Thousands of Library of Congress Photos Now Available on Flickr

Photoshoppers rejoice!
Offering historical photograph collections through Flickr gives the Library of Congress a welcome opportunity to share some of our most popular images with a new visual community.
We invite you to tag and comment on the photos, and we also welcome identifying information—many of these old photos came to us with scanty descriptions!
To view the [...]

Wall-Mart Puts the Muscle on Warner and BMG to Ditch DRM

You all know those stories we hear about the E-v-i-l Wal-Mart muscling the poor manufacturers and distributors to lower prices. Well this time Wally World is using its power for the forces of Good!

A Tipping Point For MP3s
(waaaay down the article we find this little nugget of good news)
… mass merchant Wal-Mart [is] alerting [...]

Castro; Dead, Zombie, or Animatronics?

The news is out that “It’s official: we can unequivocally declare that it wouldn’t be inaccurate to assume that there isn’t reason to not believe that Fidel Castro may or may not be dead (maybe)” Which is how the headline was submitted on Fark
If you want to keep up on what’s going on in [...]

Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs “ineffective”

Via Oikeuden edessä and slashdot:

Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs “ineffective”
In an unanimous decision released today, Helsinki District Court ruled that Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is “ineffective”. The decision is the first in Europe to interpret new copyright law amendments that ban the circumvention of “effective technological measures”. [...]

09 f9: A Legal Primer … or … What is the AACS-LA’s Legal argument?

The AACS-LA made some news yesterday. Read about some of it here, here, and here, as well as the following from the EFF Deep Links section:
What is the AACS-LA’s argument? In its takedown letters, the AACS-LA claims that hosting the key violates the DMCA’s ban on trafficking in circumvention devices. The DMCA provides that:
No person [...]

Net Neutrality

save the internet

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License Launched

The latest version of the Creative Commons licenses — Version 3.0 — are now available. Read more here. Via: /. & BoingBoing.

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

Professor Lawrence “RW” Lessig’s “The Withering of the Net”

On June 16, 2006, Professor Lawrence Lessig gave a talk at the Center for American Progress entitled “The Withering of the Net: How DC Pathologies are Undermining the Growth and Wealth of the Net.” This talk was the second in a series of three. The first talk [...]

Exposed: HD DVD and Blu-ray Processiong Keys for All HD Titles

I was following this discussion on Doom9 yesterday, where arnezami claims to have found the “processing key” used to decrypt the DRM on all HD DVD and Blu-Ray Disc films.
It looks like this is the real McCoy and the news is starting to get around…
arnezami claims to have found it by simply watching his [...]

China Announces Massive Online ID Database

Via SlashDot:

China provides access to ID database to curb fraud

Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country’s population information center’s website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person’s identity card match. If they do match the ID cardholder’s picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding [...]

Has your video been removed from YouTube based on a bogus Viacom takedown?

Unfairly Caught in Viacom’s Dragnet? Let the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) know!

Well, with its 100,000 DMCA takedown notices aimed at YouTube users, now it’s Viacom that is netting its share of dolphins. Among the 100,000 videos targeted for takedowns was a home movie shot in a BBQ joint, a film trailer [...]

Seething the Light

Nuke is having fun at the hardware store.

Nike, Burger King , and now Feit Electric?

While perusing the website of recent commenter, Jon, my keen blogger’s instinct recoiled in horror, as I discovered a photograph of the GE Feit Electric flourescent light bulb which … wait for it … contains similarities to the arabic spelling of [...]

RIAA declares war on Rap mixes – UPDATE

From analoghole

I do not think that law means what you think it means

One thing that is apparent from both the affidavit and the quotes from Chief Baker is that the police investigating the case seem quite sure that it is a violation of Georgia law to sell CDs that are not labeled with the “true [...]

RIAA Lawsuits: Boy Bites Dog

New York teen sues record industry

A New York teen, dubbed a pirate by the Record Industry, is counter suing them for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

Robert Santangelo, who was 11 when he is supposed to have downloaded music, has come out fighting. He denies sharing music using [...]

Vista DRM Already Cracked?

Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called ‘Protected Media Path’ (PMP), 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 [...]

Wii hacked to play backups

Already! Here is a link to the Inquirer article…
If this isn’t a fake I will keep posting updates here, instead of a bunch of separate posts. (Not a fake Wiinja ModChip is now available).
UPDATE:
WiinJa ModChip website
USA Preorder here
Details:
Wiinja Drivechip Mod
$55.00
Features:
Non Swap / Direct Boot
Boots Own Region WII Backups Directly
Boots Own Region WII Backups [...]

AACS Confirms HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Cracked

AACS hack blamed on bad player implementation

A month after the first signs appeared online that AACS—the content protection scheme shared by HD DVD and Blu-ray—had been circumvented, the AACS Licensing Authority has verified the hack. According to a statement from the AACS LA, AACS has not been seriously compromised. Instead, the statement said, the attack [...]

Blu-Ray DRM Cracked

Blu-Ray DRM Cracked
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.
“We need to kick DRM in the butt!” declares the sigfile of Doom9 forum poster Janvitos, launching his inspection of the format.
Doom9 forum [...]

Microsoft Confirms DRM Driver Crippling in VISTA

I got some feedback from some DRM doubters at the beginning of the year when I talked about The Perils of Windows Vista and Built-in DRM. I wish that I was wrong, but no such luck. From the horses mouth comes confirmation of every horrible charge leveled at Vista by Gutmann

Windows Vista Content Protection – [...]

Music companies consider ditching DRM

Interesting article in on the International Herald Tribune website…

Record labels rethink digital rights management at Midem

Now that even digital music revenue growth is faltering amid rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are closer than ever to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to [...]

RIAA declares war on Rap mixes

The RIAA and the Atlanta Police don’t seem to understand the difference between promotional mixtapes which are sanctioned by the artists and actual counterfeit CDs.
You know that the RIAA, MPAA, et al. have gone much too far and have been granted much too much political clout when you see government sanctioned violence committed against a [...]

A Short Course in Brain Surgery

Read more here at On The Fence Films

The Perils of Windows Vista and Built-in DRM

Why Use Windows Vista?

From January 30th, all new PCs will come pre-installed with Windows Vista. There are several good reasons not to use it.

If that article’s a bit long and technical for you, read on…

Vista is all about ‘premium content’. This is music or video that’s copyrighted by one of the major music or movie [...]

Piracy, the better choice for consumers.

Excellent opinion piece from the INQUIRER
HD disk format wars are over

By Charlie Demerjian

THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution. It is quite easy, Piracy, [...]

HD-DVD copy protection defeated … for now

BoingBoing reader Gunther says,
On the doom9 forums there is news of a new tool to decrypt HDDVD’s. How you get the key is not yet clear but there is a promise to have a tool to get the needed key later. (check the #9 post in the thread): Link, and related coverage at the [...]

How the Democrats Stole the 2006 Elections

Just some random thoughts about hacked voting machines, “Fixing the Vote” and rampant Vote Fraud …
Vote Fixing as taught by Huffington Post with video describing exactly how to actually do it. Nice of Marty Kaplan and HuffPo to give the Dems step-by-step video instructions. It looks like those instructions were followed [...]

Banned by GooTube

Well one of my GooTube uploaded videos has been relegated to the bit bucket. And I didn’t even get a “strongly worded letter” from the GooTube management.
All Americans should be free to express themselves in song! Satire is a form of political expression and speech such as this should be protected, never suppressed or censored! [...]

Sexual Consent Form

This is funny…

I saw this at Glumbert first.
Here is the Sexual Consent Form for those who wish to play along at home!

And so it begins: YouTube nukes 30,000 videos

YouTube has removed nearly 30,000 videos after being contacted by the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers.

And so it begins: YouTube nukes 30,000 videos
Long before Google swooped in to buy up YouTube there were questions about the video sharing site’s future. In particular, concerns relating to copyright infringement have persisted: can YouTube [...]

YouTube Tags Political Video as “Inappropriate”

Wasting no time joining those champions of free speech, Google; YouTube has also now gotten into the business of censoring political speech. But they don’t limit the censorship to China.
First amendment? What’s that?
This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community.
Well the video will make you [...]