In London this evening is Geek Dinner with Mike Culver from Amazon's Web Services department at The Bear in St John's Square, Clerkenwell. It all starts at 6:30pm. Come along! 
Flickr Uploadr for OS X was updated the other day and is now a Universal Binary and now supports Flickr's content filters settings. It also starts faster, which is a Good Thing.
London.pm is organising a Teach In day on Saturday 2nd of June, which is sponsored by BBC Backstage. It's for intermediate and advanced level Perl kids. I planned to learn Perl a long time ago, but I seemed to have started learning Python instead... (Via Dave Cross at OnLamp)
I've just subscribed to the Nolobe blog. Nolobe makes the excellent - if now slightly unfashionable - Interarchy, which is possibly the greatest FTP client ever built on the Mac. They've released a Quicksilver plugin.
ABC spins on DRM 
The frontpage of the newly redesigned ABC News website has the leading headline: "World's First 'Cyber Riot' -- Users Want The Right To Steal -- Power to The People?"
For a site that supposedly now groks 'user-generated content' (whatever that is), the folks at ABC seem utterly clueless as to what users want the right to do.
The code that was on the front page of digg is not about 'stealing', it's about breaking DRM. The two aren't that related. It's actually the most facile of ideas that it's about stealing - most people who steal content have no interest in breaking DRM since it's already broken by the time they are downloading it. It's the people who buy a CD or DVD legally and can't play it on their computer that have the interest in breaking the 'protections' which are 'protecting' them from the content they have legally paid for.
To give you some clue as to how this works, I pulled up a list of all eight of the mainstream films released last week in the USA and picked three - Tarantino's Grindhouse, The Reaping and Firehouse Dog. All are widely available on BitTorrent search sites. So much for digital rights management. 
Should we be surprised that ABC - a Disney subsidiary - has published a headline and acompanying article that is wilfully ignorant of the reality of DRM?
