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Online shopping is great. If you need a large quantity of something, you’re likely to have better luck online than in a traditional store. For example, say Danny G. wants to fill his Olympic-sized pool with memory pills – he can simply order 72,489 bottles from Amazon.com (you may not want to click if you’re on dial-up). Hopefully he’ll qualify for free super saver shipping.

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Arnezami, a hacker on the Doom9 forum, has published a crack for extracting the “processing key” from a high-def DVD player. This key can be used to gain access to every single Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disc.

Previously, another Doom9 user called Muslix64 had broken both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD by extracting the “volume keys” for each disc, a cumbersome process. This break builds on Muslix64′s work but extends it — now you can break all AACS-locked discs.

AACS took years to develop, and it has been broken in weeks. The developers spent billions, the hackers spent pennies.

For DRM to work, it has to be airtight. There can’t be a single mistake. It’s like a balloon that pops with the first prick. That means that every single product from every single vendor has to perfectly hide their keys, perfectly implement their code. There can’t be a single way to get into the guts of the code to retrieve the cleartext or the keys while it’s playing back. All attackers need is a single mistake that they can use to compromise the system.

There is no future in which bits will get harder to copy. Instead of spending billions on technologies that attack paying customers, the studios should be confronting that reality and figuring out how to make a living in a world where copying will get easier and easier. They’re like blacksmiths meeting to figure out how to protect the horseshoe racket by sabotaging railroads.

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Remember Stacey “Black Caucus is More Racist than the KKK” Campfield? Well, the looney Republican lawmaker is at it again.

Campfield — the blogging legislator — has a little bill that would require the state to issue death certificates for every abortion performed in this state.

Filed for intro on 02/12/2007
HOUSE BILL 982 by Campfield [pdf] [Senate Bill 1094 by Bunch]

“A death certificate for each induced termination of pregnancy which occurs in this state shall be filed with the office of vital records within ten (10) days after the procedure by the person in charge of the institution in which the induced termination of pregnancy was performed.”

Never mind little things like logic, or the real world tradition of issuing death certificates to beings who actually have something called birth certificates!

Obviously, this is another one of those cute little right-wing ploys to establish a legal precedent for overturning Roe v. Wade. According to right-wing fairy tale thinking, if a never-born fetus has a death certificate, then . . . voila! . . . a never-born fetus was once-upon-a-time a person, or the equivalent of a real born-alive person. Cuz the state says so.

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“You should go to Vista.”

“So you like Vista?”

“Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator.”

“Virtual Server?” the Boss asks.

“Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm.”

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This is really shocking:

In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the “Axis of Evil.” Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush’s controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn’t ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan’s ringing denunciations of the “evil empire.”

Once again, Iran’s reformists were knocked back on their heels. “Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized,” says Adeli. “The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America’s intentions.”

In short, Michael Gerson and Condoleezza Rice, purely in order to make a speech that (a) sounded good, and (b) pretended not to be exclusively about Iraq, set the United States on a collision course with Iran. That’s really got to be a historic speechwriting blunder.

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The Los Angeles Times and movie studio Paramount could face a federal lawsuit after a publicity stunt to promote “Mission: Impossible III” sparked a bomb scare, the paper reported.

Around 4,500 sidewalk newspaper boxes across California were rigged with devices last April that played the “Mission: Impossible” theme when customers opened them in the build-up to the release of the Tom Cruise blockbuster.

But several customers thought the music players were bombs and reported them to law enforcement officials. An arson squad blew up one of the newspaper boxes in Santa Clarita, just north of Los Angeles, as a precaution.

The US has become a nation of cowards and idiots.

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On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified “sexual behavior.” The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber’s house to Jeremy’s personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Court records don’t say exactly what happened next–perhaps the parents wanted to end the relationship and raised the alarm–but somehow Florida police learned about the photos.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

Some more background: Under a 1995 ruling in a case called B.B. v. State, the Florida Supreme Court said that a 16-year-old could not be found delinquent for having sex with another 16-year-old.

“The crux of the state’s interest in an adult-minor situation is the prevention of exploitation of the minor by the adult,” the majority said at the time. The court ruled that a Florida statute punishing sex between teens was “unconstitutional as applied to this 16-year-old as a basis for a delinquency proceeding.”

The same applies to Amber and Jeremy. Even though he is a year older than her, he is still a minor in Florida.

In other words, under Florida law, Amber and Jeremy would be legally permitted to engage in carnal relations, but they’re criminals if they document it.

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How the underground hacker economy works.

Black hat hackers and other scammers make money through methods ranging from pumping penny stocks to re-shipping rings. Meet the four most wanted cybercriminals.

Please tell me none of this is a surprise to any of you…

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Het Europees Parlement heeft maandag zijn ongenoegen uitgesproken over de controle van handbagage op vliegvelden. De controleurs gaan soms grof te werk en nemen parfum en drank in beslag die verderop in vliegveldwinkels te koop zijn.

“De regels hiervoor zijn vastgesteld in een geheime bijlage bij een EU-besluit. Hoe is dit uit te leggen bij de openbaarheid van wetten?”, vroeg PvdA-Europarlementslid Thijs Berman aan Europees Commissaris Jacques Barrot (Verkeer).

VVD-collega Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert betwijfelt of de overlast wel opweegt tegen de terreurbestrijding. “Containers vol parfums en tandpasta zijn inmiddels vernietigd. Wat levert het op?”. Ze zei dat mozarellakaas in het ene land wordt toegelaten en in het andere land niet. “Is hier geen sprake van schijnveiligheid?”.

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Het CDA krijgt Algemene Zaken, Sociale Zaken, Economische Zaken, VWS, Buitenlandse Zaken, Justitie, Verkeer en Waterstaat en Landbouw.

PvdA gaat ministers leveren voor Financiën, Binnenlandse Zaken, Onderwijs, Milieu, Wijken en Ontwikkelingssamenwerking. Voor de ChristenUnie is Defensie en Jeugd en Gezin.

Het ministerie voor éénmanshuishoudens ontbreekt weer….

A guy walks into a bar and sees a gorgeous woman nursing a drink. Walking up behind her he says, “Hi there good lookin’. How’s it going?”

Having already downed a few power drinks, she turns around, faces him, looks him straight in the eye and says, “Listen up, buddy. I screw anybody, anytime, anywhere, your place, my place, in the car, front door, back door, on the ground, standing up, sitting down, naked or with clothes on, dirty, clean … it doesn’t matter to me, I’ve been doing it ever since I got out of college and I just flat-ass love it.”

Eyes now wide with interest, he responds, “No kidding. I’m a lawyer, too. What firm are you with?”

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Last fall, while doing some reporting in northeastern Kentucky, I was talking to two local activists (registered Democrats, no less!) about why they were trying to shut down anti-bullying training at the public high school. Their gripe? By teaching that homosexuality is normal, and that students shouldn’t harass their classmates because they’re gay, the training sought to recruit students into being gay. “You know,” said one of the activists, “homosexuality cannot be reproduced, because two homosexuals can’t bear children. So they have to recruit people into their organizations.”

There’s still a slice of America, in the post-Ellen DeGeneres/Will and Grace era, that didn’t laugh when prominent megachurch pastor Ted Haggard was declared “completely heterosexual” earlier this week by a panel of pastoral counselors charged with the task of turning him into the straightest man ever to hire a male prostitute. For them, the recruitment narrative is so powerful that Haggard’s three-year dalliance with a man and his meth proves not that Haggard is gay, but that the “homosexual agenda” is so aggressive that it can recruit even the holiest among us. Far from encouraging them to denounce their vociferous anti-gay-marriage campaign as hypocritical and mean, it proves that the “homosexual agenda” is still very much worth fighting against. If you’re not born gay, then what led Pastor Ted to give in to his “dark and repulsive” urges? As the Church Lady used to muse, “could it be . . . Satan?”

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I have a question for you: Why is it that North-Americans have so much problems with nudity in movies, commercials, tv etc.
As a European I never understood that. Here at Houtlust I posted so now and then some explicit advertising mostly related to health issues like HIV or breast cancer. I noticed that I got many visitors for those campaigns from North-America. When doing a search on those subjects I seldom find any visuals of those campaigns. Yes they are commented very often, mostly possitive but also commented as ‘European’. What is the point? Are we Europeans more liberal? I don’t think so. Tell it in the comments, what is the point.

The video above is from ABC, Against Breast Cancer, a charitable organisation based in Oxford Engeland that funds breast cancer research into long-term survival. And in a European campaign you see nudity of course, in this case one breast. Did you ever saw a pole dance like this? This makes very clear how woman feel after losing a breast. It’s not about sexuality in the first place, it’s about being a incomplete woman.
Copy: Anyone can get breast cancer.
For advice how to check yourself, visit aabc.org.uk
Agency AMV BBDO

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(via)

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When the fire department in the tiny Berkshire hamlet of Cheshire needed a new fire truck, it asked Uncle Sam for a little help.

The response last month was stunning: a $665,962 homeland security grant.

The award was nearly 26 times the annual budget of the volunteer fire department in the town of 3,500. And the rub: The department is not allowed to spend it on a fire truck.

[..]

The town does have the Cheshire Cheese Monument, a sizable concrete sculpture of a cheese press commemorating a 1,450-pound cheese hunk given by town elders to Thomas Jefferson in 1801. But its value as a terrorist target is not readily apparent.

Security specialist James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, was blunt: “It’s pure pork. It has nothing to do with homeland security.”

Feel safer yet? Oh, and by the way, here’s a picture of that monument:

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Internal Microsoft email messages from 2004 reveal that company evangelists and executives were awed by Apple’s just-added desktop search and acknowledged that what they did in Windows Vista would be directly compared with Mac OS X.

The messages, which were filed as evidence in an Iowa state court trying a Microsoft antitrust case, were between several company evangelists and executives, including Jim Allchin, the head of Windows development efforts at the time. The Vista, then “Longhorn,” evangelists had just returned from the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

Lenn Pryor, former director of Microsoft’s platform evangelism, said Spotlight, the new Mac OS X 10.4 search tool that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs highlighted at the conference, was “amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn-land today.” Pryor now works for Skype.

Allchin agreed. “I don’t believe we will have search this fast,” he wrote in an emailed reply 30 June, 2004.

Another Microsoft evangelist, Vic Gundotra, who also attended the conference demonstration of Mac OS X (Tiger), noted other impressive components of Apple’s operating system, including video conferencing, what Apple calls desktop “widgets” (whichVista ended up calling “gadgets”), and user interface rendering.

“The bits we deliver in 05 September PDC [Professional Developers Conference] must be compelling, even in beta form,” Gundotra wrote in his message of 30 June. “UI must be hot. We will be directly compared against tiger.” Gundotra recently left Microsoft, and will join Google after a year’s sabbatical to abide by a non-compete clause.

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In January we’d reported that Jeff Han had formed his own company called Perceptive Pixel to market large versions of his Multi Touch screen to companies.

Here’s a new demo from Han on a much larger display. It appears they’ve created more user-inteface methods for touch screen — with menus and selection methods being demoed:

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Seizing on widely reported January sales numbers from Neilsen VideoScan, a Sony executive said Friday that the studio plans to begin marketing Blu-ray as the winner of the high-def format war.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment worldwide president David Bishop made the comments to trade newspaper Video Business in reaction to widely reported Neilsen/VideoScan sales figures indicating that Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVD in January by a ratio of 2:1.

“The message that we’re going to put out to the consumer now is, now it is safe to make a choice,” explained Bishop. “No more fence-sitting is needed… We have a critical mass of content, we have the biggest mass of consumer electronics companies in the world supporting this format. That has moved Blu-ray into the forefront.”

Adding further credence to the previously-released VideoScan numbers, studio sources told Video Business that for the first three weeks of January, the top selling Blu-ray title (‘Crank’) sold 7,500 units, while the top selling HD DVD title (‘Batman Begins’) sold 4,100 units. In a business traditionally dominated by new release disc sales, ‘Batman Begins’ on HD DVD is something of an anomaly, as it was released back in November.

And yet while all agree that it was a strong month for Blu-ray, opinion is split on whether the surge in sales is an indicator of stronger user adaption of Blu-ray compared to HD DVD, or simply a reflection of the larger number of new Blu-ray titles that hit the market over the month — 25 new Blu-ray titles were released in January, compared to just 11 titles on HD DVD for the same period.

And if you check new VHS releases on amazon, you’ll get several hundred, so I guess VHS tapes have really won the format war this time around.