Rag tag bag

I went clay pigeon shooting last night with work. I'm not sure if the guns just had better recoil protection or if my technique is getting better but I have no bruised shoulder this morning. Anyway aside from that I have a few links to share today.

Firstly the story about the United Airlines having it's share price decimated when an old story from 2002 appeared on Google's news aggregator. I'm sure the lawyers are currently winding up to see if they can blame anyone but really the story should be a warning about trusting fully automated news sources. Although this case looks fairly innocent I'm sure cyber-criminals are now devising attacks against news bots for more elaborate pump and dump scams.

The second is the launch of a UK classical music download store. As seems to be a growing trend they have launched DRM free and refreshingly also offer music in the FLAC format for high fidelity.

In contrast I offer the furore over Spore's draconian DRM and the resultant flash mob reviews on Amazon. This sort of DRM will eventually kill the PC games industry when people realise how it's turned into a rental market. Admittedly my PS3 is DRMed to the hilt as far as games are concerned. However two key differences that I can live with are that the DRM scheme doesn't get in the way of me using the PS3 as a general purpose computer and secondly when I'm bored of the game I can sell it to someone else.