December 2006 Archives

Word around town was that the new content-scrambling system used by both Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, AACS, had been cracked.  Turns out the news was premature: only the decryption keys to a few specific AACS-encoded titles on HD-DVD had been cracked, no thanks to an insecurity in Cyberlink's PowerDVD product.

VideoBusiness has a nice discussion of the whole thing in some detail, and the ever-informative folks at The Digital Bits put it this way:

Here's the bad news... those select titles (which so far include Warner's Full Metal Jacket, The Last Samurai and The Fugative, Paramount's Tomb Raider, and Universal's Apollo 13 and Van Helsing) could now be considered open and unprotected. The studios involved COULD decide to revoke the title keys on those specific unprotected HD-DVD discs, rendering them unplayable on all HD-DVD players, both software and hardware. Doing so would mean that those of you who already own the discs would have to work with the studios somehow to obtain replacement discs with new (and still valid and protected) title keys. The market is certainly small enough that the studios could do this without TOO much problem, though I don't imagine anyone involved would relish the hassle. We're making inquiries now to see what happens next and hopefully, we'll know more next week.

So basically, what we're likely about to witness is the AACS system demonstrating its own deliberately built-in ability to take a bullet and self-heal for the very first time in a real world situation. Fascinating.

"Fascinating" isn't the word I had in mind.  If one of the major "attractions" of using HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc is being constantly pestered about having to trade in my "cracked" discs for "re-protected" ones, I think I'll skip a generation.  The whole problem is not that the studios want to protect their content, but that they have to treat the consumer like a criminal to do it.  That said, if the costs of HD content are comparable to standard-def content (and so far they have been, amazingly), there may be that much less of an incentive to crack-and-rip.

No, I'm not talking about Office 2003 -- I'm talking about the way many pieces of free software (including free programs from major manufacturers) try to shoehorn some kind of browser or system toolbar into your computer.  The Java runtime envrionment tries to install the Google toolbar; the Adobe PDF Reader tries to install the Yahoo! Toolbar; the free systen-cleanup tool CCleaner tries to install Y!T as well.  And so on.

I don't use such tools; I find them more of a headache than anything else.  It's tiresome to have to say "no" to such things each time they're offered.  But at least they're optional and not mandatory ... at least for now.

From here on through to the end of the year, Windows Insight is taking a break.  I've got the holidays coming up, and I hope to get some long-overdue time away from the keys.  But when I come back I'll be continuing where I left off with the Windows Vista guides, and perhaps some new ongoing features about HD on the PC (depending on whether or not I can get the hardware), and of course whatever else comes my way that I can dig up.  I'm also thinking about doing a series of Windows Media Player tips, since I find that a lot of people come to me with "how do I do this?" questions about it, and I thought it might be useful to compile them into one place.

Either way -- see you next year!

For those curious about Microsoft Office 2007, there's a fully legit trial version available for download directly from Microsoft.  No verification needed to download, but you will have to register to get a product trial key.  It runs for 60 days completely like the real thing, and is the full Enterprise edition of the program.

There is an interesting article over at PC World about a group that may be responsible for the vast majority of phishing scams currently in the wild, or at least responsible for making it easier for third parties to devise and execute such scams.

Security experts guess that Rock Phish is run by an extremely small group of technically savvy criminals--probably about a dozen hackers--who set up the phishing Web sites, manage the domain name registration, and ensure that the stolen financial information is funneled into a central server, which researchers call the "Mother Ship."

This group then sells the credit card and banking information in Internet-based chat rooms to a much wider range of money launderers who actually extract money from these accounts, according to researchers who asked not to be identified.

Even ten years ago, this would have sounded like the plot of a Michael Crichton novel.  Twenty years ago, it would have been a John Brunner or William Gibson tale.  But it's reality; we're living with it right now, and dealing with its troubling consequences.

Scary, innit?

With all of the kerfuffle over "Zune: Hot or Not?", I've realized that there are a few features I've looked for in portable media players that nobody seems to offer.  One of them is the ability to bookmark an arbitrary point in the middle of a song -- for instance, the drum solo in a 14-minute live version of your favorite progressive-rock jam, or maybe the track points on a disc where the guys at the pressing plant messed up and somehow authored the whole disc as a single giant track.

Do any of the current players do this?  I know my own iRiver doesn't.  Not having it is no deal-killer, but having it might be a deal-maker!

DSLReports.com has a feature that I've found endlessly useful for live tests of anti-phishing tools: the Phish Tracker.  This is a list of known phishing sites, contributed to by DSLReports.com users, along with information about their activity and any other additional information that might prove useful.  Links to the phishing sites themselves are live, so use them with caution!

One of the features touted in both Windows XP and Windows Vista is a set of power-conservation features that encompass both desktop and notebook PCs.  Saving power on a notebook PC is an obvious benefit, but reducing desktop power consumption has now become a much bigger deal than it might have seemed even five years ago.  With Intel and AMD rolling out CPUs that boast of less wattage, it makes sense for Microsoft to provide additional fine-grained control over power consumption on their end.

To a high degree, that's what they've done with Windows Vista, and XP users are going to want to know how to dig into all that and make use of it.

Remember a while back I reported that HD playback would only be possible on PCI Express systems due to AGP video cards not supporting HDCP?  Looks like I was partly wrong: HDCP-capable cards do exist in the AGP form factor; they're just not all that common.  They're also upwards of $150 or so -- which, along with the $650 for a Blu-ray Disc drive, is still pretty heavy sugar to shell out.

Once again, signs point to "wait".  Especially since my favorite video company, the Criterion Collection, isn't going to produce HD in either format anytime soon.

On a mildly related note, some folks over at the Blu-ray Forum posted a thread with screenshots from both the regular DVD and the BR edition of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (one of the first BR titles).  The images seem to have gone missing as of this writing, but they were seriously impressive -- not just for the resolution of the pictures, but the colors were more discrete and not as washed-out (although I suspect that may be more a product of the post-production and mastering than the format per se).

The last several days have been terribly busy, but I did want to drop a note about Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.  It's still in beta, but the beta appears to be quite open; I was able to sign up and download the code without any trouble.  The reason I was curious about it, aside from being interested in virtualization issues in general, is because it apparently runs Windows Vista a whole lot better out of the box than the older edition did -- and runs on Vista.

As a result, if you want to run Vista now but still have some variety of full-machine backwards-compatibility, you could install Vista as your main OS and have XP running in a virtual session.

(Note that if you have an existing copy of Virtual PC you'll need to unload it before installing 2007; they can't be run side-by-side.)

I'll let you know how things go with it.