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Movies

HDCP Master Key Is Legitimate; Blu-ray Is Cracked 1066

Posted by timothy from the maybe-now-I'll-want-a-player dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Intel has confirmed that the leaked HDCP master key protecting millions of Blu-ray discs and devices that was posted to the Web this week is legitimate. The disclosure means, in effect, that all Blu-ray discs can now be unlocked and copied. HDCP (High Definition Content Protection), which was created by Intel and is administered by Digital Content Protection LLP, is the content encryption scheme that protects data, typically movies, as they pass across a DVI or an HDMI cable. According to an Intel official, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs."
Earth

Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff 303

Posted by timothy from the hey-cut-that-crap-out dept.
hollywoodb writes "The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota. To encourage the switch to clean, renewable energy, Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012 ... Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders, but the utility companies that operate in MN have, over the past decades, sited a lot of coal power plants on the relatively cheap and open land of North Dakota, which is preparing a legal battle against Minnesota over the tariff."
Microsoft

Microsoft Bing Search Launches Early Preview 310

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the badda-bing dept.
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of their Bing Search site earlier than expected. Microsoft's hope at putting a dent in Google's ubiquitous search presence, Bing has several new features including Bing Cashback, Bing Video, and Bing xRank. "Bing Video is really great because of the new thumbnail video feature. Try searching for E3 at Bing Video and you'll quickly see how it works. Simply hover over a video and it starts playing instantly. This is fantastic from the consumer's point of view but what about the publisher? It's almost like Microsoft is stepping on their toes by deploying video search in this manner. Would a user still click on to the site if they can watch the whole video from within the search results? Fair use definitely comes into mind here. Perhaps there should be a 30second limitation on the 'thumbnail preview?'"
Biotech

Electrode Implant Gives Mute Man a (Synthesized) Voice 58

Posted by timothy from the paradoxically-enough dept.
Iddo Genuth writes with an excerpt from The Future of Things: "A surgical procedure performed by a team from Boston University, Massachusetts led by Professor Frank Guenther, has enabled a mute man to speak again. An electrode implanted in the patient's brain made it possible for the patient to produce vowels by thinking them, using a speech synthesizer. In the future, this breakthrough may help patients with similar injuries produce entire sentences, using signals from their brains."
Security

F-Secure Calls For "Internetpol" To Fight Crimeware 114

Posted by kdawson from the you'll-have-to-come-with-me-sir dept.
KingofGnG points out F-Secure's Q3 2008 security summary, in which its Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen proposes establishing an "Internetpol," an international organization empowered to target and root out cybercrime anywhere in the world. Hypponen gives examples of why such a supernational force is needed — and these are not hard to find — but provides few details about how such an outfit could get started or how it would work. He does mention the wrinkle that in some countries malware writing, cracking, spamming, and phishing are not illegal or not prosecuted. Is an Internetpol even possible, let alone practical?
Politics

Canada Election Result Bad News For DMCA Opponents 311

Posted by kdawson from the wrong-direction-up-north dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For those with a stake in the opposition of Jim Prentice's C-61, the Canadian DMCA, this previous week's election results will be displeasing. The Conservative Party, which promised to reintroduce the DMCA if elected, gained 19 seats this election, mostly at the expense of the flagging liberal party, a mere 12 short of a majority government. The increase in Conservative representation, as well as the relatively low profile of this issue amidst other, more pressing concerns, increases the likelihood that the son of C-61 will come to fruition. On a positive note, the number of MPs supporting Geist's copyright pledge has increased to 34. Given the Conservative Party's historic disregard of public opinion, however, the efforts of the copyright-pledge MPs will have to rally the full opposition across three major parties in order to defeat the bill. A mere 12 MPs now stand between the Canadian public and the MAFIAA's hungry maw."
Music

Record Label Infringes Own Copyright, Site Pulled 282

Posted by kdawson from the wonder-who-filed-the-complaint dept.
AnonCow sends in a peculiar story from TorrentFreak, which describes the plight of a free-download music site that has been summarily evicted from the Internet for violating its own copyright. The problem seems to revolve around the host's insistence that proof of copyright be snail-mailed to them. Kind of difficult when your copyright takes the form of a Creative Commons license that cannot be verified unless its site is up. "The website of an Internet-based record label which offers completely free music downloads has been taken down by its host for copyright infringement, even though it only offers its own music. Quote Unquote Records calls itself 'The First Ever Donation Based Record Label,' but is currently homeless after its host pulled the plug."
Transportation

Qantas Blames Wireless For Aircraft Incidents 773

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lotta-finger-pointing dept.
musther writes "An Australian airline Qantas Airbus A330-300, suffered 'a sudden change of altitude' on Tuesday. "The mid-air incident resulted in injuries to 74 people, with 51 of them treated by three hospitals in Perth for fractures, lacerations and suspected spinal injuries when the flight bound from Singapore to Perth had a dramatic drop in altitude that hurled passengers around the cabin." Now it seems Qantas is seeking to blame interference from passenger electronics, and it's not the first time; 'In July, a passenger clicking on a wireless mouse mid-flight was blamed for causing a Qantas jet to be thrown off course.' Is there any precedent for wireless electronics interfering with aircraft systems? Interfering with navigation instruments is one thing, but causing changes in the 'elevator control system' — I would be quite worried if I thought the aircraft could be flown with a bluetooth mouse."
Image

Not Even Norton Can Protect You 3

Posted by samzenpus from the warning dept.
For those of you who have never seen a virus.
United States

House Narrowly Avoids Having to Debate Impeachment of Cheney 1033

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sweep-it-under-the-committee-rug dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) yesterday successfully moved articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney to the House Judiciary committee. 'Today's resolution from Kucinich (D-Ohio) was essentially the same as the legislation he introduced earlier this year, which included three articles of impeachment against Cheney based largely on allegations that he manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. The last article accuses Cheney of threatening "aggression" against Iran "absent any real threat."'"

Comment Re:Elevator Garage? (Score 1) 308

by TWooster (#21074527) Attached to: Very High Tech - Elevator Garages in an NYC Hi-Rise
Don't forget that elevators are very energy efficient. Properly counterweighted, the energy required to lift your car (or, conversely, the counterweight -- dependent upon whether you're moving the car up or down) would be considerably less. My physics is quite rusty, but I'm fairly certain the costs are closer to the work to lift the weight-different and the work to overcome friction. And make no mistake, these suckers will be counterweighted to match the weight of your Bentley -- costing the building owners less in maintenance and energy costs, assuming you don't pay those. Without taking friction into account, energy usage would be closer to:

Work required to lift 70 kg (let's call that the average weight of your tycoon, minus gold bars) 50 meters: W = 70 * 9.8 * 50 = 34.3kJ
Work required to lift your car every day for a year: 12.556 MJ.

But all this is moot anyway -- it'd be very close to exactly the same as that same tycoon just taking the elevator.
Data Storage

Hard Drive Imports to be Banned? 391

Posted by CowboyNeal from the outlaw-drives dept.
Arathon writes "Apparently the International Trade Commission is beginning an investigation that could lead to the banning of hard drive imports from Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, among others, on the grounds that they fundamentally violate patents held by Steven and Mary Reiber of California. The patent apparently has to do with "dissipative ceramic bonding tips", which are important components of the drives themselves. Obviously, a ban would be unthinkable, and yet the ITC has 45 days to settle on a fixed date for the end of the investigation. If the patents are found to be violated, and the Reibers do not allow those patents to be bought or otherwise dealt with, the importation of almost all hard drives would actually be ceased."
The Internet

Submission + - Characteristics of traffic to the blogosphere

Submitted by
virgilio almeida
virgilio almeida writes: "Traffic to the blogosphere is less influenced by search engines than traffic to web sites is. This is one the several findings about blogosphere reported in the study, "*Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in Blogosphere*," published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, held in March 26-28, 2007, in Boulder, Colorado. The study concludes that the intensity of traffic directed to a blog through search engines (which use traditional page-rank algorithms) does not seem to correlate with the "real" popularity of the blog, and suggests that social-network-based navigation may be playing an increasingly important role in web navigation in general, and blogosphere navigation in particular. On that count the authors note that in blogspace, the popularity of a blog is more a reflection of its owner's social attributes (e.g., celebrity status, reputation, and public image) than a reflection of the number and rank of other blogs or web pages that point to it. This highlights the need for the development of page-rank algorithms that take into consideration the social attributes of blogosphere actors (as opposed to solely on the topology of the underlying blogspace), possibly using inference techniques. The study has also analyzed the nature of interactions between users and blogs. This more-interactive nature of the blogosphere leads to interesting traffic and communication patterns, which are different from those observed in traditional web content. They have observed different levels of "conversation" in the blogosphere. Access to objects in blogspace could be conceived as part of an interaction between an author and its readership. As they show in the study, such interactions range from one-to-many "broadcast-type" and many-to-one "registration-type" communication between an author and its readers, to multi-way, iterative "parlor-type" dialogues among members of an interest group. The study is available at: http://www.icwsm.org/program.html"

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