This is bad news for all those super-mega-fugly bitches who work the 900 phone sex numbers, but the good thing is you will finally see hot girls doing exactly what you ask them to do.
Get the Phillips Expanium. I got it in October for NZ$300 which is US$200 . It does audio CDs, MP3 CDs & AAC CDs so you can use your music you may have got from iTMS or whereever.
Actually I downloaded Panther off Bit Torrent and it doesn't work, but GarageBand does. What I would appreciate is an easier way to find loops. I can't find any of my extra loops except for the weird Access Virus loops.
The technology to build the space elevator exists, it's just a case of mass production of very hard matter like buckyballs or maybe something harder if they are known to exist.
Even the color chips placed on the rover to calibrate the color photographs had shifted. What should be bright blue is instead bright pink; what should be bright green is brown.
The fundamental challenge in creating color photographs of Mars, he said, is that the cameras on the rovers take only black-and-white pictures, and the art of making color out of black and white never exactly reproduces what the eye sees.
To produce a color photograph, the rover's panoramic camera takes three black-and-white images of a scene, once with a red filter, once with a green filter and once with a blue filter. Each is then tinted with the color of the filter, and the three are combined into a color image.
Apparently they have used the infrared instead of the red filter.
There is a parrot that is conversant in 100 english words and it's able to use past, present & future tenses in speech. It is irrelevant if animals are sentient, what matters is if we will let some smelly bunch of hippies stop vital animal based research.
Perhaps you've seen 28 Days, the movie where a plague is released because some animal rights activists are stupid enough to release infected monkeys.
BTW, vegetables have limited sentience because plant leaves compute the best angle for receiving sunlight.
The Star Ladder could be created by elements formed with the new form of matter, it could be easier to fiddle existing elements into stronger forms. Why, because I'm pretty sure buckybulls aren't strong enough to use as a space elevator.
Has anyone got a list of fuel cell cars ? I think BMW, Toyota & Ford have fuel cell models, I'm just not sure. I would love to have a fuel cell car that could do about 500 km on a full tank.
Actually, I'm making an OS with the base as a VM. You can boot off a CD or DVD, then use your HD for data. And it definately has anonymous browsing built in.
don't need multiple copies of iTunes, and you definately don't want to run it in seperate accounts because it defaults to the music folder in your home which leaves it inaccessable. You can just import it from multiple drives at the same time.
I did buy that CD, (which is mainly crap except for the single) I usually only stay on gnutella or limewire while I'm downloading songs.
Most of my CDs have been ripped, I just need to add my dad's collection. The only thing that irritates me is the fact that my brother keeps deleting songs that he doesn't like even though there is 35 gig free.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to set my mp3 folder to be available from my website, I got to read the apache manual...
TORONTO - When you first meet Steve Mann, it seems as if you've interrupted him appraising diamonds or doing some sort of specialized welding. Because the first thing you notice is the plastic frame that comes around his right ear and holds a lens over his right eye.
But quickly you see that there's more to his contraption: A tiny video camera is affixed to the plastic eyepiece. Multicolored wires wrap around the back of Mann's head. Red and white lights blink under his sweater.
Mann greets you, warmly at first, though he soon gets distracted by something on the tiny computer monitor wedged over his eye.
In fact, being with Mann sometimes feels like the ultimate, in-your-face version of having a dinner companion who talks on a cell phone.
But don't be put off by it.
Someday you, too, might be a cyborg.
___
Mann, a 41-year-old engineering professor at the University of Toronto, spends hours every day viewing the world through that little monitor in front of his eye -- so much so that going without the apparatus often leaves him feeling nauseous, unsteady, naked.
While the small video camera gives him a recordable, real-time view of what's in front of him, the tiny screen is filled with messages or programming code fed by a computer and wireless transmitters that Mann straps to his body. He calls the experience "mediating reality" -- sort of like having icons from your computer screen transposed onto your regular vision.
Mann manipulates the computer through a handheld key device he invented, though he has experimented with putting electrodes on his skin and trying to control the cursor with brain waves.
If it sounds a bit creepy, consider this: Mann became a cyborg so he could be more human.
To be sure, that runs contrary to the sci-fi movie treatment of cyborgs (short for "cybernetic organisms") as electronic beasts, like in the "Terminator" movies. It also seems to violate a pastoral sense of what it means to be human: governed by spirit, reason and instinct, not infused with wires and silicon.
But Mann has sensitive and perceptive motives for his electronic immersion, which began 25 years ago. He believes that wearing computers and cameras will give people more power to maintain their privacy and individuality.
For one thing, Mann touts the power of wearable computers to filter out advertising and other elements of daily experience he finds objectionable.
And in a world of ever-increasing surveillance cameras for security, and strong database-mining software for government intelligence and corporate marketing, Mann believes regular people ought to have cameras and powerful computers on them, too. It's all about leveling the power dynamic.
"People feel they're masters of their own destiny when everything they need is right there with them," he says.
A cyborg could, say, take pictures of hostile police officers during a political demonstration and instantly post them on the Web -- to spur others to join in the protest, perhaps, or to simply provide alternative documentation of the scene. Mann calls such postings "glogs" -- short for "cyborg blogs" ("blogs," of course, is itself shorthand for "Web logs").
In more everyday language, Mann advocates "using a bit of the machine against itself."
For example, Mann has created performance art by shooting video in stores that prohibit it, using handheld cameras more noticeable than the "EyeTap" ocular computing system he normally wears. When employees tell him filming is not allowed, Mann points to the stores' own surveillance cameras behind darkened domes in the ceiling.
Then he tells the employees that "HIS manager" makes him film public places for HIS security -- how does he know, he tells them, that the fire exits aren't chained shut? -- and that they'll have to talk to HIS manager.
Top Stories - Los Angeles Times Secret Movie Moguls
Wed Jan 7, 9:36 AM ET
By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
Nearly halfway around the world from Hollywood, a 17-year-old high-school student is trying to make a name for himself as a film distributor.
Unlike the moguls in Tinseltown, though, he and his colleagues in a group called MysticVCD don't cut deals, take meetings or campaign for Oscars (news - web sites). Instead, their goal is to put a movie on the Internet first, long before it's officially released on tape or disc. If MysticVCD wins the race, the digital copy it produces will be downloaded onto tens of thousands of computers around the globe, potentially reaching more screens than the film itself did in theatrical release.
MysticVCD is one of dozens of "ripping" or "release" groups that obtain, prepare, package and feed movies, songs and games into a secretive and complex distribution scheme that functions a bit like the illegal drug trade -- minus the bloodletting.
Insiders and piracy experts say the groups are motivated mainly by ego. Instead of cash, the online underground is powered by bartering -- admission to these elite circles is granted only to those with something valuable to offer, such as computer parts or a pre-release copy of a DVD.
"I am in the scene in order to provide movies to the people" and to gain access to private sites with pirated goods, the founder of MysticVCD said via e-mail. Asking not to be named, he would say only that he lives in the Greenwich mean time zone, which stretches from the British Isles south to western Africa.
There's also a social aspect to the scene even though most groups' members know one another only by code names such as "markalso" and "bambino" and never meet in person.
Common to most groups is a disdain for selling pirated goods in favor of giving free access to anything and everything.
"Please remember: We do this for FUN. We do not make money off this whole business," said a posting from a group called Centropy. "All of us go to the movies regularly and pay for our tickets just like everyone else."
Not everyone in the scene is so pure. Some players -- including members of Centropy -- are suspected of selling pirated movies and music to commercial bootleggers who have made billions of dollars peddling knockoff CDs and DVDs on the streets of cities around the world.
Regardless of whether there's money involved, what the ripping groups do violates copyright law. Federal agents recently mounted three sweeps of online piracy groups that netted at least 46 guilty pleas and 19 prison sentences. Those nabbed range from a 40-year-old Australian to a 20-year-old student at Duke University. More investigations are underway.
"The risk that really wasn't there for them a few years ago is now, I would say, pretty significant," said Bob Kruger, vice president of enforcement for the Business Software Alliance, which has been chasing online software pirates since the early 1990s.
On the whole, however, music and movie groups have operated with near impunity, protected in part by the elaborate steps they take to screen participants, conceal their identities and disguise their locations. The entertainment industry has focused on filing suits against file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and their users, who ultimately copy much of the ripping groups' works. The industry also is trying to deter piracy at the grass-roots level with electronic locks for CDs, DVDs and downloadable items.
Kruger said online piracy groups have been around at least since the early 1990s. The initial focus was "warez," or computer programs that had been stripped of their anti-piracy protections.
Although most piracy groups still concentrate on software and computer games, a steadily growing number dedicate themselves to movie and music piracy. NFOTemple.com, a site that catalogs the boastful explanatory notes, or NFO files, posted by release groups, listed 140 crews devoted to
Most folks tend to think of the DNS as a way to map ASCII host names to IP addresses, perhaps www.nominum.com to 10.0.01 or some such.
I believe that when Vint talks about "escaping the bonds of DNS", [see BBC's report and Doug Mehus' CircleID report] he's really talking about letting it loose rather than replacing it.
In the case of ENUM and NAPTR, all we are doing is saying that "domain names can carry phone numbers, so why not let them". NAPTR is a DNS data type, so we aren't replacing DNS with NAPTR, that would make no sense. In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the DNS (there's 40 or so). NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet uses to route each piece of mail.
RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. Its really just a question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- its ready to carry arbitrary identifiers. And by the way, this isn't a new idea, see RFC 1101 for proof, although even earlier I designed the DNS in the early 1980s to allow it to be so, but it seemed too far fetched to document for a while.
But don't think that I'm claiming to have solved the whole problem. What I certainly didn't anticipate was the political, legal, and commercial fight that would come with it. These squabbles behind ENUM and RFID use of DNS are really the problem, not the technology, although there may be ways to help with more technology. I was in Geneva for a WSIS meeting of CTOs, and was surprised that the various organizations (ITU, ICANN, ISOC) haven't figured out that they need each other to make this technology work, rather than asserting ownership.
While it is inevitable that the DNS gets replaced, I think there could be far more usage and opportunity if the political aspects were addressed coherently, and if the technology types just let experimentation happen, rather than trying to make rules about how the DNS is used.
Exclusive Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who broke the DVD encryption scheme, has opened iTunes locked music a tad further, by allowing people to play songs they've purchased on iTunes Music Store on their GNU/Linux computers.
"We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use," Johansen told The Register via email.
Johansen cracked iTunes DRM scheme in November by releasing code for a small Windows program that dumps the stream to disk in raw AAC format. This raw format required some trivial additions to convert it to an MP4 file that could be played on any capable computer.
But in the best Apple ease-of-use tradition, Johansen has now made this completely seamless, integrating it with the VideoLAN streaming free software project.
How it works Johansen deduced that the system key that locks the locked music to a single Windows computer is derived from four factors: the serial number of the C: drive, the system BIOS version, the CPU name and the Windows Product ID.
"When you run the VideoLAN Client under Windows it will write the user key to a file. The user key is system independent and can thus be used by the GNU/Linux version of VLC," he explains.
While Apple's iTunes Music Store is restricted to Windows and Apple computers, and Apple only supports its own iPod player as a playback device, VideoLAN is GPL software that runs on a wide variety of computers including Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and even QNX. Although users are at present permitted to burn a CD with music they've purchased, only three Apple or Windows computers are "authorized" at any time. These terms may be tightened at any time, Johansen himself noted recently.
"The RIAA can at any time change the DRM rules," he wrote in November, "and considering their history, it's likely that they will when the majority of consumers have embraced DRM and non-DRM products have been phased out. Some DVDs today include commercials which can't be skipped using 'sanctioned' players. If the RIAA forces Apple to include commercials, what excuses will the Mac zealots come up with? 'It's a good compromise'?"
Reaction "The restrictions are very frustrating for consumers, and frankly, are unnecessary," Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred Von Lohmann told The Register.
"Every song on iTunes Music Store has been available on the Peer to Peer networks within four hours. All the DRM does is frustrate legitimate consumers; it doesn't stop file sharing," he says. "The real innovation of the last several years was Kazaa and the other file sharing applications. These are leaps and bounds more relevant than iTunes Music Store."
Although the number of downloaders has diminished in the face of lawsuits by the RIAA, tens of millions of Internet users continue to share music on the P2P networks, dwarfing the number of locked-music downloads from DRM stores such as Apple's iTMS.
Apple is widely expected to announce more locked music playback hardware at the MacWorld show in San Francisco this week. But with support growing for flat fee licensing models even amongst record industry executives, today's DRM Goldrush (and the ensuing iTunes vs Windows Media war) could be a very short lived skirmish.
Johansen broke the CSS encryption scheme on DVDs - a case the Norwegian government finally let go - so he could watch a movie that he'd legitimately purchased on his Linux PC. Now millions of Linux users can do the same with iTunes locked music. You can download the code here. http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/vlc/modules/demux/mp4/?cvsroot=VideoLAN
Slashdot Mirror
SG1 has the videophones on the maufs for communication from SGC and the mission team. They usually are interrupted by people shooting at them.
This is bad news for all those super-mega-fugly bitches who work the 900 phone sex numbers, but the good thing is you will finally see hot girls doing exactly what you ask them to do.
Get the Phillips Expanium. I got it in October for NZ$300 which is US$200 . It does audio CDs, MP3 CDs & AAC CDs so you can use your music you may have got from iTMS or whereever.
Actually I downloaded Panther off Bit Torrent and it doesn't work, but GarageBand does. What I would appreciate is an easier way to find loops.
I can't find any of my extra loops except for the weird Access Virus loops.
Apple paid GarageBand.com so that Apple could call it's software GarageBand
That heat wave happened when the majority of the health system were on holiday, it's a tradition there to take holidays in August.
The technology to build the space elevator exists, it's just a case of mass production of very hard matter like buckyballs or maybe something harder if they are known to exist.
Material costs are of course going to be high considering that the manufacturing will cost billions of buckyballs or similiar hard material.
The thing is the cost of atmospheric launches against the cost of pushing up in a vaccuum. Instead of costing $10k per kilo, it's $1k per kilo.
Because a standard 4 megapixel camera would freeze on Mars.
Even the color chips placed on the rover to calibrate the color photographs had shifted. What should be bright blue is instead bright pink; what should be bright green is brown.
The fundamental challenge in creating color photographs of Mars, he said, is that the cameras on the rovers take only black-and-white pictures, and the art of making color out of black and white never exactly reproduces what the eye sees.
To produce a color photograph, the rover's panoramic camera takes three black-and-white images of a scene, once with a red filter, once with a green filter and once with a blue filter. Each is then tinted with the color of the filter, and the three are combined into a color image.
Apparently they have used the infrared instead of the red filter.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3430481. stm
There is a parrot that is conversant in 100 english words and it's able to use past, present & future tenses in speech.
It is irrelevant if animals are sentient, what matters is if we will let some smelly bunch of hippies stop vital animal based research.
Perhaps you've seen 28 Days, the movie where a plague is released because some animal rights activists are stupid enough to release infected monkeys.
BTW, vegetables have limited sentience because plant leaves compute the best angle for receiving sunlight.
The Star Ladder could be created by elements formed with the new form of matter, it could be easier to fiddle existing elements into stronger forms.
Why, because I'm pretty sure buckybulls aren't strong enough to use as a space elevator.
Has anyone got a list of fuel cell cars ?
I think BMW, Toyota & Ford have fuel cell models, I'm just not sure.
I would love to have a fuel cell car that could do about 500 km on a full tank.
Actually, I'm making an OS with the base as a VM.
You can boot off a CD or DVD, then use your HD for data.
And it definately has anonymous browsing built in.
I'm building an OS with P2P built in, it has blacklisting of users by voting on reputation and it could check for filler by playing the file.
the only problem with multiple drives is the eject button.
iTunes can rip from any drive with a CD in it.
Just select the disc, then rip it.
don't need multiple copies of iTunes, and you definately don't want to run it in seperate accounts because it defaults to the music folder in your home which leaves it inaccessable.
You can just import it from multiple drives at the same time.
Gross, I just hope they have goatse.cx stored there
I did buy that CD, (which is mainly crap except for the single) I usually only stay on gnutella or limewire while I'm downloading songs.
Most of my CDs have been ripped, I just need to add my dad's collection.
The only thing that irritates me is the fact that my brother keeps deleting songs that he doesn't like even though there is 35 gig free.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to set my mp3 folder to be available from my website, I got to read the apache manual...
Professor Lives Life As a Cyborg
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
TORONTO - When you first meet Steve Mann, it seems as if you've interrupted him appraising diamonds or doing some sort of specialized welding. Because the first thing you notice is the plastic frame that comes around his right ear and holds a lens over his right eye.
But quickly you see that there's more to his contraption: A tiny video camera is affixed to the plastic eyepiece. Multicolored wires wrap around the back of Mann's head. Red and white lights blink under his sweater.
Mann greets you, warmly at first, though he soon gets distracted by something on the tiny computer monitor wedged over his eye.
In fact, being with Mann sometimes feels like the ultimate, in-your-face version of having a dinner companion who talks on a cell phone.
But don't be put off by it.
Someday you, too, might be a cyborg.
___
Mann, a 41-year-old engineering professor at the University of Toronto, spends hours every day viewing the world through that little monitor in front of his eye -- so much so that going without the apparatus often leaves him feeling nauseous, unsteady, naked.
While the small video camera gives him a recordable, real-time view of what's in front of him, the tiny screen is filled with messages or programming code fed by a computer and wireless transmitters that Mann straps to his body. He calls the experience "mediating reality" -- sort of like having icons from your computer screen transposed onto your regular vision.
Mann manipulates the computer through a handheld key device he invented, though he has experimented with putting electrodes on his skin and trying to control the cursor with brain waves.
If it sounds a bit creepy, consider this: Mann became a cyborg so he could be more human.
To be sure, that runs contrary to the sci-fi movie treatment of cyborgs (short for "cybernetic organisms") as electronic beasts, like in the "Terminator" movies. It also seems to violate a pastoral sense of what it means to be human: governed by spirit, reason and instinct, not infused with wires and silicon.
But Mann has sensitive and perceptive motives for his electronic immersion, which began 25 years ago. He believes that wearing computers and cameras will give people more power to maintain their privacy and individuality.
For one thing, Mann touts the power of wearable computers to filter out advertising and other elements of daily experience he finds objectionable.
And in a world of ever-increasing surveillance cameras for security, and strong database-mining software for government intelligence and corporate marketing, Mann believes regular people ought to have cameras and powerful computers on them, too. It's all about leveling the power dynamic.
"People feel they're masters of their own destiny when everything they need is right there with them," he says.
A cyborg could, say, take pictures of hostile police officers during a political demonstration and instantly post them on the Web -- to spur others to join in the protest, perhaps, or to simply provide alternative documentation of the scene. Mann calls such postings "glogs" -- short for "cyborg blogs" ("blogs," of course, is itself shorthand for "Web logs").
In more everyday language, Mann advocates "using a bit of the machine against itself."
For example, Mann has created performance art by shooting video in stores that prohibit it, using handheld cameras more noticeable than the "EyeTap" ocular computing system he normally wears. When employees tell him filming is not allowed, Mann points to the stores' own surveillance cameras behind darkened domes in the ceiling.
Then he tells the employees that "HIS manager" makes him film public places for HIS security -- how does he know, he tells them, that the fire exits aren't chained shut? -- and that they'll have to talk to HIS manager.
His behavior in such showdowns generally provoke
Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
Secret Movie Moguls
Wed Jan 7, 9:36 AM ET
By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
Nearly halfway around the world from Hollywood, a 17-year-old high-school student is trying to make a name for himself as a film distributor.
Unlike the moguls in Tinseltown, though, he and his colleagues in a group called MysticVCD don't cut deals, take meetings or campaign for Oscars (news - web sites). Instead, their goal is to put a movie on the Internet first, long before it's officially released on tape or disc. If MysticVCD wins the race, the digital copy it produces will be downloaded onto tens of thousands of computers around the globe, potentially reaching more screens than the film itself did in theatrical release.
MysticVCD is one of dozens of "ripping" or "release" groups that obtain, prepare, package and feed movies, songs and games into a secretive and complex distribution scheme that functions a bit like the illegal drug trade -- minus the bloodletting.
Insiders and piracy experts say the groups are motivated mainly by ego. Instead of cash, the online underground is powered by bartering -- admission to these elite circles is granted only to those with something valuable to offer, such as computer parts or a pre-release copy of a DVD.
"I am in the scene in order to provide movies to the people" and to gain access to private sites with pirated goods, the founder of MysticVCD said via e-mail. Asking not to be named, he would say only that he lives in the Greenwich mean time zone, which stretches from the British Isles south to western Africa.
There's also a social aspect to the scene even though most groups' members know one another only by code names such as "markalso" and "bambino" and never meet in person.
Common to most groups is a disdain for selling pirated goods in favor of giving free access to anything and everything.
"Please remember: We do this for FUN. We do not make money off this whole business," said a posting from a group called Centropy. "All of us go to the movies regularly and pay for our tickets just like everyone else."
Not everyone in the scene is so pure. Some players -- including members of Centropy -- are suspected of selling pirated movies and music to commercial bootleggers who have made billions of dollars peddling knockoff CDs and DVDs on the streets of cities around the world.
Regardless of whether there's money involved, what the ripping groups do violates copyright law. Federal agents recently mounted three sweeps of online piracy groups that netted at least 46 guilty pleas and 19 prison sentences. Those nabbed range from a 40-year-old Australian to a 20-year-old student at Duke University. More investigations are underway.
"The risk that really wasn't there for them a few years ago is now, I would say, pretty significant," said Bob Kruger, vice president of enforcement for the Business Software Alliance, which has been chasing online software pirates since the early 1990s.
On the whole, however, music and movie groups have operated with near impunity, protected in part by the elaborate steps they take to screen participants, conceal their identities and disguise their locations. The entertainment industry has focused on filing suits against file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and their users, who ultimately copy much of the ripping groups' works. The industry also is trying to deter piracy at the grass-roots level with electronic locks for CDs, DVDs and downloadable items.
Kruger said online piracy groups have been around at least since the early 1990s. The initial focus was "warez," or computer programs that had been stripped of their anti-piracy protections.
Although most piracy groups still concentrate on software and computer games, a steadily growing number dedicate themselves to movie and music piracy. NFOTemple.com, a site that catalogs the boastful explanatory notes, or NFO files, posted by release groups, listed 140 crews devoted to
Letting DNS Loose
Jan 02, 2004 | From CircleID Empowering DNS
By Paul Mockapetris
Most folks tend to think of the DNS as a way to map ASCII host names to IP addresses, perhaps www.nominum.com to 10.0.01 or some such.
I believe that when Vint talks about "escaping the bonds of DNS", [see BBC's report and Doug Mehus' CircleID report] he's really talking about letting it loose rather than replacing it.
In the case of ENUM and NAPTR, all we are doing is saying that "domain names can carry phone numbers, so why not let them". NAPTR is a DNS data type, so we aren't replacing DNS with NAPTR, that would make no sense. In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the DNS (there's 40 or so). NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet uses to route each piece of mail.
RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. Its really just a question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- its ready to carry arbitrary identifiers. And by the way, this isn't a new idea, see RFC 1101 for proof, although even earlier I designed the DNS in the early 1980s to allow it to be so, but it seemed too far fetched to document for a while.
But don't think that I'm claiming to have solved the whole problem. What I certainly didn't anticipate was the political, legal, and commercial fight that would come with it. These squabbles behind ENUM and RFID use of DNS are really the problem, not the technology, although there may be ways to help with more technology. I was in Geneva for a WSIS meeting of CTOs, and was surprised that the various organizations (ITU, ICANN, ISOC) haven't figured out that they need each other to make this technology work, rather than asserting ownership.
While it is inevitable that the DNS gets replaced, I think there could be far more usage and opportunity if the political aspects were addressed coherently, and if the technology types just let experimentation happen, rather than trying to make rules about how the DNS is used.
The article was an exclusive. However, I think it would be pretty rare to program in norwegian, or indeed any language except english.
Exclusive Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who broke the DVD encryption scheme, has opened iTunes locked music a tad further, by allowing people to play songs they've purchased on iTunes Music Store on their GNU/Linux computers.
i /vlc/modules/demux/mp4/?cvsroot=VideoLAN
"We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use," Johansen told The Register via email.
Johansen cracked iTunes DRM scheme in November by releasing code for a small Windows program that dumps the stream to disk in raw AAC format. This raw format required some trivial additions to convert it to an MP4 file that could be played on any capable computer.
But in the best Apple ease-of-use tradition, Johansen has now made this completely seamless, integrating it with the VideoLAN streaming free software project.
How it works
Johansen deduced that the system key that locks the locked music to a single Windows computer is derived from four factors: the serial number of the C: drive, the system BIOS version, the CPU name and the Windows Product ID.
"When you run the VideoLAN Client under Windows it will write the user key to a file. The user key is system independent and can thus be used by the GNU/Linux version of VLC," he explains.
While Apple's iTunes Music Store is restricted to Windows and Apple computers, and Apple only supports its own iPod player as a playback device, VideoLAN is GPL software that runs on a wide variety of computers including Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and even QNX. Although users are at present permitted to burn a CD with music they've purchased, only three Apple or Windows computers are "authorized" at any time. These terms may be tightened at any time, Johansen himself noted recently.
"The RIAA can at any time change the DRM rules," he wrote in November, "and considering their history, it's likely that they will when the majority of consumers have embraced DRM and non-DRM products have been phased out. Some DVDs today include commercials which can't be skipped using 'sanctioned' players. If the RIAA forces Apple to include commercials, what excuses will the Mac zealots come up with? 'It's a good compromise'?"
Reaction
"The restrictions are very frustrating for consumers, and frankly, are unnecessary," Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred Von Lohmann told The Register.
"Every song on iTunes Music Store has been available on the Peer to Peer networks within four hours. All the DRM does is frustrate legitimate consumers; it doesn't stop file sharing," he says. "The real innovation of the last several years was Kazaa and the other file sharing applications. These are leaps and bounds more relevant than iTunes Music Store."
Although the number of downloaders has diminished in the face of lawsuits by the RIAA, tens of millions of Internet users continue to share music on the P2P networks, dwarfing the number of locked-music downloads from DRM stores such as Apple's iTMS.
Apple is widely expected to announce more locked music playback hardware at the MacWorld show in San Francisco this week. But with support growing for flat fee licensing models even amongst record industry executives, today's DRM Goldrush (and the ensuing iTunes vs Windows Media war) could be a very short lived skirmish.
Johansen broke the CSS encryption scheme on DVDs - a case the Norwegian government finally let go - so he could watch a movie that he'd legitimately purchased on his Linux PC. Now millions of Linux users can do the same with iTunes locked music. You can download the code here. http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cg