Lauren Weinstein writes "Even though your cable company may claim that a channel is in a digital tier that you're paying for, they may be sending it to you in analog form, with associated negative effects. Surprise! Are You Being Cheated by Digital Cable? 'You're paying for digital, you should get digital. Outside of the lower video and audio quality that can be present on many analog feeds, third-party devices (like cableCARD TiVos) which could otherwise record a digital signal directly, will be forced to re-digitize an analog signal, with inevitable quality loss in the process. But how to know for sure if a channel is digital or analog as received?'"

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I bought a new Mac Mini today, it's my second, the old one is way slow and old and doesn't do the latest 802.11n tricks, and the disk is small. The new Mini is for the TV room and the old one will become a server. So now it's time to master VNC and Chicken of the VNC. This was a topic of discussion here on 11/20/06.

Ooops, it turns out the new Mac Mini does not support 802.11n. Oy.

Miguel de Icaza on new firmware for iPods that make it impossible to use one with any OS other than Windows or Macintosh.

Erris writes "PC Superstore says their store manager was wrong to turn away a client with a broken hinge whose machine should have been repaired. 'El Reg put a call in to the DSGi-owned retail giant to get some clarification on PC World's Linux support policy. A spokesman told us that there had simply been a misunderstanding at the store and that, in fact, the normal procedure would be for the Tech Guys to provide a fix. [PC World] will provide a full repair once the firm has made contact with Tikka.'

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An anonymous reader writes "The Northwest Passage, a normally ice-locked shortcut between Europe and Asia, is now passable for the first time in recorded history reports the European Space Agency. Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre said in the article: 'We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.'"

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The Canadian Recording Industry Association (which represents multinational, US, and other non-Canadian record labels exclusively) has come out against the "private copying levy," a tax on blank media that it lobbied hard for over the past 15 years. The levy is charged against blank media, and the money raised is paid to copyright holders in exchange for the right to copy music and other works onto the media. CRIA apparently fears that the levy can be used to legalize P2P music-trading in Canada (an activity whose legality is in dispute right now), thereby breaking the P2P deadlock, decriminalizing millions of music fans, and paying millions of dollars to their members. The record industry giants would prefer to go on suing music fans and technology companies -- an activity that pays the record companies handsomely, while encouraging fans to defect from buying music in the future, and which does not pay one cent to any artist.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association this week quietly filed documents in the Federal Court of Appeal that will likely shock many in the industry. CRIA, which spent more than 15 years lobbying for the creation of the private copying levy, is now fighting to eliminate the application of the levy on the Apple iPod since it believes that the Copyright Board of Canada's recent decision to allow a proposed tariff on iPods to proceed "broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement."

Given that CRIA's members collect millions from the private copying levy, the decision to oppose its expansion may come as a surprise. Yet the move reflects a reality that CRIA has previously been loath to acknowledge - the Copyright Board has developed jurisprudence that provides a strong argument that downloading music on peer-to-peer networks is lawful in Canada. Indeed, CRIA President Graham Henderson provides a roadmap for the argument in his affidavit:

"First, the Board has stated, in obiter dicta, on several occasions that the Private Copying regime legalizes copying for the private use of the person making the copy, regardless of whether the source is non-infringing or not. Therefore, according to the Board, downloading an infringing track from the Internet is not infringing, as long as the downloaded copy is made onto an 'audio recording medium'...

Link

Antonio sez, "There is a 'viral' Bob Dylan marketing project that allows people to remix the infamous Subterranean Homesick Blues film made by D. A. Pennebaker. I made this mash-up with my favorite series, Battlestar Galactica, titled, 'Subterranean Homesick Alien (a Radiohead homage).'" Link (Thanks, Antonio!)

700 megabytes of internal email from MediaDefender, a group of entertainment industry enforcers, has leaked onto the net. The emails detail MediaGuardian's procedures, their internal response to being outed for posting a fake download site to entrap users, the plans to induce users to link to their entrapment site, and the way the company sought to insulate their clients in the motion picture industry from negative publicity arising from their entrapment efforts. There's plenty more there -- 700mb is a lot of mail -- and I'm sure we'll see all kinds of interesting things in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately for Media Defender - a company dedicated to mitigating the effects of internet leaks - they can do nothing about being the subject of the biggest BitTorrent leak of all time. Over 700mb of their own internal emails, dating back over 6 months have been leaked to the internet in what will be a devastating blow to the company. Many are very recent, having September 2007 dates and the majority involve the most senior people in the company. Apparently this is not the first time that a MediaDefender email leaked onto the Internet.

According to the .nfo file posted with the Mbox file the emails were obtained by a group called "MediaDefender-Defenders". It states: "By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails contains information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking p2p users, and disrupt p2p services," and "A special thanks to Jay Maris, for circumventing there entire email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail account"

Link (Thanks, Christian!)

UniversalVM writes "What is the single biggest issue that bothers open source advocates about proprietary software? It is probably the ability of the vendor to pull stunts like Microsoft's recent stealth software update and subsequent downplaying of any concerns. Their weak explanation seems to be a great exercise in circular logic: 'Had we failed to update the service automatically, users would not have been able to successfully check for updates and, in turn, users would not have had updates installed automatically or received expected notifications.' News.com is reporting that all of the updated files on both XP and Vista appears to be in windows update itself. This is information that was independently uncovered by users and still not released by Microsoft."

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HairyNevus writes "The Washington Post has an article detailing Google's request for international privacy standards. Google is taking this matter all the way to the U.N., arguing that a hodge-podge of privacy law unnecessarily burdens Internet-based companies while also failing to protect consumers. Although Google is currently under investigation by the EU for its privacy practices, the company claims it has been a crusader for protecting consumer privacy. Google's privacy counsel Peter Fleischer called America's privacy laws 'too complex and too much of a patchwork,' and the European Union's laws 'too bureaucratic and inflexible.' The alternative? Something closer to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation's framework which 'balances very carefully information privacy with business needs and commercial interests', according to Fleischer."

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qubezz writes "The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender's internal emails from the last 6 months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business."

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Gothmog of A writes "As Richard Dawkins' offcial site reports, an organization called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries has been submitting DMCA copyright requests to YouTube. This has resulted in the Rational Response Squad (RRS) being banned after they protested against videos being taken down and accounts being closed. The RRS videoes attack creationism (AKA intelligent design) and promote the atheist viewpoint. According to the RRS, the copyright requests are without merit since the material in question is covered by fair use or has been declared to be in the public domain. Behind Creation Science Evangelism Ministries is the infamous Kent Hovind (AKA Dr. Dino) who is currently serving jail time for tax evasion."

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twistedmoney99 writes "InformIT has posted a two part article by Seth Fogie that describes how a wireless IP camera can be owned and abused. The first part describes how the cameras feed can be sniffed, replaced, or even DoSed off the air by a PDA. The second part then takes a look at the web application interface of the camera (an Axis207W) and exposes numerous vulnerabilities that lead to exposed passwords, a software based DoS, global XSS — and the kicker — a CRSF attack that through which an attacker can remotely penetrate the network it is installed on."

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Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A consignment of laptops from German manufacturer Medion, sold through German and Danish branches of giant retail chain Aldi, have been found to be infected with the boot sector virus 'Stoned.Angelina', first seen as long ago as 1994. The affected notebook models (German language) Medion MD 96290 have been pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium and Bullguard anti-virus, which reportedly is unable to remove it. A special removal tool was released to clean the laptops. Aldi has shared the same warning as well. Two years ago several thousands of Creative Zen Neeon MP3 players were shipped with a Windows worm Wullik.B."

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gattaca writes "Cisco has announced a confirmation of an unpatched denial of service vulnerability in Cisco IOS. From the NetPro Forum post: 'I have just discovered a regular expression that crashes the router. I suspect the error is because of division by zero. Since I work for the Enterprise, I do not have direct access to TAC. Please somebody report this to Cisco. I have tested it on ranges of routers (2611, 2821, 2851, 7206) and IOSes (12.0-12.4). All routers crashed with some type of BUS ERROR. Command can be issued in user mode, therefore I think it can be considered as vulnerability to potentially cause DOS.'" Of course, the command has to be entered in user mode, so while potentially a vulnerability, chances are your local IOS-based router won't be DoSed via the bug any time soon.

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Wired NextFest takes place in Los Angeles this weekend, and is full of much to enjoy. I visited earlier this week and filed this report for NPR News with "Day to Day" host Madeleine Brand: Link to audio. Three things not to miss: Keepon (who looks like a "marshmallow scrotum" or "the yellow lovechild of Hello Kitty and a friendly snowman, depending on who you ask), the creepy Chinese doppelganger 'bot, and Brainball. Here are some great NextFest photos from Dave Bullock.

A new, ultralight aircraft made from carbon fiber has beaten the standing world record for longest unmanned flight, according to its manufacturer. It has a 60-foot (18-meter) wingspan, weighs 66 pounds (30 kilograms) and is launched by hand. Snip from National Geographic report: