Hollywood Keeps Screener Piracy ‘Alive’ by Mailing 70,000 Discs a Year
At the end of the year movie industry insiders traditionally receive their screener copies, which they use to vote on the Oscars and other awards. As is tradition, quite a few of these advance screeners will leak on various pirate sites. Last year the action started late, but eventually more than a dozen copies found their way to pirate sites. The problem is not minor. Over the past fifteen years, screener copies of more than half of...
Kim Dotcom Asks Court For $829K to Fund Family Expenses
When Megaupload was shut down in January 2012, US authorities did everything within their power to financially ruin Kim Dotcom and his associates. Aside from taking much of his personal property, tens of millions of dollars of assets were seized around the world. Under instruction from the U.S. government, US$42.57m in assets were seized in Hong Kong and since then Dotcom has been trying to claw it back, bit by bit. Back in July,...
Top 5: Linux-based personal finance tools, a Piano-playing Go AI, and more
This week, we take a look at how the Go programming language is skyrocketing, using Go and Raspberry Pi to create music, and how your cat can be a model for open source community management. read...
Product pitches aren't on the list of reasons why we attend conferences
Conferences are on my mind at the moment. Partially, it’s because I recently attended the Open Source Summit and Linux Security Summit. I’m also in the process of submitting speaking proposals to various upcoming events and will be travelling to at least one more conference this year.* There seem to be four main conference types: read...
How to create a Hydrogen drumkit for fun and profit
Drum machines are fun. They can make some amazing beats, and they tend to have an easy interface. The first drum machine I ever used was the Alesis HR-16. It had 49 16-bit patches and an inbuilt sequencer. That it wasn’t rack-mountable annoyed me, but then again, it fit into a messenger bag, so I was able to take it to studio sessions easily. read...
