Reports continue to filter in about DVDs that refuse to play on standard players from Toshiba, LG, Pioneer, Sony and others. The culprit is titles that utilise Sony’s ARccOS copy protection scheme, such as Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
, The Weinstein Company’s Lucky Number Slevin
, and Sony’s Casino Royale
, The Holiday
, and Stranger Than Fiction
. ARccOS artificially scrambles sectors on the disc in an attempt to keep users from ripping the disc to a drive. Many older (or less sophisticated) players simply skip these corrupted areas as unreadable and continue on. Computers — and unfortunately, some newer players — try to perform error correction on these areas and fail playback
Microsoft, a veteran defendant of epic antitrust battles in the United States and Europe, is urging antitrust officials to consider scuttling Google’s plan to buy DoubleClick
Want a video removed from YouTube? Send along a fake takedown notice pretending to be from the copyright holder. At least, it’s a prank that worked for a 15 year old from Perth, who sent a signed form to YouTube pretending to be from the Australian Broadcasting Company. The form requested the takedown of hundreds of clips from The Chaser’s War on Everything
, which the ABC has made freely available. The head of ABC-TV comedy, Courtney Gibson, says it is not clear why the boy impersonated an ABC employee and had the clips removed, but she is glad he has now apologised
The Tamil Tigers Liberation Front a separatist group in Sri Lanka, which has been classified as a terrorist group in 32 countries has moved up from routine sea piracy to a space-based one. They have been accused of illegally using Intelsat satellites to beam radio and television broadcasts internationally. Intelsat says that they will end the transmissions within days
. Intelsat has been accused of having business links with Hezbollah before, but claim that they are blameless this time and LTTE was using an empty transponder
Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year. The sale offers Google access to DoubleClick’s advertisement software and, more importantly, its relationships with Web publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies
Computer makers have been told they’ll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year, despite strong ongoing demand for the OS. Analysts and computer makers are wondering if the move is premature given Vista’s ongoing performance and compatibility issues. Dell recently said it would reintroduce XP on a range of machines due to customer demand but Microsoft will only allow this until the end of the year
The Tokyo Institute of Technology has announced a process for creating an inexpensive, nearly transparent, electrically conductive alumina cement. The conductivity is comparable to metal, and the transparency should be adequate for use in display panels. The process relies upon commonplace and inexpensive metals compared to the rare metals such as iridium currently used in display panels
While Apple is promising several new features in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac fans won’t be able to get their hands on the Leopard OS until later this year as a result of Apple diverting Leopard engineering and testing resources to the launch of the highly anticipated iPhone, which couples iPod-like functionality with smartphone capabilities
Company officials announced Tuesday that Palm will move to a new Linux-based platform to help the company compete better
. The move was announced during a meeting with analysts in New York, where they also discussed the company’s business strategy and refused to talk about recent rumours of a possible buyout
The discovery of the LED is usually credited to four US groups in 1962, but an unrecognised Russian genius got there forty years before. Oleg Losev even filed a patent on using his device for long range communications, and wrote to Einstein to ask for help with the theory — but got no reply — via Slashdot
The Chinese government is requiring game houses to modify MMOG’s to restrict under 18 users to three hours productive
gameplay per day. This anti-addiction
software must be in place within four months, with games not compliant by 15 July liable to be shut down in China. Net9, Shanda and NetEase will be moving to comply with the government regulations. Users will have to register with their real names and Chinese identity card numbers to be allowed access to the games
The internet industry has been plunged into uncertainty as the looming federal election makes Australia’s broadband future a political hot potato. Both Labor and the Coalition have been playing politics on proposals to build the broadband backbone expected to carry the bulk of the nation’s data for years to come. Picking a winner has become too risky for internet service providers, many of which are holding off on infrastructure investments until the smoke clears
Scottish scientists have developed a computer the size of a matchstick head, thousands of which can be sprayed onto patients to give a comprehensive analysis of their condition
Microsoft says that it’s dropping DRM from some of the catalog in the Zune store. This is the other shoe-drop we’ve all been waiting for since Apple announced last week that it would sell the entire EMI catalog (albeit at a 30% higher price) without DRM through the iTunes Music Store. Interestingly, Microsoft seems to be implying that it’s going to sell DRM-free tracks from labels other than EMI
The day when you can charge your cell phone or iPod just by going for a stroll around the block could be a step closer, thanks to a nano-generator. About a year ago, Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Tech in the US discovered that, when he disturbed zinc oxide nanowires, they gave off a tiny electrical current, a phenomenon called piezoelectricity. At the time, he had to use the tip of an atomic force microscope — a $250,000 instrument — to create about one-billionth of a watt of power. Not exactly energy efficiency. But with his latest experiment, Wang has improved his design at least a thousand-fold
The Gaim project is being renamed. This follows a lengthy and, unfortunately, secret legal process with AOL, which also prevented any code releases except betas. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM. Development is being migrated off of sourceforge.net as well and is now being hosted on developer.pidgin.im
Mozilla’s research group has developed a set of content sharing tools that will allow users to swap links and more efficiently track personal content like blog posts, movies, and photos
Michigan is spending $38 million to distribute an iPod to every child, for learning purposes. The plan included measures to tax soda and satellite TV services to pay for it, among other things, to raise funds. If you recall, Duke University tried something like this with mixed results. How financially strained will Michigan residents feel about paying higher taxes to buy someone else’s kid an iPod?
Although antivirus companies will probably create a hype saying that iPods are prone to infections, a virus called Podloso
is a newly found virus that is just a proof of concept code that can infect iPods running Linux. Once launched, the virus scans the device’s hard disk and infects all executable .elf format files. Any attempt to launch these files will cause the virus to display a message on the screen which says, You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus
Azureus has announced the beta release of Vuze, a reinvention of the one of Internet’s most popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications as a commercial distribution platform for HD content. The Vuze application, formerly called Zudeo, represents a marked change from Azureus’ older P-to-P software, which required some technical proficiency to get running
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