The Digital Economy Act passed in the UK, as you know, and it’s pretty terrible. One of the more spicy sections of the law involved peer-to-peer use, and how it basically makes ISPs responsible for what their customers download. So if HBO finds that you’ve been download “The Pacific,” (really good show, by the way, much to my surprise) it can contact your ISP, who’s then responsible for telling you to knock if off. If not, you face a truly horrible punishment: you’re sent to Stoke! (That’s a joke, people!)

Even though we’re a hot eight months away before the ISPs have to be ready, they’re all getting ready right now.

The situation will work like this:

1. You download “The Pacific”
2. HBO finds out, gets mad, contacts your ISP
3. Your ISP tells you to knock if off
4. You refuse
5. HBO contacts your ISP again
6. Your ISP tells you again to knock it off, if not it can throttle your connection or disconnect your line

That’s the gist of it.

So there’s that, and the impending death of Usenet, and your days of downloading TV shows and movies illegally are coming to an end.

Flickr’d

To answer our own poll: no, I will not be buying an iPad. It’s not that I’m “anti-iPad,” which sounds pretty silly (“look, I’m against a piece of plastic~!”), it’s simply that I have no need for it. Why would I buy something that I don’t need? That makes no sense!

The fact of the matter is, I already have a perfectly functional desktop PC, laptop, and phone—where does the iPad fit in my wold? My desktop, which I built for myself at Christmastime so I could play World of Warcraft at 900 frames per second, is my main computer, and by “main computer” I mean something that’s on 12+ hours per day. I use it to write all of my wonderful CrunchGear posts, play games, and cruise around Wikipedia all day long.

I have an old MacBook that I’ll whip out when I’m on-location somewhere, and I’m not about to switch, you know, functionality for a device that’s fairly limited. Will the iPad run Photoshop and Premiere Pro at the same time? Will I be able to download whatever from Usenet in the background while managing my auctions in WoW? I don’t think so.

The iPad simply isn’t for me.

But maybe it’s for you? If so, great! Maybe you merely want something to browse the Web while sitting on the couch? Great. Maybe you want a fancy e-book reader? More power to you, but that’s not me. (The lastest two books I started reading, The History of White People and Max Gallo’s Napoleon series, aren’t available for Kindle or nook, so I assume they won’t be available for the iBooks store. E-book readers tend to work best when the books you want to read are available for it.)

Or you can try to sell it to me—why should I need and iPad? I’m not the type to want the latest thingamajig simply because it’s shiny and new—I’m cool with what I have right now, thank you very much!

Again, I’m not “anti-iPad,” I just have no need for it, so I won’t be buying it.

That’s not a crime, right?

Thus begins the countdown to the Death of Usenet. It’s capitalized because it’s important. The High Court in the UK has ruled against famous Usenet index site Newzbin, saying that the site can be held liable for the copyright infringement of its users. Hear that? That’s the sound of the world’s Usenet users screaming “OH DEAR GOD NO!” You knew this day was coming.

For the unfamiliar, Newzbin and sites like it store NZB files, small text files that point the location of actual files. These sites are easily searchable, so you can look for “the wire s01″ and all of The Wire’s first season episodes would pop up. You can sorta think of NZB files as torrent files: there’s nothing in the NZB file itself other than directions of where to get actual files.

Doesn’t matter, says the High Court, that constitutes copyright infringement.

No details of the court’s ruling have been publicly released just yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Newzbin will be forced to shut down till it no longer offers offending files. Since that’s pretty much the raison d’être of sites like Newzbin…

Incidentally, when I spoke to a lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation at CES last January, he said Usenet as we know (knew?) it had two years to go before lawsuits would kill it. This Newzbin ruling looks to be step one in that slow death.

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

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[ The following article is a paid advertisement, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of OhGizmo.com or its staff. Ed. ]

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Verizon has a bunch of new FIOS packages that may interest you. The top of the pile is the Ultimate package, which gives you “90 or more” HD channels, plus an Internet connection of 35/35, which is 35 mbps download, 35 mbps upload. The upload speed is impressive, but I still have triple the download speed. (I seriously run at 11 MB/s when downloading from Usenet. It’s almost unnecessary how fast it is.) This top package is $149 per month.

There’s two other new packages, modestly titled Extreme and Prime. Prime, the cheapest, runs at $109 per month, and grants access to 40 or more HD channels plus a 15/15 mbps Internet connection. Extreme? That’s $124, with 65 or more HD channels, with a 25/25 Internet connection.

And while I have no problem with the Internet speeds, especially if FIOS is the only game in town, the thing about the HD channels is, there’s nothing on TV worth watching. The initial HD buzz dies pretty quickly, which means you can only watch nature documentaries so many times before you’re like, “OK, I get it.” That’s for the average person, of course—maybe you’re a big nature mark?

I mean, outside of live sports, what else in TV is worth sitting through? Maybe Top Gear, and only because it’s shot so well (and the hosts are pretty cool).

Sorry for beating the Newsdemon horse, but I just noticed they had a few deals for bloggers, students, and other animals. Usenet is really nice.

Bloggers get free months when someone buys a sub through them (we don’t partake in the deal) and students can get 25% off with a .EDU account. While we don’t condone the use of Usenet, it’s nice to know it’s there, like a nice old sweater.

As a corollary to Biggs’ “cable companies are doomed” article from earlier today, I thought I’d demonstrate how easy it is to accomplish what he was threatening. That is, live a happy and successful life without having to pay $100+ a month to Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV, or whomever. (Note: I’m neither happy nor successful, so this advice is spurious at best.) Here, I’ll teach you a pretty basic method of automatically downloading things like TV shows, and movies, and whatnot from Usenet. Yes, this breaks the first rule of Usenet; sorry.

What? Today we’ll be setting up our Usenet software to look at an RSS feed. (You can also accomplish pretty much the same thing using BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is so plebeian.) This RSS feed will carry NZB files that, magically, point your Usenet software to the actual files you’ll be viewing in VLC or MPlayer or whatever. In English, that means when you come home from work or class you’ll have the latest episode of The Ultimate Fighter all ready to be watched.

You’ll need:

• A Usenet provider. The big ones, off the top of my head, are Giganews, Newsdemon, Astraweb, and Supernews. You’ll be spending around $10-$20 a month for access, but that gives you access to all the riches that Usenet provides. In my experience all these services are more or less the same, so feel free to shop around. I have no favorites.

• Usenet software. The easiest to use for our purposes here today, once you’ve set it up, is SABnzbd+. It’s free as in freedom and free as in beer.

• An NZB site that provides an RSS feed. I’ll be using Newzleech.com as my example, but pretty much every NZB site out there should do this. Maybe, I don’t know.

• No qualms with any of this. Yeah, Americans can go to Hulu to watch some shows, but my overseas friends aren’t so lucky. Maybe if Hollywood got its act together we wouldn’t have to resort to this. (Incidentally, I’m right now removing the copy protection of a bunch of DVDs I bought in the UK this past week. All I want to do is see Top Gear! Is that a crime?)

OK!

1. With your Usenet account in hand, go ahead and download and set up SABnzbd+. It’s not hard, but I’m not about to hold your hand here. It basically involves launching the application, putting in your Usenet account info, then pointing the application to a few folders. If you can’t figure this out then the rest is probably too much for you to handle anyway.

2. Set up the RSS feed! I’ll be using the TV show The Ultimate Fighter as an example. For newzleech.com, the RSS feed you make looks like this:

http://www.newzleech.com/rss/php?n=50&g=alt.binaries.multimedia&s=the+ultimate+fighter+s10

That’s your RSS feed. What that does is comb the Usenet group alt.binaries.multimedia (that’s the “g” in the URL) for the last 50 posts (that’s the “n”) containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” (for season 10 episodes; that’s the “s”). The RSS feed is updated every 20 minutes.

3. Go to SABnzbd+’s settings (Config:RSS) and input that URL. Then set the RSS checking interval (Config:RSS checking interval) to something reasonable, like once every 60 minutes. Under no circumstances should you set it for anything more frequent than every 20 minutes, since that’s considered uncouth, and your IP address is likely to be banned by Newzleech. You don’t want that.

That’s pretty much it.

Now what you’d do, I guess, is launch SABnzbd+ Wednesday morning before you leave your house. If it’s set up like we set it up here, SABnzbd+ will check alt.binaries.multimedia for news posts containing the phrase “the ultimate fighter s10” via the Newzleech RSS feed. When SABnzbd+ finds the new posts, it’ll download the appropriate NZB file, then start doing its magic.

In other words, as soon as the latest episode hits Usenet, it’ll automatically be downloaded to your computer, Internet connection speed notwithstanding.

Of course, you can add as many RSS feeds as you want, with whatever parameters you want. Maybe you like 30 Rock, or want to see Louis CK on Parks and Recreation? Or maybe you like Curb Your Enthusiasm? To quote that Nas song, the world is yours.

The purpose of this here article was strictly educational blah blah.

Now I’m off to rip the copy protection off a DVD I BOUGHT FROM HMV WITH MY OWN MONEY! What a pain.

Six months ago, Giganews announced that it would expand its server capacity to 365 days of retention. It passed that barrier some time ago, and just yesterday reached the magical 400-day mark. In plain English, that means if someone posted Some File to alt.binaries.boneless back in July, 2008, you should be able to find it on Giganews’ servers. And to think, back in my early days of Usenet use (2001ish), I was putting up with two days retention.

And of course, it’s not just files on Usenet; there’s a great deal of discussion on there, some of which is actually useful! (Note: Reading anything in the alt.politics.* hierarchy may well drive you crazy.) I used to read comp.sys.mac back in high school to better understand the operating system that I was just beginning to use.

Discussion groups aside, yeah, you can “find things” on Usenet before you find them anywhere else. I’m currently using SABnzbd, and it completely maxes out my Internet connection, which, you’ll recall, is pretty fast!

So congrats to the guys and gals at Giganews for crossing the 400-day mark. I’ve also been told that they’re not going to arbitrarily stop at 400 days, either, so keep your eyes on their Web site to see the day’s current retention.

Come September 30, Verizon will completely drop Usenet access. (It had already been limiting access for some time now.) To that end, a number of Usenet providers, including Giganews and NewsDemon, have special deals set up for Verizon users to make the hurting stop.

First up, Giganews. Verizon users get 50 percent off the Diamond Plan for three months. (The regular price is $29.95 per month.) The Diamond Plan includes 50 simultaneous connections, unlimited monthly bandwidth, and SSL encryption. Or, if you don’t want Diamond, you can have any other Plan for three months at 20 percent off. There’s also a 14-day free trial for you to test the waters. All Plans come with 391 days of retention, which is plenty. Giganews is working toward 400 days of retention.

Next we have NewsDemon, which I use. It’s giving Verizon customers 20 percent off its service, which includes unlimited bandwidth and 20 connections. The top price for NewsDemon is $22.99 per month.

Then there’s always Astraweb, which is $15 per month for unlimited bandwidth, 20 connections, and no download rate limit. (The popular $10 per month service limits you to 1 Mbit/s.) I’ve never used Astraweb, so I can’t speak to it reliability. That said, I hear good things on various message boards.

So, plenty of options for Verizon folks. Happy trails.

It seems to scan for only OSX.RSPlug and OSX.Iservice and then only scans files from Safari, Mail, and a few web browsers. Usenet and Bittorrent clients are unaffected. It doesn’t even actively scan the Downloads folder.

So it’s basically like someone at Apple wrote an anti-virus program and just snuck it into Snow Leopard. You can just imagine some grizzled old programmer who has been working on this since 1994 finally getting his chance to shine.

Apple stuck the anti-malware software into Snow Leopard without actually announcing it. The software is invisible – it just kind of hangs out – and the only thing I see this doing is encouraging anti-virus software vendors to try to upsell their paltry OS X offerings. While Macs aren’t totally impervious to virii and trojanii, there is always the off chance that a piece of rogue software could fall into the mix. This could be a simple solution to preventing Snow Leopard Macs from falling into a botnet.