Sep 7

Textbooks Hit The Torrents

Not all web piracy is the sexy stuff, like games and movies. Julis Schorzman notes that one of his college textbooks recently showed up as a BitTorrent.

The book the UW uses to teach Calculus showed up on Suprnova the other day. Here’s the link. (Wish we had Bit Torrent around when I was a freshman in college. We had to pay all $140.00 for the [tome]! Spoiled kids!

You’d think someone would have to put a lot of work into pirating a calc book, since they contain so many symbols that an OCR system would have problems with.

Interesting side note: Julis’ blog contains a tag (I think) he made up, <liblink>. Firefox reads that as <liblink>, resurrecting that Internet horror of ages past, the blink tag. Odd that such a progressive browser is so eager to enable useless old tags that it even does it where it isn’t supposed to.

by Joe   September 7, 2004 11:05 AM   |

Comments

by Deane,   September 7, 2004 11:16 AM  

I haven't seen many textbooks, but Kazaa is full of books from every genre, especially programming books. I think every O'Reilly book is on Kazaa as a PDF.

by Neil,   September 7, 2004 2:29 PM  

The tag actually has text-decoration: blink in its css.

by Deane,   September 7, 2004 2:31 PM  

So he MEANT to do it! I'm wicked offended. But thank God Firefox isn't busted...

by Phil Ringnalda,   September 7, 2004 4:43 PM  

Type about:config in the address bar, then browser.blink_allowed in the Filter bar, then double-click the pref to change it to false. No more blink.

(It's there because it and marquee are absolute requirements for a browser to function in large parts of Asia. Doesn't mean you have to leave it on, though.)

by Joe,   September 7, 2004 4:59 PM  

It's fine to support the blink tag, if someone puts on their page. But this guy put . Why did it make the tag blink for that one?

by Ciaran,   September 7, 2004 5:25 PM  

Joe: The blinking was done with CSS. See Neil's comment above.

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