Investigators claim to have recorded almost 100,000 instances of iiNet users making available online unauthorised copies of films and TV programs from the film studio’s catalogues, lawyers for the film industry said in court today…

“By making those films available in those…instances, iiNet customers invited any and every user of the freely available BitTorrent software program to download any and every part of those infringing copies,” the industry’s lawyers said in opening remarks.

AFACT accuses iiNet’s customers of using bittorrent traffic to “steal” copyrighted content, and proposes that iiNet should filter this traffic and disconnect users who file-share. This case is the first of its kind in Australia, and will set the legal precedent for cases in the future. If iiNet lose this one, then most Australian Bittorrent users will have to find a different solution.

Is it morally acceptable to filter internet traffic? As an internet user, you are not paying for access to “the internet”, you are paying for access to a global network of protocols and equipment. This equipment joins together to create the internet. When certain providers start blocking certain pieces of software and protocols, the integrity of the internet is challenged. Americans in particular have problems with the concept of network filtering, because it imposes on their institutional right to free-speech. (After all, isnt internet traffic only a means of transmitting information, regardless of protocol?)

NET NEUTRALITY [wikipedia] A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.

Blocking bittorent is only a band-aid fix for a much larger problem (the equivelant of a government blocking white vans from driving on the roads, “because most drugs are transported in white vans, and stopping white vans from driving on our roads will eliminate the drug problem”).

No matter what happens, piracy will only continue to grow in popularity, there will always be new ways to share content. Most internet users will remember napster [wikipedia], and what happened to illegal file sharing when it was shut down? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. File sharing is more popular today that it has ever been, which leads us to ask, will shutting down bittorrent traffic stop file sharing?

I would have to say: no. There are always new technologies, new workarounds and legal loop-holes. Downloaders will always find a way to download. And yet we are posed with the question: Why will file sharing continue to grow regardless of bittorrent’s future?

Most people I know do not shoplift, do not steal cars and most certainly do not snatch-bags. Yet, many of my friends share files. The law is supposed to be a moral reflection of society, laws regarding file sharing are supposed to represent the morals of its end-users. But here we are, downloading entire Michael Jackson discographies and new release blockbusters with a single click. Many bittornent users would tell you that Paying $44 for a BluRay movie is ridiculous, and that the money-hungry corporations and stars should sell their works cheaper (I bet people wouldn’t bother downloading new-release movies if they were sold for $9.99 at the local Coles)

So on one hand we have money-hungry multi-billion dollar companies “defending their rights”, and on the other side the end users are defending their right to freedom-of-speech and network-neutrality. Downloaders are going to continue downloading music, movies and TV shows, because on a moral level they diagree with the law and do not believe it to be fair.

Will the legal system sell-out to corporations? After all, the legal system is supposed to serve the people, not the corporations. The Australian legal system ESPECIALLY does not serve hollywood or the RIAA.

Also worthy of  watching: The IT crowd: File sharing

This is all my personal opionion, I do not condone file sharing in any way.

I do condone questioning the status-quo.

// FONTS //

Fonts are notorious for slowing down OSX. Font files become corrupt or cache files become invalid, which slows down everything on your system. Clearing out invalid fonts and the font cache will bring a noticable boost to system performance. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open up Font Book from your applications folder.
2. Make sure you are on the “all fonts” pane and then select all the fonts (cmd + a)*
3. Go to the File menu and select “Validate Fonts”. Font Book will now attempt to validate the font files installed on your system. When Font Book has finished validating fonts, you will notice “minor problems” and “serious problems”.
4. From the drop-down menu select “warnings” — The list now only contains fonts with problems
5. Tick the checkbox that says “select all fonts” then click “Remove Checked”. A dialogue box appears asking if you wish to proceed, click “remove”. You may need to enter an administrator password to continue.

[View with PicLens]

Cleaning the font cache // Cleaning out bad fonts is only fixing half the problem. OSX still has cache files referencing to those invalid fonts. We need to remove the font cache files and get OSX to rebuild them based off the valid fonts.

1. Download and install Font Finagler [3.9mb]. This is a free application.
2. Open font finagler, click OK when a dialogue appears warning you about disabled fonts.
3. Click “Inspect Font Cache Files”
4. Select all files that come up in the list, and click “Clean Font Cache Files”.
5. A dialogue appears stating that you will need to restart your computer immediately after the operation completes, click “Continue Cleaning”
6. Restart your computer

[View with PicLens]

// VERIFY PERMISSIONS //

Invalid file and folder permissions can be the cause of a slow computer. Repair disk permissions using the following steps:

1. Open Disk Utility from the applications folder
2. Ensure your startup disk is selected.
3. Press the “Repair Permissions” button.
4. Go grab a coffee, this can take a while.
5. When complete restart the computer.

[View with PicLens]

// UNINSTALL ANTIVIRUS AND FIREWALL PRODUCTS//

So, when you were using a PC you were told that the would would end if you didn’t have a firewall +antivirus application installed. While this is the case with windows, this is NOT the case with OSX. There is only a handful of viruses for mac, and apple is pretty good with software updates and patches.

Products like Norton System utilities or Antivirus do little more than take up hard drive space and hog CPU power. The best thing to do is uninstall these applications.

// GOOD HOUSEKEEPING //

Here are some more tips that will help keep your mac running smoothly

1. Remove old and unused applications
2. Perform a full system update.
3. Ensure you are running OSX 10.5 Leopard. If not, go buy it. $129 @ the apple store. Also keep in mind that Snowleopard  is going to be released soon, and it boasts to be more stable and much faster than Leopard, so it will definitely be worth the $29 upgrade price.
4. Remove unused user accounts
5. Remove unused Language Packs (using ONYX)
6. Keep the desktop clean (many people I talk to say that this helps and I agree)
7. Empty the trash regularly.
8. Turn off unused Bluetooth and Wifi devices (this can be done from within system preferences)
9. Disable unused animations (eg the Dock reflection, taskbar transperancy, dock “genie” effect) from within system preferences
10. Turn off unnecessary dashboard widgets.
11. Keep at least 10% of your startup disk space free.
12. Remove unwanted startup items (from system preferences > accounts > login items)
13. Reformat. Nothing beats a good old clean out, backup, erase and format. You will be surprised how much difference it makes and you will thank yourself for taking the time and effort to do it.

And there you have it, 15 ways to speed up OSX. Please leave me your feedback, and any other suggestions you have!

For example, I want to upgrade to the latest relase of the iPhone software, but because I have a beta software version installed, itunes will not update the software without going into DFU mode and manually updating the software.

1. Turn phone off (if the phone is already off, there is no need to turn it on then off again).
2. Have your trusty iPhone USB cable plugged into your computer and close-by for easy reach. Don’t plug it in yet.
3. Hold down the home button (the round one) — Don’t let go!
4. After a few seconds of holding the home button, insert the iPhone USB cable. Don’t let go of the home button during this entire process.

After 10–15 seconds you should see the iphone screen turn purple/black with a picture of a USB cable + itunes logo (First generation iphones will display an exclamation point). From here, itunes will launch, alert you to an iphone detected in restore mode, follow the prompts to restore and wa-la! Brand new iPhone (well, at least on the inside).

Why did it take apple so long to implement copy and paste? I haven’t a clue. But I will show you how it works:

COPY + PASTE

So, As you can see from the pictures copy and paste is fully functional in iPhone OS 3.0. It is available across all apps that support text input, and text can be copied across apps.

[View with PicLens]

To invoke copy, you simply double tap on the text you wish to copy. From there you can use the select all option, or you can drag the pins around the text you wish to copy/cut and then select either copy/cut from the menu. To paste, double tap in a text input area and select paste.

This feature has been pretty stable so far. I haven’t tried to copy pages of emails at a time to test the limits, but it hasn’t crashed yet. One thing I have noticed though is that when you double tap in a webpage/email the iphone OS resizes that particular column to fit the screen (as has been the shortcut since iPhone 2.0). However, if you wish to copy text in a column you must double tap once to invoke the zoom feature, then double tap again to invoke the copy feature. A total of four, semi-rapid taps. This becomes especially confusing when you are used to pinch-zooming and the OS tries to resize an already well-sized column of text, it had me confused a little at first.

SPOTLIGHT SEARCH

Another thing that I have always wanted to do on my iPhone is to search through my contacts, emails and music library. Sometimes that little alphabetical list just doesn’t cut it, especially when you cant remember the first word of the song name!

[View with PicLens]

iPhone 3.o brings a system wide spotlight search to the table. There are different ways to invoke a search, the easiest is to go to your home screen, and swipe right to reveal a spotlight search page. It operates much like spotlight in leopard, showing search results in realtime as you type. This is a whole system search, and from the page you can launch apps, play a song or video, find an event, open a contact card or open an email.

Spotlight search is also offered in the mail, ical and ipod apps. These are more specific searches: for example, the spotlight search in mail has the option to only search sent or received messages, or just text in the subject. Spotlight even searches messages on remote servers, and doesn’t download these without you asking it to, presumable to save bandwidth or cutback search time. Good call, apple. Currently none of the spotlight functions can actually search within an image, but apple has confirmed this will be a feature in the final release.

The search itself is very snappy, no noticeable lag that is longer than the rest of the system. The option to search for a contact from the contacts page is also the nice cherry on the cake, in my opinion.

HORIZONTAL LAYOUTS

The iPhone 3.0 OS updates the view UI for both SMS and email. You can now rotate to view your SMS conversation, inbox (and each message) horizontally, and also type SMS and emails using the horizontal keyboard.

[View with PicLens]

Personally, I have never been a big fan of horizontal keyboards, I prefer to be able to view what I am responding to or more of the conversation over a larger keyboard. I do know that a lot of people will welcome this update with open arms though.

CONTACT SHARING + MMS

Unfortunately I can’t tell you much about MMS, only because it isn’t an active feature yet. The buttons are all there, but they just don’t do anything.

One of the cool features is being able to share contacts. You can email a contacts’ VCF file. You can open these files on your iphone or mac directly. I’m not sure if they will open with exchange, windows, android or blackberry. Anyone want to try it out? Link to a test VCF here.

[View with PicLens]

You can see the MMS settings in the sys prefs “messages” panel in the photos.

USER INTERFACE TWEAKS

[View with PicLens]

A few nice new icons for mail + SMS. Freshens it up a little. When the phone is locked a padlock now appears near the clock @ the top (I’m presuming this is for people who cant see that the phone is locked by the giant slide-bar down the bottom saying ‘SLIDE TO UNLOCK’).

The voice recorder app looks nice. It has only worked for me once though, now it just crashes my phone. I’m gonna steer clear of this big shiny microphone ’till its ready to be used.

When you send an SMS, the message sending status bar is now at the top of the screen. The text you sent immediately moves to the conversation window and out of the text field, so you can start writing a new sms before the first one is finished sending.

BUGS

I have come across a few bugs (as expected for beta software, especially on an iphone!). Aside from the ones outlined previously (copying text in a column and the microphone)

• When making a call, the call screen loads, closes, then reloads, all within a second. Can still make calls though.
• Cant copy a phone number from the address book. When you single/double tap the OS calls the number instead of invoking the copy dialogue. Workaround: Find the contact, go to edit, tap on the number field. This opens the number editor, from which you can then double tap the number to select/copy it.
• General lag: there is a little lag opening apps, emails etc. HOWEVER I also will add that there is LESS lag than what I remember in the original 2.o public release. There is no where near as much spontaneous restarting, app crashing, screen freeze or eternal damnation. This beta release is comparable in stability to the public release of 2.o.
• When loading the “network” panel in sys prefs there is a massive 15 sec lag. I would assume this is because the OS is trying to invoke the tethering controls which are not yet active. I can live with this, rarely open that panel

Overall, iPhone 3.o is great! Cannot wait for the final release, complete with fully functional MMS, background-push for all apps and tethering. There are more features that I have not had a chance to test yet, like copying multiple images and sending them in an email.

One thing I think is contributing to lag is the sheer amount of apps installed. When I synced the phone with itunes it had forgotten which apps I did not want installed, so installed all of them. All 9 pages of them. Before doing that first sync the lag was noticably less. I plan to to a reinstall of 3.0 soon to remedy this (uninstalling the apps didnt seem to work) and will post again to share the results.