Now, they’re in the National League Championship Series with a 3-0 lead (best of 7 games) over the Arizona Diamondbacks. They’ve won 20 out of their last 21 games. This is an incredible winning streak.

Jayson Stark (ESPN - article):

Hang on. It gets better. How about Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell and the 1936 Giants. That’s the last National League team to understand what it feels like to ride one of these 20-1 tsunamis.

One more win to get to the World Series.

How’d all of this come about? A company named MediaDefender (if you check Wikipedia, hope you’re getting it on a day that the company isn’t trying to sanitize its profile). The scandal seems to have started a few months ago, but more details are continuing to be revealed as 700MB of the company’s email was recently acquired, bundled up and offered for download from a torrent site. Essentially, it has come to light via these emails that MediaDefender has been working with a large number of the media companies to hack users of peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing services and attack various websites such as TPB.

One large aspect of MediaDefender’s work is digging up information about P2P users. They set up a video sharing website (Miivi.com — not there anymore) in order to gather personal information about users who posted video content.

The most frightening aspect of all of this is the methods the company is using. The attacks on P2P sites, the fake video-sharing site, etc. And it’s not only the big media companies who use their services. A recorded phone call has surfaced containing a conference call between MediaDefender and members of the New York Attorney Generals Office. The NY AG office appears to have partnered with MediaDefender to track down info about child-porn sharers. Now, shutting down child-porn sharers is 100% an excellent goal, but I’m not much thrilled when any government agency is buddying up with a company who itself circumvents legal methods of action and resorts to phishing, hacking, DOSing, spamming, and sabotage.

In a fantastic twist of irony, hackers everywhere now seem to be using MediaDefender for target practice. The leaked emails were culled from one of their employee’s private Gmail accounts. I don’t know exactly how the phone call was captured, but the NY AG’s office was using a VOIP (voice-over-IP) connection and this could have been hacked/recorded somehow. Now that P2P users are aware of the threat from this company, they’re able to use information about the company in order to circumvent MediaDefenders ability to track them using applications such as PeerGuardian (site | wiki).

The outcome of the MediaDefender scandal will be interesting to watch. The company has certainly had their reputation trashed, at least among the IT crowd (no, not that The IT Crowd). The lawsuit will be watched closely as it could signal the tides of change in the ongoing privacy vs piracy war in Sweden and in general.

Note: I’m not defending intellectual property pirates. I just don’t want to relive 1984 or any other sort of dystopian nightmare.

Sources:
- The Pirate Bay Files Suit Against Big Media
- Leaked Media Defender e-mails reveal secret government project
- Peer-to-peer poisoners: A tour of MediaDefender
- MediaDefender Phonecall
- MediaDefender Emails
- Hackers Smack Anti-Piracy Firm Again and Again
- Media Defender emails

There’s a Myspace profile for Tecktonic (I think he’s a DJ or something), but it’s kinda freaky so I’ll spare you.

Update: BuzzFeed has a good collection of links related to Tecktonic (videos, news, et cetera).

There’s now a Wikipedia entry for Tecktonik.

It is unclear why Coldplay’s music apparently made Lawrence snap, though a famous June 2005 New York Times appraisal by Jon Pareles may offer an insight. The critic called the British group “the most insufferable band of the decade,” adding that, “the lyrics can make me wish I didn’t understand English.”

Read the full story at The Smoking Gun.

Coldplay - Yellow: the music video

No explanation needed, but if you want the context…

CNN
FOX News
New York Times

And the party begins:

Though it’s just in beta, I found the experience quite pleasant. After registering for the free service, I downloaded the application (requires Windows XP and it installs Microsoft .NET 3.0 software) and read a few of the Times’ articles for the day including a detailed story about China’s leaders and their stance on the nation becoming a global power, an article about a new type of keyboard, and an article covering the pros and cons of cell phone insurance.

The New York Times Reader viewing the Technology section

It has several benefits compared to a standard news site or aggregator. The application enables the paper to maintain its typical look, feel, and layout on a computer screen. It does this while also providing enhanced abilities such as adjustable font sizes, links to external websites, and easy navigation to any section of the paper. Of benefit to the NYT is their ability to control the layout and sizing of the advertisements which obviously fund the service.

Another nice feature for the user is the ability to schedule updates. You can have it sync to the server and download the latest articles once a day. In addition to this, it can grab new stores on an interval you set (30, 60, 90, or 120 minutes).

If you’re able to run this application and our looking for a bit more news and depth than the Drudge Report can give you, or perhaps you can’t afford a real newspaper, this would be a great application for you to give a try.

This sucks.

I haven’t bought many albums from Tower Records because I don’t have any locations near me, but the few times I’ve been to Tower Records are quite memorable.

The first time was when I was in London, England, in the summer of 2000. My family and I were at a Tower store there. I didn’t have any cash on me, so I used an ATM machine to withdraw some British pounds (which actually took my account balance negative I found out later). I went inside and bought the brilliant green’s self-titled album. This was a huge deal for me because it was my first Japanese music purchase. Also, it’s a good album that I listened to many, many times over the next three years. I’ve still got the album now.

My second memorable visit to Tower Records was at its store in Utsunomiya, Japan, during the summer of 2002. I listened to many CDs at its kiosks on that day. Listening to American music helped remind me of home and my life during the two months I was in the country. I ended up buying MxPx’s compilation album “Ten Years and Running” featuring the best hits from their 10 years as a band. I rocked out to “GSF,” “Chick Magnet,” and “Move to Bremerton” all summer long.

Those are the two big memories. I believe we also drove by Tower Records when I was in L.A. for Spring Break in 2005 with Phil and Varv. It may have even been the store they in West Hollywood, California, that’s featured in the Wikipedia article (the image also attached to this post).

It is unfortunate this has happened, but this is the state of the modern recording industry. The good parts die, yet the record labels remain the same.

Tower Records, you will be missed.

The AP has the story. There’s going to be a press conference in the morning, but you can expect all sorts of coverage. The press will be obsessing over this for a few weeks at least.

Honestly, hearing this news shocked me. I didn’t think I was being lied to, but I didn’t believe it at first either. I’m curious to see what details come out.

From another AP article:

“He killed the girl by accident,” Immigration Police chief Lieutenant-General Suwat Tumroungsiskul told reporters after primary school teacher John Mark Karr, 41, was interrogated a day after his arrest in Bangkok.

“They fell in love with each other. She was very beautiful. So he kidnapped her and killed her by accident,” Suwat said.

Totally messed up. In any case, he’s going to be charged with with murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault.

If he’s guilty, he should fry.

However, if you use Safari (Jake, I’m talking to you), it won’t work. Yet.