Slashdot | DVD-Audio's CPPM Circumvented: "When DVD-Video's encryption had been broken about 6 years back, the next generation of the Audio CD, DVD-Audio had been delayed for several months. It was originally to use the CSS2 encryption scheme, but the breaking of CSS meant the music industry no longer wanted anything to do with CSS in the new upcoming DVD-Audio format at the time. As a result, DVD-Audio took on Content Protection for Pre-recorded Media (CPPM), a much more advanced copy-protection system, which includes Key Blocks and watermarking and allows revocation (for compromised devices).

It was not long ago that DVD-Audio playback software came to the PC. For example Creative's SoundBlaster Audigy 2 comes with a DVD-Audio as well as WinDVD's DVD-Audio add-on. So, rather than try to compromise the DVD-Audio's encryption itself, someone has succeeded in making a patch that uses WinDVD to perform the decryption and playback, but instead pipes the decrypted audio output to the hard drive instead of the sound card.... This tool is available at Rarewares."

Opera bakes in BitTorrent | The Register: "Opera has released a version of its web browser with the BitTorrent client built in. Users clicking on a Torrent file will see the file load in Opera's traditional Transfer window, so for most file transfers, there's no need to install a third-party BitTorrent client. To Opera, it's simply another MIME type, like Gopher and Usenet before it."

Slashdot | The 12-minute Windows Heist: "Sophos has come up with some pretty interesting research: apparently, there's a 50 percent chance unprotected Windows PCs will be compromised within 12 minutes of going online. Sophos came to that conclusion based on research covering the last six months of virus activity. The company said authors of malware such as spam, viruses, phishing scams and spyware have increased both the volume and sophistication of their assaults, releasing almost 8,000 new viruses in the first half of 2005 and increasingly teaming up in joint ventures to make money. The new-virus figure is up 59 percent on the same period last year."

Slashdot | Britain's First Jedi Member of Parliament: "In his maiden speech to the House of Commons, the Hon. Member for Copeland, Jamie Reed MP, announced that he is a Jedi: 'as the first Jedi Member of this place, I look forward to the protection under the law that will be provided to me by the Bill' (the quotation is a fair way down the page; search for 'Jedi,' not surprisingly)"

Questa non è una battuta umoristica: è sarcasmo, perché è in discussione in GB una legge estremamente controversa che vieterebbe ogni forma di satira religiosa perché la satira inciterebbe all'odio religioso. Patetico.

Embrace and extend - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Microsoft has publicly stated that it aims to 'embrace and extend' popular standards and existing work. 'Embrace, extend and extinguish' (EEE) is a scornful takeoff on this by Microsoft's critics, used to suggest that the stages of embracing and extending are only prefaces to extinguishing or supplanting existing work with Microsoft alternatives. (A similar takeoff with slightly more detail on the process is 'Copy, corrupt, copyright, circulate, control')."

L'articolo contiene un elenco delle tecnologie strangolate con questa tecnica.

Gates talks, but can't walk, his Tablet PC pledge | The Register: "On January 28, we reported that Microsoft finally acknowledged a bug in the default digitizer that ships with Windows XP Tablet Edition. The bug is pretty serious. It eats up the PC's memory forcing the user to reboot, or use a third-party digitizer, and had been plaguing users since the spring. In a follow-up to our piece, Microsoft's ISV manager Frank Gocinski told Microsoft Monitor's Mary Jo Foley that Redmond would ship a fix.

No service packs were slated, so Microsoft might just post the bug fix, as soon as it was ready, he said.

Alas, it was an empty gesture. There are no plans to fix the bug, or provide users with a fix, we hear.

For now, users are directed to this sage advice from Microsoft PR guy Robert Scoble:-

'I shut down my Tablet PC most evenings and start it up from a fresh boot,' he advised, on hearing of the taptip.exe bug. 'Why do I do that? Because I’ve been using computers for 20 years and have learned that’s the best way to work.'"

Highly critical Internet Explorer bug emerges: "SECUNIA WARNED of a fresh bug in Internet Explorer which it dubbed 'highly critical'.

The bug happens because the javaprxy.dll COM object can be injected incorrectly in IE through the object tag. This, said Secunia, can be exploited by others to cause memory corruption or allowing execution of arbitrary code."

Bush administration annexes internet | The Register: "the US Department of Commerce (DoC) has made it clear it intends to retain control of the internet's root servers indefinitely. It was due to relinquish that control in September 2006, when its contract with overseeing body ICANN ended."

Certo, si potrebbero definire dei root server alternativi non-USA, ma questo significherebbe frammentare la Rete. Che idiozia isolazionista.

Altre info e discussione su Slashdot e su CNN.

Reverse engineering patches making disclosure a moot choice? | The Register: "When Microsoft released limited information on a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer last month, reverse engineer Halvar Flake decided to dig deeper.

Using his company's tool for analyzing the differences in the patched and unpatched versions of a program, Flake pinpointed the portable networked graphics (PNG) vulnerability that Microsoft fixed with its latest update, locating the specific changes in less than 20 minutes."

In altre parole, mantenere il segreto sulla natura della falla chiusa da una patch è assolutamente inutile.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Comet mission set for deep impact: "The cosmic fireworks are scheduled for 0552 GMT on 4 July - American Independence Day.

Deep Impact, the spacecraft which carries and ejects the impactor will take pictures and gather data from the collision and its aftermath, 133 million kilometres (83 million miles) from Earth."

L'articolo include anche un ottimo schema della missione.

Pagine ufficiali NASA per Deep Impact sono qui.