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techy.Bytes - October 2006

The Internet as We Know it is Dead

October 30th 2006 11:14
This topic is like any other political topic, all events, people, cats, dogs, apples, helicopters, aliens, cybernetic organisms, potato’s, three legged seven eyed bucked tooth Nigerian whales of the Guatemalan deltas and/or coherence that may resemble actual news on technology are purely coincidental.

‘Intelligence’ organizations exist for one, and only one reason, to provide information to government organizations to better allow said government organizations to act. Pity most of the time this information hardly lives up to be ‘intelligent’, if ever.

So now the ‘intelligence’ agencies are looking at the internet, specifically websites in general that seems to be a threat to the free world (so-called). The FBI has done its fair share of cyber terrorist busting, interrogating a 14 year old girl to the point of tears for posting pictures defaming George Bush on her MySpace page.


An interesting note is the fact the girl did remove that picture after learning it could be a federal offense, she censored herself just to abide by the law, yet that didn’t stop the FBI from illegally interrogating her. I say illegally because it is not allowed by law to interrogate a minor without the presence of his/her guardians.

Camp X-Ray
Welcome home Mr. Put a Picture of GWB on the Internet
Funny thing is, given my lineage, if it was my doing I’d be in Guantanamo bay right now making all the headlines and controversies for being arrested and thrown in an infamous prison over some random picture I posted on the internet.


What makes me find this most disturbing is the fact the FBI in all honesty took this little threat with utmost seriousness, she’s just a 14 year old girl with a political opinion, a very fervent opinion, but an opinion none the less, one she is entitled to without fear of prosecution. Not by the FBI, not even by George Bush.

Anyone here who’s going to say she has any potential to do any ‘attack’ on the United States is over exaggerating to the point of mass hysteria, and I’d like to bring forward the fact to said people that inciting fear can be a crime. Anyone here who is going to defend the FBI for its actions is in turn attacking our own most fundamental civil liberties. It’s a joke no matter what angle you’re going to look at it, and you can call me a radical leftist all you want (something which I most certainly am not) but it isn’t going to change the fact that the FBI is out busting 14 year old girls.

MySpace Logo
MySpace Logo
After reading about this MySpace threat, one begins to question their original motives as to why they were browsing websites such as MySpace in the first place. Was it REALLY for threats against the United States in the first place? I can just picture a fat FBI agent donut in one hand, coke next to the monitor updating his MySpace account entitled ‘hot_chick_59XXXOOO’ and having a generally ‘great’ time catching up with *his* MySpace ‘girl-friends’ when suddenly coming across this one page, and choking on the donut ‘Marge! Marge! Come quick! Look at this! Now we really have found something!’

I fully understand and respect that it is in fact a federal crime to threaten the president with death, I also expect the same courtesy to be applied to me. Next time someone threatens me with death I’d like to be able to call the FBI, Police or anyone with a position of authority to go thoroughly interrogate them in any manner I see fit. Yes, that includes the President of the United States when he practically threatens war with anyone who doesn’t agree with him ‘You are either with us, or with the terrorists’ [sic]. Well Mr. Bush, I am not with you if it comes down to interrogating 14 year old girls to the point of tears, but I am most certainly not with the terrorists either. You are breaking your own law, you are threatening to kill me by way of war because I disagree with you, for that you should be promptly arrested, interrogated and tortured thoroughly to the point your organs fail. Hey, it’s your law, you signed it in, not me, if my organs should fail while being interrogated for it to be considered torture, then so should yours.

Websites created by ‘Islamists’ (I have no idea of its meaning, but I assume it must mean ‘Muslims’) are now the target of our (definitely not ‘stupid’) intelligence agencies. Well they never were doing anything of any use from before, I would like to draw the attention of anyone who disagrees with me to this newspaper article. I guess now surfing the net is their actual job of which they are paid to do, one can no longer blame them for not doing their work.

To put ‘islamist’ websites within context, I’d like to show a couple of websites I frequent: www.islam-guide.com and www.islamtoday.com/. Last I checked there were no calls to Jihad on either of them.

Raised the Flag
They raised the flag declaring their freedom, only so we could tear it back down years later.
Everyday we slip further into a totalitarian state yet people defend it, history will remember these times as the days when people gave up their freedom, not fought for it, this is the first time in history such a thing has happened. One of the biggest freedoms we once had, the internet, is being used against us, against all of us and people instead of expressing their outrage opt to sit behind the TV and watch ‘Dancing With the Stars’. We, the people of these ‘free’ countries who work and raise families and abide by the laws are now perceived as a threat by the very governments we have voted in!

When it gets this far you know it will only get worse, and no you are not exempt, your colour, your country of origin, even if you are a typical 14 year old law abiding girl, you will not be exempt, you will be arrested and interrogated for something you did that seemed and was so miniscule.

You may be thinking to yourself 'Ahmed, what kind of hysteria are YOU trying to incite? You have nothing to lose in what you are saying, you are just looking for attention aren't you?'. To those people I say that I am in fact sacrificing, I refer you to this article. Wether or not you believe that article is true, I do, I am consciously writing this, knowing full well prospective employers may very well turn me off a job because of this blog post, particularly in my field of my study which will give me a job that is essentially the backbone of the IT industry.



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Going back in (internet) Time

October 30th 2006 02:38
The Internet never forgets, everything you say, every photograph you upload, every video you play online, it will always be there… the internet never forgets.

So a while ago I have one of ‘those’ moments, looking for something on a website, it wasn’t there anymore when it was a few weeks back. Where did it go to? Well a safe bet would be the link was removed. Anyway, I do some Googling (and even MishMashing) to find someway of digging into a websites creepy history, after all, the internet never forgets… does it?

My search yielded ‘The Way Back Machine’. As the name suggests, this machine is way back, so far back it can go all the way back to 1996. What it does is it crawls through different websites and saves the HTML, but not the assets such as images, PDF’s, Flash files etc. So you get all the text, but none of the pictures or fancy bits, unless they are still online in the exact same location, and I can tell you that it happens.

It’s really nifty, despite being somewhat slow to load, probably because of the traffic load on the servers. I believe they have thus far indexed 55 billion pages, heck, if you’ve made a website years ago you might still find it floating around on the ‘Way Back Machine’.

Admittedly I haven’t found any *real* use for it, however real is simply electrical impulses in your brain, who gives a damn? Its fun! I visited some of my favorite websites from over the years, from way back, before I even knew of such a thing as the internet (and I have no idea how I used to manage).

So without further a due I’m going to present to you my favorite website through the years:

IGN:
1998
2000
2001
As of now

Ctrl-Alt-Del Online:
2002
2003
2004
As of now

Well I have more websites I like, but these two are the only ones I could think of right now. Give it a try, if not for anything, for a little bit of fun, go anywhere you want, including 'those' sites you like to visit, yes you know which ones I'm talking about.



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Easy 3D

October 27th 2006 22:17
I’ll have to be blunt here, I don’t particularly like it how artists get all the credits for the SFX in movies. The job they do is simply too easy, well granted, it isn’t too easy per-se but it is certainly far easier than that of the one who makes the tools.

Pixar's Geris Game
Geri's Game is an academy award winning Pixar short film
I used to be quite enthusiastic about my 3D modeling for instance, blame it on 'Toy Story', but my complete lack of… artistic integrity… saw to it that I was never going to pursue a career in that particular stream of art. As such I fear I may never work in the pristine offices of Pixar...

Anyone can do it really, there’s nothing in specific that is difficult about the stuff you see happening on CGI movies such as ‘Toy Story’. I taught everything to myself, with the help of a few step by step tutorials a few years back, not particularly difficult, but certainly not easy. Well, not easy for a kid with absolutely ZERO artistic aptitude.

While you may be thinking that you are going to have to cough up a bundle for the software that does 3D like in Toy Story you are in fact erroneous in your belief (oh I’m a naughty boy with the thesaurus today, aren’t I?).

So how much will you be looking to spend? I’d hazard to guess close to $0. Well, just short of the makers paying you, you probably will be paying $0. The trick is in finding the right software, don’t mind paying the down payment of a house for it until you are sure you love it, and that you are going to profit from it. Oh and yes, it is perfectly legal to download trial versions of software, of which there are many in the world of IT.

'daylight'
Inspirational
But where to start, where to start? Well for inspiration Highend3D is a nice place to start. If you are looking to learn 3D modeling you can either buy a book for a specific piece of 3D editing software or look online for free resources. Actually the way I learned was downloading a completely free (non-trial) program called ‘gmax’. Supposedly it’s a 3D modeling program targeted at people who play games, as it helps them remodel characters and such, however it actually still qualifies as a 3D modeling program.

gmax is essentially a stripped down version of ‘3D-Studio Max’, a very stripped down version. The real difference for most beginners is that gmax, unlike 3D-Studio Max does not have a trial period. It does however lack a lot of the very powerful features of 3D-Studio Max, such as the ability to create hair, or any form of rendering tool. For newbie’s that shouldn’t matter for the time being, you don’t need to make hair or render your model to see it with lots of wizwaz graphical enhancements applied.

What I found best about gmax was that I could download tutorials to learn how to use it, not that 3D-Studio Max didn’t have even better tutorials, just that gmax doesn’t have a trial period.

If you aren’t buying into what I’m saying and you do want the extra tools and all that, or are looking for a trial version of the most powerful 3D modeling program on the market without a set time period in which to use, then I recommend you download Maya. It is probably the most powerful, and complex, 3D modeling tool available this side planet earth. The learning edition is free, and comes with learning resources to help you get started.

As a small point of interest why don’t you take this test?




References:

-First image taken from Pixar Animation Studio's website

-Second image by chenqingfeng taken from Highend 3D Gallery
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Technoptomistic

October 26th 2006 04:45
One thing you learn about, from reading about the future of technology is that it’s bright it’s big and its here now, or coming very soon. You also learn that’s a pack of lies.

Final Fantasy 13 Screenshot
Final Fantasy XIII to be released on the Playstation 3 is still not quite photo-realistic
Not yet, after years of reading about technology, have I read about something to do with the future of technology that has come to pass at set date, let alone pass. It always diverts from one place to another. I read in APC magazine (Australian PC User) that by 2005 desktop PC’s would be replaced by SFF PC’s (Small form factor). In all fairness I read that in 2005, it was written in 2004, as you can probably tell that didn’t happen. Now for those of us who are looking for a slender PC we go buy laptops, for others we stick to our normal PC’s. Another example is Back in 2002 I read that by 2007 we should see photorealistic graphics in games, well, no, we haven’t even gotten close, the best is still quite fake, and we probably still have a long way to go


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Child Pornography, Easy Peasy

October 23rd 2006 05:47
It is actually true, you have no idea how easy it is to get underage porn on the internet. I came across this little fact when doing research a couple of years back on pornography that I was going to write for an assignment.

What I wanted to focus on was illegal pornography, particularly child porn. I’m the kind of person who’d rather try and find this ‘material’ on the internet to see how easy it is to get myself rather than read what someone else wrote. However, I’m not going to go Google ‘under age porn’, that won’t work, I know without even trying


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Respect my Authority

October 13th 2006 17:30
As I type this I am struggling to stay awake. I have been sitting down in front of the computer for so long, almost non-stop for the past two days with about four hours sleep in between and maybe a total of five hours of breaks and time away from computer (to eat food for example).

Ladies and gents, I’m a computer programming student. I have been diligently coding away for the past couple of days, perhaps not coding more so as solving the puzzle. The thing about programming is that it’s easy to know how to do things, but making those things work as intended is another story all together. You put down the code easy, but it never works the first time, and if it does, it isn’t working the way you want it to. So you’re always tweaking here or there, putting this there or that here hoping it will work


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Lots of Balls

October 10th 2006 13:18
Forget silly computer graphics, the future is all about reality. It is about seeing things being created in front of you in real time. Does it sound farfetched that we may one day, in our own lifetimes, see massive structures creating themselves right before our eyes based on a 3D computer model? Well if ''Synthetic Reality',the main proponent behind this technology has its way we may start seeing prototypes of this technology within five years.

Claytronics
We still have a loooong way to go
The technology doesn’t exist yet, not in the way we’d like it to, but the concept does. Basically we are talking about millions of little spheres all attached to a sheet of material moving around by way of magnetism and making structures with the sheet based on information a computer program is feeding it


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Buying me out?

October 8th 2006 05:31
I’m sure some of you may have heard of Penny-Arcade an online WebComic. Its name was probably inspired by the name from a TV channel nickelodeon. Kind of besides the point of this article but a Nickelodeon in the distant past was a cinema targeted mainly at children which cost a Nickel per view, like TV they had episodes of a series and the kids would watch a new one on a weekly basis. The name ‘Penny-Arcade’ was probably inspired by the ‘Nickelodeon’ name of both the TV channel and the actual Nickelodeons that existed however an arcade machine that costs a penny per game probably does not exist.

The topic of this article is a little more serious than names one chooses for a WebComic, it is about corruption that exists in the heart of the most innocent form of persuasive media in existence, comic strips. I believe the creators of Penny-Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik literally took a 180 degree spin on their opinions about a certain companies products straight after certain events


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Crammed Up

October 6th 2006 17:06
It doesn’t have built in Bluetooth, it doesn’t have a 1 gigabyte mp3 player, it doesn’t have a camera built in, nor does it come with a full colour LCD display, but damn well does it tell the time! I am, of course, talking about my watch.

To think I could have been talking about anything then, from a mobile phone to a house. Why do they insist on cramping so much technology (usually in a redundant manner) into everything? Right now, I love my watch, it doesn’t use batteries and tells the time to within a second for ever 36 hours it runs, which is an added bonus


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Google’s Suicide?

October 4th 2006 13:55
Kills itself and is reborn, at least that might happen. Google have recently (and inconspicuously) launched ‘SearchMash’, if you notice ‘SearchMash’ has nothing Googly about it except maybe its inherent simplicity which it shares with Google.

MishMash
SearchMash, could end up being Google's self prescribed downfall

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Videogame Propaganda

October 3rd 2006 06:38
While I said that videogames in general may very well replace movies as the primary form of entertainment in the not too distant future, I didn’t mention how (like movies) they can be made to shoot propaganda at unsuspecting minds.

Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
One of the many pro-US games on the market
Most war games out there tend to be pro America understandably so, their main target tends to be America. From Splinter Cell which makes you an elite CIA operative to Battlefield 2 which consists of maps mainly of the US military attacking another area


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Long assumed, now practically confirmed through the magic of some sort of 3D wizwaz infrared device that Mona Lisa was wearing a thin transparent gauze veil.

Scanning the Mona Lisa
Scanning the Mona Lisa for new discoveries of an old painting
What’s so special about what she was wearing? Well this kind of gauze veil was worn by women who were pregnant. Yes, you heard it right, she was pregnant. Experts always had a hunch she was pregnant from the way her fingers are bloated in the paintings (aka sausage fingers), typical of pregnant women, but unsure if it was simply the painting or in fact the masterful attention to detail of the Artist (Leonardo Da Vinci


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