Today marks the first time that the United States has marked Canada as a ‘priority’ problem in the fight against intellectual property theft. This puts the largest trading partner of the US in the same rogues gallery of pirates that includes Algeria, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia and Venezuela amongst others.
Read MoreAs most of you know, the guys who run The Pirate Bay, the most popular search engine for torrent files, were found guilty of, well… being pirates even though they don’t actually host the copyright infringing material. A Swedish court on Friday found the four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case guilty, sentencing each to a year in jail. The defendants were also ordered to pay a total of 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to copyright holders, among them a number of American media giants. The…
Read MoreAnother couple of weeks, and another ashrants.com video. Once again, the animation is done with Lightwave, the lip sync with Magpie Pro and editing done with Newtek’s SpeedEDIT, which is a subset of the software that comes with the TriCaster hardware. The music is a jam performed by the Asphalt Potato Jam band. Enjoy!
Read MoreA new online gaming service called OnLive was announced this week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), promising a new way to play video games via digital distribution, but will it undermine the hardware based consoles? Instead of worrying about keeping that tricked out gaming rig up to spec, or having a big old console sitting under your TV, OnLive actually runs the games on their own servers and streams the video to you through a 1Mb browser plug-in for your computer or a “microconsole” hooked up to your monitor/HDTV….
Read MoreThis is part of an animation side project I’ve been working on. The site is finished, and the first couple of animations are in the can, so I thought I’d post the latest here for (what I hope will be) your enjoyment. The website is ashrants.com For those who are curious, the animation is done in the venerable Lightwave 3D, with an able assist in the lip sync department by a program called Magpie Pro. Magpie makes lip syncing dialogue easy, and can output for just about any 2D or…
Read MoreA trial is convened in Sweden, in which the co-founders of filesharing directory The Pirate Bay face two years in jail and a €100,000 fine for “assisting copyright infringement”. YouTube begins crippling the audio on all of its content, whenever it auto-pattern-matches with any audio pattern claimed by a record company, sparking fears of the ‘End of Mashup Culture‘ and reports of the first massacres of teenage digital dreams. Then, just weeks later, as if to reassure any who might be in doubt as to whether there is room in…
Read MoreSometimes two or three things come at you in the news in the same week which are such perfect expressions of opposing spirits of the times, that the connection simply begs to be drawn between those points. Take the recent rant on Derfcity, declaring a modern economic End Times for cartoons as a result of the Great Comic Axing at alternative weekly newspaper chain, Village Voice Media… OK. This is it. We’ve reached the apocalyptic final struggle for the future of cartoons. Village Voice Media is the largest group of…
Read MoreVince Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, has announced the introduction of a new service on the Google Blog. The Measurement Lab will give end users and researchers remote access to a number of advanced network diagnostic tools to simplify the task of network analysis. Many of the individual programs are also available as downloads to be installed (so far only on Linux).
Read MoreIf you’re like me, the only exercise you often get on a Saturday afternoon is when you take a break from playing video games to walk into the next room where your computer lives and check out some videos on the Interwebz. Now, if you have either a PS3 or a Wii, YouTube has effectively robbed you of that 15 seconds of pure raw cardio by quietly offering up Youtube for Television, currently in Beta and advertised as only available for the aforementioned systems. Technically, the phrase “only available for…
Read MoreIn response to the recent unceremonious shuttering of tens of thousands of AOL blogs, Jason Scott — ASCII text files archivist, documentary filmmaker of the CC-licensed BBS Documentary, and writer of recent counter-technocultural foul-mouthed gems like Datapocalypso! and FUCK THE CLOUD — is striking up a kind of internet viligante, do-gooders league called Archive Team, which will cooperate, wiki-style, to save the sum total of cultural data on commonly used public blog servers and website shingles. Scott himself has already started the ball rolling, by personally saving (and making available…
Read MoreThe TED conference has just posted a dynamic slideshow talk from 2005 by comics artist/theorist Scott McCloud, wherein he delves into his own biography and how his artistic vision was informed growing up by science. Which is interesting enough, but in the final half, he gives a crisp rundown of the analytical territory which he is famous for populating with graphic Aristotelian orgies, beginning with his 1993 treatise, Understanding Comics. The final third is the most interesting to me. McCloud is bearish on hypertext, or any form of interactivity which…
Read MoreIn every operating system known to man, an alternative browser is a separate application with it’s own rendering engine. You know, Firefox or IE or Safari etc… Apparently this isn’t true on the iPhone OS. Either that or some otherwise tech savvy people had their reality distorted by some kind of field, and we at rgbFilter aren’t immune. We recently ran an article covering the ‘news’ originating from Macrumors that suddenly, Apple was allowing 4 new alternative WebKit based browsers into the App Store. The story was picked up by…
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