a Faux Pas

The United States and Antigua have been in a bit of a fight.  It started off with the US disallowing online gambling for sites based in Antigua (which is completely legal there).  Antigua, upset that the US allows its own internet gambling, argued their case to the WTO.

The [WTO] agreed with Antigua that it had no effective trade sanctions against the United States other than to suspend its WTO obligations to the United States in respect of copyrights, trademarks and other forms of intellectual property. Antigua now has the right to produce counterfeit copies of Hollywood movies, Microsoft software, or whatnot to satisfy the judgment.
(via TheRegister).

So what started as a tiff around gambling, has opened the door for legalized pirating of Music and Movies.

zookz.com is the first Antiguan-based company to exploit this loophole by offering unlimited downloads of music or movies for $9.95/month, or both for $18.95/month.  Get your hard drives clear and your bandwidth free, you need to strike while the iron is hot, because you can bet that the US will try to close them down.  If you sign up before August 15th, you get a free month of movies for buying their music plan… excellent.  The biggest con is that they do not have a queue system in place yet, so everything must be downloaded one at a time.  A small price to pay.

As a bonus, here are some additional links.

Allofmp3.com was a fantastic Russian-based music site (Russia doesn’t recognize our copyright law).  However, here are the best alternative, yet dodgy pay sites: http://mp3sparks.us/?p=13.

The best singular MP3 downloading site? Amazon.com’s DRM-free music and cheaper than iTunes.  They may just take over Netflix as well.

The best all-you-can-download MP3 site?  Zunepass, which allows you to keep 10 songs per month and unlimited downloads for $14.95/month.

- Downloading like a madman, AFP

If you’re into the whole DIY (do you like to do it.. yourself?), then this is an incredibly powerful and effective way to turn your weak point & click camera into a beast capable of THIS:

Lightning at Dusk

The above affect was created by adding some software to your camera and doing some tweaking to make it automatically take pictures based on motion detection.  Makes you suddenly think of a thousand more uses, right?

One of the most amazing user-led projects out there, CHDK firmware turns cheap Canon cameras into photography powerhouses. You can take take time-lapse movies as in this stunning sunset example; automatically photograph lightning; easily make pretty HDR images and stereograms; have unlimited depth-of-field; and, perhaps most impressively, take photographs with shutter speeds of 1/60,000 of a second!
(Courtesy of Blahblahblah, on Metafilter)

Read more about the usage of CHDK, or the dirt in the detailed forums.  As a bonus, check out the NYT article How to Be a Better Photographer When on Vacation.

- Professional photographer, AFP

Get on with it…  Next generation electronic communication is here.

Via Lifehacker.com’s breakdown:

Q: Explain it in 140 characters, please. I’m still a bit in the shadow about what it DOES. -roxaloxa
A: Simplest terms: Google Wave is Gmail on crack. Imagine Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Docs in one big inbox.

Your new inbox: