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Eight. There are only eight planets these days, my friend.

It's not about freedom; it's about the inability of the teenage mind to really comprehend risks http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A526 87-2005Jan31.html. You may have a very mature 16 year old but he will never be able to process the danger like someone with a developed brain. A teenage kid may not understand that driving like a maniac is dangerous, but he will understand that he's gonna be in some serious trouble when his folks find out.

//shameless plug
I just got interviewed about protecting email using encryption, the article appeared in Sunday's Washington Post.

The interviewer was really interested in talking about encrypting the email messages using PGP. I think that's a great idea; we encrypt most email we send. However, I tried to hammer home the fact that if your email password gets sniffed while you're checking your encrypted emails, that you'll end up needing to encrypt every email since someone else might be checking it for you. And/or deleting or changing it....

//end shameless plug
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Read and comment on the musings of information security geeks

My mistake, thank you for pointing this out. Here's the link I found verifying this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/long term/microsoft/stories/1998/microsoft110698.htm

It was the DOJ vs MSFT case regarding Netscape/Internet browser but the quote was regarding Apple Quicktime and not Navigator. Too many Microsoft "kill" quotes to get them straight. ;-)

LoB

I didn't think Cheyenne Mountain was actually being permanently shut down.

This Denver Post article and this Washington Post article say Cheyenne Mountain is being put on a sort of standby status with minimal personnel until the U.S. government figures out how the facilty fits into the changing priorties of our national defense strategy. The main justification given was that a nuclear missile attack from Russia or China is very unlikely. This seems a bit short-sighted to me, as there are other potentially dangerous nuclear powers emerging right now.

I find this rather ironic, since in the pilot episode of SG-1, the whole Stargate program had been mothballed and the facility was only being manned by a skeleton crew - until the Goa'uld decided to pay us a little visit. Hmmm... Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

what a great idea, stuffing the mountain with nuclear waste !
What an ingenuous plan ! I would wagger that this is not where you live ...

So does George Allen

Still, the report concluded that there is enough land, water and human capacity to solve the shortages. "The big solution is to find ways to grow more food with less water. Basically, more crop per drop," Molden said. "The number one recommendation . . . is to look to improve rain-fed systems in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia."

Very few people argue that nuclear power is bad anymore. It has had a much better safety record than many other forms of power other than the highly publiced but rare nuclear accidents. Some people still are left in the 1960's which was the last time their brain could think for themselves before they were indoctrinated but even the founder of Greenpeace has spoken out in favor of nuclear power as a viable alternative to fossil fuels and the global warming that comes with it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html

Between another series of civil wars all over the Middle East practically inevitable and daily production capacity already at a limit, oil prices are very likely to double in the next two years. Biofuel will be a good choice for countries able to produce it (Europe, US, China, Russia, Brazil, Australia), but a massive problem for regions already in agriculture hell (Africa, India, even the Middle East). In the latter regions, the need for fuel will press food production to drop further. Much of the fuel - especially from Africa - will be exported, too.

If there was no biofuel, the fuel consumers would be forced to change their lifestyles. The way things are, we won't, and the starvation toll is going to rise accordingly. Currently, it stands at 27000 - or 8 times 9/11 as I like to call it - per day. (Source: WHO)

There are some subtle points that need to be considered. Just because someone gets to call President Bush to task, does not mean it is anyone who walks in the door of a Court. So, just walking in the front door, and saying "I don't trust the president, let me run through any and all files of the entire government without limitation" should not result in immediate access to the country's greatest secrets. Like him or not, President Bush was the person elected to protect them, not the man off the street. The rest of the world did not elect President Bush, and in fact, he was elected to promote the interests of the United States against their interests. Al Qaeda does not like President Bush not telling them where all his spies are. They are represenative of lots of people who do not trust President Bush precisely because he is on America's side. So, let's discard the rest of the world, or the minority of Americans argument for America unilaterally disarming in a world where intelligence operations are important.

So, you are in this country, and think you have been particularly harmed, and that the things that you need to show you have been harmed are government secrets. After all, if you think it isn't a secret, then you would not need to go into that stuff. Take for example espionage cases. There are very few attorneys who have the type of high security clearance needed to represent accused spies. People like Plato Cacheris. They do not get to see everything the government has. Why the lawyer off the street? He does not have any clearance. You cannot represent an accused spy effectively unless you are cleared at least to the level he was.

Now, a whole different hill of beans is the judge. It is true that the judge is an official of the government, but not all executive government officials have access to all secrets. That is part of how they stay secret. But the judge has to be able to determine what kinds of secrets might be at stake. This is often handled by the government bringing the secrets over for the judge to see, and then removing them when he is done. This is because courthouses are not designed to keep national security secrets. Their employees are not screened to that level. A judge may exercise some independence in checking on the nature of the secrets, but would have separation of powers issues with going through too much.

Alas, warrants are not a solution if you think the problem is a Constitutional one. Why? Well, the Constitution outlines what kinds of warrants solve constitutional fourth amendment problems:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am4

Now, what does a Warrant require? 1) probable cause, 2) an oath or affirmation by the agent specifying what he knows about what is to be searched or seized, and 3) particular description. That means that "program warrants" (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/06/08/AR2006060801992.html) where NSA would have an entire program warranted at once might be a control by the legislature on the president, perhaps grounded in its power to fund programs, but not in a Constitutional meaning of Warrant. Therefore, if you buy the constitutional argument of rights without any balancing test, require a warrant, that warrant must be particular, and NSA has to stop listening to any communication involving America, an American, etc., and therefore is constituionally forbidden from searching for terrorism where any of those are involved.

Please put that position in your political party's platform

Are we so Backwards in Europe? Now there's a thought

viruses are often host specific. They have to attach to specific receptors to enter the cell.

What about mutations in the virus?

I guess you missed this little gem from the Washington Post, a direct quote from one of the dudes:

...if you watch those 'Get a Mac' commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/08 /the_macbook_wireless_exploit_i.html

Kreb's writes, "In the video shown at Black Hat, he plugged a third-party USB wireless card into the Macbook -- but in the demo Maynor showed me personally, he exploited the Macbook without any third-party wireless card plugged in."

So according to Brian Kreb's via The Washington Post - He saw a stock MacBook attacked.

Apparently not everyone knows reality has a liberal bias.

"A number of news outlets and blogs have picked up on these various statements and clarifications, but nowhere have I seen this tidbit: Apple's Fox said that prior to the Black Hat demo, SecureWorks did contact Apple about a wireless flaw in FreeBSD, the open-source code upon which Apple's OS X operating system is based. In January, FreeBSD released a patch to fix the problem, which according to the accompanying advisory, related to a flaw in the way FreeBSD systems scanned for wireless networks that could be exploited to allow attackers to take complete control over the targeted machine.

I looked through the last eight months of patches from Apple and could not find any evidence that it also shipped an update to correct this flaw. Fox said she would check with Apple and get back to me. Fox also said Apple staff were already aware of the flaw when SecureWorks contacted them about it prior to their Black Hat presentation, and that Apple had already determined that the wireless flaw addressed in the FreeBSD patch was not exploitable on any of the Mac products.

"SecureWorks has not be able to exploit this for us," Fox said. "No one has been able to show us a way to exploit our internal [wireless] device drviers with that flaw."

I've been asked this many times, so let me make this crystal clear: I had the opportunity to see a live version of the demo Maynor gave to a public audience the next day. In the video shown at Black Hat, he plugged a third-party USB wireless card into the Macbook -- but in the demo Maynor showed me personally, he exploited the Macbook without any third-party wireless card plugged in. As far as I'm aware, only one other person at the conference saw the demo the way I saw it (a Black Hat staff member whom I'm not at liberty to name); the discrepancy over the wireless card is probably the biggest reason why the Mac community was so confused and upset by my original post.

came across the following comments (apparently from the author) at the Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog.

"As I said, the comments they made to me were ALL about the demo that Maynor and Ellch gave in their video (Apple would not address any of the questions I had about what I saw in person). When pressed about whether Apple was disputing similar vulns reported to be present in their Macbooks, Apple said they'd have to get back to me. Their PR people said explicitly they were only prepared and briefed to talk about the demonstration shown in the video. They were not prepared to talk about whether their current code base was vulnerable.

Your last question is the main reason I have not updated the blog yet with Apple's comments. Apple claims that SecureWorks has only shown this to be a problem with 3rd party cards, which as we all know, isn't really an issue for Mac users. But they have not responded to my requests for comments on whether or not the flaws Secureworks pointed out to them as existing in the Macbooks are indeed valid or exploitable. So, right now it is a "who shot John?" game. Until Apple replies with some direct responses to my questions, the post will remain as is."

It'll probably be overturned, but this is because the EFF cherry picked the judged they wish to use and the next appeal will probably see that the ruling was poorly written and made little sense.

During the course of our interview, it came out that Apple had leaned on Maynor and Ellch pretty hard not to make this an issue about the Mac drivers -- mainly because Apple had not fixed the problem yet. Maynor acknowledged that he used a third-party wireless card in the demo so as not to draw attention to the flaw resident in Macbook drivers. But he also admitted that the same flaws were resident in the default Macbook wireless device drivers, and that those drivers were identically exploitable. And that is what I reported.

Printable Version

I love helping you /.ers out. Instead of spending painstaking hours clicking thru multiple page news stories, I sit here and quickly provide you with printer friendly links

First, only international communications are authorized for interception under this program. That is communications between a foreign country and this country.

Second, the program is triggered only when a career professional at the NSA has reasonable grounds to believe that one of the parties to a communication is a member or agent of Al Qaida or an affiliated terrorist organization. As the president has said, if you're talking with Al Qaida, we want to know what you're saying.

Nice misinformation. The amendments would not retroactively protect policymakers -- it seeks to protect the people who implement the policy -- i.e., those following orders. Reference: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/08/08/AR2006080801276_pf.html

Note: Conyers backed down this past May.

Corporations have long been treating consumers like sheep. It's a small wonder that they haven't started publishing fake newspapers yet.

Have you been sleeping under a rock? Haven't you seen this?

As long as consumers keep treating corporations like shepherds, they have no right to expect any other sort of treatment.

Read it, here it is. Not quite sure how that's supposed to cheer me up though. That's like telling someone going down on the Titanic to relax, because everyone's about to die. More people being lonely doesn't really help. That's why I never understood why that line at the end of "message in a bottle" where millions of bottles wash up on the shore was supposed to be some type of consolation. Who cares how many people are isolated if you are already on the island yourself. You could say "you're in good company," but that's just an expression. The problem is that nobody is in good company. Now we resort to meeting each other via IM and secretly harboring suspicions that the person on the other end is some type of serial killer.

Bush looks like a dummy, and his policies might be completely terrible, but he knows his stuff, and he has worked hard to get to where he is.

According to this article in the Washington Post from August, 2005:

The August getaway is Bush's 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford -- nearly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president's travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush's time away from Washington even further.

Until now, probably no modern president was a more famous vacationer than Ronald Reagan, who loved spending time at his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif. According to an Associated Press count, Reagan spent all or part of 335 days in Santa Barbara over his eight-year presidency -- a total that Bush will surpass this month in Crawford with 3 1/2 years left in his second term.

Whether after all his work, hard or otherwise, he can call his presidency a success, history has yet to decide.

I'm talking about "success" as "being the best at what you want to do."

By that definition, most of us are doomed to failure since there is always someone better as what we do, usually a lot better. And depending on what you set your goals to be, they can be easy or hard to achieve, or impossible. Some people even prefer an honourable failure to an easy success. Failure itself is not a sign of lack of hard work any more than success is proof of it.

If Perelman is truly a genius on par with Albert Einstein, he faces two problems in Russia.

First, the Russian government will want to tap into his genius to improve its weapons systems. In the Russia of today, if he said, "no", then he would be faced with harrassment and, even, trumped-up charges leading to imprisonment.

Second, like Albert Einstein and Andrei Sakharov, I expect that Perelman would be a supporter of human rights and democracy. Their genius enables them to see that freedom fosters the growth of intellect, of which they have much. Unfortunately, in the Russia of today, too much talk about political change to removing the ruling party can cause a tax audit or worse.

Russia, today, is much better than the old Soviet Union, but saying that Russia is a democracy would be an exaggeration.

So, I hope that Mr. Grigori Perelman is okay. If he can read this message, then, I wish that he would, at least, post a message on SlashDot so that we know that he is all right.

Perelman really should come to USA. Here, he can work on neat projects like the new hyperdrive for space travel. If this hyperdrive is ever to succeed, we will need the enormous intellect of Perelman to work out the hairy mathematics.

But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.

They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004.

He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.

"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said.

And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.

Intelligence officials said the munitions were found in ones, twos and maybe slightly larger collections over the past couple of years. One official conceded that these pre-Gulf War weapons did not pose a threat to the U.S. military before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They were not maintained or part of any organized program run by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

There is no evidence that insurgents have found the chemical munitions. But one official said that insurgents have improvised conventional weapons, so they could apply similar creativity with the vintage weapons.

Those "WMDs" were left over from the first Gulf War and by this point had degraded so much they were less dangerous than household chemicals. In order to be a WMD, the weapon must have the ability for mass destruction. 15-year-old sarin or mustard gas won't do it.

Basically it's you, Rick Santorum and Don Rumsfeld on one side claiming these validate the WMD saber rattling, and the rest of the world shaking its head sadly on the other side.

Remember when Republicans claimed the inspectors were incompetent because they couldn't find WMD in Iraq, and the US couldn't afford the millions of dollars to maintain sanctions on Iraq?

It's completely free to develop games for windows but then if you want the games to be available for download through xbox live you need to pay a $99 subscription fee. Also it appears there may be some kind of revenue sharing.
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/08/14/AR2006081400041.html:
Peter Moore, vice president of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, said individuals will own the games they create using the tools and that the company will do revenue sharing deals with people who create games for the Xbox 360. "I'd love to send a royalty check to a kid," said Moore, who added that Microsoft hopes to get the tool kit into high schools.

Your post is full of bullshit.

Artists who allow free downloading of their music find that is *INCREASES* sales. Independant studies show that show P2P increases sales.

The only reason the music industry is afraid of P2P is because it threatens their business model. Once people get used to trying music for free, RIAA members lose their marketing chokehold. This chokehold is the the last remaining reason that artists agree to contract terms that can only charitably be described as "indentured servitude."

RIAA members aren't terrified of piracy, they're terrified of competition.

Having said that, it's a catch-22. If Windows implements an approved kernel hook for the antivirus companies, it will get exploited. If they don't, then no antivirus software, but just as many virus writers.

• "That will accomplish nothing thanks to our system of entrenching incumbents"

  The people of CT, GA, and MI beg to differ.

• "If they lie, cheat, steal, etc, 65% of the district will still vote them back into office. Period."

  Tell Joe Lieberman. Please. You also might mention it to Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay, Galen Fox, George Ryan, John Rowland, Tom Noe, Marion Barry, Bob Ney, Vince Cianci, Bill Janklow, Jim West, and...well, let's just say there is a limit.

• "You're assuming that there's anybody on any ballot, anywhere, that can both be considered "more honest" and "has a chance in hell in unseating an incumbent.""

  Yes, I am. They don't have a great shelf life, but they do exist.

• "But in general, how can this regurgitated idea of "Work within the system to change the system" accomplish anything when the system in question is designed with the sole purpose of isolating any possible dissent? The system is created especially to resist you."

  Ah, but I was created especially to resist it. And "it" in this case is a relative newcommer, while I have the benefit of millions of years of evolution. BTW, the whole "work within the system or not" dichotomy is misleading. Ignore the system and focus on the fact the humans are highly skilled at detecting and smacking down cheaters. This isn't about "the system" it's about standing up for what's right.

--MarkusQ

A similar law in Utah is being challenged by the porn industry.

While the FTC, influenced by the Direct Marketing Association, rejected the idea of a do-not-email registry...

More dangerous, he said, was the possibility that spammers might get hold of the list, which would provide them with a gold mine of valid e-mail addresses that would be used for more spam.

"Consumers will be spammed if we do a registry and spammed if we don't," said Muris, who has long opposed the idea.

Instead of starting a registry, Muris said, the FTC would first push the private sector to agree on a method for electronically authenticating senders of e-mail, which would cut down on spammers' ability to hide their identities and locations. Muris said such authentication is a necessary precursor to any no-spam registry.

Thousands of people did die today... Due to car accidents, cancer, and poverty. If we're just trying to stop deaths, we should focus on making safer cars, researching cancer, and helping those less fortunate than ourselves.

I suspect, however, that all of this terrorism hype isn't about stopping deaths.

You've got it spot on, it isn't about stopping "deaths", randomly distributed accidents, excess deaths due to poor life style choices like eating too much cheese on your onion rings every day, or disease. It is about stopping deliberate, calculated mass murder. Terrorist incidents are infrequent due to active preventative measures, not because it has a low naturally occurring frequency.

We don't even know for sure that there was going to be a terrorist attack.

By repeated observation, the British like most people in Western society have learned that when young Muslim men between the ages of 18-40 accumulate explosives, hold secretive meetings, receive large sums of wired money, and follow up by studying airline schedules, and plots to blow up aircraft in midflight, it is unlikely to lead to a spontaneous soccer match, .... at least not one you would care to attend. A terrorist attack, on the other hand, seems to be a distinct possibility. Some well informed people might even spot something resembling a pattern or two. Of course, who knows? Maybe they just wanted to go "dancing". But hey, believe what you want.

The US and UK governments are far from being trustworthy.

You left out Australia, Spain, Russia, Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Philippines, Afghanistan, and quite a few more countries that are having problem with Islamist terrorist organizations.

The US government has contemplated "simulated" terrorist attacks to change public opinion.

Well, here is a shocker: the US government tries to change or influence public opinion or behavior pretty much every day on all kinds of matters: diet, exercise, tax code compliance, joining the military, better methods to raise corn, reducing pollution, reducing drunk driving, avoiding travel to various foreign countries, and so on. The fact almost 45 years ago a handful of anti-Communist zealots managed to get a draft paper for a dubious plan like Northwoods to the President where it was immediately shot down (with no doubt that one or more of the words: crazy, stupid, insane, criminal, were in the air) is a wonderful example of US democracy and civilian control of the military in action. The system worked. Or is that bad? Unless you are proposing total thought control, which has plenty of problems of its own, there will always be ideas that need to be shot down in government.

You know, it strikes me as odd that you would seemingly trust the government to deliver all manner of social welfare services, health care, and medicines, when you believe that same government is untrustworthy and is trying to fool you or maybe even kill you.

Congratulations, Aaron. You just made it onto next month's no-fly list! It's a veritable who's-who of international terrorists and United State Senators alike! Keep up the good work.

I think the government really does have its priorities, but monitoring 10 million computers to find out what porn sites people like to visit isn't one of them.

While I'm not going to deny the possibility that they do have more up their sleeves, I think the past couple years have made me less likely to don the tin foil. With the terrorist attacks, resulting WMD wars, Gee Dubya elections, and blatant fear-tactics, I've really begun to realize that "government intelligence" truly is an oxymoron.

The Basque/ETA situation admittedly has a completely different historical context so why your refering to it confuses me really.

He didn't refer to the Basque/ETA situation. The 2004 Madrid train bombings had nothing to do with ETA or Basque separatism. The Spanish government in power at the time aggressively asserted that ETA was behind the bombings -- so aggressively that the President of Spain was personally calling major newspapers making the claim -- and when days later it was revealed that they were not, the government lost so much credibility that it was turned out of office.

Here's some more info if you want it.

To be honest, I really wish I heard more of these stories here in the States. I think no news is bad news.

Spoken like a true American. We tend to forget pretty quickly. Umm... remember this from October? Probably not. In fact, I couldn't remember any of the specific plots we foiled, other than Richard Reid (if we can even count the Brits acting on US intel as a win for us).

I think its more a cultural difference, though. American journalists like panic! blood! chaos! I bet you might remember the UNC student who ran down some of his fellow students, or the Muslim fellow in Seattle that shot 6 people (including a pregnant woman) attending synagogue, or the other guy that shot up El Al... Notice that we are enemy #2 (sandwiched between Israel and the UK), but of these, we've had the fewest terrorist acts in our country since 9/11. That means we are stopping attacks. The reason we only hear about failures and not successes is that our media doesn't report when our side wins, they only report catastrophes (I recommend Michael Crichton's State of Fear -- it's well researched and covers this and quite a few other topics).

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/08 /followup_to_macbook_post.html

so what if a vendor for once supplied a default driver for standard hardware with a possible exploit, surely that doesn't bring the world to an end? point.

nothings perfect, don't expect it to be, and if it was indeed a completely bogus hack, I highly doubt they'd of been allowed to present it at the conference without prior being shown to some people in the know.

very well, i grant you that.. if you'd done more than just read the ars technica article, you'd know what i was saying isn't bollocks.
More information on the demonstrators can be found here and here. Apologies for the Amazon link, but David is a hard man to pin down and i'm busy. ;)

actually, just a cursory glance at his voting record for the past couple of months indicate lieberman has sided with the GOP on just 2 issues: the war in iraq and illegal immigration. everything else has been a lock-step march with the democrat party. btw, hillary clinton also voted with the GOP on the illegal immigration ammendment (S 2611), and also supported the war in iraq. would you also consider her a republican in all but name? make no mistake - lieberman is a liberal.

actually, just a cursory glance at his voting record for the past couple of months indicate lieberman has sided with the GOP on just 2 issues: the war in iraq and illegal immigration. everything else has been a lock-step march with the democrat party. btw, hillary clinton also voted with the GOP on the illegal immigration ammendment (S 2611), and also supported the war in iraq. would you also consider her a republican in all but name? make no mistake - lieberman is a liberal.

http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/06competitors.cf m
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/08/08/AR2006080800960.html
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20060807- 9999-1m7sub.html
http://mywebcache.com/2006/08/07/subjugator-holds- onto-top-honors-in-9th-annual-auv-competition/

Why look to Iran? Most Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the US.

If people actually wanted Viiv-like products, there'd be a lot more do-it-yourself versions while we're waiting for Intel. If the problem were a lack of software, there'd be plenty of open-source projects by impatient hackersthat's how we got Napster and BitTorrent. But the geeks seem uninterested. Where are the obsessive bloggers? The forum feuds? The amateur meetups? Show me any truly hot technology, and I'll show you 100,000 guys who can't wait to tell you about it. Has anyone bored you to death talking about their Media Center PC lately?

This is a joke, right?

People are talking, but you can't do it with free software. Just telling people how will get you tossed in jail, thanks to the DMCA and greedy big media. Rather than buy a big screen TV, I'd love to have a projector and stereo hooked up to computer. I've already got my music collection digitized. The access and convenience of Amarok are awesome. It would be great to do the same thing with movies. The cost of a projector is about the same as a big TV, but it's much more portable and gives better quality. The problem is CSS. I can't watch or archive DVD movies with my software. It's against the law to distribute software that would let me in the US or even tell people what sites in countries with sane laws have it.

Did they name the article "Myth" for kicks or what? So many people talk about Mythtv, it's hard to believe a Slate Editor has not heard of it. It even made it into the EFF's "Corruptables" video.

You can do it with non free software, sort of. The author mentions the miserable death of ViiV. Paul Boutin did not receive his promissed test model and wonders why. He must have missed this Washington Post review where the damn thing did not work at all because of all the DRM nonsense. You might be able to watch current DVDs if you fall all the way back to Windoze 98SE and have a stash of the now illegal Xcopy and other software required. The network and file system restrictions of such a computer would make most people cry, but it's the easiest route for honest people. People unafraid of the law have been swapping movies almost forever, but the effort and risks are way to great for "normal" people who will just rent a video. Yes, you can even find software that works with your free software, it's just a huge pain all around and you will again be stuck with a static system because upgrades will break it. Contraband is not free, it's not convenient and it's hard to trust.

Big Media is the root cause. They do not want their media on computers they don't have complete control over. They want it to act like a cable box, to shove adds down your throat, tell you what you can watch and when and how much you will pay for it all. Given that most media buffs already have a cable box and all the gear, the computer version that does not work looks really lame and big media is happy. There will be no video Napster, they think.The customer is not happy, too bad.

This represents a tremendous opportunity for independent media and it's why Net Neutrality is such a big deal. Already, artists can get great viewings on youtube, google video and other sites. These are just the beginning because they rely on flash and other crappy software. The quality sucks and you can't save them without a lot of effort that's liable to lace your computer with malware. The potential of the media are better seen with stuff like Star Wreck, a free, full length movie. It's a big file and independent productions are going to stay that way due to patents on video streaming and more advanced compression routines. "So what", you might ask, "I've got broadband." That's where Net Neutrality comes in and independent media gets the shaft. Warner Brothers, which so badly mangled AOL and squandered their c

Remember when you fold your hat, you want the shiny side of the foil OUT, or it won't work to protect you from Karl Rove's Mind Control Rays.

Before you start implying that someone is paranoid, you may want to do a little fact checking. Going over the grandparent post line by line:

• Would it surprise you to learn that these doctored photos were placed by someone on the far Right trying to discredit the centrist media?

  Note that he's not saying that it's true, just suggesting that it might be. And, given that this is a well known technique in spin control / psyops, it isn't an unreasonable questions.

• Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.

  Well, he's certainly not alone in this theory, and it is consistent with what Rove is known to have done to Alan Dixon, John McCain, and many others.

• The goons on the Right in this country are playing a very deep game.

  Goons is subjective, and pejorative, but the rest of this point is darned hard to argue with. When a party rises from the mat to take control of all three branches of the federal Government, is a coordinated effort lasting decades, you'd be hard pressed to call it luck.

• They're sophisticated enough to data mine,

  Widely known

• and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero.

  His name was Max Clealand, and they did just what he said.

• It's just fascinating that the paste-eaters at LGF are always the ones who find these doctored photos,

  "Always" is an exaduration, and "paste-eaters" is (probably) unjustified, but other than that it is an interesting point. They certainly have found a number of them, and always leaning to the right.

• but never say a word about the ones on GOP web sites that show too much smoke on the destroyed World Trade Center.

  This did happen, and so far as I know none of them raised a stink, so he's spot on.

• With a news media that's run by press agents,

  Also well known.

• and a government run by lobbyists,

  Well, they write the laws, and

• you should just be prepared to only believe your own experience, and the media that you absolutely trust.

  If you want to, go ahead and argue that you should believe sources you don't trust.

• Other than that, expect it to be lies.

  Thing that aren't true, are...lies. Again, pretty hard to argue with.

• Then, get ready for the struggle to save our freedom that is inevitable.

  Everyone from Ben "A Republic, if you can keep it" Franklin has agreed with this.