Apple is DRM’s Biggest Backer:“Arstechnica is running an article pointing out that while some pockets of the entertainment industry are experimenting with DRM-free distribution, Apple Inc, which announced that they have now sold over 2,000,000,000 songs on iTunes, is now the strongest pro-DRM force in digial media. From the article: ‘DRM is dying. It’s a statement being echoed with increasing frequency around the Web over the last few weeks, and is perhaps best articulated in this Billboard article.
Browsing Posts published in January, 2007
Decryption Keys For HD-DVD Found, Confirmed:kad77 writes “It appears that, despite skepticism, ‘muslix64′ was the real deal. Starting from a riddle posted on pastebin.com, members on the doom9 forum identified the Title key for the HD-DVD release ‘Serenity.’ Volume Unique Keys and Title keys for other discs followed within hours, confirming that software HD-DVD players, like any common program, store important run-time data in memory. Here’s a link to decryption utility and sleuthing info in the original doom9 forum thread. The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?”
Tunneling MySQL connections through SSH (3 Jan 2007):This is a description of how to set up a secure tunnel between your MySQL Server and a locally running MySQL Administrator using Putty. By creating a secure tunnel to your MySQL server using Putty, you can grant localhost access to powerful applications like MySQL Administrator while at the same time, make your server appear as if it isn’t even there. In effect, make your MySQL server disappear from the outside world.
HTML Cheat Sheet: HTML is the language of the web. It is the semantic support on which websites depend. This A4 reference lists the various tags available to the web designer, as well as a selection of useful character entities, attributes and events.
A wireless boost for video at home:Your PC may soon be beaming video around the house. A hot topic at CES is likely to be which tech works best.
New Spy Chief’s “Total Information” Ties:“John Michael McConnell, the retired vice admiral slated to become America’s new top spy, [has some] longtime associations [which] may cause him headaches during Senate confirmation hearings,” Newsweek.com notes.“One such tie is with another former Navy admiral, John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who started the controversial ‘Total Information Awareness’ program at the Pentagon in 2002.” The international consultancy that McConnell has worked at for a decade as a senior vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton, won contracts worth $63 million on the TIA “data-mining” program, which was later cancelled [kinda sorta -- ed.]… While his role in the TIA program is unlikely to derail McConnell’s nomination, spokespeople for some leading Democratic senators such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon say it will be examined carefully. McConnell was a key figure in making Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., the prime contractor on the project, according to officials in the intelligence community and at Booz Allen who would discuss contracts for data mining only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “I think Poindexter probably respected Mike and probably entrusted the TIA program…
Network neutrality supporters target Congress:In the wake of AT&T’s decision to support network neutrality for two years, supporters of the idea have turned their sights upon Congress, and they’ve started predicting victory.
Open Source 2007?:There’s an interesting article called "Open Source 2007" that appears in Educause Review magazine. The irony is that the article was published in 2004 and was somewhat avant garde at the time. While it’s hard to make predictions (especially about the future!), it’s clear that most of the ideas on open source have come to be accepted. Brad Wheeler, CIO of Indiana University and an open source advocate with the research and statistics to back up his views, makes a compelling case for why open source will has already become mainstream. Adoption of open source software –both infrastructure and applications– has accelerated faster than many have predicted, though perhaps it has become more accepted in commercial markets and among high-tech companies than in academia.Brad Wheeler also chairs the Open Source Portfolio. I wonder if he’s related to David Wheeler who has also published a lot of good quantitative data on open source?
Open Source in Telco: In the last year, we’ve seen open source software explode into the telecommunications market. Typically telco equipment manufacturers, carriers and the like are on the bleeding edge of technology adoption, so this is really no big surprise. The only surprise is how fast they’ve migrated from home-grown and proprietary software to open source. Some of the largest deals MySQL closed in the last year were in the telecommunications industry, who are heavy users of MySQL Enterprise and MySQL Cluster. This includes such well known companies as Alcatel, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, France Telecom, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel, Telio, Vodafone and many others. We’ve also started to see a new generation of "Web meets Telco" companies, like Tellme Networks, build almost completely on open source. Tellme was able to reduce the costs of their mission critical applications and improve availability by using MySQL. They use it in their core distributed data cluster handling more than 2 terabytes of data per week as well as for data warehousing and as a general data store for their applications. Tellme has grown tremendously in the last few years. They are the market leader in Directory Assistance handling nearly 2 billion call sper year and over 80% of all automated calls in Amercia including customers like American Airlines, Amazon, E*Trade, FedEdx, Merrill Lynch, Dominos and many others. They are also now powering all Cingular Wireless 411 calls. If you’ve ever used an automated voice recognition system to make reservations or check on the status of an order, you’ve most likely been using Tellme’s service. You can also use Tellme to do any kind of general web searching by calling 1-800-555-TELL (or 1-800-555-1212). Seeing widespread use of Open Source in mission-critical telecommunications applications shows how far the technology has come in recent years. It’s not just about web application front-ends anymore. The new generation of business critical applications are web-based now and it seems clear that this trend towards web convergence will continue. My believe is that the Web 2.0 companies we regard as leading edge today will showcase an architecture that becomes mainstream for Enterprise 2.0 in the next few years.
Ash: An AppleScript Shell:Looking for an easier alternative to osascript that still runs in the command line?… It’s a Perl-powered script that lets you interactively execute AppleScript commands (including multi-line tell commands) as well as create interpretable scripts (via #!/usr/bin/env ash). There are a number of useful flags built in that can be used to execute commands from a specified file, echo values during execution, to display the current AppleScript, to repeat the most recent script, to call Unix commands, and so forth. e.g.tell application “Finder” set theSelection to selection set n to number of items in theSelection -echo “number of items selected: ” & n repeat with i from 1 to n -echo “item ” & i & “ is ” & (item i of theSelection as alias) end repeatend tellThe script downloaded easily–although you do have to gunzip it and chmod it to make it executable…. There were some strange echos during the execution trace, i.e. it listed the whole script up to the current line for every step along the way, but I’m guessing this could be turned off by one of the built-in flags or by editing the source itself, which is quite short.
ZFS Overview from Sun:Here’s a PDF overview of ZFS by Jeff Bonwick of Sun Microsystems. The 128-bit ZFS file system will apparently be used in Leopard to provide multi-disk data pools as well as to create data snapshots for backups. ZFS provides fast data access with lots of data integrity features. It’s a nice, easy-to-follow overview that’s well worth a look if you have any interesting in learning more about ZFS.
Between worm attacks and simple human observation, sites like MySpace are the perfect place to obtain saleable personal information…. In October, the alliance issued its first social networking study examining the link between specific online behaviors and the potential for becoming a victim of cybercrime. Despite all the publicity about sexual predators on sites like MySpace and FaceBook, the alliance took a different approach by measuring the potential for threats such as fraud, identity theft, computer spyware and viruses. Although 57 percent of people who use social networking sites admit to worrying about becoming a victim of cybercrime, they are still divulging information that may put them at risk, as Boyd suggested. Social networkers are also downloading unknown files from other people’s profiles, and responding to unsolicited instant messages that could contain worms, the NCSA reported.“
Hackers Disagree On How, When To Disclose Bugs:darkreadingman writes to mention a post to the Dark Reading site on the debate over bug disclosure. The Month of Apple Bugs (and recent similar efforts) is drawing a lot of frustration from security researchers. Though the idea is to get these issues out into the open, commentators seem to feel that in the long run these projects are doing more bad than good. From the article: “’I've never found it to be a good thing to release bugs or exploits without giving a vendor a chance to patch it and do the right thing,’ says Marc Maiffret, CTO of eEye Security Research, a former script kiddie who co-founded the security firm. ‘There are rare exceptions where if a vendor is completely lacking any care for doing the right thing that you might need to release a bug without a patch — to make the vendor pay attention and do something.’”
Wi-Fi is like sand — it gets everywhere. If you’re toting your laptop to some sunny paradise this winter, you’ll find you can combine body surfing, board surfing and web surfing at hundreds of public beaches all over the world.
U.S. to declassify secrets aged 25 and older
