Tom Lachecki

Briefly exploring the world of the music business and how record labels don't tend to embrace on-demand access to music across the internet. Is the solution really to sit back and allow unfettered access to IP?

Here's a Debian bug thread I ran into on the interweb today. It's quite old, dating back to 2002, but I think the discussion still holds very much real-world relevance to the prevailing view of society.

If it's immoral and illegal to send the latest episode of Heroes to your friend, the Pirate Bay ought to be at least partially responsible for facilitating that transaction.

On the one hand, Facebook users are on a free service and shouldn't expect any realistic right to say what should or shouldn't be on it. On the other, Facebook users are responsible for Zuckerberg's entire income and have made him worth a LOT of money. So can you consider the use of a social network an indirect form of payment?

The European directive that requires Internet Service Providers to log their customers' communications came into force in the UK today, and means that details of user emails and internet phone calls will be stored by ISPs for twelve months. On paper, Directive 2006/24/EC is not such a bad thing. In real life, though, the fact of the matter is that the European Directive on Data Retention is highly controversial.

I explore the foibles of DNS lookups with proxy servers in Firefox 3, and try to determine why they cause my browser to hang intermittently.

Today in "Why New Facebook Sucks"…

I have yet to figure out why so many people are doing this at the moment, but there's an epidemic of omitting terminating regular expression delimiters.

Today at work I discovered a flaw in our framework that was really pretty obvious from IE6, but hadn't been noticed at all pre-testing because nobody expected it.

It looks like there's a new malicious Facebook virus in the wild, and it just popped up today. Users are logging in this morning to find wallposts left by their friends along with a link.