Testing Out Hulu
I was able to snag an invite from GigaOM to the Hulu beta. So far its pretty cool. They offer full episodes of shows like The Office, Chuck, Family guy, plus more. Here’s an episode from The Office:
I had to resize the episode so it would fit in the blog without overlapping the sidebar, but on the Hulu site you can watch a larger version as well as full screen.
Update: Ars Technica also has beta invites to give out.
Facebook Apologizes for Beacon
The New York Times has an article on their Bits blog about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook apologizing for their Beacon program and now allowing users to opt-out completely instead of having to opt-out on a per site basis. This is a nice gesture, but I feel that Beacon should have been an opt-in program from the beginning.
Facebook Beacon Alert
Aaron Brazell has released a Firefox extension that alerts a user when they are visiting a site that participates in the Facebook Beacon program to better judge if they want to continue using the site and have their information shared with Facebook.
Here Comes Another Bubble
As seen on TechCrunch:
You can also download an mp3 of the song from The Richter Scales website.
EFF confirms Bittorrent Interfence by Comcast
Ars Technica reported yesterday about a study published by the EFF that confirms Comcast is interfering with bittorrent traffic regardless if its being used legally to share things that are public domain. I’ve noticed this myself when using bittorrent to download Ubuntu ISO’s. This study confirms what was reported in October by the Associated Press.
“Comcast is discriminating among different kinds of Internet traffic based on the protocols being used by its customers,” said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “When confronted, Comcast has been evasive and misleading in its responses, so we decided to start gathering the facts ourselves.”
Lets hope the FCC will step in.
Photo by wiccked.
My blog posts are now also available on my Facebook profile. My Facebook profile is pretty much used to congregate everything I use (blog, twitter, etc) into one place. Feel free to add me as a friend.
Gmail now offers Free IMAP.
As reported earlier on TechCrunch, Google has begun offering free IMAP support for all gmail accounts. This is excellent because it now keeps all email clients in sync which is especially useful on mobile phones and pda’s that don’t support the gmail java app. My free gmail account has the settings for turning on IMAP, but my pro account for bfmedia.com doesn’t have it yet, so hopefully they get around to turning the feature on for pro accounts so I can try things out with my main email account.
Update: It’s available on my pro account now.
Ask the GOP Candidates
From the EFF Deeplinks Blog:
On November 28, the Republican candidates for President will face questions from the public in the form of user-generated video clips uploaded to YouTube. (A similar event was held by Democrats last July.) We hope the candidates get to hear from Kim LeBiavant, who has a very important question regarding warrantless wiretaps.
Here’s the YouTube clip:
You can vote by heading over to 10questions.com.
Halo 3 - My Review
So this past weekend I completed the Halo 3 campaign and I have to say, while the graphics and game play was amazing, I was a bit let down by the length of the game. It seemed like as soon as I started, I was finished. Guess I was just expecting more from the third installment. One bit of info if you decide to give the game a try, after the final scene wait till after the ending credits, there’s a surprise.
Rant - FOX NFL
I’m going to rant for a moment so bear with me.
I’m sitting in the living room enjoying a nice relaxing Sunday afternoon watching football. The game on Fox this week for my area was Rams @ Cowboys. The game has been pretty much one sided since halftime with the Cowboys in the lead. This is fine because the Cowboys are one of the teams I enjoy watching.
Well, right before the 4th quarter Fox decides to change over to the Packers @ Vikings game because the score is closer. This pisses me off. I don’t care if the Cowboys game is one sided, I wanted to watch it. If I didn’t I would have changed the channel to CBS for the AFC game or one of the Sunday Ticket channels on DirecTV, and I can’t finish watching the Cowboys game on Sunday Ticket because it’s blacked out since my local channel was originally showing the game.
Final word to FOX, don’t change over to a closer game, or at least unblock the Sunday Ticket channel so I can finish watching the game I started with.
