Hacking for fun and profit

Google has finally announced their long anticipated “paypal killer”. The name: Google Checkout.

One cool feature of Google Checkout is that you can buy from stores with a single Google login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you’ll see a little icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout. It’s an easy way to identify fast, secure places to shop when you search. And after you’ve placed your order, Google Checkout provides a purchase history where you can track your orders and shipping information in one place.

And clickz reports:

Additionally, AdWords advertisers will receive free payment processing for sales of up to 10 times their monthly spending. A company spending $1,000 in one month for AdWords would receive $10,000 worth of free payment processing the next month. Beyond that, or for non-advertisers, the charge will be $0.20 and two percent of the sale per transaction. PayPal charges 1.9 percent and $0.30 per transaction.

But, is it a paypal killer?

I don’t think so, but it will really hurt paypal since it operates in it’s most profitable market: business online payments. It doesn’t compete in the peer to peer payment arena, maybe in the future.

Now let’s see paypal’s reaction on all this. Competition will be good.

This is a public service announcement.

Since this is a time where almost every single man in the world is trying to watch the Football World Cup, you can do it from work with a chinese broadcast.

Note that the comments are in chinese, so I guess most people will just mute the transmission.

If you know about more internet broadcasts of the Football World Cup in Germany, let me know to update this post. Note: transmissions that can be seen only from Windows will be ignored.

Of course, you can still watch it using telnet.

Ned Batchelder writes about a new service providing a live stream of all the matches in the Football World Cup in Germany via Telnet. This is like watching the world cup in the Matrix, really.

All you have to do is telnet to ascii-wm.net port 2006. There are no details on how it is done, but I guess they are using aatv or something like that.

And now for the screenshots.

This is Figo:

And this is Cristiano Ronaldo:

More text mode magic:

• Text Mode Quake
• Text Mode Quake II
• Text Mode Unreal Tournament

And if you use MPlayer, you can watch your videos and DVDs in text mode with the “-vo aa” codec (aalib).

This is a public service announcement:

Antonio is implementing a free service for everybody in need for a hackergotchi. Just send an email to with a photo and you will get a free hackergotchi in a few days.

I just got mine:

Thanks Antonio!

Lawrence Lessig is coming to town this month.

More info:

• Launch of the Creative Commons licenses in Perú (spanish)
• iLaw Perú 2006 (spanigh), there is also an english version

I know there is people coming from all Latinamerica for these events. I hope to see you there.