Interesting Links for 12-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• Can a court order stop a torrent file?
  Of course it can't. And much though I feel sympathy for the young lady, she hasn't got a hope in hell of fixing this one.
  (tags: censorship torrents privacy law nudity )
• Putting pension tax breaks for the rich under the scrutiny
  (tags: politics money pensions libdem )
• Madonna’s NFL Satanic Ritual disguised in

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Fuck.

I'd assumed that the halftime show was a prayer to Gorgastriaum.

[anef]

Pensions tax relief is now restricted to the first £50K of contributions per year. The rate of relief is also restricted for people earning over 150K, and for people earning over £180K relief is only given at the basic rate. I don't see the need to mess about with it any further.

[steer]

Actually the issues with possible disruption to torrent files is why piratebay and others are moving to magnet files. It's hard to block a torrent file sure but not enough to qualify as impossible. Hence the current generation bittorrent stuff uses magnet links instead.

[andrewducker]

And, apparently are working on distributed searching too. For that awesome eMule experience.

[steer]

Yes -- I've had some minor involvement in that work myself. The problems difficult because you have to have some way of stopping people corrupting the search by adding "false" matches. (Imagine the problem of designing google without some central authority to weed out the spam.)

[andrewducker]

I notice that the latest version of uTorrent is asking me what the quality of the torrent was like. I assume that's part of one approach to this problem!

[nancylebov]

Maybe there should be a list of geek business fallacies, with one of them being "People should be able to recognize what is good". Thus, little or no marketing and advertising.

This is not entirely bad, since advertising can be tiresome to be around, but it's not the best for conventions and businesses.

[autopope]

The McKinsey revelations in the Mail on Sunday are dynamite. I mean, seriously politically incendiary.

[andrewducker]

Yup. I wonder if the Daily Mail has had them for a while, and was holding on until it decided the bill was dead anyway, or if this is just a perfectly timed breakthrough on their part. In either case, Lansley is in serious trouble.