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Prepare for Digital TV Changeover

This video offers a step by step tutorial that will make the steps necessary to prepare for digital TV clear.
Finally... Feb.17, 2009 will be here before we're ready...

digitalconversion.wmv

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Pirate Bay to Hollywood: Open your Own Torrent Site

A bold move for sure but Hollywood won't get it. Torrent technology would revolutionize downloading video on demand and give the likes of Netflix a wake-up call.

Link: TorrentFreak

Written by Ernesto on March 12, 2008

Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij from The Pirate Bay recently did a video interview which resulted in some great quotes. One such quote comes from Fredrik, he suggests that the movie and music industry should set up their own torrent site, and monetize it through advertisements. “We would be out of business.” he added.

Dayrobber, the site that did the interview, is a new web-tv site that publishes 5 minute short shows. The initial plan was to release the second and the third part of the
interview on Thursday and Friday, but especially for TorrentFreak they
decided to release all three parts today.

Denver Airport Offers Free Wi-Fi

Link: PC World

Denver International Airport quietly drops the fee for wireless Internet access in time to serve ads to holiday travelers.

Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
Monday, December 10, 2007

Denver International Airport is betting that travelers will like getting something for free, and so far it looks like a good bet.

The airport, one of the busiest in the U.S., last month switched its public Wi-Fi offering from paid to advertising-supported. Within a week, and with no public notice of the change, Wi-Fi use grew tenfold, said Jim Winston, director of telecommunications for the airport. He expects the network to get even busier.

DIA is a large-scale case study of free Wi-Fi in airports. About 50 million passengers pass through the airport every year, with as many as 165,000 per day during busy times of the year, airport spokesman Jeff Green said. Now that Wi-Fi is free, there are 7,000 to 8,000 connections to the network per day, according to Winston. To link all those free users with the Internet, the airport at first bumped up its "backhaul" to 5M bps (bits per second) but later found that wasn't enough. It now has a 10M bps connection just for the Wi-Fi users.

New Solar Panels Produced at Less Than $1 Per Watt

Link: (TreeHugger)

by Matthew Sparkes, London, UK on 09.24.07
Science & Technology (solar)

Solar panels that cost less than $1 per watt to produce are on their way, as Colorado State University's new method for low-cost, high-efficiency solar panels looks set to begin mass production. The panels will be made by AVA Solar, and production should start towards the end of next year at a huge factory employing 500 people.

The cost reduction comes from the new, continuous manufacturing process which uses cadmium telluride thin film rather than the more expensive crystalline silicon.

Once manufactured, the cost to buyers could be brought down to $2 per watt, which is roughly half the current cost of solar panels.

The process is also greener, with less wastage than previous systems. Only 2% of materials need to be recycled. "This technology offers a significant improvement in capital and labor productivity and overall manufacturing efficiency," said the director of Colorado State's Materials Engineering Laboratory, Professor W.S. Sampath.
::Industry Week

How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons

Wired Article Link:

Security Matters
Commentary by  Bruce Schneier
04.19.07 | 2:00 AM                     

More than a year ago, I wrote about the increasing risks of data loss because more and more data fits in smaller and smaller packages. Today I use a 4-GB USB memory stick for backup while I am traveling. I like the convenience, but if I lose the tiny thing I risk all my data.

Encryption is the obvious solution for this problem -- I use PGPdisk -- but Secustick sounds even better: It automatically erases itself after a set number of bad password attempts. The company makes a bunch of other impressive claims: The product was commissioned, and eventually approved, by the French intelligence service; it is used by many militaries and banks; its technology is revolutionary.

Unfortunately, the only impressive aspect of Secustick is its hubris, which was revealed when Tweakers.net completely broke its security. There's no data self-destruct feature. The password protection can easily be bypassed. The data isn't even encrypted. As a secure storage device, Secustick is pretty useless.

On the surface, this is just another snake-oil security story. But there's a deeper question: Why are there so many bad security products out there? It's not just that designing good security is hard -- although it is -- and it's not just that anyone can design a security product that he himself cannot break. Why do mediocre security products beat the good ones in the marketplace?

Don't use WEP for Wi-Fi security, researchers say

Link: Article

 

Peter Sayer April 04, 2007 (IDG News Service) The Wi-Fi security protocol WEP should not be relied on to protect sensitive material, according to three German security researchers who have discovered a faster way to crack it. They plan to demonstrate their findings at a security conference in Hamburg this weekend.

Mathematicians showed as long ago as 2001 that the RC4 key scheduling algorithm underlying the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) protocol was flawed, but attacks on it required the interception of around 4 million packets of data in order to calculate the full WEP security key. Further flaws found in the algorithm have brought the time taken to find the key down to a matter of minutes -- not necessarily fast enough to break into systems that change their security keys every five minutes.

Spam Costs $712 Per Employee Annually

Link: InformationWeek
By Thomas Claburn, April 2, 2007

A survey by Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm suggests that nine out of 10 e-mail users are frustrated with spam and one in 100 "appear to be at the breaking point."

As a luncheon meat, Spam is a bargain. As unsolicited marketing, spam is a rip-off: $712 per employee per year, or $71 billon to all U.S. businesses annually.

That's the cost of spam in terms of lost productivity, according to a survey released Monday by IT research firms Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm.

These figures come from a survey of 849 e-mail users conducted last month that found that two of every three e-mail messages received by businesspeople are spam, despite the fact that 60% of companies filter spam. The survey results are based on a $30-per-hour pay rate, a 2,080-hour work year, 100,249,046 U.S. e-mail-using workers, and that e-mail users are spending 16 seconds on average identifying and deleting spam that has evaded detection and landed in an in-box.

Judge's decision leaves RIAA with lose-lose situation in Elektra v. Santangelo

Good!!

Link: Ars technica

By Eric Bangeman |Published: March 21, 2007 - 08:38PM CT                

The case of Elektra v. Santangelo has been one of the more closely followed cases in the RIAA's crusade against suspected file sharers, due in no small part to the aggressiveness of Patti Santangelo's defense. Ray Beckerman is reporting that Judge Colleen McMahon has denied the RIAA's motion to dismiss the case without prejudice, ruling that the case must either proceed to trial or be dismissed with prejudice.

Related Stories

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• Federal judge: Making files available for download = distribution
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• RIAA sues Santangelo children

It's a noteworthy ruling because if the case is dismissed with prejudice, Santangelo would be considered the prevailing party and would likely be entitled to an award of attorneys' fees, as in Capitol v. Foster. In her ruling, Judge McMahon concluded that "no conceivable interest of justice would be served by permitting this case to be dismissed without prejudice against defendant." Instead, the defendant should have a shot at vindication via a trial or have the case dismissed with prejudice.

Microsoft researchers follow Web spam money trail

Link: Zero Day | ZDNet.com

March 19th, 2007

Posted by Ryan Naraine @ 7:40 am Categories: Hackers,  Microsoft,  Browsers,  Vulnerability research,  Spam and Phishing,  Spyware and Adware,  Botnets,  Viruses and Worms,  Data theft             

Using a homegrown tool called Fiddler, researchers at Microsoft have come up with a system to track the money that flows from big-name advertisers to search engine spammers.

The methodology, created by Microsoft Research in partnership with the University of California, Davis, has already uncovered a complex scheme where a small group using false doorway pages are able to profit by  redirecting traffic passed from search engines in one direction and then sending advertisements acquired from syndicators in the opposite direction.  (More at the New York Times).

Boycott the RIAA in March

Gizmodo Link:

Gizmodo: Putting Our Money Where Our Mouths Are:

Alright, we've been following the RIAA's increasingly frequent affronts to privacy and free speech lately, and it's about time we stopped merely bitching and moaning and did something about it. The RIAA has the power to shift public policy and to alter the direction of technology and the Internet for one reason and one reason alone: it's totally loaded. Without their millions of dollars to throw at lawyers, the RIAA is toothless. They get their money from us, the consumers, and if we don't like the way they're behaving, we can let them know with our wallets.

With that in mind, Gizmodo is declaring the month of March Boycott the RIAA month. We want to get the word out to as many people as humanly possible that we can all send a message by refusing to buy any album put out by an RIAA label. Am I saying you should start pirating music? Not at all. You can continue to support the artists you enjoy and respect in a number of ways..