EMI’s copy-protection technology has resulted in a Melbourne resident doing exactly what the company is trying to prevent — copy a music disc in order to listen to it
IT security pioneer Professor Bill Caelli has warned that Hollywood and Bill Gates may be able to take control of our PCs via new digital rights management techniques that allow content providers to enforce their policies on our machines
Position Available: Interpreter, must be fluent in Klingon. The language is one of about 55 that may be needed in the future by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County, Portland, Oregon
Recently, the RIAA has been trying to flood KaZaA with files that appear to be valid copyrighted material but are empty. The P2P networks are considering a possible move against the RIAA in response to this by using recently enacted anti-spam laws — via Slashdot
Kermit the Frog and the rest of the Muppets are heading home after their German parent company, EM.TV & Merchandising, agreed to sell them back to their original owners, the children of Muppets creator Jim Henson — beating out Disney and Sony
Foxtel subscribers will be able to access 53 new channels and the ability to pause live television under a package providing new set-top boxes from early next year
With Pattern Recognition now out, William Gibson talks about blogging, which ones he’s looking at and why he may have to quit blogging himself — via Slashdot
Verbatim has just extended its Digital Vinyl series — CDs overprinted with a grooved vinyl record texture, complete with centre label — by boosting the capacity to 80 minutes (700MB), shipping them in a 50-disc spindle pack and offering a label area that can be directly printed on using an inkjet CD printer — via The Register
A federal judge has ordered Harry Potter books back onto an Arkansas school district’s library shelves, rejecting a school board’s claim that tales of wizards and spells could harm school children
Another chapter in the high times of the internet stockmarket bubble closed yesterday when the Chaos Group, a one-time high-flyer, announced plans to sell its internet music business back to its founder
Peter Lloyd, author of Taking The Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix, believes that many of the plot developments in The Matrix
that seem to contradict the laws of physics, biology, etc, can actually be explained with a closer look at the science — via Slashdot
Starship Dimensions places images of various starships from science fiction settings such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, ID4, Macross/Robotech, Lexx, Freespace and Battlestar Galactica side-by-side, in scale. The author has also conveniently included football fields, humans, King Kong, and buildings for comparison. You can even drag them around the page and stage your own interstellar battle royale — via Slashdot
Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term Shock and Awe
for a computer game. It is among a swarm of companies scrambling to commercially exploit the war in Iraq, which has killed more than 5,000 soldiers and civilians in the space of three weeks
Standard PC file-compression programs can already be used to detect the language in which a piece of text is written. Now researchers have shown they can distinguish between classical music, jazz and rock — all without playing a single note. And audio fingerprinting can name a tune as it plays, promptly displaying the title and artist on an internet radio or mobile phone
A Los Angeles police officer, Kelly Chrisman, used department computers to access confidential law enforcement records of celebrities and sold the information to tabloids
Radio stations that are 100% digital can’t play certain copy-protected CDs because the copy-protection doesn’t allow them to rip the tracks on to their station’s system. Copy-protection is therefore directly responsible for the lack of airtime in this market by the artists who choose to copy-protect their CDs.
The music industry fired another strong counterattack, suing four college students at three universities who run file-sharing sites
After getting a standing ovation as he walked on stage, Michael Moore was later visibly shaken at the loud boos and jeers that followed his anti-Bush comments at the Oscars
In the same vein as the Internet Movie Database, the fledgling Internet Book List needs people to vote on books they’ve read, and even more it needs dedicated people to submit books and author information
The vast majority of people say they have been mentally tortured at one point in their lives by a song that keeps repeating itself over and over in their heads
RSS – Posts