danajohnhill.org

Tomorrow is my birthday and I’ll be celebrating it by listening to the best mariachi band in the world and watching Impressions de France and eating a buffet meal while listening to the strains of a German um-pah band.

There’s some big, exciting news coming up, and I’ll write more about it on Sunday.

So long until then.

UPDATE:  Back from Epcot, which was quite crowded due to the Food and Wine Festival.  But we got to do most of what we wanted, including Soarin’, Test Track, plus the 360° films at the Canadian and Chinese pavillions, the beautiful “five minute film about Norway”, and, my favorite attraction of all, Impressions de France. 

I have read recently that the hated RIAA is now targeting a website called Usenet.com, and that actual newsgroups may not be far behind.  Newsgroups are a largely unknown region of the internet where copyright infringement is rampant.  Certainly, there are many thousands of text-only discussion groups, like rec.music.classical.recordings, which I visit every day.  But there are also thousands of binary groups containing millions and millions of copyrighted movies, pictures and recordings.  Presumably, only those groups with sound recordings would be affected, but that makes up an astonishing number of groups, and might, conceivably include my own most-favoritest group, alt.binaries.music.springsteen.

Frankly, I am surprised it took the RIAA this long.  Usenet is like the Wild West of the internet, and, most amazing off all, unlike services like Napster, Usenet is hosted by individual servers, so there are central computers containing all of these files.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the MPAA was far behind in filing their own suits.