If you follow the government’s logic, shutting down the file-sharing website Megaupload is going to make a dent in on-line piracy. Granted site was a cornucopia of all the dark seedy things generally frowned upon – pirated video games, movies, TV shows and porn – but all of this stuff existed before and will continue again. As a testament to just how much volume the site generated, investigators estimate Megaupload drove enough traffic through ads and fees to earn $175 million. Of course the action has driven the usual response across the Internet. The hackers have gotten their feathers all ruffled up and spun the Anonymous hacks left, right and sideways against federal websites. More annoyingly, companies having any sort of file-sharing twist are crippling their own services to avoid similar indictments and lawsuits. How different is sharing files through DropBox or Google Documents, really?

Music I purchased in the fourth quarter of 2011:

• Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto – A lot of great tunes with a few blahs – like most of their albums.
• Grouplove – Never Trust a Happy Song – Starts promisingly, but I find it hard to get through the whole album. Particularly when they get all … well, just listen the verses on “Naked Kids” and you’ll see what I mean.
• Nothingface – An Audio Guide to Everyday Atrocity – A little like Helmet, but with the hardcore edge.
• MuteMath – Odd Soul – Fantastic indie rock album. (Tip ’o the hat to Zach for turning me on to them.)
• Opeth – Heritage – They abandon the hardcore screams on this one. The album is still really great … but I miss the occasional growl.
• Relient K – Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right … But Three Do – Trying to expand into their early stuff, but it didn’t really work. Will still pick up their finale, but no more going backwards.
• Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire – Fantastic. He’s back in the zone.
• Saves the Day – Daybreak – Might be their best album, which is saying a lot. So fresh without having to re-invent their sound.
• Set Your Goals – Burning at Both Ends – Solid punk-pop.
• We Were Promised Jetpacks – In the Pit of the Stomach – I wanted a lot from this (given the reviews) … and it left me wanting. (At least for now.)
• Wilco – The Whole Love – Starts off with some A Ghost Is Born-ish awesomeness, but some songs in the middle feel a bit lazy.

Thus far, the Republican party has put out an incredibly weak showing of candidates to pit against Obama for the next election. They’ve been so bad that when comedian Stephen Colbert announced his exploratory committee for election candidacy, it makes one pause and wonder – would he actually be competitive given name recognition and general political disgust? The theme may have been the subject of Robin Williams’ comedy Man Of The Year but given the present political scene and the absolute distaste Americans are holding for professional politicians, Colbert’s joke just may go further than he thinks.

SELinux was released ages ago by the National Security Agency to tighten up security on the popular, open-source operating system. The work set up ACLs around nearly everything in the OS and much to the chagrin of regular users, had a configuration so undocumented and difficult that most people just tend to turn it off. Given the rampant external rooting of Android and malware plaguing app stores, it was only a matter of time before SELinux has been brought to the Android platform. Given the NSA’s mandate for securing strategic, national communications, it would seem Android is the government’s chosen platform for future federal and military use.

p. The Doomsday Clock has been showing mankind’s precipitous proximity to self-imposed apocalypse since 1947. Although nuclear holocaust was the primary driver during the Cold War of it’s figurative midnight alarm, the clock itself is tied to many factors such as climate, economics and science. Mankind was closest to obliterating itself in between 1953 and 1960 when the clock showed two minutes to midnight and had backed all the way to seventeen minutes to midnight during the ‘90s. The clock has slowly been moving back towards midnight with a recent adjustment to advance within five minutes. For reasons including corporate carbon output, failure to ratify weapons treaties and other concerns, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists commented on the clock’s advancement:

“It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.”

So I was e-mailed a crypto puzzle the other day with a challenge – decrypt this. It’s coming from a high school student looking to learn more about the subject of cryptology. I thought I’d post it here for two purposes:

1. Nerds – try your hand at decrypting something.
2. Nerds – help point him in the right direction to learn more.

Fortunately, he has provided the key as well but relies on keeping the algorithm itself a secret. Bash away, but please do so constructively.

Ciphertext

Kfpmt Nczy, kfdn mdq fhksjktk wkav olbxaim. Qj zxb dgw onc pl poob ipd rjet sere rw pevjea. Fqst tgv pf rpt noc dcvx.

Key

As 2012 begins, OmniNerd enters it’s eighth year of existence. Here’s a quick look back at the site’s changes and some of the top content from 2011 in various categories.

Visually, OmniNerd didn’t change too much but there were major changes to the site unseen to the naked eye. Mark converted the entire architecture to Rails 3.1 and migrated us to new hardware to keep up with the times. Matt added some moderator tools to deal with spammers along with the “Looking Glass” feature to revisit content from 1, 3 and 5 years past. Additionally, the promotion links were changed to better support FaceBook Sharing and Google “+1s”. Our nerds contributed 193 new articles, 38 links, 16 books and 41 polls all while debating each other with 1793 comments.

The most heavily commented content varied somewhat evenly between polls and articles. There was plenty of content following the top ten with highly active discussions as well, but these had the most:

1. Noewegian [sic] tragedy (97)
2. Warren Buffet Promotes Taxing Rich (76)
3. Texas Firearm Legislation Session 82 2011 (54)
4. What Is The Supernatural (35)

2011 is certainly not the first year that Time magazine elected to not highlight a particular individual but rather an entire class of individuals. For 2011, Time chose “the protester” as its Person of the Year. Given the events of 2011, that spans Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other outbreaks across the globe. A worthy choice or editorial cop-out?

My wife gave me a little binder to hold my ticket stubs a while back. It’s chock-full mostly of faded and worn paper bits from the concert scene of the lat 90s. Growing up in Dallas I went to see either Tripping Daisy, Hagfish, Course of Empire, The Toadies, or Reverend Horton Heat¹ on a weekly basis, it seemed. I still have the Dr. Martens on which I spent all of my extra cash to survive the mosh pits. Yes, I was one of those.

Speaking of stereotypes (or maybe just of types), I put together this list (in the order they occurred to me) of the various kinds of people I encountered at concerts in those days. It’s been over a decade, but something tells me things haven’t changed much…

the Butt-pusher

Gets to the concert who knows how early in order to secure a kung-fu grip on the rail – a grip they will not release until the last encore is over and the lights come on. Will inevitably become annoyed as the movement of the crowd behind squishes them against the rail, and will push back with their rear to try and make some room.

the Heater

Uh huh … tell me again NATO wasn’t in Libya just for the oil. I believe I was told by the OmniNerd population (or maybe just one individual – you know who you are) that we were there to protect human rights and suppress violent outlashes from the governments. In the past two weeks alone, the violence and bloodshed that have increased in Egypt, Syria and Yemen seem to prove to me that you are absolutely wrong.