In his DRM: a Personal Story blog entry on Friday 11/18/05, Phil Windley wrote about TiVo®”s Digital Rights Management (DRM) protecction of TV shows recorded on a TiVo.

Rightly, Phil pointed out that this DRM was protecting TiVo”s business model, rather than protecting the creative work itself. By putting a DRM “wrapper” on the recorded show, TiVo”s prevents users from playing the recording on any player that does not have a TiVo key.

I much prefer my home theater PC-based solution.
Continue reading “Recording TV to Watch Later - TiVo & DRM”

~ Cyber Security Tips During the Holiday Season ~
Don’t Let the Cyber Space Grinch Steal Your Holiday!

Thursday, December 15, 2005
(3:00pm-4:00pm Eastern)

With the expected surge in Internet shopping during the holiday season, expected to be 25% more than last year”s holiday season, this is an opportunity to learn or review two separate types of issues.

Continue reading “Upcoming Cyber Security Webcast”

Reuters reports that Sony BMG announced, yesterday, that it is recalling all the music CDs that it issued that included the XCP copy-protection technology.

The XCP system, with its rootkit, was used on 49 titles — an estimated 2.1 million CDs have already been sold to consumers.

The recall involves both a CD exchange program for consumers and the return of any unsold CDs from retail outlets.

XCP protected the copy-protection system by installing a rootkit — software that subverted Windows into hiding files, directories, processes and registry entries. The rootkit was easily used to hide anything else, as long as you started its name with 5 specific characters.

On October 20th, the National Webcast Initiative held a special national webcast on “Protecting Our Children on the Internet.” This event was part of National October Cyber Security Awareness Month

The National Webcast Initiative is the result of a partnership of the Department of Homeland Security US-CERT and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). It was established to develop a series of national webcasts which will examine critical and timely cyber security issues. These webcasts are available to a broad audience to help raise awareness and knowledge levels, including home users, small business users, corporate users, governmental users, and others.

The National Webcast Initiative is also coordinated by the New York State Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination (http://www.cscic.state.ny.us) and the New York State Forum (http://www.nysforum.org).

The October broadcast was a play called “Cyber Smart in Cyber Space.” Their archived webcast (a broadcast over the Internet - the Web) is now available on-line.
Continue reading “Protecting Children On The Internet”

I”ve been giving my home theater PC quite a workout recently.

SageTV, the software package that runs under Windows to control my home theater PC, was recently updated to version 4.0. The changes were many, but the interface was still pretty consistent with versions 3.0 and 3.5.

One of the biggest changes was the release of SageTV Studio. This is a separate download and requires SageTV to run. It is the interface editor for the whole program. With Studio, users can change their own look-and-feel of SageTV they way they want to — if they are willing to learn how to use Studio.

The bigger advantage is that SageTV allows you to replace the standard user interface with an interface designed by someone else. Since version 2 (last year), a very small cadre of SageTV advanced users have been experimenting with Studio and making their customizations available.

Continue reading “Home Theater PC”

Joel Comm, Google Adsense master and author of Adsense Secrets, has finally released his book on Chitika eMiniMalls.

While I”ve been running them on my sites since October 10th, and been very pleased with their performance, I expect Joel”s book to help me take that to the next step.

I may not have been one of the first to buy it, but I was certainly one of the first. I also bought his audio CD of the book (which will be shipped) and got a free download of the mp3 file as one of the first 100 customers.

The book is short and full of content. The CD is short and excellent, too — well, it is the book without the pictures. I had to go out this evening, so I listened to the book during my drive. What a nice way to pick up tricks — using the otherwise dead time of driving. What would I do otherwise? Listen to some old music on the radio?