has faced local community complaints about the range over the years. In fall 2004, another F-16 pilot accidentally discharged his jet's 20 mm gun during a night approach to the range target. Several non-explosive bullets pelted a school on the other side of the parkway in Little Egg Harbor as janitors worked inside. No one was injured then.

This is my home town. This kinda thing actually happens often.

The wail of sirens seemed to come from all directions while planes and helicopters circled constantly overhead, but many residents in Ocean Acres seemed unfazed by the commotion unfolding before them.

Susan and Rick Campanile, who have lived on Mermaid Drive for 30 years, said the frequency of forest fires, especially those in Warren Grove, have almost numbed them to the possibilities of what could happen.

"It always makes you nervous, but you can't do anything," Susan Campanile said.

One year they entertained guests at a cookout as cinders fell from the sky while a fire burned along Route 72. Other times the threat grew so real they hosed down their home as a precaution.

Yesterday, though, the Campaniles merely joined the rest of their neighbors out in the street to watch the smoke plume grow.

Asbury Park Press | 12,000 Acres of Jersey Burn

Black Helicopters (BH) are not just helicopters with a black paint-job as you may have been told. They are, in fact, autonomous agents -- lifeforms -- created by New World Order (NWO) agencies via nanobiotechnology. Their primary purpose is to spy on the activities of average citizens in order to gather tactical information and discover "subversives" who are not bowing to the will of the Liberati's UN-backed Federal Government. Furthermore, when the NWO Invasion takes place in the not-too-distant future, they will round up citizens for internment in concentration camps or carry out the elimination of the more vocally anti-Liberati.

This page tickles my conspiracy theory funny-bone in almost every conceivable way. This page will arm you with all the information you need to know about Black Helicopters in order to convince anyone that you are completely nuts.

It's even got posters you can print out and hang up: "The Nanobiotechnological Menace of Black Helicopters (PDF)"

The TRUTH About Black Helicopters!

One afternoon, Talinda discovered that she couldn't log on to her eBay account because the password had been changed. Soon after, she got an email from PayPal reporting that someone was trying to change the password to that account. Though such emails are often spam, sent by cyber criminals in an attempt to "phish" for user data, a call to PayPal confirmed it was real. No one had taken the Benningtons' money, but someone was trying to gain access. The PayPal rep told her to notify her local police.

"This person is hacking into everything," Talinda thought. "Are they watching me now? Are they here?"

In August, Chester got an automated text message from Verizon Wireless, his cell phone provider, confirming a new password for his online account. Like most phone companies, Verizon allows subscribers to manage their accounts on the Internet and view lists of incoming and outgoing calls. To open this type of account, users need only go online, fill out a form, and choose a password.

But Chester had never opened an online account for his Verizon mobile phone; he got his bills the old-fashioned way, by snail mail. So why was Verizon confirming a password change?

Suspicious, Chester and Talinda logged on and changed the password, promptly receiving an SMS verification of their change. Then another notification informed them that the password had been changed again. So the couple changed it back and got another confirmation. When they got yet another text message announcing yet another change they had not made, the Benningtons logged on and found a question written in the space where the password should have been.

"Who is doing this to you?" it read.

"Artist 2.0", meet "Fan 2.0".

Linkin Park's Mysterious Cyberstalker