The last cert I got wanted the company number.. or to be exact they wanted *a* company number. They didn't verify anything else (in fact the registration address is our accountants and is unrelated to the rest of the company).
They sent the cert the same day.
Verification of 'limited company' status is bullshit anyway. I can buy an off the shelf limited company for £30 over the web, and apply for a certificate tomororrow if I want.
Well, it is and it isn't. The cost of filing as a limited liability corporation (LLC) isn't all that bad. Our lawyer (who has handled wills and other family matters) will do it for somewhere between $300 and $500.
Or they could revoke the device key for the software player, which would mean the software player gets upgraded with a new key, and newer discs can be cracked using the exact same technique. Otherwise anyone selling software players would be faced with the massive liability of having sold something that doesn't work as advertised.
Tough titties.
They wrote a player that was broken because it was badly coded. Their choice to cut corners.
The HDDVD licensing people will just revoke their license & those that have bought the software will get their money back. Expensive mistake but you can bet their contracts allow for exactly this scenario.
They probably will. I could bet money that part of their license to the decryption technology is that they protect the keys so they can't be broken. The player manufacturers are the ones that get shafted in this - they'll have no product any more.
You can - all the HDDVD and BluRay players have internet connectivity. They can and do download blacklists in 'firmware updates'. Such updates are also pressed into future disks - so you can't even get away with never connecting the player. These can revoke both disk and hardware keys, so you'd have to replace your copy of serenity, or even potentially your TV if the keys for that got revoked.
The only question is whether they have the guts to do it.
Nah someone accidentally did 'ifconfig eth0 down' when reconfiguring it. Now they're stuffed unless someone has a serial cable that's a few hundred miles long...
"Video formats supported: H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store)"
No mpeg2, divx or anything else... so it's clear they don't want you using videos from anywhere else. Pure h264 videos are rather hard to get at the moment.
It really wouldn't suprise me if the DVI was HDCP enabled - in fact the content providers will probably insist.
A good mpeg2 HD movie is about 16-20GB off Usenet. You have to cut that by half to put it on a DVD... which isn't that hard really. Go to mpeg4, increase the compression until it fits.
"When a phone is unlocked it loses its privileges on a provider's data network. An unlocked phone can make GSM calls and send basic SMS. No MMS, no Internet, no iTS. Apple would either have to reverse engineer a method to gain access to the data network (unlikely as most data networks require SSL-level security to access) or it would have to offer something different."
Whoever said that was talking utter bullshit. I've always used unlocked phones and use MMS and Internet all the time.
Look at the OBEX stacks for all the bluetooth capable phones. They all conveniently ommit this stack, even though it would be simple to add, so that you cant connect to the contacts database in the phone. Instead they want you to go and PAY for the service to access the phone data.
If I had a phone with this problem I'd get a refund. In-car sets often require access to the contacts database.
The iPhone is aimed squarely at the US market. They'd have to make an iPhone 2 to sell it in Europe anyway.. No 3G, No MMS, Mediocre Camera, Camera on wrong side of phone (so you can't make video calls)..
So expect an iPhone 2 in about 12 months time with these features if they want to launch in the Europe/Asia (which is a larger market than the US by a long way so they'd be stupid not to).
(The Apple TV is also aimed squarely at the US market also, given that itunes doesn't support video downloads in any other country (and 'a selection of pixar short films' does *not* count) - sensing a pattern here...)
'HD' online porn tends to be 640x480, although there are some 1024x768 feeds out there.
The problem isn't that they take too long to download - they're compressed to hell and back so are typically only around 600kbps, but that the porn sites themselvs don't have the bandwidth to stream too many.. a thousand geeks typing one handed is gonna bring the site down.
Enough bandwidth to do High Def is years away, as is the hard drive space to store very many movies.
DVRs already store hidef movies on hard drives. The hard drive space hasn't been an issue for a while.
Bandwidth is easy - download in the background and overnight. You can get a full length movie in a few hours overnight and be watching it the next day. Eventually it'll be realtime but that is probably a few years off (until we have FTTH, which is looking at 10 years to widespread adoption).
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They are (or, at least, were at the time) a slightly more serious threat than a Star Trek movie.
Come on... Star Trek, the early years? I'd rather be nuked.
The last cert I got wanted the company number.. or to be exact they wanted *a* company number. They didn't verify anything else (in fact the registration address is our accountants and is unrelated to the rest of the company).
They sent the cert the same day.
Verification of 'limited company' status is bullshit anyway. I can buy an off the shelf limited company for £30 over the web, and apply for a certificate tomororrow if I want.
Well, it is and it isn't. The cost of filing as a limited liability corporation (LLC) isn't all that bad. Our lawyer (who has handled wills and other family matters) will do it for somewhere between $300 and $500.
It's a *hell* of a lot cheaper than that.
Your lawyer was price gouging.
Or they could revoke the device key for the software player, which would mean the software player gets upgraded with a new key, and newer discs can be cracked using the exact same technique. Otherwise anyone selling software players would be faced with the massive liability of having sold something that doesn't work as advertised.
Tough titties.
They wrote a player that was broken because it was badly coded. Their choice to cut corners.
The HDDVD licensing people will just revoke their license & those that have bought the software will get their money back. Expensive mistake but you can bet their contracts allow for exactly this scenario.
They probably will. I could bet money that part of their license to the decryption technology is that they protect the keys so they can't be broken. The player manufacturers are the ones that get shafted in this - they'll have no product any more.
You can - all the HDDVD and BluRay players have internet connectivity. They can and do download blacklists in 'firmware updates'. Such updates are also pressed into future disks - so you can't even get away with never connecting the player. These can revoke both disk and hardware keys, so you'd have to replace your copy of serenity, or even potentially your TV if the keys for that got revoked.
The only question is whether they have the guts to do it.
How do we know? There was no suggestion that sharks with laserbeams on their head were involved, either.. you never know...
Nah someone accidentally did 'ifconfig eth0 down' when reconfiguring it. Now they're stuffed unless someone has a serial cable that's a few hundred miles long...
Use foxmarks, and all your firefox bookmarks get synced on various machines.
iPhone is an appliance. I don't want third-party apps on my fridge; I don't really want (to need) them on my phone.
If iPhone is just a phone then it's an outrageously expensive previous generation one.
The whole *point* is that it is also a PDA - thus justifying the cost. If it's just a phone then it's got no chance.
Not really - the iTV downloads video and plays it on your TV. ITV transmits video to your TV (ok, not directly, but I digress).
There's heaps of space for confusion there. Not to mention ITV is a household name whether the overlap is there or not.
To frame it in a way Americans can relate to, If they'd named it 'CNN' they'd have had the identical trouble.
Weren't they the founder member?
Maybe Sealand should join NATO, so anyone attempting to invade it gets bombed by about 6 countries.
OTOH that could lead the the US or UK being treaty bound to declare war on themselves.. I wonder how that pans out?
AppleTV has DRM support... from the specs..
"Video formats supported: H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store)"
No mpeg2, divx or anything else... so it's clear they don't want you using videos from anywhere else. Pure h264 videos are rather hard to get at the moment.
It really wouldn't suprise me if the DVI was HDCP enabled - in fact the content providers will probably insist.
No you can't - the itunes store checks the billing address. You'd need a US credit card to do that, which is hard to get without a US address.
The original star trek: the next generation series was 2 episodes per DVD - OTOH that was the early days of DVD production.
The Simpsons originally did the same (3 episodes per DVD).
You can guarantee that the TV companies will continue this tradition with HD.
A good mpeg2 HD movie is about 16-20GB off Usenet. You have to cut that by half to put it on a DVD... which isn't that hard really. Go to mpeg4, increase the compression until it fits.
"When a phone is unlocked it loses its privileges on a provider's data network. An unlocked phone can make GSM calls and send basic SMS. No MMS, no Internet, no iTS. Apple would either have to reverse engineer a method to gain access to the data network (unlikely as most data networks require SSL-level security to access) or it would have to offer something different."
Whoever said that was talking utter bullshit. I've always used unlocked phones and use MMS and Internet all the time.
Look at the OBEX stacks for all the bluetooth capable phones. They all conveniently ommit this stack, even though it would be simple to add, so that you cant connect to the contacts database in the phone. Instead they want you to go and PAY for the service to access the phone data.
If I had a phone with this problem I'd get a refund. In-car sets often require access to the contacts database.
Only for symbian native stuff. Most 3rd party apps are J2ME which doesn't have the same requirements.
If we aren't the target market just who is? 8GB ipod mini $249. Phone - normally free with contract.
iPhone $550. That's a hell of a difference.
The iPhone is aimed squarely at the US market. They'd have to make an iPhone 2 to sell it in Europe anyway.. No 3G, No MMS, Mediocre Camera, Camera on wrong side of phone (so you can't make video calls)..
So expect an iPhone 2 in about 12 months time with these features if they want to launch in the Europe/Asia (which is a larger market than the US by a long way so they'd be stupid not to).
(The Apple TV is also aimed squarely at the US market also, given that itunes doesn't support video downloads in any other country (and 'a selection of pixar short films' does *not* count) - sensing a pattern here...)
Wow they do it that way around in the US? Wierd. Surely you should be locking up the pervs not the women who have to feed a drug habit.
'HD' online porn tends to be 640x480, although there are some 1024x768 feeds out there.
The problem isn't that they take too long to download - they're compressed to hell and back so are typically only around 600kbps, but that the porn sites themselvs don't have the bandwidth to stream too many.. a thousand geeks typing one handed is gonna bring the site down.
Enough bandwidth to do High Def is years away, as is the hard drive space to store very many movies.
DVRs already store hidef movies on hard drives. The hard drive space hasn't been an issue for a while.
Bandwidth is easy - download in the background and overnight. You can get a full length movie in a few hours overnight and be watching it the next day. Eventually it'll be realtime but that is probably a few years off (until we have FTTH, which is looking at 10 years to widespread adoption).