In an acronym-filled room in Washington, filled with CEOs from TW-AOL, IBM, EMI, MPAA and a host of others that use real names, the large media companies of the U.S. started in again on their battle against file-sharing. The Register has a quick article with some of the minutes from the meeting. What are they doing? Bringing back CPRM (a copyright-protection mechanism built into storage media) is on the list, for sound-cards now as well as hard drives.

<q>we are working with sound card... [More]

When Gartner issued their recommendation that companies stop using IIS (see forum posting), Microsoft responded that other vendors, notably Apache, also had security problems. To whit:

<q>It doesn’t matter what system you are running, if you don’t keep up to date you will be hit. </q>

The Register published replies to Microsoft’s response.

<q>…That’s not very smart. It’s like saying that it doesn’t matter whether you buy a Toyota Camry or a Russian Lada, because you will eventually have to... [More]

An article on Slashdot reports that the FTC is shutting down a number of sites that trap you into an endless cycle of pop-up windows. Many of these cycles involve porn and gambling site advertisements. One stumbles into them by mistyping popular web addresses.

Once again, the government shouldn’t be getting involved here. This guy is just using ingenuity to manipulate the functions of popular browsers. It’s not a virus. It doesn’t do any damage. The problem lies in the browsers. Here’s a... [More]

An article at EE Times details a bill coming to Congress soon. This new bill pushed onto the floor of Congress by big players (MPAA with Disney and Fox in the lead), will force any company making a digital device to install hardware-level copyright protection. Let me clarify. That means any American company. In an already struggling economy, this is not a good idea. Who’s going to buy these devices? Probably a lot of people. Will they know that they’ve been crippled? Not until it’s too late.... [More]

Ars Technica reports on a new proposal by the W3C which would allow them to promote standards which are not open. That is, standards that are copyrighted and/or patented by companies. This opens up future problems like the GIF one, in which Unisys laid in wait until the format was accepted as an open standard, then came forward with its patent. The article points out that the W3C seems to be in a remarkable hurry to pass this recommendation:

<q>As we[W3C] have begun to use portions of the... [More]

Believe it or not, ZDNet (albeit the British version) has weighed in with a scathing critique of Microsoft(There’s a great little analogy comparing Microsoft to a blue whale and its users to krill.), its licensing policies and its treatment of customers.

<q>…XP Home Edition says that your computing experience will be made less pleasant because the operating system will turn itself off if you change your computer too much, at which point you’ll have to go begging to Microsoft to be allowed to... [More]

There’s a good article on Wired about the largest telecom company in Japan. It covers a lot of how the Japanese are using cell phones and the approach a successful (as so many in Europe and the States are not) telecom company should take.

Slashdot writes that the Gartner Group has come out with a statement recommending that businesses not use Microsoft’s web server.

Slashdot misreports the severity, though:

<q>Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten, thoroughly and publicly tested, new release of IIS,‘ which they say has an 80% chance of happening by the end of next year.</q>

Note that the Slashdot quotes extend into the portion that is... [More]

The justice department just kind of let them walk. They definitely abused their monopoly (see this thread). It seems the prosecution lost their witnesses. All of the companies pushing the U.S. Government to release Microsoft’s yoke suddenly have much more important things to worry about…like bankruptcy.

The well-known Dutch cryptographer claims to have broken Intel’s DVI (Digital Video Interface) encryption, but won’t publish for fear of being prosecuted under the DMCA as soon as he sets foot on American soil.

http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/article.html?id=236

http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story

More hacktivism from the Cult. This time their software aims to provide private, closed networks untouchable by prying eyes.

The last section ‘Some Truth about Peekabooty’ is the most interesting, I think.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/19067.html
 

 

This is a comparison of Windows 98 and Windows 2000 with the GeForce2 GTS (slowest one) and Radeon (both 64MB cards). They tested 8 different games with different engines, including Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 and Serious Sam. Surprise, surprise, Quake and Serious Sam showed 0% change between platforms.
Looks like you can move safely over if you like….

Here’s the main chart:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1422&p=12

and the whole review:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1422&p=1... [More]

A (biased) description of a recent meeting of the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and
Foreign Judgments, discussing globalizing copyright laws.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/15/2138208&mode=nocomment

http://www.jargon.8hz.com/jargon_49.html

SDMI is the secure digital music initiative. They issued a challenge last year to any comers to crack their protection. Anyone who agreed to enter the contest was bound to secrecy, though and not allowed to reveal any details of how they cracked it, if indeed they could. Once group from Princeton declined because of this proviso and cracked it anyway. Turns out they can now be prosecuted under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which purports to disallow reverse-engineering of software... [More]

This guy forged identities of most of the richest people on the Forbes 400. He almost got away with it too…

read on…

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/26868.htm

Apparently, the Beta testers are somewhat upset about it already. There’s a good alternative suggestion culled from the newsgroups, and an all-too-real and all-too-expected reason why it probably won’t get done.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17742.html

This site is by one of the leading hardware guys on the web…he’s from Germany. His writeup is huge, but if you’re interested in the feature set:

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q1/010227/index.html

My take is that the GeForce3 introduces some amazing new techonologies and the card kicks ass. However, the next card will take some of the rough edges off of those technologies and kick even more ass.

A couple of more articles on the insidous approach of a dumbed-down era of computing:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15718.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/17419.html

Here you’ll find a 526 byte Perl script that can descramble DVDs in real time.

http://slashdot.org/article/.pl?sid=01/03/06/1954213&mode=nocomment

One day the court hates MS:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17192.html

Another, they seem to have no problem with MS:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17192.html

This ones for software patches, issued to Symantec. It was actually issued in April of 2000.

Read it, the description is so general that any and all patching technologies fall under it.

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06052531__

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/realnews.wcs

Read the one from 08/08/2000.

Discussion of user-interface paradigms and logical conclusions. ‘Files’ and ‘Folders’ are obsolete. Computers should only deal with ‘things’, each of which have ‘properties’. These ‘things’ can be grouped by an number of properties, using a search or ‘query’. That’s it. He addresses the need for a view on your data that lets you see an email on the same footing as a file. It’s brought together is something called a ‘lifestream’, which is a date-ordered stream of data. Sub-streams are created by... [More]