Less than a week after it came out Sony BMG was planning to sell music not loaded down with copyright, they’re officially selling DRM-free MP3s through Amazon’s MP3 store later this month, making it the first to carry DRM-free music from all four major labels.
It had to happen sooner or later.
I remember when the hoopla was about radio scanners eavesdropping on analog cordless phones. Every new technology seems to introduce a new way to violate our privacy. This little gem seems to allow capturing or recording audio while a bluetooth device is not actually in a call. This would mean that you can eavesdrop from room-to-room or with a laptop, from car-to-car at a stoplight even when someone is not using their bluetooth headset.
Here is a link to a useful collection of bluetooth hacking tools.
http://www.security-hacks.com/2007/05/25/essential-bluetooth-hacking-tools
Here is a link to a video demonstrating the bluetooth hack.
http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/eavesdropping_on_bluetooth_hea.html
Firefox 3 Beta 2 has been officially released over at Mozilla.
[Improved in Beta 2!] Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.
MSDN’s Channel9 and the IEBlog both confirm the new version of IE, IE8, will pass the ACID2 Test!
According to a source familiar with the latest Leopard build seeded to developers, in addition to all those meaningless “little” fixes, our source tells us that Apple has fixed Stacks by adding the missing “list view” option that should have been there all along.
From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company’s telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes.
They’ll know we are in a “Community of Interest” before we do.
The idea of squirting music is one of those ideas that seem obvious enough once you think about it and to tell you the truth, it sounds really cool. But…without having looked at the patent yet (I will and will post details here later…) it seems obvious that there has to be a DRM mechanism involved.
Microsoft, in case you missed it, DRM just isn’t working out all that well…maybe someone will get the hint and open source DRM.
They’ve actually been doing this for some time now…read on.
If you haven’t heard of Amazon’s S3 web service yet then you are missing out…this is a very cool service and with the addition of the new MySQL service could very well become the new infrastructure for small internet startups.
Google’s study looked at more than one hundred thousand disk drives which were a combination of serial and parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to 400 GB. The observed range of annualized failure rates varied from 1.7 percent, for drives that were in their first year of operation, to over 8.6 percent, observed in their third year.
I have spent many sleepless waiting for a hard drive to fail simply because S.M.A.R.T. predicting impending failure. For several years I would have the following email message sent by cPanel.
Subject: [cPanel smartcheck] Possible Hard Drive Failure Soon
S.M.A.R.T Errors on /dev/hda
From Command: /usr/sbin/smartctl -q errorsonly -H -l selftest -l error /dev/hda
ATA Error Count: 1
Error 1 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 93 hours
—-END /dev/hda–
I eventually switched to another machine simply because I couldn’t take the stress but the hard drive never did fail.
Take a look at Google’s findings…if only I had known! 