Luis Rei

Gov’t crackdown spurs initiatives to route around DNS | ITworld: “Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the principal investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led an alphabet soup of government agencies in seizing the domain names of 82 Web sites (PDF) that ICE said were ‘engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works’ (See: Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0). The seizures were accomplished by getting the VeriSign registry, owner of the .com and .net top-level domains, to change the authoritative domain-name servers for the seized domains to servers controlled by DHS.

Regardless of the supposed criminal intent of the affected systems, the seizure without notice of these domain names by US authorities sent shock-waves around the Internet world. It got people’s attention in a much stronger way than version 1 of this enforcement operation had — the first iteration late last June seized the names of nine sites selling pirated first-run movies. Many people woke up to the reality of how vulnerable the DNS is to government meddling.

(More recently, the uproar caused by the WikiLeaks publication of US diplomatic cables — and subsequent attempts to censor the site and/or to hound it off the Internet — have resulted in what developer Dave Winer calls ‘a human DNS’ implemented ‘in a weird sneaker-net sort of way,’ via Twitter and ad hoc bulletin-board sites.)”

I particularly liked 4LW which is an incredible simple yet brilliant solution that could easily be implemented in web browsers:

“Basically you grab 256 words from the dictionary in the S/KEY RFC, then with a simple lookup table (where each octet of the IP address is mapped to a word in the dictionary) you can convert any IP address into 4 hopefully easy to remember words and back again.

For example:

The IP address for rabidgremlin.com is 174.143.242.193, if you run this through 4LW you get the following phrase: LICK GORY ULAN MUTT

Some others:

210.55.180.158 (google.com) = ROOM RED LULU IDEA
72.30.2.43 (yahoo.com)= ACHE ION ANA NAY
72.21.210.250 (amazon.com)= ACHE FUM ROOM WENT
65.49.90.35 (whitehouse.gov) = TEN OWL BLUR LAM
184.84.165.161 (dhs.gov) = MASH BAWD KANE JERK”

• Infomation Symmetry » XAircraft X650 QuadCopter(QuadRotor)

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• Main Page - openmulticopter

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• Multicopter Wiki

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Update: please disregard this post.  Source article is crap. This is all wrong. My apologies.

The news is in portuguese, in essence, FCCN, the entity responsible for Portugal’s ccTLD (.pt) refused to allow WikiLeaks to register WikiLeaks.pt on the ground that it does not allow domains that create confusion with existing sites in TLDs (e.g. wikileaks.org).

It’s quite obviously a poorly thought of excuse: by that rule, Apple would not be able to register apple.pt which it did as did many other companies.

FCCN is much more dependent on the Portuguese government than ICANN is on the US Gov - and we all know how that turned out (if you don’t, ICANN removed control of wikileaks.org from WikiLeaks).

Original article (in portuguese): Portugal recusou domínio .pt à WikiLeaks - Sol

(Via @relax)

Gamers Abandoning DS, PSP In Favor of Smartphones, says Interpret - IndustryGamers

PSP2 and the next Nintendo DS will be D.O.A.

(Via slashdot)

Who didn’t see this coming?

[caption id=”attachment_1210” align=”aligncenter” width=”768” caption=”Amazing: Turning on a Light with the push of a button”]

• Arduino playground - Code

  (tags: arduino library examples quadcopter)

Watch Google’s Disorienting Hipster Ad For The Nexus S

Worst. Ad. Ever. I actually felt somewhat sick while watching it.

The device itself is a big “meh”. It’s not really a “next generation device” for android. More like a Nexus 1,5. Or more accurately, a Samsung  Galaxy S 1,5.

Incredible how Google’s flagship still lags behind a 6 month older iPhone in such a fast paced market. 16GB of memory? For a 2011 device?!? Mind you, the iPhone has had a 32GB option since 1.5 yrs ago (first with the 3GS and now the 4) and wouldn’t surprise anyone if the next one had a 64GB option (which is already overdue). Oh yeah, there’s no SD slot in case you were wondering.

Apart from that you get a S/AMOLED display - I’m guessing either LG can’t make enough IPS panels for everyone or Sammy just wants to push their crap - which is the best word to describe AMOLED technology (so far). Still, it’s better than the Nexus 1, even if the resolution is unchanged. It’s nowhere near the quality of the higher resolution IPS display on the iPhone 4. It does win in size. 4” is probably the best size for someone with my high - I definitively prefer 3.7” (N1) over 3.5” (iPhone). 4.3” is too big, it becomes hard to use the phone with just one hand (which is how a phone is supposed to be used).

I’m betting NFC won’t be very useful (in my corner of the world) for a solid couple of years (if ever) so it’s not really a great selling point.

The CPU, Hummingbird, is apparently the near identical brother of the 6 month old iPhone 4 CPU, the A4. Same amount of RAM… In summary: concerning the hardware, everything that isn’t worse than the iPhone 4 also isn’t better. On top of that, the only improvements over the old Nexus 1 are a better screen and a better processor…

The cherry on top of the mediocrity cake: the camera. Looks like the same from the N1: 5MP, no HD (720p) video. Yeah, that’s right, the NS can’t record HD video… face meet palm.

I would have to think about exchanging it for my N1 even if it was a free upgrade. While I currently only have 16GB I will likely move to 32GB as soon as prices become more reasonable (probably even before that).