Myria - Slashdot User

Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" Project Aband-> 0

Submitted by

Myria

on Saturday September 22 2007, @06:46PM

Myria writes "The Associated Press reports that Alaska's Gravina Island Bridge project, most of whose funding had once been secured by Sen. Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens, has officially been abandoned. The $398,000,000 bridge, widely dubbed "the bridge to nowhere", would have connected Ketchikan, population 7,410, to its airport on Gravina Island."
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RIAA & MPAA Petition California for License to

Submitted by

Myria

on Saturday April 07 2007, @04:01PM

Myria writes "Saturday's Los Angeles Times is running an article about how the RIAA and MPAA are lobbying the California Senate for an exemption from a proposed law making "pretexting" illegal in the wake of the Hewlett-Packard scandal. The attempt appears unlikely to succeed. From the article:

The trade group asked that any owner of a copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret be able to use "pretexting or other investigative techniques to obtain personal information about a customer or employee" when seeking to enforce intellectual property rights. ... The industry's proposed amendment is unlikely to get anywhere when it comes up for an initial hearing in the California Senate's Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
"

Microsoft announces Vista 32 will not play HD-DVD

Submitted by on Friday August 25 2006, @01:17AM

Myria writes "Microsoft has announced that the 32-bit version of Windows Vista will not be able to play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray content for copy protection reasons, according to APC Magazine here. Vista 64 will not let the user install device drivers that are not signed. Vista 32 allows them for compatibility. Poised by Microsoft as a safeguard against rootkits, required driver signing is really a DRM scheme. If only signed drivers work, it's not possible to make fake sound card and video card drivers that dump everything to disk. Its protection against rootkits is dubious at best, since overwriting the MBR and rebooting is enough to install a rootkit regardless of driver signing. With so few reasons to use Vista, and so many reasons not to, what's the point?

Joanna Rutkowska showed an exploit against driver signing on August 3 at Black Hat. Now that it's publicly known that driver signing is tied to DRM, is what she did now illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?"