Exploring Stuff That Makes Life Great
The guys at Filmonic have gotten their hands on some really cool cast manips by someone called “xwolverine2” for the (seemingly dreadful) upcoming Dragon Ball Z movie. These are based on the recent announcement that Justin Chatwin will be Goku and James Marsters is Piccolo. Since Digg has decimated them, courtesy The Digg Effect, we’ve got the pics right here.
Goku
Piccolo
Now, I’ve come across pages on YouTube saying that 20th Century Fox has just acted like an ass and have taken off a video for copyright infringement (when it really was the case). But it turns out that movie leaks aren’t the only thing 20th Century Fox is pulling out. If this guy at The Movie Blog is right, then his negative review of the truly abysmal Reno 911: Miami may have been yoinked by ‘Fox.
YouTube sent him an e-mail telling him that 20th Century Fox doesn’t want that video on, due to copyright infringement. The guy, “John”, retaliates by saying that all the content he used in the review was from free trailers, the sort of stuff you don’t pay for, you know? He has not used pirated material in the review, and has hence, not infringed no copyrights.
20th Century Fox hasn’t yet talked about the matter, giving John ample time to spread the message that they are yoinking bad reviews from YouTube and so on. Is this the truth? Is a big, veteran corporation like 20th Century Fox capable of preying on us inferior, internet-obsessed weaklings just to keep reputation? Like hell they are.
“True” pirates may have disappeared since the time of colonial adventures and salty sea adventures, but as far as the entertainment goes, today’s pirates are no less. TorrentFreak, firm upholders of the Pirate code (alongside The Pirate Bay and related websites), are facing what can be described in clichéed terms as a taste of their own taste.
BREIN, a famous Dutch anti-piracy organization seemingly stole a quote from TorrentFreak. The context was an article on SumoTorrent, another torrent site, moving to Canada (TorrentFreak’s equally propagandic writers declare this to be a celebration on their part, but we’ll leave that to you). BREIN copied a quote from TorrentFreak, who had conducted an interview with SumoTorrent earlier, without linking back to them or acknowledging them. Plagiarism? I say piracy!
Legally, TorrentFreak has a point – BREIN has infringed their copyright. TorrentFreak is actually considering a lawsuit here, for a good $975,000 and prison time. Harsh? I have a feeling. Then again, I also have a feeling that the lawsuit won’t go anywhere for quite some time. If you head to TorrentFreak here, you’ll find out how they are freaking out over the issue in a rather biased manner.
What is hilarious here (apart from TorrentFreak’s bias) is the irony of the situation. BREIN is anti-piracy, but has plagiarized a quote from a pro-pirates site. TorrentFreak, who would generally be sympathetic to anti-piracy lawsuits, are considering an insane lawsuit themselves against BREIN. Oh god, this is making my head spin.
[Update] – Crytek has updated the status of their latest patch.
inCrysis, a Crysis fansite recently hosted an IRC interview with Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek and Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA. They’ve posted the transcript of the event at their site, which can be found here. While most of the stuff is technobabble, I did extract the following information from it:
Some other things worth pointing out:
Thanks, Crownest!
Check out the StuffWeLike.com review of Crysis.
You might have an account on Flickr. Heck, you might have even posted a dozen photos of that geek party you held last year that nobody commented on. Well, you might be pleased to know that you just lost the race to get the 2 Billionth image on Flickr.
Over here at Flickr, you can see that lucky little yukesmooks posted image #2000000000 on Flickr. The photo, whose preview you can see above is of some sort of a tree (or something that looks like some sort of a tree) and was taken at Market City in Chinatown Haymarket in Sydney. Nothing spectacular, in my honest opinion.
I suppose the next thing to look out for will be who gets image #2500000000, or #3000000000. Here’s a challenge from StuffWeLike: post image no. 2185510267 on Flickr and we’ll give you a special hug.
I’ve been using Gmail for a couple of years now (maybe a bit more) and I haven’t encountered any such thing, but it is best to stay on your guard. Network World has run an interesting article on one complaint that Google is facing at an alarming frequency: Disappearing e-mails.
Even though Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail each have more users than Gmail, it appears that there are actually more Gmail users complaining of missing e-mail. Many clues point out towards this being a technical issue, such as the incident with Jessica Squazzo, who lost every single e-mail that she received precisely in 2007. Google denies this, claiming that the user is at fault (phishing attacks, passwords, you know what).
Even though this is something to be wary about, there are some points you need to think about. Even if this is Google’s fault for losing the e-mails, the users aren’t guilt-free – at least the ones mentioned in the article. From the article:
Moreover, both Sessum and Squazzo, interviewed separately via e-mail, question why a malicious hacker would go through the trouble of trying to access someone’s e-mail account in order to delete messages, instead of acting stealthily to harvest information they could exploit, like credit card numbers.
Well I can’t answer that, but it might be related to why some viruses delete all the data on your hard disk and/or corrupt it, as opposed to stealing your private information and your credit card numbers, which you oh-so-trustfully keep in a non-encrypted Notepad file in your My Documents folder with the name “CREDIT CARD NUMBERS.txt”
Sessum is actually “building a small company on Google’s back” and therefore trusts Google, a free internet service to not lose her data. I say bullshit – free internet services are not the first choice for building companies on. She complains about the Google support system like so:
“Google’s back-end support function is MIA. You can’t find a number to call. You have to tap our personal network of friends to find a name and a way in through the back door, do a dance and rub a stone for good luck, and hope that someone will help,” she said.
Well you didn’t pay for it , so you should expect the same treatment. I’d be grateful Google even has a support system (which I didn’t know till now).
And most importantly, for all of those complaining about how they lost all their important and/or professional data on Gmail: Gmail is in beta. Yes, it is in beta. No guarantees, no nothing. You lose something – all your fault. You build a business over a free e-mail service in beta stage and lose all your e-mail – your fault. Anything goes in beta. 😉
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