Posts filed under No Way!!!

Speed Photography in New York

And again a ridiculous law in the United States. The land of opportunities, and lame laws. Starting in August 2007, you can't be in one place for more than a half hour to make (scenic) photographs or shoot some video. This includes the setting up of your tripod etc. So no more waiting for that special sunset, or waiting for the sky to clear for that one special shot of/for your sweetheart. To make it even more ridiculous, you also need an insurance of 1 million USD if you need more time (which means you need a special permit). No doubt that this is initially intended for the professional movie makers or photographers, but there's the fear that this will be abused to harass the common man/woman/tourist. It must be very handy to have very general laws/rules, which the government can interpret as they see fit. Why don't they just pass a law which is states "It's illegal to....". In this case they can fill in the blanks whenever they want... Oh wait, they already did... The Patriot Act.
Posted on July 31, 2007 and filed under News, No Way!!!, Personal, Photography.

Illegal HEX codes

As some of you might know, the protection of Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD movies is based on a 'secret' key. You need the key to watch protected movies. The (software)players for these movies are able to 'decrypt' these keys from the disc containing the movie. So you already have these keys on the disc. They (the movie companies) just try to hide them from the user (security through obscurity). This is not strange that they use this scheme. It's just the way DRM works on these discs. Due to the lame-ass DMCA law in the United States, it's ILLEGAL to try to find the key on the disc :???: . Somehow a HD-DVD key got discovered (or leaked), and it's going around the great Internet. Several websites have been approached by lawfirms to take the pages down. This key is represented by a hexidecimal code. How the hell is it possible to declare a hexidecimal string illegal?? The same string can also be represented by a different format (e.g. BASE64). Is this also illegal? Since we dont know other hex keys for decrypting copy protected content, every other string of hex codes might also be illegal. Image this; what if the 'next' key might represent the number pi (03 14 15 92 6.....)? Does that mean that all math books need to be burned? Just another example of the fucked up DMCA law in the US. B.t.w. wondering what the last part is of the key... just use Google to search for "09 F9 11 02 9D".... Google knows he rest.
Posted on May 1, 2007 and filed under DRM, News, No Way!!!, Security.

Internet Porn On A Different 'Channel'

Most internet traffic for browsing is using ports 80 (http) and 443 (https). The wise governor (Huntsman) of Utah has suggested to ban pornsites from these default ports. This way it should be easier to block traffic to these sites (just block the porn-port). So I guess that the following ports will be used in the future of Internet browsing:
  • 69 - porn related websites
  • 666 - websites about satanisme
  • 1337 - TechTalk
  • etc.
Thankfully, the world is bigger than Utah, but I do feel sorry for those who live there......
Posted on March 21, 2007 and filed under Internet, News, No Way!!!.

First KP, Now AllofMP3

Yesterday I wrote that ISP's in the Netherlands are thinking about blocking website which are known to contain child pornography. In that post, I also asked myself; "What's next??"..... Well, it isn't going to be the blocking of gay sites, or satanism.. No, it's gonna be AllofMP3.com (according to nu.nl). Well, if the dutch RIAA (Brein) gets what they want :-( .
Posted on February 8, 2007 and filed under Internet, News, No Way!!!.