Your Warranty Is Void.com

Yes, it’s faded. I took this pic from a projection standing about 50ft away.

Good fortune has smiled upon me.  My company offered to send me to DEFCON 25, flight and hotel paid.  In this article, I’ll talk about DEFCON 25, the sights, the sounds, and my experiences of a hardware geek gone to the world-renowned hacker mecca. If you have ever wanted to go to DEFCON but aren’t quite sure what to expect, I have provided a summary of the trip as well as an important “FNG TIPS” list of things you want to be aware of before you leave.

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Ok, so here’s the deal.  I’ve been on the fence about whether or not to black out my site in formal protest of SOPA but after talking with several other website owners and operators and consulting with a lawyer friend of mine, I did confirm my worst fears.  While SOPA may be “well intentioned” to be a fight against piracy, the law is so vaguely written that it would allow anyone to shut down any website with little to no recourse or any due process.

As a self-generating content site, (I write my own articles and most of my images are hand-taken. Those that aren’t are linked and used with permission from the original content owners or with permission from the parent company.) this is seriously a threat to my sites’ existences.  If I posted a bad review of a product didn’t like it, under SOPA,  they could scream that my site was enabling piracy and they could effectively steal my domain without any due recourse. I could not petition to get my domain back, nor could I do anything else legal about it.  All of my hard work on this site would have been wasted and even worse, under SOPA, they could even make it so I would lose all of my webhosting in its entirety.

I am opposed to any legislation that is written so vaguely and allows the indiscriminant shutdown of any website on the allegation of piracy.  I oppose any legislation that makes my ISPs the “police” of the Internet. I oppose any legislation that allows others to take control of my domains without due process.  If you are to charge me with something, you had best be prepared to defend yourself.

Other sites have taken notice.  Google, Reddit, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and many others are joining in the protest tomorrow and I am going to be one of them.  We must send the warning to Congress that this must not be allowed to pass as it will destroy the Internet. Essentially, this will turn into a witch hunt, where everyone is guilty.

I understand that some of you may not understand and that some of you will be upset, however I will return on January 19th and I hope you will continue to read my site.

Hello Everyone!

I want to take this moment to thank you for visiting my site and for making YourWarrantyIsVoid.com a wonderful success!  I started this site almost a year ago not expecting anything but your continued support, comments and suggestions continues to amaze me.  I can’t thank you all enough for reading my site, commenting on the articles and contributing your stories with the articles I post.

From my workbench to yours, may you have an awesome Yule/Christmas/Kwanzaa/Chanukkah/Solstice/whatever and a very prosperous new year.  Hopefully the next year for me will result in significantly more time to get to writing articles for everyone as well as more things to hack apart for articles to write!

Thank you, all of you.

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Well, after taking a bit of time to think about the site and all the hard work I’ve put into it, I decided to do some site work and created a Facebook page and a Twitter account so you can be informed of the next update. For facebook click here and for Twitter, follow @WarrantyIsVoid.  I’m still in the process of fleshing out both profiles so it might be a bit, but for now, I’m up and running.

Well my life has been busy as all get out and I do have a new post in the works however I’m taking a quick break because I have a new toy that makes for a far better story.

I have recently gotten my hands on a new Samsung Moment on the Sprint network. Within the next few days, I will post all the gory details from this Android n00b and will be offering a comparison against the other smartphone I have, the Palm Pre.

I’ve realized that I don’t have as much time as I’d like to post my hacks, mods, discoveries, and the like on here so I have decided to create a new category in order to be able to have a wider range of subjects to post on.

The new category is called “Hardware PrOn” and will include pictures of teardowns of various devices that I encounter as well as some ideas on what you could do with one if you happened to find one.

From all of us here at YWIV, wishing you and yours a blessed and happy Christmas this year.

Look for a new post within the next few days that might help with any yuletide hard drive upgrades. 🙂

Hello Everyone!

A review of my stats shows that I’ve been getting increasing traffic to my site from mobile users with iPhones and Android based phones at the top of the list.  I know the site’s a bit slow on mobile devices so I went ahead and uploaded a new theme called WPTouch for those of you on the go that still like to drop by.  All major functions of the site are available through WPTouch so you can still comment and view all the information here, it’s just now in a considerably faster mobile-friendly format.  If you have any issues, please let me know in the comments so I can address them.

Hello again everyone!

I’m back from my vacation and although my operating table, err my work bench is still largely unassembled, I will have some new content for you in the upcoming days. The move was hell, but thankfully it’s over so now it’s time to start hacking again!

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Howdy everyone!

I apologize in advance for my lack of site updates. I’m currently in the process of moving so unfortunately all projects have been put on hold for the time being.

I will resume posting mid-October as soon as the move is completed and I have unboxed my brain. It’s in a box somewhere..

As always, thanks for visiting. Check back soon!

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