Scientists developing "Stupid Filter"

lol stup1d f1lt3r

But in all seriousness from the article:

http://www.tfot.info/news/1065/stupidfilter-time-to-fight-back-the-imbeciles.html

"A team of American scientists are developing the “StupidFilter” – an open-source filter software that will be able to detect “rampant stupidity” of web-content in written English. Similarly to the way spam recognizing software detects suspicious e-mails, the “StupidFilter” will look for pre-fed words or sign combinations that characterize stupidity, assigning particular tokens with different weights based on how often they occur in hand-picked examples of idiotic comments. The developers are using weighted Bayesian analysis along with some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines, in order to efficiently distinguish unacceptable messages among the submitted texts."

This could be an interesting solution to filtering out spam and just plain dumb comments that seem every so prevalent in many sites today (I'm looking at you youtube) If a post is deeped, well stupid by the stupid filter the user will recieve a message telling them they must rephrase thei post before they can post it. If done right this could be a good solution but there are many things that could go wrong with it (False-Positives and detecting things that are perfectly intelligent) but the team is working to differentiate between things like intentional spelling mistakes for emphasis and just plan spam posts.

lawl.

Sebastian Bach - Angel Down

I picked up Angel Down from Sebastian Bach (Former Lead Singer of Skid Row) after hearing a lot of good things about it. This is a great all around album with some diverse songs, from kickass thrashers to Ballads. This album is sort of like a fusion of Skid Row's Slave To The Grind and Subhuman Race, Slave to the grind had some incredibly catchy hard rockers and Subhuman,an Race had an edgier Heavy Metal Feel.

The first song on the album Angel Down has an ominous intro and then burst into a heavy thrash metal song with Bach screeching the vocals, his voice is definitely as great as it was in skid row and he remains one of the best Heavy Metal Singers of all time.

This album also has some surprises, contributing vocals to the three songs in the album is Axl Rose, making his first performance in ages, which has built up alot of hype for the album. He first appears in Back in the Saddle which is an awesome cover of the Aerosmith song, Rose and Bachs vocals go perfectly together and this metal cover of back in the saddle kicks ass. (Love is) a bitchslap also features Rose on the vocals, and the songs blunt name is reminiscent of the old G N' R days, it's a hard rocker with Axl and Bach wailing over heavy guitar. Some other notable songs are You don't Understand which has a retro seventies feel and American Metalhead is just an all out metal thrash. Overall I think this is one of the greatest modern Rock/Metal albums I have heard in a long time, the songs are varied and very well done.

MPAA hit with copyright takedown notice? Oh the irony

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released a software toolkit made to help universities detect potential illegal file-sharing on school networks. The toolkit is based on the increasingly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution and includes custom traffic monitoring software created by the MPAA. The toolkit was available from a website put up by the MPAA, the software was removed last night after they received a request from the Ubuntu Technical Board to take it down due to GPL violations.
To make clear what the GPL license is it's official definition states "The GPL is an open-source software license that broadly permits modification and redistribution of software but requires distributors to make the source code available to third parties and publish their changes. Licenses like the GPL, which require distributors to make source code available, are referred to as copyleft licenses."
The MPAA consistently tries to get harder penalties for copyright infringement passed through congress, and it seems like they themselves fail to respect copyright laws.
























Picture: http://www.steveball.com/words/archive/2002/2002-09-01.htm

Windows Vista "Kill Switch" Removed

With the release of the new Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft has even further tightened it's Anti Piracy measures, to what in my opinion is getting completely ridiculous. This "Kill Switch" will activate when windows detects a pirated copy of windows, basically what happens is you're screen goes black and a small window comes up informing you that you are running a pirated copy of windows, whether you actually are or not. This is the problem, Windows Anti-Piracy measure (Windows Genuine Advantage, sounds nice doesn't it?) has been reported many times to deactivate perfectly legal copies of windows. This is a huge problem when users who have bought the operating system are being treated as pirates.I think this is a good step in the right direction because I think legal users don't deserve to be treated as criminals. Microsoft describes this change as a "Change of Tactics". The change will take effect with the release of Vista Service Pack 1.
Vista being deactivated

















Users Being Pissed
















http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7126902.stm
BBC aticle on the matter

Images:
www.pcdoctor-guide.com/
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