A couple of weeks ago was the
HD-DVD protection officially circumvented. Now the Blu-Ray protection (which also uses AACS for protection) is a '
goner'.
I wonder how many trillions of dollars were spent on this protection (which is being paid by the consumers who buy these discs). I just hope that the movie industry follows the music record labels (EMI n this case) in
removing protection on audio CD's.
B.t.w. I saw the ripped HD-DVD movie '
Serenity' on my PC, and must say that the HD quality is phenomanal. Time to become an early-adaptor on the HD format (again :-)). This means a new
Full-HD TV, and an appropriate player.
The highly anticipated version
Wordpress v2.1 has been released today.
This meant upgrading my older version (v2.05). The upgrading itself was quite easy (if you follow the
upgrade instructions to the letter).
I also upgraded my
hacked TinyMCE Wordpress Editor with an '
official' upgrade....
Let the posting begin
Update: 'unhacked' it again because of erratic behaviour of the editor, and manipulated the original included TinyMCE editor (see the end of my earlier
post regarding this).
OK, the title might sound a little weird, but trust me..... I work on a daily basis with digital certificates (end-user, and SSL certificates). These things get more, and more common these days. More and more webservices are being 'secured' by SSL certificates. The only problem is that the technicians who run the services don't know shit (well, most of them do) about SSL and/or PKI. I don't blame them, because it tends to be a little complex. SSL certificates can be generated as selfsigned certificates, or you might wanna get a commercial SSL certificate from Certificate Authorities like VeriSign, Thawte, GeoTrust, etc. Anyway, in every case, you need to generate a certificate signing request (CSR), and submit it to the Certificate Authority. The problem is that there are some applications that stay in a pending mode if you generate a CSR, and wait for the resulting certificate to come back from the CA. This might take a couple of days. It would be a lot nicer if you can request the certificate on another platform, and import it in the application when you get the thing. There are several ways to generate a CSR on the different platforms;
- OpenSSL - equivalent to rocket science for most people, since it's a commandline tool
- Via webserver tooling (IIS, JAVA Keytool, etc.)
- XCA - Not very user friendly if you're requesting just one or two certificates a year.
- And probably some other 'obscure' ways
But what if your application needs a SSL certificate, or your webserver is located on the other side of the world (and you have no way of accessing it directly)? How the hell do you generate a CSR? The Windows platform itself doesn't have any tools for creating certificates (only if you use IIS or have a CA running on the platform). I hope to solve this by creating an application (cross platform off course) which creates these CSR's, and create pkcs12 (or .pfx) files when you import the resulting certificate in the tool. This pkcs12 file can be installed on the server as needed. Finally, a challenge for me to start programming again.
Within the next couple of weeks, I need to pick a new lease car. It's probably gonna be the new
Honda Civic 1.8 Executive (black). I just hope that they have some sort of iPod integration for this car.
Anyone any info on that? It's got to be integrated or something, because the audio system is integrated into the dashboard, so it's not possible to place a 'stand-alone' car stereo in the car with iPod support (e.g. the
Alpine car hifi components :-P).
Blu-ray HD is falling behind on HD-DVD. Why? Well, it seems that Sony (the 'owner' of Blu-ray HD technology)
doesn't allow porn on Blu-ray discs.
The first porn titles are being released on HD-DVD, and we all know what that means.... (remember VHS versus the superior Video2000 or Betamax), and as a matter of fact, the Internet got its boost from the online porn business.
Byebye Blu-ray, and hello HD-DVD
in December 2006, Cisco (Linksys) launched a new product called the '
Iphone'. This week, Apple launched the much anticipated '
iPhone'. This resulted in speculations on the Internet. Is Apple allowed to use the word 'iPhone' for the new gadget?
Lawyers say that Apple might be heading for a huge lawsuite over the term 'iphone'... Why? Because it seems that Cisco canceled the patent on the word 'iphone'. Just another way of generating lots of free publicity if you ask me.
Just
search for 'iphone', and see for yourself.
Well, Steve Jobs introduced the
Apple iPhone at MacWorld 2007. The new phone features:
- Phone (duh)
- Internet
- 4GB or 8GB iPod with all the usual iPod features (and widescreen!!!)
- POP3 and IMAP mail support (free push-IMAP with premium Yahoo accounts)
- All touchscreen, no 'normal' keyboard or stylus.
- Runs on OSX
- Available in Europe 4th quarter 2007, and will probably cost around 500 euros
Well, I know what I want for X-mas this year :-D
UPDATE: I just saw the actual keynote, and I must say that the iPhone is really impressive. Can't wait till x-mas...... must have.... NOW!!!!
The highly anticipated MacWorld 2007 starts tomorrow with Steve Jobs' keynote (18:00 hours CET). During this keynote, Steve will discuss the last years highlights, but will also introduce, or comment on the new hardware, and software which will be release this year.
The following items are rumoured to be announced/introduced:
- iPhone (phone, PDA, music player hybrid)
- iTV (a sneak preview was provided in 2006)
- Dual Quadcore Mac Pro's (8 cores instead of the current 4 cores)
- New Apple Cinema Displays (larger, and improved with the Apple iSight)
- More info on the new features in OSX Leopard
Anyway, I'll be scouting the Internet tomorrow for 'live' coverage of the keynote. Hopefully a decent video stream will be available for those who can't attend the keynote.
So, if I'm not responding to phone calls, e-mail, or on IM......
The new and improved security in Microsoft Vista regarding DRM may have (and probably will) have great consequences for the end-user. Peter Gutman published
his research on the DRM features in Windows Vista, and his findings are staggering.
The biggest concerns are related to hardware certification revocation, and dynamically downscaling quality.
Dynamically downscaling qualit means that if Vista plays some DRM enabled media on the PC (HD-DVD, or whatever), all other in and outputs are degraded. This means that your high quality pr0n has a lousy quality, while you're listening to DRM enabled music..... Well that suck, but implications can be huge, as Peter Gutman explained.
Furthermore, the revocation of driver certificates. If, somehow, a driver signing certificate gets stolen from a manufacturer, Microsoft has the ability to revoke that particular certificate. This means that the complete install base for that drives becomes totally useless. It could mean that your PC won't be able to boot (and everyone else's) if you have that particular brand of motherboard. What if key public services become useless because of this driver revocation? No more fresh water, traffic lights gone haywire??
Peter also mentiones that the DRM scheme in general is very weak;
Note B: I'll make a prediction at this point that, given that it's trying to do the impossible, the Vista content protection will take less than a day to bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple security hole that applies only to one piece of code (and can therefore be quickly patched), and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn't mean it'll be broken the day or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker is motivated to bypass the protection, it'll take them less than a day or a week to do so.
Funny thing is that engadget recently posted
an article about a piece of software that claims to remove DRM from HD-DVD movies...... So Peter's thoughts on that weren't that far off :).
Personally I think that the entire Music and Movie industry needs to come to their senses, and stop treating every customer as a criminal. But unfortunatelly, I don't think that that's gonna happen
soon.
I'll probably need a new TV next year, and it's gonna be this
Philips 42PF9731D/10 TFT TV.
It features;
- 42 inch wide screen
- Full HD display (1080p)
- dual HDMI inputs
- Ethernet, and USB (for viewing movies or photos from your PC :) ).
- Support playback for mp4, mp3, DivX, XviD, etc.
- 2 tuners
- Multiple in- and outputs
Only drawback is the price (+3000 euros), so the New Years Eve lottery jackpot is more than welcome. If that hapends, I'll also throw in a
Xbox-360, and a
Nintendo Wii.
