Not long after the release of Ubuntu 9.04 (which LinuxMint is based on), LinuxMint 7 has been released. It looks like the developers put a lot of work into making this disto an improvement over the last one, with a nice new green spin on things.

LinuxMint 7 Gloria Screenshot

Other than a new look, the rest of the work has been done by Ubuntu, stability fixes, etc. So far I have run into almost no problems with this new distribution, except one problem with the sound drivers, which I easily fixed.

If you are already a LinuxMint user, the instructions to upgrade can be found here: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=861 although it is suggested that you completly refomat your computer when upgrading.

If you are a new user, you can find the download information here: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

If you have ever wondered if the person on the other end of the phone is really who it claims, well wonder no more, thanks to this new technology that can verify people’s identity based on sounds emitted by their ears. This technology is based off of the response power of the persons ear, which is different on everyone. What I mean by this is, it sends pulses into the ear, and based on the amplitude, etc of the response, it can tell whether it is the person that it claims to be.

Unfortunately, this new technology is not fully developed yet, and still has to work around basic problems, like the fact that ear wax buildup, along with many other things, will alter the amplitude of the response of the ear. Once this technology is fully develolped, however, it will have many uses, anywhere from disabling stolen cell phones, to verifying identies, as mentioned earlier.

More information can be found here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.200-our-ears-may-have-builtin-passwords.html

For so long, p2p sharing programs and eager audiophiles have run rampant about the information superhighway we all know and love. But now the RIAA has found what I find quite intriguing solution: ratting you out through your ISP. The RIAA tells all the major Internet Service Providers to search for any computer that happens to be using p2p software. The ISP then in turn sends you a note similar to the one here.

The note serves as a warning saying, “We know what you’re doing and bad things will happen if you don’t stop.” After a bit they’ll start to slow down your bandwidth until kb/s is merely a myth. But it gets even better, folks! If you continue, you won’t get sued. Instead, your cable bill might get an unexpected addition to it by calculating how many songs you’ve looted and bills you as though you got it all off of a legal download service such as iTunes. Or maybe they’ll just take the easy way out and cut off file-sharing completely, or perhaps if you’re caught sharing music repeatedly they’ll just charge you an insane sum of money for your dastardly deeds.

It sounds pretty scary, doesn’t it? Speculations are that the RIAA has been looking at sales reports most likely and seeing that America’s CD sales are sliding downhill while the number of p2p songs has exponentially increased, despite countless yet futile warnings.  Now, I personally don’t use Limewire and all that jazz, but for those who do now might be a good time to start listening to your conscience if you haven’t bound and gagged it already.

Well, I have been doing a lot with P2P programs lately, and since there seems to be much confusion about this, I thought I might as well try to clear it up, based on what I have researched about it.

Many people seem to think that since a lot of the files on P2P networks end up infringing copyrights, that therefore P2P networks encourage illegal file sharing. This is not true, if anything, most P2P sharing companies severely discourage illegal sharing.

Although the basis of P2P means no harm, often some ISP companies such as Comcast go out and block or throttle P2P traffic in order to keep it down or off their network. Overall, P2P has caused a big mess due to the high internet traffic it can cause, because each bit of information has to be send more than once by different computers. One figure suggests that 1/2 of the internet traffic is P2P traffic. No matter what efforts are taken, P2P still causes a hit to the Music, Movie, and Software industries every year. Each of the industries report losses in the billions a year due to it.

So the fight goes on, Im afraid that this fight will last almost as long as the internet, and maybe even get worse as the technology availaible progresses.