So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

(more…)

Followed are some resolutions I took recently :
1 : I have removed windows from my machine ( even when I can get as much licenses as I want. I am still Microsoft Student Partner.. being an MSP, I can directly attack MS and other MSPs, I am so mean ). Now I have Fedora and Gentoo on my machine. Yes, I know I have been preferring Ubuntu over Fedora, but I installed Fedora to give it another shot. Conley once said, Gentoo and Ubuntu has nonfree softwares in its repositories, which I agree is not good, but Gentoo is worth making that exception. . Though I am worried about the future of Gentoo. It’s development is in big question-mark.

(more…)

So, this is how it works in IIT Kanpur. Most of the students use pirated softwares. That means the “MS windows” they use is pirated, “MS office” is pirated, “adobe professional” etc etc. There are plenty of pirated softwares available in IIT Kanpur LAN. Even if someone buys Windows or gets it with laptop, they use other pirated softwares. Name any software, it will be available in IITK LAN. Same is with movies and songs. And IITK administration doesn’t do anything against it. Its not that they don’t know about it, but its because they don’t wanna stop it. For example in IITK newsgroup people tell others that they have downloaded this pirated software/movie/song and have shared it here. Rather IIT Kanpur has made separate groups for sharing videos, music and softwares. Reason for this mass piracy being that 1 : IITK students are technically sound, 2: these software companies, they encourage piracy in developing countries and hence piracy is so common in India, 3: Indians, right now, don\’t want to spend money on softwares (why would they when pirated softwares are available so easily).

(more…)