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Television

Submission + - CSI Victim of Drive-by DRM

Submitted by BillGatesLoveChild
BillGatesLoveChild writes: The Sydney Morning Herald reports Australian viewers have been plagued by their new Digital TVs mysteriously locking up. Strangely most of the lockups occurred on one TV station and one program in particular: CSI.

Although the TV station involved refused to confirm or deny it, it now appears to be because they were altering the digital TV transmission to prevent viewers from exercising their Fair Use Rights to copy it. The problem was initially reported with LG Brand TV sets, other Digital TV owners are reporting similar problems.

If a TV stations zealtory for enforcing DRM prevents viewers from watching their programs, isn't it time to set back and ask if the whole DRM crusade is completely broken? So far no one has suggested that affected viewers can download CSI ad-free off Bit Torrent anyway.
The Internet

Submission + - Are TelecommunicationsTying Arrangments Back?

Submitted by
MCTFB
MCTFB writes: "With the merger of AT&T (formerly SBC) and Bell South, many of the features of the Ma Bell Monopoly seem to be in full force. Nevertheless, telecommunications consumers now at least have the option of internet phone companies like Skype and Vonage, or do they?

According to an entry on the Technorabble Blog, the blog author claims that he was the victim of a tying arrangment from AT&T where in order to get DSL service, he had to effectively get voice service as well. AT&T of course does not officially claim that one must purchase voice service, in order to get DSL service (because this would be overtly illegal), but the pain the blog author went through just to get his voice service removed, suggests that there may indeed be a covert attempt by AT&T to make it so difficult for DSL consumers to get DSL service without voice service, that DSL consumers will think twice about even bothering with internet phone service from a company such as Skype or Vonage.

What if anything can be done about this other than have telecommunications consumers spend many, many hours on the phone just to get someone at the home office to change a few settings in their customer database entry that will painlessly give them the services that they actually want?"
Media

Submission + - How MediaSentry Poisons P2P

Submitted by
Quid custodiet ipsos custodes?
Quid custodiet ipsos custodes? writes: "Ars Technica has an interesting tour of MediaSentry's operations. MediaSentry, best known for putting fake files on P2P networks, apparently has no less than 60 employees, 2,000 geographically diverse co-located servers, and 9 GBps of bandwidth which it uses to attack P2P networks that serve files it has been hired to protect. They use no less than four different tactics: decoy files, some of which are now advertisements; spoofing results to P2P network search requests; spamming uploaders with download request to eat their bandwidth; and swarming, where they join BitTorrent or similar swarms and serve bogus data to slow or corrupt the downloads. While some of this has been known for a while now, it would be interesting to see how this admission to the details of their operation plays in court. Given that the RIAA has offered little more than screenshots as evidence on infringement, could they not be mistakenly accusing people based on spoofs they paid MediaSentry to create?"
Music

Submission + - How to Turn A Music Lover to Piracy

Submitted by
dugn
dugn writes: "The Consumerist (consumerist.com) is running a story about how a run of the mill (read non-tech-savvy) music lover was pushed to become a pirate. http://consumerist.com/consumer/drm/how-i-became-a -music-pirate-245644.php A simple good piece that shows how the end user experience of DRM is starting to get needed traction in more blogs and mainstream web sites."
The Internet

Submission + - Utah backs calls to boot porn from Port 80

Submitted by
jeevesbond
jeevesbond writes: "Utah's governor and state legislature has lent its weight to efforts to persuade Congress to pass laws requiring adult content providers to stay off port 80, which generally carries HTTP web surfing traffic.

Governor Jon Huntsman last week backed a resolution from the state's parliament calling for the net to be split into "adult content channel" and a "family content". Utah's support for the proposed Internet Community Ports Act lends support to anti-porn group CP80, though it has little bearing on whether Congress will back the idea."
The Courts

Submission + - Do you know your rights during police encounters?

Submitted by stry_cat
stry_cat writes: Think you know your rights during police encounters? Like most Americans you probably know less than you think. FlexYourRights.org has a short quiz to see if you know what to do when you encounter the police.

I'll give you a hint, it's not like how they make it out on TV.
Media

Submission + - Peer-to-peer poisoners: A tour of MediaDefender

Submitted by
wwmedia
wwmedia writes: "When your company poisons peer-to-peer networks for a living, public relations usually takes a back seat to discretion; quiet is the rule in the P2P content-protection industry. That's why Jonathan Lee, the company's VP of business development, isn't worried that the corporate web site is down when I reach him in his Santa Monica office. "It's kind of ugly anyway," he says. For a company like MediaDefender, the largest such firm in existence, privacy comes naturally, but a 2005 acquisition by ARTISTDirect has encouraged the firm to take its services public as it starts to look beyond its original client base — music labels and movie studios — and dives headfirst into the brave new world of providing legitimate P2P content for advertisers. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/mediadefen der.ars"
Security

Submission + - A Freakonomic analysis of identity theft

Submitted by mlimber
mlimber writes: In a recent article, the Freakonomics guys analyze who pays for identity theft: 'So if the banks, the consumer and the police aren't sufficiently incentivized to stop identity theft, who is? ... The merchant.... "If you're a merchant," Peisner says, "you have all the liability."'
Encryption

Submission + - HD-DVD and Blu-Ray keys continue falling

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: arnezami at Doom9 has released a program that appears to reveal most of the keys needed to decrypt both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. Along with other users determined to safely backup and fairly use the high-definition content they purchase, arnezami and friends have greatly advanced the work begun by muslix64 only three months ago.
Microsoft

Submission + - NZ objects to Microsoft Open XML standard

Submitted by kumachan
kumachan writes: According to a Standards New Zealand spokesperson, the objection is that "the ISO [The International Organisation for Standardisation] has already developed a standard for XML open format [that is, Open Document] and the committee does not believe that there is a need for another standard, and that Microsoft's [standard] is in conflict with the existing one." http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/82AF97DEB BAFD057CC2572990006C14C
Privacy

No Passport For Britons Refusing Mass Surveillance 790

Posted by kdawson from the and-you-thought-Sweden-was-bad dept.
UpnAtom writes "People who refuse to give up their bank records, tax records & details of any benefits they've claimed, and the records of their car movements for the last year, or refuse to submit to an interrogation on whether they are the same person that this mountain of data belongs to — will be denied passports from March 26th. The Blair government has already admitted that this and other data will be cross-linked so that the Home Office and other officials can spy on the everyday lives of innocent Britons. Britons were already the most spied upon nation in Western Europe — more so even than Sweden. Data-mining through this unprecedented level of mass-surveillance allows any future British government to leapfrog even countries like China and North Korea."
Music

Submission + - Canadian Music Industry Says Its Never Sued Anyone

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lies from the recording industry probably doesn't count as news, but this whopper from the Canadian Recording Industry Association is striking for how deluded the industry has become. More than two years after it filed suit against 29 alleged file sharers, CRIA President Graham Henderson told an industry conference that "we've never sued anyone."
Privacy

Can Outing an Anonymous Blogger be Justified? 197

Posted by CowboyNeal from the scruples-be-damned dept.
netbuzz writes "Absolutely, depending on the circumstances, yet a Florida newspaper's attempt to unmask 'a political group hiding behind the name of a fictitious person' has sparked outrage in some circles. Part of the reason for that outrage is that the paper posted to its Web site a surveillance video of the blogger visiting its advertising department, a tactic the editor says he now regrets. What's really at issue here is the right to publish anonymously vs. the right to remain anonymous. The former exists, the latter does not."
Privacy

Submission + - Private database of student info open to Google

Submitted by deeceent
deeceent writes: A community college student who was Googling himself last month found some disconcerting information when he typed his name into the popular Internet search engine: a database file from his college popped up that included his name, birth date and Social Security number. The file also contained data on about 2,000 other students.

"We didn't think the information was open to Google," said Susie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Los Rios schools. "It was a shock to learn they were able to do it."
Music

Submission + - RIAA going after Internet Radio

Submitted by scopius
scopius writes: As reported this morning in The Wall Street Journal, the RIAA is now pushing Congress to hike royalty rates for Internet Radio. Tim Westergreen, co-founder of Pandora.com, claims that this action will shut down Pandora, along with many other internet radio stations. The rates set by the board are .08 cents per song per listener, and this rate is in addition to royalties already paid to the songwriters of the works. Up until this point, these stations had been paying a flat fee, but these new rates will be much larger than revenues for most stations. One interesting point is that normal radio doesn't have to pay anything like this rate, they only pay the songwriters royalties, according to the article.

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