Live from Austin!

Hilary Rosen has stepped down as head of the RIAA, to be replaced by (Republican) Bill Frist’s right-hand-man Mitch Bainwol. Will this lead to a kinder, gentler approach by the RIAA? Will they try enticing people to buy downloadable music, rather than suing 60 year old grandfathers for hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Well, to get the likely answer to that question, consider that Bill Frist was a medical student at Harvard. He found himself running out of lab animals, so he used to visit the local shelters, adopt cats as “pets”, take them home, and then carry out experiments on them. How do we know this? He admitted it in his autobiography… He says he used to treat them as pets “for a few days” before “carting them off to the lab to die”.

I guess we’re lucky he became a Republican. Most people who start out dissecting pets go on to become serial killers…

So that’s the kind of guy Mitch Bainwol likes to work with. As to Bainwol himself, he was director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee… but before that he was managing director of Clark & Weinstock, a lobbying firm, so he’s gone from lobbyist to Senate to lobbyist via the bi-directional revolving door in under a year. He was also involved in taking Microsoft’s side in the anti-trust trial, and was a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, who successfully persuaded the Republicans to block increased medicare coverage for the elderly. I guess grandpa will need to hand over his retirement fund one way or the other.

Question from Dan

What’s the last dream you remember having?

Well, I dream practically every night, and I remember most dreams for at least a few hours, but most of them are pretty mundane. Last night’s was mostly concerned with a party my parents were having and trying to make some decent coffee for two of the guests, sara, and myself. I assume you’d like to hear about something more interesting.

The last amusing dream I had started with a UFO crash in Florida, which had happened some time in the past. I was part of a loosely associated gang of hackers and political ranters with an interest in such things, and we eventually discovered that an alien in human form had survived the crash and made his way north.

After much convoluted plot and some espionage action, we discovered that the alien had reported back to his planet, and a full-scale invasion had been planned. However, rather than take on the might of the USA directly, the aliens had opted to infiltrate and take over the record companies and the Recording Industry Association of America.

Their plan was sinister and brilliant: they would persuade the US government that the 70%+ of citizens swapping files on the Internet were dangerous copyright terrorists, and get them all locked up in jails—at tremendous profit to the private security firms running the jails, which they also controlled.

Once that was done, the full-scale invasion would proceed—because the landing ships would easily slip by the nation’s missile defenses, and by then there wouldn’t be enough citizens free to defend the nation on the ground.

On discovering this plot, we did our best to bring it to the world’s attention by engineering media events. Eventually we managed to goad the RIAA into taking off the mask and bringing in the dropships early to colonize the Earth with their evil alien spawn.

Step 1: The RIAA issues a press release claiming that the “equivalent” of 421 CD burners were seized in a raid on music pirates.

Step 2: The Register follows up, noting that only 156 CD burners were seized. They contact the RIAA, who explain that some of the CD burners were quite fast, so the RIAA statisticians decided to count them as more than one burner.

Step 3: CNN blithely reports from the press release, claiming that 421 CD burners were seized. CNN is owned by AOL Time Warner, a member of the RIAA.

The Register has published the details of how the RIAA web site got hacked.

It turns out that the RIAA left the admin tools of their web server active, without any password protection. To “secure” the site they set their ROBOTS.TXT file to ask search engines not to index the admin tools directory.

The hackers looked at ROBOTS.TXT to see what the RIAA didn’t want people finding via Google, saw the /admin directory listed, went there, and found they had total back-door access to the site.

I hope the fuckwit RIAA webmaster got fired. I mean, it barely even qualifies as a hack. It’s like walking through an open door that has a big neon sign next to it saying “Please do not walk through this door”.

I’d really like an iPod. Apple are now selling them laser-engraved with the message of your choice.

Do you think they’d sell me one engraved “Fuck you, Hilary Rosen”?