Megauploads demise poses a serious question to users of online and cloud storage – how safe is your data?

US prosecutors have said that data belonging to Megaupload users and stored by third parties could be deleted as soon as Thursday.

Users have been unable to access data since the file-sharing service was raided.

The warning was made in a letter filed by the US Attorney’s Office.

Megaupload’s lawyer Ira Rothken told the Associated Press that at least 50 million users had data which could be deleted.

Mr Rothken said that freezing of Megaupload’s funds meant it was unable to pay those who were storing its data. BBC.

Now I’ve never used Megaupload so it might well have been obvious what was happening at Megaupload which meant no sane person should have entrusted Megaupload with their data.

However there’s no room for complacency you need to consider what your favoured storage site allows on to their servers – could they be charged by the US authorities with copyright infringement? Because if they could then how would you survive if you could no longer access the data they store?

The answer with data is having more than one copy in more than one location! Then you won’t be caught out if you suddenly lose access to one copy.

Just a little bit of fun – The Single Lane Super Highway.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has won the right to petition the UK Supreme Court in his fight against extradition to Sweden. BBC.

When is this annoying prick going to fuck off to Sweden and prove his innocence which he’s so found of claiming but not proving? There’s no reason why a trial in Sweden wouldn’t be fair as much as Assange might protest otherwise.

Looking for something a little different this Christmas? For a whole range of handmade, bespoke and vintage items ranging from Art, clothing, jewellery, Toy and more besides have a look at Etsy – it’s like visiting an up-market craft fair without the crowds!

Driving to work I slotted in a CD which has only been played once in my wife’s car where it worked perfectly! When I got to work I had a look and there are some pretty nasty scratches. Which left me wondering how do you get scratches out of CD’s?

I look took a look at Amazon which revealed some pretty scathing comments regarding commercially available products.

This product will not fix your discs. It claims to fix deep scratches but it can’t! Do not buy this product, it is a waste of time any money. I have sent this back to Amazon to get a refund.

This product is awful. It literally uses sandpaper to remove scratches on the CD/DVD. It completely destroyed my CD. The polishing pad did not polish it one bit. Luckily, I tested it on an old worthless one. Straight in the bin it went!

This product is great, if you want to make coasters out of DVDs. They are good for nothing more after having been run through the device!

That said some of the more expensive products had a mixture of scathing and compliment reviews. On balance of reviews the SkipDr Premier (Automatic) looks about the best, but £24 is a fair amount of money to pay for something that might completely destroy a CD! Especially as the machines only good for around 50 discs and one of the positive reviews suggests you’ll need to run a disc though around 20 times – which means that’s just two discs making it look an expensive gamble.

Independent reviews of machines are hard to come-by and an up to date review even less so – I guess a lot of people just don’t use discs anymore! PC Mag picks the Alera DVD/CD Disc Repair Plus as it’s “Editor’s Choice” but that’s back in 2005 – the machine doesn’t appear to be available anymore although something by Aleratec looks remarkably similar as does the manufactures’ name come to that – it’s available at Amazon with one appalling review – although checking the USA Amazon site reveals a more even spilt between good and bad – however it is considerably more expensive than the SkipDr machine.

Overall I’d have to say a machine is no better than a 50-50 bet.

WikiHow has a pretty comprehensive article on How to Fix a Scratched CD and includes a video showing how to use toothpaste – which is certainly a cheaper option than a commercial machine.

Burning Issues carried out a test of various CD repair options – although I don’t believe it has been published since 2007! And this article appears to be from December 2000 – the interesting point is how well Brasso (Wikipedia has instructions on using Brasso) performed against commercial machines and how poor toothpaste performed which isn’t what wikiHow suggests as this table shows (Note many of the specialist product are no longer available).

CD Repair Table Collated from Burning Issue - click table to enlarge

The wikiHow article had one suggestion that made a lot more sense.

Have the CD professionally refinished. If the disc still doesn’t play correctly, bring it in to a music store (especially one that sells used CDs) or a DVD rental store and ask if they can repair the disc for you. Many of these businesses have CD refinishing machines that do a remarkable job, and they’ll probably charge you less than five dollars to repair the CD.

The website Total Disc Repair which as well as supplying disc repair machines costing from £300 upwards also has a link to Play Like New where you can type in your post code and find a local disc repairer – there’s also a couple of links to online specialists.

Back to my original problem – I’m going to use a lens cleaner on my car’s CD player – I don’t think I’ve done it since I got the car – nearly three years ago. And if I need to get a CD repaired I think I’ll try out one of the local disc repairers.

Taken from xkcd.

We’re all familiar with the term too-big-to-fail well for the first time at least to my ears I’m seeing too-big-too-rescue!

Europe’s banks may not be too-big-to-fail, so much as too-big-to-rescue. This is the big concern hanging over France – can the country actually afford to prop up the French banks that have lent so much to Italy and Spain? BBC.

And if France get’s into difficulties where does that leave Germany? Bailing out every country in the Euro? The current economic crisis is starkly highlighting the problem the European Central Bank faces an economic a policy that suits Germany certainly doesn’t suit Greece – but then we always knew that we just ignored it!

The grim reality for German is that if the Euro is to be saved and economic meltdown avoided then Germany is going to have to suffer economic policies designed to for southern European countries – which at the moment seems wholly unlikely!

Anyone in the UK with a smug smile on their face because the UK didn’t join the euro will soon be wiping the that smile off their face as they all too slowly realise a break-up of the Euro is a disaster for UK banks the like of which we’ve not yet seen!

I received an email from my local MP Richard Graham which starts

All of you want this government to succeed where the last one failed and get a grip on immigration. We cannot again have a situation where a government predicts 14,000 immigrants (from Eastern Europe) and gets 444,000 instead.

We’ll leave alone the “All of you” it’s not true and what are those brackets around Eastern Europe for? Anyway Graham then goes on to describe how the Tories deal with immigration.

1. The first ever annual work visa limit of 20,700 has been introduced
2. 1000 extra visas for people of ‘exceptional talent’
3. Crack down on bogus colleges and student visa regulations tightened
4. Backlog of 500,000 asylum cases cleared with 36,000 sent home so far
5. Every passenger on non-EU flights will be checked before travelling by April next year
6. Exit checks at all borders to be introduced by 2015

Whatever your views on immigration these won’t make on jot of difference to EU citizens from Eastern Europe – maybe that’s what the brackets are about a subconscious admittance that he’s speaking rubbish.

Online OCR allows you to extract text from image files (JPG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF and GIF) and convert to text files (Word, Excel, PDF or html) all for free and without registration, you’re limited to 15 images and hour, but it’s free and was quick and accurate with the documents I tested. If you register you get additional features and a free credit but once that’s used you’ll have to pay.

With the appointment of Mario Monti in Italy and Lucas Papademos in Greece the EU now has two unelected bankers holding the reins of power.

Next in line for an unelected banker would appear to be Spain as the tried and tested method of racking up interest rates starts with today Spain seeing short term borrowing costs surge.

The evil spectre of Fascism is being raised across Europe, we are in mortal peril and no one seems concerned.
I’m reminded of Martin Niemöller’s poem First they came… although it might need adjustment

First they came for the Greeks
And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Greek

Then they came for the Italian
And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Italian

Then they came for the Spanish
And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t Spanish

Then they came for us
And there was no one left to speak out for us

It’s time to stand up to the neo-liberal bankers we surely don’t want to end up as slaves to the financial markets paying back their debts!