nicksterspace is a tumblelog.

[Sent to http://copyright.econsultation.ca/, the Canadian government’s public consultation on the legislation regarding copyright law and the internet.]

Hello, I’m a student at the University of Ottawa. The recent debate about copyright law has really hit home for me. I have seen the results of the wrong decisions in the United States, with students being sued for millions, and for what, really? I believe that right now, the internet is the future, in ways we can’t even imagine now. Just as…

I’m up tonight not because I want to be up, but because I don’t have a choice. I couldn’t sleep. I decided to go to bed early tonight, because I was tired and I had nothing to do. last night I basically stayed up until 8, and then slept until 1, so I had good reason.

This isn’t a typical can’t sleep, though. This is the result of memories coming flooding back, unable to be contained. Things I thought I got over, things maybe I had forgotten about. I can’t even sleep on my pillow without thinking of the places I rested my head in the past.

This hasn’t happened in a while, a restless night of memories. Normally when I go to bed, I’m out like a light, except these last two nights.

A small correction.

What man has joined,
nature is powerless to put asunder.

I like night time.

I write this from a street corner. Ever since one fateful night last summer, I have always enjoyed the silence of a late summer night. Except for the rogue air conditioner, and a car driving a bit too fast, it is silent.

This gives me time to thing, time to process what is not an ultimatum, not a contract, but a treaty, a ceasing of armaments of silence.

Silence is a paradox. On one hand this silence is saving my life. Another silence is making this necessary.

There will be no in flight dinner for passengers this evening. Instead, we will reimburse you with the strength of your convictions, the clarity of your mind, and your ability to make a solid decision in your life, even if that change is to not change anything at all.

From my street corner, I realise that there never was a lack of poetry, just a lack of understanding that poetry in the form of love, and love in the form of a cholera epidemic, are not always apparent. I never stopped writing, we only stopped understanding.

Time is acting odd for me today. When I got home today, I felt as if I had been gone a very long time. I looked back at the actual time that passed, and I realized that it just seemed far back. Events that occurred the day before felt as if they were part of my distant past. They occurred, were processed, and stamped into the logbook of my life. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, since even just last week, Before the End, feels like eons ago. Events that occurred just a little over a week…

What man has joined,
nature is powerless but to asunder.

Well it looks like I’m going to be blogging on Tumblr now. I don’t like Wordpress.

Old posts should be here

soon.

Countering App Store piracy

marco:

John Gruber on Crackulous, the automated app-pirating tool for jailbroken iPhones:

I suspect we’ll soon start seeing high-profile App Store apps that attempt to detect whether they’re running on a jailbroken phone, and, if so, quit.

That’s not the best approach to counter this. It would be too easy for the crackers to find and disable the check in the apps.

The ideal piracy detection system doesn’t make it immediately obvious to the crackers that their efforts have been detected. That way, they believe their crack is sufficient, release it, and move on to another app.

If your app interacts with a web service, you can then do all sorts of interesting things. For example, you can log the unique iPhone IDs that run pirated copies of your app and blacklist them from future updates. Or you could quit the app on launch, but only after it has been installed for a few days. You could even create a database of pirating iPhone IDs and share it with other developers.

If you also have user accounts that people use on the site from a web browser, you can match pirate iPhone IDs to your site’s user database and see what IPs they connect from or what email address they signed up with to contact them, send notices to their ISP, or prosecute them.

So it’d be a waste to just immediately quit, and they’d just find your check and disable it.

Or you could just ignore the pirates, since hardly anyone jailbreaks their phone and they’ll never pay for anything anyway, and spend that time making the app better to attract more paying customers.

It’s a bad idea to punish all jailbroken users for the actions of a few. Just because a phone is jailbroken doesn’t mean apps are being pirated. That’s a good way to lose users, since not everyone who is going to download an app is doing so nefariously, but I don’t doubt there are a lot of users who just want free stuff.

Bluenotes had Tegan and Sara playing today!