What The Heck Blog

Human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection have been identified in the United States. Human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection also have been identified internationally. The current U.S. case count is provided below.

An investigation and response effort surrounding the outbreak of swine flu is ongoing.

CDC is working very closely with officials in states where human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) have been identified, as well as with health officials in Mexico, Canada and the World Health Organization. This includes deploying staff domestically and internationally to provide guidance and technical support.

CDC activated its Emergency Operations Center to coordinate the agency's response to this emerging health threat and yesterday the Secretary of the Department Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, declared a public health emergency in the United States. This will allow funds to be released to support the public health response. CDC's goals during this public health emergency are to reduce transmission and illness severity, and provide information to assist health care providers, public health officials and the public in addressing the challenges posed by this newly identified influenza virus. To this end, CDC has issued a number of interim guidance documents in the past 24 hours. In addition, CDC's Division of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) is releasing one-quarter of its antiviral drugs, personal protective equipment, and respiratory protection devices to help states respond to the outbreak. Laboratory testing has found the swine influenza A (H1N1) virus susceptible to the prescription antiviral drugs oseltamivir and zanamivir. This is a rapidly evolving situation and CDC will provide updated guidance and new information as it becomes available.

Hey everyone!
I'm sorry if you've been expecting a video for a while. I've been VERY busy with my school projects because it's that last term and there's a lot of final tests and projects. I'm editing a video right now as I'm writing this blog to update my "statuses" so you know what's up. Anyways I'm going to have a video up soon and when summer comes, I'll try to have more videos more frequently.

So what's up with my life so far? Well I recently purchased the Adobe Masters Collection and Adobe Productions Collection. In other words I purchased the entire line the Adobe products and to my suprise, these products and applications are beyond superb! Before I used to use Sony Vegas Pro 8, Acid Pro 7 and a couple of other programs for doing different things like editing and designing, but ever since I started using these Adobe products, it just puts other professional products to SHAME! Anyways my new videos will be edited on Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Affects instead of Sony Vegas Pro 8, but I'll still have Vegas Pro 8 as a backup for some other things.

http://whattheheck.tk

This is a test blog posting trying to confirm that my ping.fm is connected to my myspaces blog page!
keeping it cool!

Yikes. I hope this is not true since I buy some of my stuff from TigerDirect, but the allegations from Dell are many. It seems that at one time TigerDirect was a reseller for Dell computers, but was also buying Dell computers from other sources. This is where the lawsuit stems from.

Dell alleges the following:

In an April 17 lawsuit filed by Dell in New York district court, Tiger is accused of - among many other things - selling old and out-of-date Dell computers it purchased from other resellers while claiming they were brand new and shuttled directly from Dell. Tiger was also fingered for telling customers the antique boxes were covered by Dell warranties when the warranties had expired long ago.

Furthermore, the Round Rock PC giant accuses Tiger of using a modified Dell logo on its website that “mimics and bastardizes” the Dell trademark.

The complaint claims Dell’s attempts to contact Tiger with its grievances were partially or completely ignored. In some cases, Dell says, Tiger would partially address a complaint “only to embark on other acts of infringement and false representations virtually immediately thereafter.”

This is the laptop being advertised with the Dell logo without the slanted E.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out. I may be changing vendors if these allegations are true.

Hey everyone!
I'm just taking a break from my regular news blogs, but I just wanted to tell all of you that I will be starting a "Video Picks" blog, on my Live Spaces. This "blog" will be of all the videos I like and deserve to get features on my blog. I'll be updating it regularly everyday when I'm on YouTube so keep SUBSCRIBING to WTH BLOG!!!

Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year.

In a statement, the firm says it will no longer be accepting new customers and will focus on helping "customers build new relationships online".

Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion, with users migrating to social networking sites.

Yahoo says that existing GeoCities accounts will remain live for now, although it stresses that users should start looking for alternative sites.

"You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web-hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service," the firm said in an online post.

The closure of GeoCities spells the end of Yahoo's free hosting, although other services - such as e-mail accounts - remain unaffected.

Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, said the closure of GeoCities was the end of an era.

"I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.

"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet, but after the initial exuberance on what the web could do, it turned out to be more complicated than just giving them free hosting.

"You need to give users tools to actually do things and make things simple, one of the reasons sites like Facebook and MySpace are so popular," he said.

The BBC goes behind the scenes at the Internet Watch Foundation to see how its researchers cope with the psychologically demanding job of policing sites peddling images of child abuse.

The watchdog that blocked a Wikipedia page last year over a rock album cover says it still believes that the image at the heart of that controversy was illegal.

But the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) says it has moved on after the row in December 2008, and claims its quest to eradicate child abuse images from the web is now having real success.

Critics have accused the organisation of being both unaccountable and ineffective. This week the BBC was given unique access to the work of the IWF, as the watchdog tries to fight back.

It's in a house in a quiet village north of Cambridge that the Internet Watch Foundation runs a hotline for reports of child abuse images. It's a job the self-regulatory body was given in 1996, as the internet industry sought to avoid direct control by the police or government.

Upstairs at its HQ there is a door marked "IWF staff only - image viewing in progress". I was allowed in, to find four analysts at work, sifting through reports that have arrived overnight from members of the public.

The analysts, who mostly have backgrounds in IT, prefer to remain anonymous, but one of them, Karen, agreed to tell me about her work.

She showed me a list of the reports she had to deal with that day, some from members of the public who said they had been looking for adult sites but had been shocked to come across child abuse images.

Some callers fear they may be accused of downloading illegal images.

Her first task is to try to determine whether the images are in fact illegal under UK law. "My next step would be to chase that image or website to the country where it is located," she said.

In almost all cases, the offending sites are abroad, and Karen contacts one of the IWF's 35 sister organisations - if there is one in the country concerned - and informs the UK police.

I put it to Karen that it must be difficult to do such emotionally draining work, especially when some feel that it's not even worthwhile. "There are times when I questioned my own sanity for doing this," she admitted.

"However, I'm a mother with two children, I feel that it's an important job and someone needs to do it. That's how I get through the day."

Karen sees some sites cropping up time and again, with the criminals moving them from country to country, trying to stay one step ahead.

She said: "We're also finding a trend towards sexual abuse images of younger and younger children, and more severe forms of abuse."

She explains that most of the sites operate a pay-per-view system, charging $80-100 (£55-68) per month for access to images and videos.

The offending sites are also added to the blacklist compiled by the IWF for internet service providers, which then block access.

It was this process which led to the blocking of a Wikipedia page about a 1970s album cover featuring an image of a naked young girl. That ruling, reversed within days, threw a spotlight on the IWF, and the transparency of its procedures.

David Gerard of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and other similar projects, says the incident showed the IWF to be "ham-fisted and incompetent at every level".

He maintains that there is no way to block illegal content "without massive collateral damage to speech, communication, learning and society".

Dr Richard Clayton , a computer scientist at Cambridge University, has a different criticism - that the watchdog suffers from confusion about its aims.

His research shows that, while banks manage to get phishing sites taken down within hours, the IWF takes an average of 28 days to get child abuse sites removed. "'Are they trying to get sites removed from the internet?' he asks, if so they're doing a poor job.

"Alternatively, if they think their aim is to catch the criminals putting up this material, then they should become part of the police."

Peter Robbins, chief executive of the IWF, says the various critics are ignoring the fact that the watchdog's mission is proving a success.

He says the IWF has learned from the Wikipedia controversy, though he still believes the image on the album cover was illegal. "Was that an image of a pre-pubescent girl? Yes. In our view it's not OK," he says.

But he accepts that it was not realistic to ban an image that was widely available in shops and on the internet. "I don't want to dwell on this incident. The fact is that we are dealing with some horrendous content on a daily basis and we're working really hard with hotlines and law enforcement bodies to try to stop the distributors of these images."

Lawyers for four men jailed for running The Pirate Bay file-sharing website are calling for a retrial, saying the judge could have had a conflict of interest.

Judge Tomas Norstrom is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and sits on the board of Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

But the judge has told Swedish Radio: "These activities do not constitute a conflict of interest."

Sweden's Court of Appeal would rule on a possible retrial, the lawyers said.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to a year in jail.

The four were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment.

Peter Althin, who represents The Pirate Bay (TPB) spokesman Peter Sunde, said it was for the appeal courts to decide if there was to be a retrial, as it emerged the judge and lawyers for the entertainment industry were members of the copyright association.

"In the autumn I received information that a lay judge could have similar connections. I sent these to the court and the judge was excluded in order to prevent a conflict of interest. It would have been reasonable to then review this situation as well," Althin told Sveriges Radio.

Speaking to the BBC, Sven-Erik Alhem - a former senior attorney in Sweden - said the judge had made an error of judgement, but a retrial was unlikely.

"The judge should have told the parties of his other engagements. Had he done that then they could make a decision on whether they wanted him as a judge in their case.

"I'm not sure the superior court could say that this was unfair, but had he been open then it wouldn't have been an issue," he said.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, told the BBC the judge had made an "unforgiveable" decision.

"This is corruption and judicial decay at an unforgiveable level.

"The judge in one of Sweden's most high profile case ever is also a member of an interest organisation for one side and associates with the prosecution trial lawyers in his free time? That is inexcusable corruption," said Mr Falkvinge.

The Pirate Bay file-sharing website was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the past five years it has been run by individuals.

Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.

No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers. The site hosts BitTorrent links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers.

Microsoft has said sales in the first three months of 2009 fell 6% from the previous year - its first quarterly drop in 23 years as a public company.

The world's largest software maker said profit dropped by 32% to $2.98bn (£2bn). Sales slipped to $13.65bn.

Microsoft makes most of its profit selling the Windows operating system and business software such as Office.

However demand has been hit by falling sales of personal computers as consumers and businesses trim spending.

"We expect the weakness to continue through at least the next quarter," said the firm's chief financial officer, Chris Liddell.

'On track'

Microsoft - which became a public company in 1986 - has been looking at ways of cutting costs.

In January, it said it would cut up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, including 1,400 immediately.

Microsoft's fall in profit was more severe than analysts had been expecting.

"There's stuff to be happy with - they're controlling costs and getting that under control," said Kim Caughey, a senior analyst with Fort Pitt Capital.

"The bad thing is demand and consumer preference seems to have affected their top line."

Shares in Microsoft rose by 4% in after-hours trading - possibly reassured by comments from the firm that it was on track to release the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, during its 2010 financial year.

Police say a woman stabbed her boyfriend in the chest with a steak knife over Pop Tarts.

Police say when officers arrived on Friday they saw 18-year-old Catheline Marie Colon cleaning blood from the floor. Authorities say Colon had lived with her boyfriend, 19-year-old Shawn Andrews, for about three months, but had moved out.

David Kellermann, acting chief financial officer of mortgage company Freddie Mac, was found hanging in the basement of his Reston, Va., home, dead from an apparent suicide early this
morning. The death was “an active investigation” and there were “no signs of foul play,” Fairfax County police officer Sabrina Ruck said. Local police said they were called to Kellermann’s home at 4:48 a.m., but would not say who’d placed the call to 911. Kellermann, 41, had been the company’s CFO since September, after a government takeover of the company following the housing crisis.

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Condolences to the family.

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GREAT FALLS - An employee at the Wal-Mart in Great Falls faces felony theft charges for allegedly taking electronics from the store and posting the items for sale on an employee bulletin board.

Remo Spencer was arrested Saturday at Wal-Mart.

Spencer had posted an ad on an employee bulletin board indicating that he had several iPods and computers for sale.

A manager became suspicious and reviewed surveillance footage, discovering the thefts.

Police say Remo returned eight laptop computers and seven iPods valued at nearly $7,000.

Recently you may have noticed that youtube had added a new tab to the navigation bar. The “shows” tab appears right next to the “videos” tab and takes you to youtube.com/shows. From this page you can navigate TV shows and Movies. Normally adding free shows and movies would excite users, but many are upset about the new additions. The general fear is that youtube is going to slowly take away the “You” and it will just turn into hulu. It almost seems as if their is their aim. As stated in this video with over 135,000 views and almost 2,000 video responses the user is noting that youtube is going to slowly fade out the small users and just promote users like Fred and other highly ranked partners. I believe this is true as youtube does not make any money from mine or your account, but if you are a partner they are making money from your account. They receive small portions of your adsense profits. Please watch this video as it shares many of my own opinions on what youtube is going to do.

Google's YouTube is moving ahead with its push for more professional movie content. Sony (SNE) confirms to Bloomberg that it's talking to Google about potentially putting ad-supported, full-length movies on YouTube.

More deals like that could increasingly pit YouTube up with Hulu for deals and eyeballs. YouTube has the biggest online video audience by far, but Hulu has built a brand around professional TV shows and movies.

But will either site win in the long run? While online video has proven popular for short clips and even full TV episodes, it seems like most people still want to watch movies (and probably TV episodes, given the chance) on their TV sets and not their laptops. And that's where cable companies -- not Web video companies -- have an advantage, owning dedicated networks with no bandwidth caps or fees, digital set-top boxes in tens of millions of homes, and having actual revenue to share.

Any studio that does a deal with YouTube or Hulu has as much incentive to do a deal with a cable provider like Comcast or Time Warner to put those movies into their free (potentially ad-supported) on-demand libraries. In the long run, that's probably where people are more likely to watch them, which is how revenue is made.

So unless the laptop overtakes the TV as the preferred viewing spot -- not happening soon for most people -- it's hard to see either YouTube or Hulu making serious money for studios (relative to cable) with movies on the Web.

Just like Windows users should be thinking twice before stealing software via bittorrent, OS X users also have a reason to give this another consideration as malware on this platform continues marching on. To make matters worse, due to the popularity of the software that this latest Trojan is being bundled with, this particular threat could end up being fairly wide spread amongst the careless.

What makes this interesting is that appears that it is the crack tool that extracts the problem and not the installation of Photoshop itself. So it is likely that despite news of this threat being circulated around, some individuals will continue to download this pirated software despite the clear and obvious risks.

Now what bothers me more than this threat, is a security software company explaining that users should not download illegal copies of Photoshop because of the potential for infection. Um, really? Here is a consideration. Don’t download and install it because doing so is wrong. It’s not as sexy as merely protecting your system, but is just a thought.

A Metairie resident is recovering after a stranger bit a chunk of flesh out of his arm and swallowed it Saturday afternoon.

Joseph Lancellotti, 67, told authorities he did not know the suspect, later identified as Mario Vargas, 48, or why he was attacked in his front yard.

Lancellotti was gardening at his home in the 4400 block of Kawanee Avenue about 2 p.m. when he noticed a man walking toward his house, shouting angrily, the report said. Lancellotti said he couldn't understand the man because he was yelling in Spanish. But when the man got within two feet, he slugged Lancellotti in the head, the report said.

Lancellotti said he tried to defend himself with a garden rake. As the men struggled over the rake, the stranger bent over and bit Lancellotti on his right forearm, the report said. Lancellotti's flesh ripped away as he fell to the ground. The man then got on top of Lancellotti and began choking him, the report said.

It was then that neighbor Chantal Lorio, a podiatrist and director of the Wound Center at East Jefferson General Hospital, came out to check on Lancellotti. Lorio said Monday that she first thought Lancellotti was having a heart attack and the other man was trying to help him.

The stranger was still gripping Lancellotti as Lorio noticed her neighbor was lying in a pool of blood. She didn't learn what happened until she began dressing the wound -- with the stranger still clutching her neighbor's shirt.

"He said, 'He bit my arm, chewed the flesh and swallowed it in front of me, ' " Lorio recalled. She said the bite measured almost 3 by 1 1/2 inches, and was less than 1/4-inch deep.

The pair tried to calm the stranger, who never made any attempt to run away. He eventually let go of Lancellotti and walked two blocks to a parking lot, where he hovered near an empty police car, the report said. The suspect was still standing there when deputies arrived and took him into custody.

Vargas, of 724 Camp St., New Orleans, was booked with second-degree battery. He was being held Monday at the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center in Gretna in lieu of $25,000 bail.

Lancellotti's wife, Bonnie, 60, said Monday that her husband was recovering from the bite, physically and mentally. She said his sense of safety in his neighborhood has been shaken.

With all the bacteria involved, Lorio said a bite from a human is worse than an animal bite.

Bonnie Lancellotti also has concerns about the suspect, who apparently had been treated at East Jefferson General Hospital earlier in the day for a finger injury. Vargas was released 45 minutes before the attack, according to the incident report.

Bonnie Lancellotti wondered whether hospital staff noticed anything amiss while treating Vargas. "This person's clearly lost his sense, " she said. "I mean, what else can you say, eating people's skin?"

Keith Darcey, spokesman for the hospital, said, "We cannot comment on any individual patient because of privacy laws. But as a matter of general hospital policy, the emergency department has behavioral health nurses available to help diagnose patients who might require mental health assistance."

The Air Force went to the unusual step of providing three different explanations for what happened at Roswell in 1947.

The most recent no-show from the Air Force claimed that what was identified as wreckage was falling dummies. Never mind that the dummy program hadn’t started til years later and that the dummies were over six feet tall (the aliens were claimed to be under four feet). It appears that the dummies were not the ones claimed to have been falling from the sky.

Roswell Report: Case Closed, by Captain James McAndrew, made the latest round of idiotic claims. It relied upon information from a Lt. Col. Raymond Madson. Madson has decided to speak out recently, stating that the information used in the book was not all of the information he provided to McAndrew.

Madson said that although the “dummies could be mistaken for something they are not” - they could never be mistaken for small alien beings! Furthermore, the dummies had tags on them, promising a $25 reward for their return. Gee, none of the Roswell interviewees ever mentioned that.

Madson now says that, “McAndrew was sent on a mission.” Today he had no doubt that McAndrew “was assigned to carry out a directive” that was intended to “produce a specific result.”

Madson believes that alien bodies were retrieved and flown to Wright-Patterson airbase (a widely-held belief). He worked there for a while and met his wife there. The future Mrs. Madson worked on the base in Medical and was hearing the same things at about this time.

Like many of you out there these days, I am finding myself catching on TV via the Internet a lot more than I used to. It used to be via those services rebroadcasting stuff directly from the networks themselves. Today, it is from services like Hulu.com instead.

But what about those people who are simply spending more time on the Internet instead of watching TV? Ah, that is a different issue entirely. And apparently, this is becoming a growing trend. Over in the EU, it seems that the Internet usage is quite literally overtaking the time spent watching TV, which is a bad thing for content providers in the TV world.

Back here in the states, the quality of ads has been greatly reduced to Sham-wow and mighty-putty commercials. Imagine how bad the ad landscape for TV is going to be in the years to come with more adoption online and less elsewhere?

Over at Slashdot they have created a stir about the EULA that Google
provides for their Chrome browser. One sentence:

‘7.3 Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service. For some of the Services, Google may provide tools to filter out explicit sexual content. These tools include the SafeSearch preference settings (see google.com/help/customize.html#safe). In addition, there are commercially available services and software to limit access to material that you may find objectionable.’

So what does this really mean for Chrome users? It all comes down to interpretation. Over at Google they state on their blog site that their Safe Browser feature hopefully protects users from rogue sites. The Google blog says that:

Google provides features such as Safe Browsing that warn you if you are about to go to a suspected phishing site, and we verify the URL you are planning to go to with a database of known phishing sites. Other relevant factors include the need for Google to comply with the law relating to your web-browsing experience, such as regulations against hate speech, child pornography and so on.

So I believe that the ‘filtering’ that Chrome provides is a benefit and not an attempt to filter out content that does not fall within the parameters of Safe Browsing. If anything, the filtering of objectionable sites is a good thing. IMHO.

But what do you think?

Comments welcome.

As most of you have heard by now, April 16th is going to be a very important day for those in the YouTube community. For those of you who haven’t heard, in exactly one week, YouTube is planning a major redesign of their website.

The redesign will structure the website so as to promote commercial content partners (CBS, ESPN, Disney and many other corporate content creators), while “hiding” the user generated content under a single tab called “Videos”.

Alongside the Videos tab will be tabs for Movies, Music and Shows, all of which will feature premium (read: corporate) content only. This is no doubt a move to make the site more attractive to advertisers. According to Wikipedia, YouTube burns through a million dollars per day in bandwidth costs, and only brings in $200 million per year in revenue. Do the math then and you’ll see YouTube is actually losing $165 million per year for Google.

However, by spotlighting and promoting “safer”, more advertiser-friendly content on 75% of the site, YouTube might be able to even out their expenses-to-income ratio. But I think they are going about it all wrong.

The user-generated content is what gave YouTube its edge, its atmosphere, and its press. No one wants to report about a website that lets you watch the same content you can already watch on TV. Almost every piece of press I’ve read about YouTube has focused on the viral videos or success of its homegrown users, the Michael Buckleys and LisaNovas and vlogbrothers… not its Universal Music videos.

So, unlike most users who tend to complain, but offer no solutions, let me suggest YouTube that you take the following steps before sweeping your real users under the rug:

1. Partner (almost) everyone. This seems like a no brainer. Hire part-time college students to watch and approve monetized videos, because I understand you can’t just blindly approve every video uploaded for monetization. College kids work cheap, and getting paid to watch YouTube videos is a pretty sweet deal. Then, Partner every single user you can. I don’t care if they only have 31 subscribers, they’re using your bandwidth, and getting views on each video, and each of those views could have been monetized. Multiply that by the millions of users who fall into this category, and you’re talking some serious extra cash, YouTube.

2. Promote more of your Partner’s videos. I’ll never understand why, on average, only 30% of the featured/spotlighted videos are monetized videos. You have millions of hits coming to your front page every day; send those views to videos that bring in some cash.

3. Connect advertisers with Content Creators. I know you already do this for a very limited, very select group of individuals. But hire someone full time to connect advertisers with eager content creators. So many companies want to pay your top users to hock a product or service, I know this because, after writing my book, they’ve been contacting me to help broker these deals. Marketers don’t know how to contact your top users, and users don’t know how to negotiate a deal once contacted. Step in and help facilitate these deals, take 15% for your troubles. The content creators won’t mind, because they’ll be making way more than they would on their own, and the marketers would love to have someone to contact about this.

I guess that’s it, for now. I’m sure my readers will have even more ideas for you in the comment section, YouTube. I just think, and everyone else does as well from what I’ve read, that you’re going about this all wrong by burying the worker ants who’ve carried you this far.

This is the video that Nadine, AKA nayders07, mentions me in her show because, well, I guess right and won her Op game. I'M NOT BRAGGING.

Netbooks are a relatively new phenomenon. More and more users are buying netbooks and it is estimated that over 21 Million netbooks will ship this year. This is nearly double of what shipped last year. Netbooks are really more practical for what users are doing these days. Everything is on the web. Instead of applications like word, power point, aim, and so on web applications like Google Docs and twitter are replacing their desktop predecessors. Heck even games are being replaces with Quake Live. If you ask someone what they do on a computer they will say they watch youtube videos and check their email on Gmail. Neither one of these require a powerful processor or much ram. Why not use a device specifically designed for the task you are trying to preform. With their cheaper price and longer battery life it is almost too obvious of a decision. The only setback is the smaller keyboard, but some after a short amount of time users should be able to adapt to their nice new netboo

Coldplay were on a roll - a new album going to No 1, 300,000 sales in three days, concert sellouts and now this! A damn plagiarism claim from a band called Creaky Boards. Who ever heard of Creaky Boards anyway? They issued the standard categorical denial of allegations that they copied the title track to their new record, Viva La Vida Or Death and All His Friends.

In a video posted on the video-sharing website YouTube, Andrew Hoepfner, Creaky Boards' singer and songwriter, claimed that the melody of Coldplay's song, "Viva La Vida", is pinched from a track he wrote last year called, ironically, "The Songs I Didn't Write".

He blamed Chris Martin for the alleged artistic theft, saying that Coldplay's frontman attended a Creaky Boards concert in New York last year. The clip, which was first posted on Sunday, rapidly went viral. By last night, it had been watched by nearly 300,000 people, many thousands of whom had typed comments remarking upon the various similarities between the two tracks. In an industry where even small chord sequences can become subject of costly copyright disputes, allegations of plagiarism are as potentially damaging to a musician's finances as they are to their reputation.

Maybe it's just clever marketing. Hoepfner's video clip has succeeded in gaining a new following for his band, and was driving traffic to their MySpace page. The YouTube video concludes: "I wish Coldplay the best of luck. If they ever want to collaborate, I've got some microphones we could use in my bedroom."

You Decide:
This is the report on a radio station


This is the video posted by the lead singer of Creaky Boards

This is test to see if the services: Multiply, Blogger, and Wordpress take status updates as blog posts on the site. http://ping.fm/dwBVR

So i've just found a very fast way to blog on 3 sites at once without going onto each site...and that is to use ping.fm! Sign up for free at httt://ping.fm and it's really fast!

So check out http://ping.fm to sign up and start using this FREE service. And also checking out http://ping.fm/kwEc0 and http://ping.fm/dwBVR

um...trying out this micro blog thing on ping.fm .... it might not work but sign up for this and it you can blog/micro-blog/tweet/update to many statuses at once!!! it's better than doing it manually on each site!

If you are seeking programs such as Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 or Acid Pro 7.0, which are both VERY expensive software for entering professionals going into film and music making, then you've read the RIGHT blog post!

After watching about 3 hours of Chris Pirillo's live stream, I was introduced to this podcast that this (hot) girl started and it is called "1indienation". This podcast is a dedicated "radio station" that plays and introduces popular or unpopular yet great, indie music bands, from pop to country, and from electrica to rock.

Recently I had posted a new video, "Best Rap Video Ever?" which was a 4 part reenactment of the original by MediocreFilms. After posting thing video, i had received over 200 views in less than 10 minutes. And like most people that do reenactments, I posted that video as a Video Response to the original. After a day doing so, I had gotten a YouTube email stating that MediocreFilms has subscribed to me. After reading that I literally "fainted". I thought this was a complete joke and I wanted confirmation of this. So I went on my YouTube channel and viewed my subscribers and indeed, MediocreFilms had subscribed to me. A few minutes later I received a YouTube message from MediocreFilms's Greg telling me how much they had enjoyed my video and that I was really talented. So I have one thing to say a do after this: GO SUBSCRIBE TO MEDIOCREFILMS 'CAUSE THEY ARE THE BEST F***ING PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!!!!!

SECURITY WAS pushed back to the top of the agenda this week with news emerging over the weekend of the Chinese GhostNet and April Fool’s Day passing with the Conficker worm failing to deliver its payload.

The GhostNet was discovered by Canadian security researchers and was found to have infected thousands of government computers in 103 countries. Once installed on PCs, the software was able to send documents back to its creators and even control the PC microphones and webcams.

Although the attacks emanated from China, the Chinese government has denied any involvement.

In contrast to the targeted attacks carried out by GhostNet, Conficker may have infected up to 10 million machines around the world using a weakeness in the Windows operating system which has been patched subsequently.

Although Conficker and many variants of it have lain dormant on infected machines, the virus was designed to begin communicating with its authors from April 1st. As a result, security experts believed that Conficker might deliver its payload on April Fool’s Day by responding to whatever commands were sent out by its authors.

“This is like having a multiple of sleeper cells in every city and country in the world but we don’t know what instructions they are going to be given,” says Conor Flynn, a director of security firm Rits.

Conficker operates in a similar manner to Blaster and other worms which proliferated quickly over the internet. But the reach of Conficker suggests that people are still not taking the basic steps of automatically patching their operating system, using a firewall and keeping an anti-virus package up to date, according to Michael Hofmeyr, a consultant with Deloitte Touche’s enterprise risk services division.

Although people have little excuse for being infected, Mr Hofmeyr credits Conficker with being more sophisticated than the average worm. “Once it gets on your system, it patches the vulnerability it used to get in, to make sure no one else can take over the machine,” explains Mr Hofmeyr.

While GhostNet targeted the machines of diplomats, media outlets and even the Dalai Lama, Mr Flynn says it is “more sinister and disturbing” because the current generation of security products would struggle to prevent it.

“An attack like this will not be detected by anti-virus software because it is brand new,” explains Mr Flynn.

“The anti-virus companies need a large number of people to report back an attack so that they can include it in their signature files. A custom trojan horse used to target a small number of companies may never be picked up.”

Security experts say that the discovery of GhostNet shows that it is time to move to heuristic security products which detect and prevent suspicious behaviour on a PC. The current generation of products rely on detecting the unique signature of a known piece of malware.

“The industry has been slow to react to this kind of targeted attack and move away from signatures,” says Mr Flynn.

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