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Sony

Blender Foundation Video Taken Down On YouTube For Copyright Violation 306

An anonymous reader writes "As if the automated take downs on Youtube weren't already bad enough, today fans of the popular open source 3D software Blender were greeted by a copyright take down notice for their third open movie, Sintel, despite it being released under a Creative Commons license: 'This video contains content from Sony Pictures Movies & Shows, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.' It is believed that the takedown was a result of Sony Electronics adding Sintel to their official 4k demo pool."
Education

MA High School Forces All Students To Buy MacBooks 1217

An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Salem News: "A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer to prepare kids for a high-tech future. But there's a catch. The money for the $900 Apple MacBooks will come out of parents' pockets. 'You're kidding me,' parent Jenn Parisella said when she found out she'd have to buy her sophomore daughter, Sky, a new computer. 'She has a laptop. Why would I buy her another laptop?' Sky has a Dell. Come September 2011, every student will need an Apple. They'll bring it to class and use it for homework. Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"
Encryption

Encrypted Images Vulnerable To New Attack 155

rifles only writes "A German techie has found a remarkably simple way to discern some of the content of encrypted volumes containing images. The encrypted images don't reveal themselves totally, but in many cases do let an attacker see the outline of a high-contrast image. The attack works regardless of the encryption algorithm used (the widely-used AES for instance), and affects all utilities that use single symmetric keys. More significant to police around the world struggling with criminal and terrorist use of encryption, the attack also breaks the ability of users to 'hide' separate encrypted volumes inside already encrypted volumes, whose existence can now for the first time be revealed." The discoverer of this attack works for a company making full-disk encryption software; their product, TurboCrypt, has already been enhanced to defeat the attack. Other on-the-fly encryption products will probably be similarly enhanced, as the discoverer asserts: "To our knowledge is the described method free of patents and the author can confirm that he hasn't applied for protection."

Comment Education Problem (Score 3, Interesting) 568

I blame schools. Secondary education is big business. There's only a handful of schools with quality programs. Here in Louisiana, many schools still teach pascal and basic. Later courses are taught by underqualified professors who've been out of the loop for years. For my C++ course, I had to constantly argue with the teacher over every program I would write because he did not know the ANSI standards. The class barely covered the first three chapters of a "teach yourself C++ in 24 hours" type book. Classes tend to "gear down" to the accomodate the dumbest person in the class, which is just wrong. I got fed up, left school, got six years experience, then came back and got a business degree.

Comment Am I missing something? (Score 1) 466

There is absolutely no way to create a data format that makes it impossible to extract a perfect unencrypted digital representation of that content. At some point, no matter how much encryption and encoding and authentication you add to the disc, the consumer is going to be able to play it in all its digital glory. The mere fact that this is possible means you have to have access to the unencrypted data, which can always be copied.

They're employing encryption techniques in a field it wasn't suited to address. PKI is meant to be used to allow a user to authenticate that the content on the disc came from a trusted source. It fails when you try to forcefully disallow reading content from a disc if the source (in the case of DVDs, the player. in the case of an XBox, the disc) isn't trusted. This can generally be circumvented by a nerd with a soldering iron.

Hollywood is spending millions on making it more difficult to emulate an authenticated player, but it's fundamentally futile. You only need to circumvent the authentication once. From then on, you can release software that can do it for anyone that wants it, as long as there's a player on the market that gives you software access to the encrypted content.

Classic Star Wars Trilogy Finally on DVD 673

chinton writes "From starwars.com: 'In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie, as well as the original theatrical edition of the film. That means you'll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983.'"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Sveasoft illegally uses OpenWRT 2

Ok I admit it, I have been lazy recently. Not much had happened in the WRT scene in a while.
OpenWRT now has a great Web-Interface, DD-WRT got better on a daily basis while Sveasofts lost all its developers except James and the quality of their firmware releases declined even more.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Freeman 1.04 released 1

The new version of Freeman (1.04) is now available for download!

Last time Sveasoft apparently had unintentionally released an unprotected binary on which Freeman 1.02 was based. This time Sveasoft didn't make the same mistake, the MAC protection had to be hacked and removed.
Kudos to the people responsible for that!

User Journal

Journal Journal: Alchemy 1.0 released to the public 5

Sorry for not updating this journal in a while. On April 21st, Sveasoft decided to drop work on Alchemy and release it to the public as it is. It is called final and it should be somewhat stable.

Also, after not releasing any source code to the subscribers for 5 months, they finally made the Alchemy sources available.

Both files will appear on the mirrors shortly.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Tag-free Sveasoft Alchemy pre7a 11

Hello everybody,
thanks to two fellow suppliers I had the chance to make a tag-free version of Alchemy pre7a. You may notice the name change, apparently Sveasoft decided that having seven release candidates durin a feature freeze is a little embarassing.

This version, as always, has been tested before release. Please read the included text files for further information, post questions or comments in this forum thread

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