Oops! Someone leaked the strategy!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/16/0244242&from=rss
DRM — It's Not Really About Piracy
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 16, @05:03AM from the squeezing-blood-from-silicon dept. Media Music
shadowmage13 writes "Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article: 'In a nutshell: DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you... Like all lies, there comes a point when the gig is up; the ruse is busted. For the movie studios, it's the moment they have to admit that it's not the piracy that worries them, but business models which don't squeeze every last cent out of customers.' You can take action on Digital Restrictions Management at DefectiveByDesign of the Free Software Foundation, Digital Freedom, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
[Best quote: “History repeats itself, especially the bad parts.” Bob]
RFID... 10 minutes of overstatement?
http://digg.com/politics/The_National_ID_Card_Hello_Big_Brother
The National ID Card - Hello Big Brother!
Say goodbye to your privacy and hello to big brother. Guess you'll have to think twice about buying that special something very soon...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7pHb7bPfMc&eurl=
For legal research?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/013589.html
January 15, 2007
UK Statute Law Database Will Be Available to Public Free
The BBC reports that the government has decided to provide free public access to a database of UK laws.
[My favorite is this anti-terrorist measure...
Poaching Prevention Act 1862 (c.114)
2. It shall be lawful for any constable or peace officer in any county, borough, or place in Great Britain and Ireland, in any highway, street, or public place, to search any person whom he may have good cause to suspect of coming from any land where he shall have been unlawfully in search or pursuit of game, or any person aiding or abetting such person...
...define your average citizen as “game” and you can search any terror suspect you want -- “don't need no stinking warrant!” . Bob]
This should help you stalk your congressman...
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/013591.html
January 15, 2007
GovTrack Announces New Features for the New Congress
From the announcement on the GovTrack homepage:
"The full text of bills is now displayed in HTML and highlights the changes made to the text during its legislative history, such as due to amendments and substitutions.
The people pages now show a recent voting history, an ideology meter, and pages for senators show their constituent approval rating.
The Subjects page now shows 80 major subject categories to help find interesting subjects.
There is a new page for committees but the membership information has not yet been updated for the 110th Congress.
The Upcoming Senate Committee Meetings monitor can now be tracked with an iCal feed.
Stop the presses! The FBI suspects that people can access public data!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070115/101253.shtml
FBI: Terrorists Can Operate Airport Webcams, You Know
from the well-duh dept
A new "assessment" from the FBI and the Homeland Security Department suggests that airport webcams are the latest public menace, and may be used by terrorists to plan their attacks on the nation's airports (via The Raw Feed). The warning was triggered after a link to an Alaskan airport webcam was posted to an unspecified "extremist website," raising concerns among the feds that terrorists were using the cameras to track "security measures, guard shift changes, and pedestrian and vehicular traffic patterns." No specific instance of webcam use by actual terrorists was given, and the warning is "precautionary", says the feds. As with the recent Google Earth terrorism worries, terrorists are going to get the information they need whether or not these technologies exist. We're guessing that a group seriously considering an attack isn't going to rely solely on grainy 100 yard views of tarmacs, but it's nice to know the FBI and Homeland Security have realized that public access webcams shouldn't be aimed at secure airport facilities. S till, we might be safer if we just shut this whole Internet thing off.
Now this is just stupid!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/15/201259&from=rss
Mandatory DRM for Podcasts Proposed
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 15, @04:51PM from the good-idea-bad-idea dept. Music
Knytefall writes "Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and two GOP senators are sponsoring a bill called the PERFORM Act that would require podcasts with music and satellite radio to be locked-up with music industry-approved DRM software. From the article: 'All audio services — Webcasters included — would be obligated to implement "reasonably available and economically reasonable" copy-protection technology aimed at preventing "music theft" and restricting automatic recording.'"
Some Jefferson letters...
http://www.solutionwatch.com/544/footnote-millions-of-historical-documents-online/
Footnote Millions of Historical Documents Online
Monday January 15th 2007, 4:31 am
Written by: Brian Benzinger
Footnote is an impressive resource which launched last week that allows users to access and annotate millions of historical documents online for the first time. Interested in the Civil War or perhaps the Bureau of Investigation? Just look it up on Footnote and within seconds view digitized copies of the original documents including photographs, signed documents, letters, case studies and more. Footnote has also established a partnership with the National Archives providing access to millions of historical documents for viewing online. Around 4.5 million documents have already been added to the site and apparently millions more to come.
...beware the “appearance” of security...
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/407?ref=rss
Rainbow table targets Word, Excel crypto
Robert Lemos 2007-01-15
Office workers looking to protect their documents may want to select a higher grade of encryption.
Swiss information-technology firm Objectif Sécurité announced last week that its latest pre-generated list of passwords and their hashes, known as a rainbow table, can now crack the standard encryption on Word and Excel documents in about 5 minutes on average. Using about 4 gigabytes of data, the program--named Ophcrack_office--can quickly defeate almost 99.6 percent of all passwords, according to the company.
"What happens is that we actually crack the 40-bit key that is used to encrypt Word and Excel documents," [a 40 bit key would be called “trivial encryption” in a not-politically-correct article. Bob] Philippe Oechslin, CEO of Swiss information-technology firm Objectif Sécurité and the inventor of rainbow tables, told SecurityFocus in an e-mail. "We found a way to use the same tables for both Word and Excel, although they have different file formats."
Rainbow tables sidestep the difficulty in cracking a single password by instead creating a large data set of hashes from nearly every possible password. To break a password, the attacker merely looks up the hash to find the password that produces that code. The theory behind rainbow tables extends research by Martin Hellman and Ronald Rivest done in the early 1980s on the performance trade-offs between processing time and the memory needed for cryptoanalysis. Others have also attempted to turn the tables into a business.
While such software has legitimate uses, such as recovering a document to which the password has been lost, data thieves could also use it to steal corporate secrets.
Geek stuff
Welcome to VirtualBox.org!
InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).
I find this very hard to hear. Perhaps you will have better luck?
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1886/disaster-recovery
Disaster Recovery
Posted by Paul Lancour | January 15th, 2007 8:00 am
How prepared is your organization to deal with the challenges of a disaster? How safe are your facilities, your data, your people? What is the most common disaster that causes a disruption of services in business today? Sometimes it's the things you don't think of that get you. Stephanie Balarous of Forrester and Laurel Burton of Qwest review what you need to know about disaster recovery for your business in this Qwest podcast.
How to ensure you have something to recover with... (Don't credit the Identity Theft argument. Consider offering backup to your clients!)
http://digg.com/software/CrashPlan_Automatic_Offsite_Backup
CrashPlan - Automatic Offsite Backup
I've been waiting for someone to write this app [I'll bet there is a business model here... Bob]. Rather than paying monthly fees to backup services, CrashPlan uses a friends PC to automatically backup your data. All data is encrypted on the remote drive for added privacy. Check out the 'Features' page.
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