I submitted a written proposal, and the related email conversation can be found here.
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Know some way to silence a 1U server? Maybe you can suggest something.

I’ll contact ICANN and see what can be done to resolve this issue.

I’m all for this genre based music categorizing and all that stuff. It’s a great concept, really. The thing with Genius is just, that it’s indexing all your music, no matter what. I don’t get the part of creating hash values for all your files. Sure, you could have entered the wrong title, artist or album somewhere, right, very thoughtful, but Genius won’t tell you there’s something wrong with a particular song. It doesn’t even care. However, it does index and hash all your files. I don’t get it why it’s doing that. Since Genius is not intended to tell you which songs have the wrong name, it could just use data that has already been collected from songs, Apple sells in the iTunes store. Genius could simply use artist, album and title information to create the so called Genius playlists. Clearly it’s just the user’s fault if a title is wrong, right? I mean, Genius won’t even dare to correct you anyway. But Genius is hashing all your files. It’s hashing all files, for everyone. I am a little paranoid maybe, but my only explanation for this is file sharing prevention and discovery. There’s online stores everywhere, those files can have been hashed by Apple and indexed as ‘fine’. Then there’s the other files, users copied from their CDs to their computer. This is where the evil new Genius feature could make it’s turn. It hashes the files on every computer. This also means Apple is collecting the hash values for every file from every user to provide the Genius results directly from Apple. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Apple uses their servers for the complex algorithm that determines the songs in your library that match each other. It takes ages for huge libraries to collect the hash values and Apple collects them. This means Apple can count how many people have the same file in their libraries. Now there’s the deal:

Apple collects data from the record companies and the online stores, to determine which files are known to be widely spread. If the Apple Genius algorithm on the Apple servers now discovers a file, that has been shared and that is not amongst the files that are sold in online stores, Apple can guess at a certain amount of copies, that those aren’t based on the fair use scenario. Fair use of that media states that you can make copies, and you can even share them with your friends, however there’s a limit when the sharing with friends exceeds fair use. If Apple discovers such shared files, Apple could report them, or even have some revenue out of that, by selling that particular information. It makes the RIAA happy, doesn’t it? I dare to believe that this would be the case. It’s certainly clear that Apple doesn’t really need to hash everyone’s files for determining matching songs. Microsoft’s Zune service provides this song matching and recommendations as well. However, the Zune software does not feel too much of need to analyze and inspect all your files in your library to provide those recommendations for songs you could want to buy. Speaking of recommendations. All the Genius recommendations do is telling you about albums and songs from the selected song’s artist that aren’t in your library. If you already have everything, or if Genius can’t find the artist or album in the iTunes store, well, you just get the current download sales charts. Now that’s a really awesome feature. Apple Genius, it’s just big brother watching your habits, and dare you to download illegal music, big brother will find you! I don’t like it, because even if I don’t download illegal MP3s I might still have friends that send me music files, because they want me to listen to certain music they like. And maybe I will do the same with exactly the same file. That’s completely legal, and still, I don’t like some people watching every move and every step I take. It might sound paranoid, but we’re soon living in 1984 anyway. I think some people, especially if they work for larger companies like Apple, should consider if a certain approach of doing things is reasonable for their customers.

The OS will be advanced in any way, thinking ahead of us, no matter what, computers may outdo the human brain with any calculation and bio system engineering will allow us to make us a new way to photoshop reality. Web search and cloud services will have been replaced with the ultimate galactic of information for 24 years already. Using your computer is no more, think, advance it, improve it, and make your thought real. Who needs input and software, when the PC will automatically build it and use self controlled actions to perform the tasks you want without any additional software. The OS gets smart, TOO smart.

PS: I’m bold lazy, think uppercase to bold. Hope I didn’t get too loose about… weird prospects. My mind was just floating out on the empty data grid in my neurons.

So, I am going to explain my reasoning:
An anti-virus needs computer resources, and that might be bad. Depending on the settings, it might take up to twice the time to load a file you want to open. If you notice that slowdown however, highly depends on your settings for that virus detecting program you use and your hardware, in general your hard disk and RAM. That may be a disadvantage for you. Your price for the safety of your data you’re paying. But maybe you have been tricked. Tricked by all those companies selling virus databases and scanners, that do nothing, just because others have done all the work for you, because today, everyone has one installed, that said anti-virus program.

Anti-virus programs are a technology that only needs to find something, where you hope it never does. Most viruses today are sent via email or in form of links in emails or instant messages you just need to click on and then open the file downloaded. If you are a user that might be likely tricked by such things, please install or keep your anti-virus program installed, you have been warned, it’s your security shield.

However, as most viruses are sent via email, email providers began implementing anti-virus engines into their mail servers in order to filter them out like spam. All for your convenience, a brilliant idea. They automatically may remove just the infected file as well, sending you the message just without said file. So if you never click on links from strangers, you got via email or IM, you should be fairly save, because CDs, DVDs and other kinds of media to store software have already been scanned. Yes, scanned for viruses, with technology you may use to do the same thing again, which won’t find anything, because if there would be something virus like on that storage media, then it’s probably well protected against scanners anyway. But on Windows Vista you are safe from any ‘violent’ actions by viruses thanks to User Account Control. So don’t worry to turn your anti-virus program to off, if you’re an advanced user and only click on links and icons you trust.

There’s also another huge source for viruses, the software piratery on file sharing systems. Cracks, keygens and the like may be viruses. If you want to be on the safe side, really BUY the software you need. There’s a reason. You support the people behind that great software to provide you with new versions. To give you more out of your purchase. But why am I mentioning software piracy here? Simple, that’s the place where ‘advanced’ users usually get their viruses from. Anti-viruses do not detect them fast enough, usually, because it takes one or two days, to get them there. If some software pirate reports them, that is. However, todays corporate minds are pretty clever, too. They pay the anti-virus vendors to index the harmless keygens, too. And this is exactly why they become even useless for the people of that kind. The software pirates cannot use anti-virus engines to separate the good from the bad evil programs. So if you’re a pirate, TURN ON that anti-virus and stop your evil doings, will you? Otherwise, you may just run the virus and enjoy the punishment for not buying the not for free software.

There are ISPs that make mistakes. Mistakes like not restricting your bandwidth. I thought this was great, at least for me, because I could use my internet connection for various things. For example this website, with this blog you’re currently looking at, is hosted at my home. But you know, they fixed that bandwidth issue. Now, I don’t get the rest of my towns speed anymore. It was like downloading files at LAN speed. Or, running a server here was fine, too. So if any of my sites appears slow now… it’s probably my bandwidth limit that’s now properly applied. Google crawls are now giving my site the rest…

Well, aslong as it’s working I’m fine…
No, actually I’m just kidding about this. My ISP never did such a stupid thing, my wire is fast, the way it should be. I just maybe forgot those evil FTP hackers trying to bruteforce my password for the Administrator account. Well, I have no FTP account with such name, because I am not using the FTP solution that’s built into Windows Server 2003 but a thirdparty one.

At first they start to cry with this desastring high sound. And after a while it goes ‘click….crrrr….clack’ and when it’s got to read data it’s getting even worse. ‘Click, crrr… click, click, click, click’ that’s what it sounds like. It’s really weird, but for some time, you might even get used to that sound. However, you shouldn’t. It’s a bad omen for computers in general, and an even worse for servers. And the bad things, and here I am talking about data loss, tend to happen, when you the least expect it.

And I tell you, I really like to loose my data.

Ok, goodbye, my harddrives, it’s been nice with you. Take all the data with you to the ground of no return. *sniff*

shit happens…