2 Robots

A Telnet client for your iPhone or iPod Touch! This client can be used for interactive communication with another host using the TELNET protocol. It implements a simple terminal emulator, and can be used to connect to any standard telnet server including Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X, Cisco, or even Windows as long as telnet [...]

Space Wormy is now available for iPhone and iPod Touch!

You can get the full version through the iTunes Store. It has much better graphics, sound effects, and more!

I’ll admit it. When I was younger I used to pirate music, movies, games, and software. I was a poor high school and later college student. I had no money. I couldn’t afford to buy those things. If I didn’t find a way to get it for free, I just couldn’t get it, period. It wasn’t a question of wanting to pay or what the market thought was fair. I just didn’t have any.

That was a while ago. Now I have a job. And I don’t pirate any more. Partially, this is because I’ve been a software developer, and I see things more “from the other side.” But mostly, its because I can. I have $50 to my name so that I can go out and buy that game I wanted, or the box set dvd’s, or whatever (not to say I don’t think they are overpriced).

That’s why I’ve always thought that the piracy numbers given out by the movie (MPAA), music (RIAA), and software (BSA) industry groups have been complete garbage. I mean, Billions of dollars? Common, that’s rediculous. Just because someone has pirated your software/song/movie doesn’t mean they are willing to pay for it. That’s always been my assertion, but of course I could never prove it.

Luckily, Russel Carrol, Director of Marketing at Reflexive (a PC game company) has done it for me. In an article posted at Gamasutra, he lays out a very data-driven and scientific analysis of the company’s piracy rates both before and after taking steps which reduced piracy. Read the article. Really.

His conclusion: Only 1 in 1,000 pirates are actually willing to purchase the product.

Does it still seem worth suing college kids, guys?

I think its a shame that email encryption and signing isn’t more prevalent on the Internet. As a technology that has been mature for over 10 years, there is little or no built-in OS support for it in either Windows or OS X. The latest version of Ubuntu Linux, however, happen to have built-in support for Gnu Privacy Guard, the GPL free implementation of PGP encryption and identity verification.

This software is capable of both making sure that only the recipient can access the email you send them (pretty good when using a public mail server, like Google or Yahoo, for example), and also to guarantee that the person in the “from” field is actually the person who sent the email.

In fact, if GPG became a part of the SMTP standard protocol (or even became used commonly), it would serve to thin out the majority of spam mail, as well as phishing email attempts.

So, in an attempt to get GPG used a little more often, you should read the book Cryptonomicon. Aside from providing excellent information on what GPG is and why you should use it, it is an excellent adventure story.

Then, take a look at the following guide to add GPG support to OS X Leopard.

Click on for my public GPG key …

2robots.com is currently getting a major server upgrade. Service may be a little spotty over the next few days, although I’ll try to keep that to a minimum. So far, only the main webserver (www.2robots.com) has been transfered over to the new server. Over the next few days, the rest of the hosted domains, as [...]

This week was a bad one for manned space flight. An accident at Burt Rutan’s Space Ship Company killed 2 workers during an engine test, and injured 4 others. A Nasa contractor found evidence of sabatoge in a flight computer destined to be brought up to the International Space Station in August.

However, what makes this week such a sad day for manned space travel is a recent report that NASA has been allowing astronauts to show up drunk at the space shuttle launch.

Read on for more.