Their "open" DRM platform requires licencees to sign an agreement with Microsoft, and pay a licence fee that serves to keep the number of licencees small. A fellow attendee's verbatim note was: "We don't want this technology to be available to every hobbyist...."

Microsoft just declared war.

Blogzilla: DRM-a-go-go

INTEL IS ABOUT TO CUT Linux out of the legitimate content market, and hand the keys to the future of digital media to Microsoft at your expense. Don't like it? Tough, you are screwed. The vehicle to do this is called East Fork, the upcoming and regrettable Intel digital media 'platform'. The funny part is that the scheme is already a failure, but it will hurt you as it thrashes before it dies. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Intel is now referring to this as VIIV. Pay attention to the computer hardware you buy because the more people buy these chips, the more a dangerous new DRM technology will take hold.

Intel to cut Linux out of the content market

Sony BMG is facing a cacophony of criticism this week following the revelation that some of its CDs are packed with special copy-protection software that conceals itself with an advanced hacker cloaking technique. We think the company is getting off easy.

Wired News: The Cover-Up Is the Crime

The entire experience was frustrating and irritating. Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files.

While I believe in the media industry’s right to use copy protection mechanisms to prevent illegal copying, I don’t think that we’ve found the right balance of fair use and copy protection, yet. This is a clear case of Sony taking DRM too far.

Sony has gone very far over the line here. I will happily join in the chorus of people screaming lawsuit. Letting this one go would establish the premise that it's acceptable for the media industry to violate your property in order to protect theirs. That approach can only lead to worse problems.

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Now this is a truly new application of a keyboard, which I am sure will be rather hellishly expensive, but will probably not have any problem finding people to buy it judging from how much some fools are willing to pay for the reduced-size "Happy Hacker" keyboard--particularly since they willingly pay even more for the version where no one bothered to silkscreen labels onto the keys.

I give it a whole three months of this thing on the market before someone codes up a Drempels-style hack to make the keys change color and so on while the keyboard is being used. The possibilities are damn near endless.

Pimp.

This man deserves a patent with a large sack of money pinned to it.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
{sergey, page}@cs.stanford.edu
Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.

Brin and Page's original paper about Google while grad students at Stanford. Good reference for understanding how spiders/crawlers index, how you can search massive amounts of data efficently, etc.

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Started by the guy who wrote the book (literally) on hacking Tivo, this site is for posting info on hacking ANYTHING. Yes kids, 2600 has finally grown up and become a useful tool for everyday life.

mehack

All about mini-itx motherboards. The perfect hardware platform for your linux PVR or linux car.

mini-itx.com - news

] PhreakNIC 7 dates have been set for October 24-26, 2003!

PhreakNIC 7 :: Nashville, TN

Kinda adds new dimension to the tech term "fat pipe", no? :]

] The human genome is about 3,120,000,000 base pairs long,
] so half of that is in each spermatozoa -- 1,560,000,000
] base pairs.
]
] Each side of these base pairs can either be an
] adenine-thymine or a guanine-cytosine bond, and they can
] be aligned either direction, so there are four choices.
] Four possibilities for a value means it can be fully
] represented with two bits; 00 = guanine, 01 = cytosine,
] and so forth.
]
] The figures that I've read state the number of sperm in a
] human ejaculation to be anywhere from 50 to 500 million.
] I'm going to go with the number 200,000,000 sperm cells,
] but if anyone knows differently, please tell me.
]
] Putting these together, the average amount of information
] per ejaculation is 1.560*109 * 2 bits * 2.00*108, which
] comes out to be 6.24*1017 bits. That's about 78,000
] terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the
] entire text content of the Library of Congress to be
] scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20
] terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five
] seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In
] comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up
] much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s.
] Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th
] of that.
]
] If you consider signal to noise, though, the figures come out
] much differently. If only the single sperm cell that fertilizes
] the egg counts as signal, you get (1.560*109 * 2 bits) / 5 s =
] 6.24*108 bits/s, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 78 Mb/s.
] Still a great deal more bandwidth than your average cable modem,
] but not nearly the 5,000,000 Mb/s of the OC-96.

Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems