I’ll be the MC and a featured speaker at this weekend’s big hacker convention titled The Next HOPE. These events are truly amazing with talks every hour on all kinds of electronic madness. There’s a lockpicking workshop where you can learn some tricks, jailbreak your phone, as well as vintage gear to check out. Tons of vendors bring cool devices that shut down TVs in bars, etc.

It’s at the Hotel Pennsylvania, across from Penn Station. Come hang out with thousands of hackers, activists, nerds, music fans, and former FBI and CIA guys who tell amazing stories of surveillance, counterespionage, and other trippy tails.

My dumb speech is Saturday at noon.

What does frustrate me is the current state of technology journalism. It’s turned into a bunch of elitist whiners who throw bloggy tantrums over the MOST IRRELEVANT THINGS EVER. Take, for instance, the rants of a few tech journalists against the Ipad as somehow being draconian and the Iphone to be horribly limited and betraying our human civil rights. If you went back in a time machine to 1988 and showed someone and Iphone and whined about how horrible it was, they would beat you with a tire iron for being a self absorbed unappreciative dick. THIS is what’s wrong with your life? Really? You can’t make copies of movies you bought in Itunes? Entire continents don’t have indoor plumbing, swim in sewage, and die from a mosquito bite and you in your hipster geek glasses and Prius are whining about your apps? Good going self absorbed prick.

Wow. I think i just did a Technofile there.

The new site has comments. It’s going to be available until people begin acting like children. Be nice. Don’t call names. If you disagree with someone, don’t be mean. Don’t post something you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.

Thanks for stopping by.

Just to clear up some misconceptions -

1. we have no objection to people recording the show, sharing the show, bittorrenting a show. what we have objection to are the people who buy the box set, which contains way more than just the radio shows on it, and posting that online for anyone and everyone to steal.

2. None of us are “making a living” off of this show. However it does put some spare cash in our pockets. And there are bills to pay – the accountant – duplication equipment, laser toner – these things cost money. and if a source of income for the show goes away because people are stealing it – why would we keep doing it?

3. The international market is much larger for us than the United States – and as the box set appeared on torrent sites over the last few weeks it affected us significantly. The posting on Christmas day threw me over the edge.

4. We’re well aware and technically savvy about how the “world works.” things get pirated. But as i said in my original post, this speaks to the basic core problem of what we’re trying to explain to posters on message boards who are bashing us for threatening to not bother doing something that loses money – if i may rephrase economist James Surowiecki’s point: People want access to everything, they want it now, and they want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if profits vanish, so will the product.

The original post on my site has launched an enormous debate about content, piracy and compensation, and it’s an interesting discussion to have – and I think one that needed to happen overall. And some fans took action against the torrent dicks. From what I hear the box set got pulled down.

I’ve been involved in content creation since I got out of college and for the 12 years I did the Technofile I reported extensively about the DRM debate, piracy, and clueless record companies who sue grandmas. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is garbage. But equally disgusting is this malaise in the online world and especially the PC gaming community that torrents don’t f*ck over people and take money out of their pockets. They do. My point was to show that torrenting the box set takes a couple of hundred bucks a month out of Big Wayne’s pocket, and he’s unemployed.

Most of all, thanks for the support everyone – we’ll try to keep doing the show as long as we have a place to do it and we make enough money to buy beer to get producer danny drunk.

Cheers

Lazlow