The Six Strikes program has been kept quiet since it was agreed upon a year ago. So, nobody really knows how it will work. Many observers speculate that it will only affect BitTorrent traffic, but what about Usenet?

Unlike BitTorrent, when you download from a Usenet server, there is no “swarm” – just you and the server. So, third parties hired to look for offenders cannot legally observe your traffic. However, if your ISP wanted to monitor you, they could do so very easily.

Usenet does not have built-in compression, error-detection, or encryption. In it’s default mode, Usenet data is transferred as plain text, and is easy to read by spies. In practice, files are compressed with RAR, and encoded with yEnc (or other methods) before being transferred. But of course, your ISP could easily decode, and decompress files if it chose to.

However, many Usenet servers and client programs like SuperNZB have implemented SSL. It’s pretty much a standard feature now, and will prevent your ISP from seeing what you are downloading. However, if you use an NZB-indexing website that doesn’t run HTTPS, your ISP will be able to see the NZB files that you download. Would that be enough for them to issue a warning? Probably not, but nobody really knows yet.

Once Six Strikes goes into operation, we will see how it works. However, that won’t preclude it from being expanded in the future. So, it seems wise for Usenet users to switch on SSL, and keep it on. And maybe use a VPN when visiting NZB-indexing sites.

Wikipedia announced that it has completed the transfer of all of its domains from SOPA-supporter GoDaddy to MarkMonitor. See the announcement here.

Of course, these weapons systems are very complex. You can just yank out the VAX and pop in a Mac. Also, since we don’t do nuclear testing anymore, how could you test a new ICBM system anyway? You could test the whole system right up to the nuclear explosion part, and simulate the blast. But you wouldn’t know for sure that the bomb would explode.

Is it possible that our doomsday machines will just crumble into duds?

“This industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

That quote will be repeated forever as a prime example of “former politician turned corporate lobbyist and trying to ram through Congress laws written by corporate lawyers rather than elected lawmakers.”

Dodd now faces a potential bribery investigation, if this petition on whitehouse.gov page gets enough signatures.

DNS provision pulled from SOPA. See Tom’s Guide story here.

Public serpents are walking-back SOPA. See Ars Technica story here.

It’s too early to declare victory over SOPA. See Fast Company story here.

The White House now opposes SOPA and PIPA. See TPM story here.

Does your congressman support or oppose SOPA? See this page.

Will Google, Facebook, and Twitter go offline to protest SOPA? This page says that they are discussing it.

If you want to boycott companies that support SOPA, install this Android app on your cellphone and scan bar-codes at the store.

Stop SOPA! Save Usenet!

If you enjoy Usenet, now would be a good time to make your congressional representatives aware of your feelings.

Apple will probably get the rights to the the trademark in China, but only after coughing up more cash to the corrupt Chinese.

And since the iPad has taken market share from traditional notebook computers, DRAM manufacturers are stuck with billion-dollar facilities, and barely enough sales to pay their business loans.

Read the Bloomberg story here.

SuperNZB is designed to be as fool-proof as possible from a novice user’s perspective. For example, suppose that the power goes off while SuperNZB is downloading an NZB file. When you re-start SuperNZB, it will look through your parts folder, and your downloads folder to see what’s there. It will then show all of those file totals on the Queue window, and you can resume downloading right where you left off. With a large NZB file that contains many thousands of files, such a feature can be a little time consuming. And if the files are not on your internal disk, it will take even longer.

SuperNZB is designed from the ground up with this kind of functionality, and as a consequence it is very resilient when things go wrong. And since NZB files are made by humans, there are plenty of things that can and will go wrong. So, SuperNZB is constantly reading and writing to-and-from your hard drive saving data, assembling parts, decoding, PAR-ing, RAR-ing, doing database look-ups, etc.

SuperNZB is very input/output intensive, so run it with your internal hard disk. Chances are that your internal drive is rather gigantic.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to store data on external devices. And we will keep this issue in mind even though SuperNZB itself cannot be easily redesigned for these scenarios. We have an as-yet unannounced NZB downloader in development aimed at advanced users, and we have support of non-internal drives as a design goal.