Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called Protected Media Path
, which is designed to seriously degrade the playback quality of any video and audio running on systems with hardware components not explicitly approved by Microsoft. The bypass of the DRM protection was in turn performed by breaking the Driver Signing / PatchGuard protection in the new operating system. Alex is now quite nervous about what an army of lawyers backed by draconian copyright laws could do to him if he released the details, but he claims to be currently looking into the details of safely releasing his details about this at the moment though
Alex Ionescu has found a way of fooling Vista into believing DRM is working when it’s not. It allows premium content such as HD-DVDs to be played on an uncertified computer
. This is quite different from the method used by muslix64 to circumvent DRM by locating the DRM key in the binary image of a DVD player program such as WinDVD
Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year. Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly refuses
to force its citizens to use driver’s licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the US Congress to repeal the law
A New Jersey state appellate court yesterday affirmed that any personal information given to ISPs must remain private. Yes, this indicates that New Jersey, like a lot of states, is ahead of the curve on Internet privacy,
said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group
Europe is upping the pressure on Apple to open up its restrictive DRM that ties iTunes to the iPod. Norway ruled last year that the iPod-iTunes tie-in was unreasonable and gave Apple a deadline to make a change to its policies, but was unsatisfied with the response they got. Now France and Germany have joined forces with Norway, making it a lot harder for Apple to just walk away from those markets
A North Dakota man aims to be the first hemp farmer in the United States. That is, the first one since the practice was made illegal in 1938 and only allowed again temporarily as part of the WWII war effort. After 10 years of recent effort by North Dakota lawmaker David Monson, he is now poised to receive a license to grow the crop beloved by sustainability advocates — as long as he gets fingerprinted first
The plaintext exploit used to partially crack HD-DVD a couple of weeks ago was brought to bear on Blu-Ray by the same gents this weekend–and it worked a treat
Record companies are considering ditching DRM for their MP3 albums. For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without rights management
technologies attached. Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, mobiles, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Should one of the big four take that route, however, it would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their monopoly over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade and allowed file-sharing to take its place —l via Slashdot
The Center for Consumer Freedom placed ads in the NYT attacking PETA, a radical pro-animal group. A little digging reveals that the Center for Consumer Freedom
is an astroturf organisation (fake grassroots) funded by the fast-food companies that PETA opposes — via Boing Boing
Apple plans to open up protected music and movies content bought from the iTunes Store. The iPod maker is expected to make two announcements this week — the first will be to allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB; the second will be to licence its Fairplay DRM to the company’s Made For iPod licencees
The husband of Second Life land baroness Anshe Chung said he should not have filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint against YouTube in his attempts to have the site delete a video of her avatar being attacked by a barrage of digital flying penises. And as a result, he said, he has revoked the DMCA claim. I didn’t realise that some people would misunderstand this as a censorship attempt, which it definitely was not,
Guntram Graef said. So, what was it if not an attempt to scupper the story?
Dell is the target of a class action suit on behalf of Canadian consumers who purchased several models of Inspiron notebooks. The suit claims the computer maker knowingly sold faulty machines
The terror alert e-mail service being offered by the British secret service is not secure, according to a Spy Blog, a libertarian organisation that monitors security and surveillance developments. MI5 launched an e-mail alert service on Tuesday which informs subscribers of any changes to the national security threat levels. However, a Spy Blog investigation claims to have found that subscriber details will be sent out of the country, unencrypted, to a server based in the US
News emerged this week that top cryptologists at the US National Security Agency had a hand in some of the security features in Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista. The NSA, best known for its code-breaking capabilities and covert-spying operations, loaned a team of cryptologists to the software giant for reviewing some of the security features in Vista, which is expected to be used, eventually, by hundreds of millions of computer users around the world. Microsoft has confirmed the agency played an active role in the software’s development
Sony has been convicted of misleading the French public and told to pay damages to a consumer watchdog for selling downloadable songs that only run on its own music players
A blogger named Spocko had his blog shut down by ABC/Disney lawyers because he had posted clips from an ABC Radio-affiliated program and commented on their content, as well as informed show advertisers of what exactly they were paying for. Spocko merely pointed out the content that station KSFO was broadcasting, and as a result Visa pulled their advertising from the station. More companies were reportedly considering pulling their ads
British travelers using a credit card to purchase their ticket may now have their credit card and email accounts inspected by US authorities. This has been true since October, when the US and the EU agreed about what information the US could demand from airlines and how this information would be handled. But details of the agreement only recently came to light following a Freedom of Information request. The US says it will encourage
US carriers to reciprocate to any requests by European governments
This New Year’s Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of US government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they’ll no longer be official secrets — it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption
The AACS DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has been cracked. The program allows one to decrypt and dump the video for play on a users hard drive, or it can be burned to a blank HD-DVD and played on a stand-alone player
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