[Quote:]

Two of the most eagerly anticipated next-gen releases in recent memory have hit a series of playback snags on select Blu-ray players, but a fix is said to be on the way.

[..]

The most severe problems have been reported on Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100, which are both said to be incapable of playing back the discs at all. Less catastophic issues (error messages and playback stutter) have been reported for Samsung’s BDP-1000. The discs appear to play back fine on all other Blu-ray players (including the PlayStation 3), although users have reported lengthy load times of up to two minutes.

It has been widely speculated that these issues stem from the use of BD+ copy protection on the two discs. We contacted Fox for comment, but so far there’s no official word from the studio.

Why punish the people who actually pay for your product? The only way to suffer from this is if you purchased a copy, the people who are downloading this are free of the pain… It’s like they want you to pirate it. They are creating a system where the only people who have a trouble free experience are the pirates.

[Quote:]

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200.

The computer, if you hadn’t already guessed, is the fabled “$100 laptop” that’s been igniting hype and controversy for three years. It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries.

[..]

The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.

[..]

No, the biggest obstacle to the XO’s success is not technology — it’s already a wonder — but fear. Overseas ministers of education fear that changing the status quo might risk their jobs. Big-name computer makers fear that the XO will steal away an overlooked two-billion-person market. Critics fear that the poorest countries need food, malaria protection and clean water far more than computers.

(The founder, Nicholas Negroponte’s, response: “Nobody I know would say, ‘By the way, let’s hold off on education.’ Education happens to be a solution to all of those same problems.”)

But the XO deserves to overcome those fears. Despite all the obstacles and doubters, O.L.P.C. has come up with a laptop that’s tough and simple enough for hot, humid, dusty locales; cool enough to keep young minds engaged, both at school and at home; and open, flexible and collaborative enough to support a million different teaching and learning styles.

It’s a technological breakthrough, for sure. Now let’s just hope it breaks through the human barriers.

[Quote:]

Popular whole disk encryption vendor, PGP Corporation, has a remote support “feature” which allows unattended reboots, fully-bypassing the decryption boot process. The feature, which until recently was not documented(customer accessible only) in most support manuals, allows a user who knows a boot passphrase to add a static password (hexadecimal x01) that the boot software knows. If this flag is set, the boot process does not interrogate a user. It simply starts the operating system.

Vendor response:

You bring up an interesting issue with the automated reboot feature, but you don’t have the details right. I can’t fault you for that, as we haven’t documented on the web site. Full product documentation should be coming in the next release.

The major inaccuracy you have is that the passphrase bypass operates only once. After the system boots, the bypass is reset and has to be enabled again. Note that to enable it, you must have cryptographic access to the volume. You cannot enable it on a bare running disk.

We are not the only manufacturer to have such a feature — all the major people do, because our customers require it of us.

Really? Which customers? Three letter acronyms? And what other functionality did you fail to document? How can we trust you in the future?

Woa.

Amazing what you find on the web these days

I Cannot Tell a Lie

[Quote:]

“If there’s no dancing, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.”

– Emma Goldman

[Quote:]

Good news from California’s Alameda County — a judge has voided election results after the county botched its response to a contested race conducted on Diebold electronic voting machines. The judge ordered that the disputed Measure R — an initiative addressing the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries — go back on next year’s ballot.

Measure R lost by fewer than 200 votes in the 2004 election, and Americans for Safe Access and voters in the city of Berkeley brought a legal challenge seeking a recount. But while the lawsuit was ongoing, election officials returned the voting machines to supplier Diebold Election Systems, and 96% of the detailed audit information from the election was destroyed. EFF helped analyze the remaining data, but as the judge recognized, it was impossible to tell if the tallies reported on election night were correct.

[Quote:]

The government has told head teachers to lighten up after one British school told children in the dinner queue that if they didn’t give their fingerprints they wouldn’t get any food.

The Department for Education and Skills said this week in a statement to the BBC Radio 4 Programme You and Yours that schools who refused school dinners to kids who won’t scan their fingerprints might be in breach of the law, contrasting with the long-overdue guidance note it issued on school fingerprinting in the summer.

This draconian application of fingerprint technology at Morley High School, Leeds, had forced one parent to make her child packed lunches, since the school provided no alternative way for children to get their dinner.

John Townsley, head teacher of Morley High School, told You and Yours: “We have given parents an opt out. The opt out is that you don’t have to have anything to do with the system whatsoever and that you then have the responsibility as a mum, dad or carer to provide a very healthy alternative to your child.”

But the DfES said: “Schools have a legal duty to provide meals for pupils who want them. So telling concerned parents to provide pack lunches if they were unwilling to sign up to the fingerprint system, as Morley High was doing, might amount to a breach of the Education Act 2002.”

[Quote:]

The Chronulator is an open source kit for building a handsome and marvellously impractical clock; the builders at ShareBrained Technology say, “The Chronulator starts life as a clock, showing the hours and minutes on two old-school analog panel meters. Dress it up to look like old test equipment, audio VU meters, or motorcycle gauges. Mount it in a picture frame, shadow box, computer case, plush toy, pumpkin… Customize the code and hardware to make the meters indicate something other than time — network traffic/lag, outside temperature, freeway congestion, terror threat level, stress level, whatever! Let your imagination run free.” Link

[Quote:]

The Storm worm first appeared at the beginning of the year, hiding in e-mail attachments with the subject line: “230 dead as storm batters Europe.” Those who opened the attachment became infected, their computers joining an ever-growing botnet.

[..]

Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.

Great article by Bruce Schneier!

[Quote:]

In a move designed to counter criticism over its veto of a $35 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Bush administration today announced plans to enact sweeping changes to the existing child labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

“The question should not be Is our childrens getting gooder insurance through the government, but How can our childrens gets gooder private insurance, and I think the answer to that is simple: get a job,” President Bush told a group of kids at the Fort Meade, Daycare Division facility.

The State Health for Employed Minors Program (SHEMP) would give tax breaks to businesses that hire workers as young as 8 years old to work 32-36 hour work weeks, provided that the companies also cover the younger workers for major medical and dental insurance.

Businesses had lobbied hard to move the work hours up to the standard 40-hour week, but in the end had settled for the 32-36 number in exchange for a much-reduced orthodontia clause.

“We see it as a win-win all around,” said Stu Mengele, chairman of the Business Interest Group, a Washington-based corporate think-tank and lobbying firm. “We’ll have more high-energy laborers – seriously, have you seen them zip around a playground? The tax cuts will promote business growth across the board.

“And several million kids will have insurance to cover them for any on-the-job injuries they might stumble into,” Mengele added. “Everyone wins!”

Democrats in Congress have publicly expressed misgivings about key aspects of SHEMP, and it is expected that they will complain loudly before signing the program into law.

“Does SHEMP cover naps? Snacks? How about recess? Will IBM be installing swings and a slide adjacent to every break room?” asked a flustered Nancy Pelosi recently on the House floor. “I don’t have the power to stop it, but I will damn sure pencil any concerns I have into the margins of anything coming from the President’s desk.

“Anything!” she repeated defiantly.

Both chambers of Congress are expected to begin debate on the program sometime later this month.

[Quote:]

When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that went missing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside IT contractor.

The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according to sources close to the investigation of a possible violation of the Federal Records and Presidential Records acts.

[Quote:]

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

[Perjury:]

FEINGOLD: The question here is: What is your view regarding the president’s constitutional authority to authorize violations of the criminal law, duly enacted statutes that may have been on the books for many years, when acting as commander in chief? Does he have such authority?

The question you have been asked is not about a hypothetical statute in the future that the president might think is unconstitutional; it’s about our laws and international treaty obligations concerning torture.

The torture memo answered that question in the affirmative. And my colleagues and I would like your answer on that today.

And I also would like you to answer this: Does the president, in your opinion, have the authority, acting as commander in chief, to authorize warrantless searches of Americans’ homes and wiretaps of their conversations in violation of the criminal and foreign intelligence surveillance statutes of this country?

GONZALES: Senator, the August 30th memo has been withdrawn. It has been rejected, including that section regarding the commander in chief authority to ignore the criminal statutes.

So it’s been rejected by the executive branch. I categorically reject it.

And in addition to that, as I’ve said repeatedly today, this administration does not engage in torture and will not condone torture.

[Quote:]

When a team of FBI agents lands in Baghdad this week to probe Blackwater security contractors for murder, it will be protected by bodyguards from the very same firm, the Daily News has learned.

Half a dozen FBI criminal investigators based in Washington are scheduled to travel to Iraq to gather evidence and interview witnesses about a Sept. 16 shooting spree that left at least 11 Iraqi civilians dead.

The agents plan to interview witnesses within the relative safety of the fortified Green Zone, but they will be transported outside the compound by Blackwater armored convoys, a source briefed on the FBI mission said.

“What happens when the FBI team decides to go visit the crime scene? Blackwater is going to have to take them there,” the senior U.S. official told The News.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on security measures taken by agents in Iraq.

“It makes absolutely no sense that the FBI will be protected by the very people they are investigating,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan). “But given how the administration runs this war, it’s hardly surprising.”

In OS X 1.4, you can tell the finder to show some extra info beneath each icon, such as the amount of space available on a volume:

As you can see, this 160 Gb disk (well, that’s what they call it when they want to sell it) has 148 Gb of space, and of that amount, you’d think that 54 Gb was still available.

Wrong.

The text actually says that mumble-point-54 Gb of space is still available. Here’s the full info:

So, because they didn’t have enough space available to show the full number, they decided to cut off the most significant digits.

Somebody didn’t think this through…

[Quote:]

Basically, opening a carefully crafted TIFF image will crash mobile safari, causing a buffer overflow and allow for arbitrary code execution. This same exploit was used more than 1.5 years ago to crack the PSP firmware.

Apple fans expect a lot from Apple, and if the tiniest detail doesn’t fit, they complain. Take this story about the new Dock in OS X 1.5. The new Dock does a lot wrong, but the attention for detail people give this show much people care. Luckily, they also have a sense of humor, as one of the comments show. Here’s the original piece, and the comment in question below it;

[Quote:]

I’ve yet to see any other comments on the Dock being used on the side of the screen. This may be because those who’ve tried it have been stricken instantly with vertigo and had to go lie down for a bit. I’m powering through the nausea, however, in an effort to make you sick too.

It really isn’t an exaggeration to say that it may make you dizzy. Like an M.C. Escher acid trip, there appear to be several perspectives at once. I have lots of questions, including:

• What’s keeping those icons on (in?) the Dock?

• How did they simultaneously make the “Currently Running” lights so difficult to see, and yet so distracting when you do notice them?

• Is that a crosswalk in my Dock?

• Did they nail the Trash to the wall?

• Why is the Dock reflecting the desktop background?

• For the love of pete, why is it reflecting a window? How does that help me?

• And finally, what’s the keyboard shortcut to turn on Dock hiding?

In a word, it’s just awful.

And the comment:

Q. What’s keeping those icons on (in?) the Dock?

A. The Distorsion Reality Field, it’s more powerful than the Gravity one.

Q. How did they simultaneously make the “Currently Running” lights so difficult to see, and yet so distracting when you do notice them?

A. That’s because Apple is all about details.

Q. Is that a crosswalk in my Dock?

A. No, it’s the WiFi signal strength. Apparently, you own a MacBook Pro.

Q. Did they nail the Trash to the wall?

A. It’s not a trash, it’s a basket. And if you use the easter egg in Leopard (type: “October, you’re kidding?” in a Stickies window and select the text and drag it into an iCal window) , you can play basket ball using the iSync application icon as the ball.

Q. Why is the Dock reflecting the desktop background?

A. To make you buy an expensive GPU, isn’t this obvious?

Q. For the love of pete, why is it reflecting a window? How does that help me?

A. It doesn’t help you, it helps Apple make you buy a high end GPU. And if you’re not happy, please consider that in the next evolution of Mac OS X, the Dock will use the iSight so that it can draw a reflection of yourself as sitting in front of your Mac.

Q. And finally, what’s the keyboard shortcut to turn on Dock hiding?

A. There’s none. In Leopard you will have to tap the four corners of your touch-sensitive 30″ screen to hide the dock. If you need a hand or two for this, you can always bring your Mac to the Genius Bar of the nearest Apple Store. Never wonder what a muti-touch patent could be useful for?