I bring you the mildly amusing tale of the “GMail Machine”. <\/p>\n
Some bright spark came up with the following great idea:<\/p>\n
“Welcome to the Gmail Machine. As most of you know Gmail accounts have been rather difficult to come by. Soo.. We decided to create this service to allow you a chance to win a free Gmail invite. Simply click your refresh button over and over again to see a random number(hippygeek: between 0 and 99999<\/i>), if you see the number 1337 (hippygeek: oh dear :S<\/i>) you win a free Gmail invite!” [Google Cache<\/a><\/i>]<\/p>\n Another bright spark posted the URL on Slashdot. At this point they apparently had over 200 Gmail codes to give out.<\/p>\n 6 hours and about 10,000,000 hits later, no more GMail codes have been given out and the GMail Machine is no more! That’s some serious bandwidth.<\/p>\n I do try to stick up for Slashdot now and then because it’s a great news source if you ignore the subsequent flame wars underneath each news item – but this just shows the kind of people who read it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n For some real humour, visit today’s User Friendly<\/a><\/p>\n A good in depth article on OD2 music dowloads is here<\/a> (OD2 provide music downloads to companies like Virgin, MSN and Wanadoo). I’m yet to find a download site for mainstream music which isn’t a rip off. <\/p>\n Is there even a fair solution? I suspect the problem is more the business models of the record companies rather than the download sites themselves – and now they’re trying to make things worse by making us pay to listen to a song rather than pay to own a copy of a song. OD2s DRM licenses only last for a year for example! And what happens if you burn a track to CD legitimately then your hard disk dies and you lose all you licenses… how do you prove you payed for the music? Oh and btw, if you run Linux you’re screwed anyway because the software only runs on Windows. It even appears that burning the tracks to CD is breaking the terms and conditions of the OD2 service desptite being a major selling point! (read the article for more).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I bring you the mildly amusing tale of the “GMail Machine”. Some bright spark came up with the following great idea: “Welcome to the Gmail Machine. As most of you know Gmail accounts have been rather difficult to come by. Soo.. We decided to create this service to allow you a chance to win a … Continue reading GMail Machine Demise and the OD2 Rip Off<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}