Ed Felten has released a Sony CD DRM Paper, an analysis of the Sony debacle.

I’ll quote the conclusion from this excellent 27 page paper:

Our analysis of Sony-BMG’s CD DRM carries wider lessons for content companies, DRM vendors, policy- makers, end users, and the security community. We draw six main conclusions.

First, the design of DRM systems is driven strongly by the incentives of the content distributor and the DRM vendor, but these incentives are not always aligned. Where they differ, the DRM design will not necessarily serve the interests of copyright owners, not to mention artists.

Second, DRM, even if backed by a major content distributor, can expose users to significant security and privacy risks. Incentives for aggressive platform building drive vendors toward spyware tactics that exacerbate these risks.

Third, there can be an inverse relation between the efficacy of DRM and the user’s ability to defend the computer from unrelated security and privacy risks. The user’s best defense is rooted in understanding and controlling which software is installed on the computer, but many DRM systems rely on undermining the user’s understanding and control.

Fourth, CD DRM systems are mostly ineffective at controlling uses of content. Major increases in complexity have not increased their effectiveness over that of early schemes, and may in fact have made things worse by creating more avenues for attack. We think it unlikely that future CD DRM systems will do better.

Fifth, the design of DRM systems is only weakly connected to the contours of copyright law. The systems make no pretense of enforcing copyright law as written, but instead seek to enforce rules dictated by the label’s and vendor’s business models. These rules, and the technologies that try to enforce them, implicate other public policy concerns, such as privacy and security.

Finally, the stakes are high. Bad DRM design choices can seriously harm users, create major liability for copyright owners and DRM vendors, and ultimately reduce artists’ incentive to create.

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These rooms are painted so that, when looked at right, optical illusions will appear.

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Four men were arrested after a disturbance outside the the Los Angeles Convention and Exhibition Center in downtown Saturday, prompting authorities to lockdown the facility and evacuate approximately 30,000 convention-goers.

“Light Entertainment�? outside the Black College Expo drew the “wrong crowd�? to the 1200 block of South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles police Officer Mike Lopez said. Initial reports of shooting, at 4:40 p.m., were apparently erroneous, Lopez said.

An organizer of the expo reportedly said a balloon popped inside the hall, which might have been mistaken for a shot being fired. Los Angeles police took no chances and responded in force clad in crowd control gear.

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Those ice-cold drinks from favorite fast food restaurants may not seem as refreshing after a seventh-grader’s science project reveals what may lurk inside the cup.

Benito Middle School student Jasmine Roberts examined the amount of bacteria in ice served at fast food restaurants.

Her project won the science fair at the New Tampa school, and she hopes to win a top prize at the Hillsborough County Regional Science and Engineering Fair, which starts Tuesday.

The 12-year-old compared the ice used in the drinks with the water from toilet bowls in the same restaurants. Jasmine said she found the results startling.

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A comedy adventure set in the land of the Emperor Penguins in the heart of Antarctica. These penguins sing, and each needs their own special song to attract a soul mate. Our hero Mumble (ELIJAH WOOD), son of Elvis (HUGH JACKMAN) and Norma Jean (NICOLE KIDMAN) is the worst singer in the world… but he can tap-dance something fierce!

ehm…

right.

sure.

Totally cashing in on ‘March of the Penguins’ and the innate “awww” factor of penguins in general. Should make $100 million no problem, regardless of script.

Perhaps I’ve been out of the target-market too long, but to me this is a perfect example why I won’t bother with the movie theater any more. Movies don’t have to rely on story or acting anymore to make money. The initial rush to see a new movie is so huge there isn’t enough time for the bad news to get out. All you need is a big name actor, a big name behind the camera, and enough good material to fill 3 2-minute trailers.

Look at the top 5 box office hits this week:

1 The Pink Panther… A remake.

2 Final Destination 3… another sequel to a written-by-committee suckfest.

3 Curious George… Kids movie. Eh. Still not an original.

4 Firewall… Guy’s family is held hostage and he saves the day. Nope, never seen that before.

5 When a Stranger Calls… Yet another remake.

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Weeks before King Kong opened in U.S. theaters in December, illegal copies of the movie were already for sale on the streets of Bolivia’s impoverished capital for less than $1.50 each.

Sidewalk vendors in Brazil sell the photo editing software Photoshop for as little as $7 a copy, less than 1 percent of its list price, and in October, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva admitted to watching an illegal copy of a hit Brazilian film on the presidential jet. About 99 percent of all the recordings sold in Paraguay are pirated.

The recording industry association IFPI estimates that pirated wares make up three-fifths of all the music purchased in Latin America and 95 percent or more of sales in Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. In contrast, pirated copies make up a third of all the music purchased worldwide and a fifth of U.S. sales.

“We’ve lost the market in many of these countries,” said Emilio Garcia, the IFPI’s Latin American antipiracy coordinator. “And we’re steadily losing more.”

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One Brazilian record company is trying a novel approach: It is lowering the prices of some CDs to less than $5 apiece. However, the discs are sold only in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, a market that company president Joao Marcelo Boscol said had long been “100 percent pirate.”

“We are trying to enlarge the market and include consumers who have never bought CDs legally in their lives,” Boscol said. “We think given the choice, people will buy legal CDs. They’re not proud of buying pirated goods.”

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“Now I understand why Dick Cheney keeps asking me to go hunting with him.”

– Former Reagan press secretary and gun control advocate Jim Brady, in a press release, referring to Cheney’s accidental shooting of a hunting companion.

(yes, that is this Brady)

This isn’t real-time yet, but the final version will be.

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The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding�?, intelligence sources have claimed.

Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been�? in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.�?

Grenier also opposed “excessive�? interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.

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The Bush administration has really nailed the New York Times on a story about the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. The paper claimed that Bush was on vacation on August 30, 2005. In fact, according to the White House, “the president was closely monitoring the situation and not ‘on vacation.’�? Scott McClellan lays the smackdown:

[I]t is sad and irresponsible that The New York Times is rewriting history to fit an inaccurate storyline and conveniently ignoring key facts.

This is an outrage. The New York Times should immediately print a correction, along with a photo of what Bush was really doing on August 30, 2005:

As you can see, just as White House notes, the president “was focused on saving lives.�?

Here is a prediction that the “Duck!” Cheney story isn’t going to die down anytime soon. I think it misses the biggest point of all: people understand this incident. The average American Joe can’t tell the difference between a Kurd and Shiite, but this one, they do understand. Take a look at this weblog posting to see how it resonates…

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The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

*cough*

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“Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt … making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, (was) shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.”

– The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

“He is a lawyer and he got shot in the face. But he’s a lawyer, he can use his other face. He’ll be all right.”

“You can understand why this lawyer fellow let his guard down, because if you’re out hunting with a politician, you think, ‘If I’m going to get it, it’s going to be in the back.’ ”

– Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson

The bald eagle is shown in Homer, Alaska on Saturday, Feb. 5, 2005. Seven years after the government said the fierce raptor is no longer threatend with extinction, officials have come up with a plan for getting it removed from the endangered species list. (AP Photo/Heather Forcier/File)

Nam Choke, an 8-year-old bull elephant (L), and Boonrawd, a 7-year-old cow elephant, form a heart shape with their trunks while the sun sets in the background at an elephant camp in the former Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, 70 km (44 miles) north of Bangkok February 12, 2006.

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The US administration led a “national failure” in its response to Hurricane Katrina, while millions of dollars were lost to fraud after the disaster, Congress charges in an upcoming report.

Emergency planners failed to act on warnings before Katrina laid waste to New Orleans and the surrounding region last August. They then failed to give speedy help, House of Representative lawmakers assert in excerpts of a damning report to be released in full on Wednesday.

President George W. Bush’s administration also faces scathing criticism from a Congress watchdog which says millions of dollars in Katrina aid were given to people who provided false identities and addresses.

“In many respects, our report is a litany of mistakes, misjudgments, lapses and absurdities all cascading together, blinding us to what was coming and hobbling any collective effort to respond,” said the lawmakers.

“Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare,” they added.

“At every level — individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental — we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina.”

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Onbekenden hebben maandag aan het begin van de avond in Rotterdam een koffertje uit de auto van een piket-officier van justitie gestolen. In de koffer zaten “op zichzelf niet vertrouwelijke werkinstructies voor de dienstdoende officier van justitie”, aldus een verklaring van het Openbaar Ministerie.

Je moet als officier van justitie wel volledig wereldvreemd zijn wil je nu nog iets onbeheerd in je auto laten liggen…

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Can you obey the law and still be a spammer? Leave it to the politicians to show you how it’s done.

Charlie Crist, attorney general of Florida and gubernatorial candidate, styles himself as an anti-spam crusader. Indeed, he proposed legislation to fight spam in Florida, and has made it a priority to enforce it. So how could Floridians complain that his election campaign is spamming them? Democrats and Republicans alike were infuriated that the email they received from Crist’s campaign was unsolicited, and therefore spam, as reported by the St. Petersburg Times.

“He’s not living up to his own standards,” complained Dorothy Butler in the same newspaper; Butler is a Democratic recipient of Crist’s email solicitation. “To me this is spam because I never asked for any of his political stuff.”

Although that message did have instructions on how to opt-out, another recipient complained his repeated requests to be removed from the list went ignored until he wrote to the campaign reminding them of Crist’s anti-spam credentials.

“The irony and hypocrisy amazes me. Do I need to file a complaint with the attorney general’s office? Anybody have the number for the Fraud Hotline?” wrote Joe Spooner, a Republican. Spooner eventually was removed from the list.

In response to these complaints, Arlene DiBenigno, Crist’s political director, maintained that “it’s not spam, its political speech. We’re not selling anything, we’re not being deceptive. We love the First Amendment, and there’s nothing more powerful than political speech.”

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MPs have voted against making the government carry out a report on costs before introducing identity cards.

They decided by a majority of 53 to overturn an amendment made to the ID Cards Bill by peers last month.

But MPs called for a report on costs every six months for the first 10 years of the scheme being in place.

MPs also backed ministers in making it compulsory for people to be given cards – and put on a register – when they apply for passports.

Critics are concerned about the cost and civil liberty implications of the scheme and some commentators had predicted the votes would be closer.

ID card plans, opposed by Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, will now go back before the House of Lords.

Mandatory if you apply for a passport. In other words, if you disagree, you can’t even leave the country and go live somewhere else.