I’m surprised that it took me so long to hear about this, especially because I use BitTorrent quite often – the makers of The Pirate Bay were fined millions of dollars and sentenced to jail for "assisting in making copyright content available."

For those who don’t know, The Pirate Bay is a website that provides torrents for download. With these torrents, people worldwide can connect with others’ computers and transfer files directly from one computer to another. Even better, a user can connect to multiple other users at a time and download different portions of the same file simultaneously, allowing for much greater download speeds. Torrents were originally created to transfer documents and resources among students in universities and employees in office buildings. By making direct peer-to-peer connections, bandwidth costs for uploading to and downloading from a secondary host on the internet were eliminated.

There’s always a wrong way to use something – not long after, people started sharing copyrighted material over the torrenting network. Only one person had to purchase a product, and everyone else could get the software free by downloading it straight off of the original buyer’s computer. Programmers, musicians, and producers were losing massive amounts of money when their programs, music, and movies were being circulated without them ever receiving a penny.

Millions of people flocked to use torrents, and soon enough, websites solely dedicated to distributing torrent files were created. A pretty famous one I use often is Isohunt. The Pirate Bay, mentioned above, is also pretty popular, and was the unlucky one out of a handful of different torrent websites.

This wasn’t the first time The Pirate Bay was targeted by law enforcement. On May 31, 2006, Swedish police raided the Stockholm servers of The Pirate Bay. This resulted in the servers going down for three days. It is generally assumed that the raid was supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, better known as the MPAA. Overall, the raid was a failure, seeing as it caused a increase in the popularity and usage of The Pirate Bay by a factor of two.

So the final results of the case of April 17, 2009? Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström will all be spending one year in jail, and must pay $905,000 in fines each. Appeals will be submitted, and further information will be provided at a later time.

About a week ago, my dad told me a story about a Korean man who killed his son. The man himself wasn’t seen as a killer; he was a former co-worker of my dad’s. He was apparently very cheerful and respectable, and worked his way up to being a supervisor at the Palatine P&DC, a post office headquarters in northern Illinois.

Then, earlier today, my dad told me that this whole thing could have been a misunderstanding. A friend of the victim who got killed heard the victim’s dad say "It’s all my fault" in Korean. This friend was of Korean descent but was born in America and learned Korean as a second language. He reported the victim’s father as the murderer, not knowing that he had mistakenly analyzed the Korean language due to his lack of understanding of Korean. The literal translation was "It’s all my fault," which could be taken as "It’s all my fault because I’m the one that killed him." What the victim’s father is arguing is that although the direct translation may be so, it actually meant that the father held some responsibility of his son’s death because he was not guarding him sufficiently. More or less, this is being presented as an issue of literal versus implied meaning.

Just something I found interesting.

About an hour ago, one of my friends instant messaged me through AIM. He told me that he made a slideshow of him and me, and that I should visit a TinyURL website to download it. After I downloaded the specified file, I realized that I just voluntarily downloaded a virus. McAfee SecurityCenter is currently doing a complete system scan to find whatever I just downloaded, and my desktop background is currently flashing, saying "Warning! Spyware Detected on Your Computer!" Tonight really isn’t the best time for me to be writing, so I’ll let you know what happens tomorrow.

—

Edit (April 24, 2009, 09:55 PM):

Yesterday, I briefly described that I downloaded a virus. Actually, there’s a little bit more to it. When my friend sent me that link, I downloaded an .exe file to my desktop and double clicked it. I noticed that files were being extracted to C:\Windows\Tempie, but I didn’t really think too much of it. I waited for the progress bar to reach 100%, with the only thought in my head being wonder of why it was taking so long. Soon afterwards, it started installing. Then, I woke up.

There was no way I could close it; it ran in the background, and the only reason I knew something was happening was because McAfee SecurityCenter went insane blocking trojan installations and unwanted registry changes. As I watched, not knowing what to do, the dust settled and McAfee went silent. It had lost the battle. The damage was done. I was looking at a flashing background telling me that I had a virus. I started staring blankly at my screen again.

I realized that I was intelligent enough to download, extract, and install a virus, all voluntarily and manually, thanks to a friend who got his AIM account hacked. Below is the original conversation:

Pooncube (9:04:50 PM): Check this out
Pooncube (9:04:54 PM): I made a slide show of youu and me
adamparkzer (9:04:57 PM): uh
adamparkzer (9:04:57 PM): ok
Pooncube (9:04:58 PM): Link removed
adamparkzer (9:05:28 PM): … Why is it telling me to download a file

I still had homework I had to finish, and I didn’t feel like wasting time trying to remove a virus, so I let McAfee SecurityCenter do all the scanning and deleting. After about an hour and a half, it found two infected files – two files I use to hack Flash games by force-transferring packets and run external flash scripts. After my frustration got pretty severe, I went ahead and started digging around. I found the virus and removed it manually in eight minutes with no reboots required.

Moral of the story: Don’t download files from links that your friends send you, especially if someone hacked them.

—

Edit (April 30, 2009, 09:58 PM):

Last week, I downloaded, extracted, and installed a virus onto my own computer. I ran a virus scan which took an hour and a half, but McAfee found all the wrong files, and I ended up having to manually remove the virus, which took a mere eight minutes. If you’re unfamiliar with this occurrence, click here to read the full blog post.

Yesterday and today, the same guy IMed me with more TinyURL links, possibly thinking I would fall for it again. The conversation went as follows:

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Pooncube (6:07:34 PM): what’s up?
Pooncube (6:07:38 PM): I made this thing on myspace for U
Pooncube (6:07:42 PM): Link removed
adamparkzer (6:07:55 PM): Idiot
adamparkzer (6:07:59 PM): I’m not falling for that again

Thursday, April 30, 2009
Pooncube (4:10:20 PM): heyy
Pooncube (4:10:25 PM): this is our new picture cube LOL
Pooncube (4:10:29 PM): Link removed
Pooncube signed off at 4:10:34 PM

Seeing as I already owned myself by downloading a link he sent me, these additional lures aren’t really that significant, but I thought I would share them for the laugh. Obviously, the hacker doesn’t realize that most people don’t download files from someone who already tricked them into downloading a virus.

Last night, I read this joke while browsing the internet and doing some research for my homework. It went something like this:

What’s the difference between a duck?
One leg is both the same!

I read it about three times before scratching my head and going to Google for an explanation. Even after Googling "What’s the difference between a duck," I was unable to find a valid explanation to what it actually meant. It drove me crazy for the rest of the night, and I was unable to concentrate on my home­work. It’s not often when something confuses me this much. I ended up going to sleep an hour earlier than normal.

Today, during school, I asked many of my friends and teachers, but their responses were unhelpful. A majority of the people I asked responded with "A duck and what?" Others responded with completely random answers, like names of fruit and European countries. One person said that his dad told him this joke when he was younger, but he hasn’t been able to understand it since.

After much contemplation, I devised the best explanation I could of the joke:

The joke itself is a paradox, and is supposed to be funny because it makes fun of "What’s the difference" jokes. You hear them all the time: "What’s the difference between your mom and my mom? Yo mama is fat, and mine isn’t!" Note how "What’s the difference" jokes compare two different things, but only one object is given in the joke.

The answer has a grammatical error with plurals: "One leg is both the same." You cannot compare two things and state they are the same when you are only dealing with one item.

If you haven’t made the connection yet, this whole joke is a play on plurals. When you hear "What’s the difference," you’re expecting two items to compare, but you get one (a duck). When you hear "both the same," you’re expecting two items that are identical, but you only get one (one leg).

If anybody disagrees with my explanation, I would like to hear yours, seeing as I’m not 100% sure if my explanation is anywhere near what the joke really means.

You see them everywhere. Banners advertising products and services can be found on just about every website, sometimes on every page. I have my own collection of banner advertisements on my own website, and a leaderboard sized advertisement on the bottom of every page on my blog. But being an internet user and lover myself, I know how annoying advertisements can get, so I try to make my advertising placement and formatting as fitting and subtle as possible. Take the advertisement on this page, for example. It’s located all the way at the bottom, out of the way of the main content. It even fits the color scheme of the page, so it seems like it belongs naturally on this page.

Unfortunately, I’m not the owner of every website. Some webmasters choose to place destructive advertisements on their pages that may pop up, pop under, play sounds, or flash like crazy and give you seizures. Some webmasters even give chunks of their website to advertisers in the form of an IFRAME, so advertisers can do whatever they wish to do with that space. Their selfishness to do nothing but promote their business has caused an overall bad image for advertisements in general, internet-wide.

Here’s a reward for you for reading this far into my blog post for today: a solution to annoying advertisements. Mozilla Firefox offers an add-on called AdBlock Plus that removes page elements that match any entry in a list of thousands of well-known advertisements. Even better, you can custom-define your own advertisements to get rid of ones that were not originally on the list.

Now that you have eliminated probably the most annoying aspect of the internet, you caused a different problem, this time for webmasters like me. I get paid for displaying advertisements and getting clicks or impressions. That’s right, even for impressions – I get credited for merely showing you the advertisement, without you having to click on anything, in some cases. So essentially, by showing you how to remove advertisements from your browser, I indirectly lowered potential income I could make from advertising. But, because I’m such a nice person and taught you something new, I think you should use the exceptions for AdBlock Plus and add my websites as approved sites.

Unblock me, please? :D