BRUCEB NEWS
Power And Cruelty In George Orwell’s America
Power Eric Lutz / Vanity Fair, April 3, 2020 Tierney Sneed / Talking Points Memo, May 13, 2020 Yahoo News, May 13, 2020 George Orwell on power: “Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not...
KAZAA SHARED FOLDERS
If you’re using Kazaa, Morpheus, AudioGalaxy, or any of the other file sharing programs, make sure you’re not sharing more than you intend. A study released today concluded that...
VERISIGN DOMAIN REGISTRATION SCAM
I got a piece of junk mail that was more slippery than most. Keep an eye out for it. In a plain white envelope was a plain white piece of paper that was formatted to resemble an...
REPLAYTV SPYING ORDER OVERTURNED
A federal court overturned the order entered last month that required Sonicblue to write and install software to monitor what its customers were watching and report that...
MEDIA JUKEBOX VERSION 8
During the last year, not much has changed about the software designed to play .mp3 files. The market leader is MusicMatch Jukebox, which has such a quirky interface that I find...
UMAX PIONEERS NEW PRICE GOUGE
Umax is one of the leading manufacturers of scanners. A week ago, they began charging for driver updates that previously had been available as a free web download. And prices are...
THE FBI, PROUD GUARDIANS OF OUR RIGHTS
Gotta love this story. In 2000, the FBI apparently used Carnivore electronic surveillance in an attempt to collect information on Osama bin Laden's network. Unfortunately they...
ADVERTISING ON TIVOS
A nasty surprise lies ahead for users of personal video recorders. TiVo and Replay market devices that are godsends to serious TV hounds. They connect at night to a program...
RECORDING INDUSTRY MARCHES ON
More developments in the recording industry's relentless war to make sure we can't actually hear any music. Yesterday KaZaA, the Dutch software and products company which founded...
DUNGEON SIEGE
Got a new computer, an Nvidia GeForce 3 or 4 video card, and a bunch of free time? Check out the reviews of Dungeon Siege and see if it looks like you might be tempted. I don't...
REPRIEVE FOR INTERNET RADIO
On May 2, I wrote about an order due to take effect this week requiring Internet streaming radio stations to pay punishingly high royalties for songs - far higher than comparable...
XBOX LIVE AND ONLINE GAMING
The next hot market is online gaming - plenty hot already, but due for a big push in the next eight months. Many people are joining massive online worlds and investing oodles of...
CRACKING CDs WITH MAGIC MARKERS
The recording industry is going to elaborate lengths to create music CDs that are copy-protected - to prevent you from copying, or "burning," music onto recordable CDs, onto a...
VIRUSES REAL AND IMAGINARY
REAL: A particularly nasty new virus named "Klez" is making the rounds by e-mail. It has the usual characteristics: it arrives in a randomly-generated message from someone you...
EXTRAORDINARY DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY
"Personal video recorders" (PVRs) are the hot new item in the television industry. Tivo and Sonicblue Replay are the market leaders. These boxes act like a super VCR. They record...
SCANNER TUTORIAL
PC Magazine has an article about scanning that answers a lot of basic questions about digital images, scanning resolutions, and what to do with some of the scanner controls -...