Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: GSM, Buffy, Wobble
Macrovision, everyone's favorite killjoy. byteCoder writes "Apparently Macrovision marketing is trying to put a good spin on Intuit's plan to eliminate the use of Macrovision's DRM software for pre-paid copies of TurboTax (as discussed last week here). This reminds me of the classic Monty Python line: "I'm not dead yet!""
That's got to be some spin -- An anonymous reader points to Eric Hellweg's Tech Investor on CNN, which suggests that the backlash which triggered Intuit's copy-protection reversal may have cost the company $100 million.
Can I use my Go Phone there? An anonymous reader writes ""In a follow-up to the Slashdot article 'CDMA vs GSM in Post-war Iraq,' The Reg has a story about how MCI has won the contract to rebuild the mobile phone system with GSM. This is a good thing for the people of Iraq that GSM is being used, GSM is the world standard and several U.S. companies (AT&T for one) are switching to GSM."
Adding Money to Insult. Neophytus writes "Remember the 'Star Wars Kid' that waxy.org found a couple of weeks ago? Well after over a million downloads the guy has been found. His name is Ghyslain, a 15-year-old tenth grader living in Quebec. Jish contacted him and got a brief, but interesting, interview."
No unlimited copy privileges in jail. the-dude-man writes "As reported here A 19-year-old pleaded guilty to costing DirectTV for leaking information about the secrets of DirectTV's most advanced anti-piracy technology to hacker websites. As part of the plea deal, Serebryany admitted to copying and distributing 800 megabytes of scanned documents from DirecTV, costing the company $68,000 in investigatory costs. Both sides stipulated to sentencing factors that carry six months to a year in prison under federal guidelines -- assuming no prior convictions. The sentencing court can depart from the guidelines only if the judge finds that the proposed sentence doesn't adequately reflect the facts of the case. According to court records affidavit, Serebryany's adventures began when he found himself with access to some of DirecTV's most coveted technological secrets while working for his uncle at a document imaging company at the office of a Los Angeles law firm, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue. The firm was representing the satellite TV company in a lawsuit against NDS, the makers of the smart cards DirecTV uses to control access to its signal."
For every 11 discontented customers, there's one of these happy oddballs! RedWingsSuck writes "A few weeks ago, I asked /. users what they thought about the wobble my 12" Power Book has developed. Last week Apple Care told me that I could send my laptop off for repairs. I decided to drive to the local Apple Store, about 15 minutes away, and drop it off. They had my laptop for less than 3 days. When I went in to pick it up, they told me that it was sent in and the BC (bottom cover) was repaired. It doesn't wobble anymore, so I am happy. I was really surprised with how fast it was fixed. I didn't mean to sound like I regretted my AiBook purchase in the last post, and now I even happier."
Relax, it's a television show. HardcoreGamer writes "Buffy creator Joss Whedon responds to questions from New York Times readers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it comes to the end of its 7 season run. He also discusses the now-canceled Firefly and concludes with one of the key reasons why the show is ending: 'I'm simply too tired.'"
Perhaps Buffy was getting tired, but Firefly was just starting to shine! I hope Joss Whedon doesn't mean that he was tired in general, just tired in regards to BTVS. I'm still hopeful that Firefly will make a comeback someday. In any event, two of its actors have played villains on Joss Whedon's other shows, Angel and BTVS. I thought that was nice of him, helping the actors of his cancelled show by giving them parts on his still-running shows.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
In theory. However, similar to DVDs, the decoder needs to be able to decode the signal. This means there must be a 'key' (be it an RSA key, secret algorithm, or whatever) in the device somewhere. Basically they are trying to achieve client-side security, which is just a myth. The only way to partially achieve this is to hide the key in silicon and hope the attackers don't find it, and when/if they do, change it. So as far as security is concerned, DirecTV is relying on secrecy - which is the only security possible in their situation. So it is fair enough they wouldnt want the details out in public.
I.O.U One Sig.
Then I guess you'll be happy to know that John Doe was not picked up for a second season.
Well, the B5 effort was hijacked by all sorts of external effects- unpredictable actor availability (3 main characters left unexpectedly) and an uncertain number of seasons.
Yes, Straczynski planned for 5 seasons originally- but towards the end of season 4, it really looked like #5 wouldn't get made (the current network was dropping it, and no one was found to take it up until the last minute)
So, he squeezed many of the concluding events into the 4th season, in case it turned out to be the final one. That's why the main villians were all vanquished in the 4th season, and the 5th opened up with discovery of new (servitor) monsters that had been hidden under rocks up till then.
So, it's really understandable that the 5th season seemed lacking- it's best parts were squeezed into earlier episodes.
actually, the conditional access system uses a public key system for just that reason... packets are sent to the card, which tell it to do things; like give you certain channels, etc. but the packets need to be signed or the card will not accept them. dtv holds the private key, and the card has the public key. now we know everything about the (current) access card, including code, but that doesnt let us sign a packet to be sent to the card because we dont have the private key, so instead we need to introduce faults (power and clock glitching) to access the card.
the real reason why dtv doesnt publish or talk about any aspect of their cards is because they do not want to give any clues about the internal sturcture of the cards for fear that they will be reverse engineered more easily.
I laughed my ass off when I saw this. For those who are not familiar, Trogdor the Burninator comes from Strong Bad email #58:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail58.html
They've got the Trogdor flash game too:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/trogdor.html
The reconstruction, like most of the war, is being paid for primarily out of the pockets of the US taxpayers. That's mostly coming from US workers.
You do know that the puppet-iraq gov is going to hand over untold numbers of oil contracts to american firms eh? this is the real prize here... how many years of pumping cash out of the desert is going to goto the US-Oil now that you've invaded and occupy Iraq?
The present bickering about 'reconstruction contracts' is missing the really big show. Thats going to be many many many billions in oil plunder.
Don't anyone get blinded by the facts now. After some quick googling, pages such as this will easily be found:
u lfwar
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/facts/g
Check at the bottom, under "The Cost". While Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid the lion's share, I just listed France and Germany (plus Japan) because they're the ones being daemonized by the US, even though they contributed more financially to the first Gulf War than the US.