DRM, Tech Buzz
UserpicThe Pirate Bay Announced Video Streaming
Posted by Sasha

The Pirate Bay, the world's most high profile file-sharing website launched another video sharing website, The Video Bay. The service will offer unrestricted video content in violation of copyright law.

Peter Sunde, TBP founder, announced The Video Bay to the Open Video Conference in New York.

In a statement on the site, Mr Sunde said the service would use the latest HTML 5 features.

"More specifically the audio and video tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats.

"This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk encoding, so please don't bug us too much if the site isn't working properly," he said.

The statement from TBP is viewed as provocative as its founders were found guilty of breaking copyright law  and sentenced to one year in jail each, though still are free man.


I am only surprised that it took them so long to announce it. Perhaps mobile phones were not capable in the past, but broadband was.

With a service called TV Everywhere, Comcast and Time Warner will give cable subscribers access to "premium" television content via broadband, and later cellphone connections.

To begin with, 5,000 Comcast subscribers will begin testing the system next month, giving them access to Time Warner's TBS and TNT channels on their computers, and the same channels' video-on-demand catalogs on their cable boxes.

Read the article


An outstanding BBC production called "The Dream" (1990) was adapted by Murray Watts from "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man". "The Dream" is a monologue of an utopian vision of heaven of earth. Director: Norman Stone - Staring: Jeremy Irons. (In 5 parts Total time 40 minutes)



Hottest Girls has is the first application approved for sale in the iTunes App Store that contains nudity. Photos of topless women join the application’s “2200+ sexy bikini babes and lingerie models.”

Of course, porn has long been accessible on the iPhone through its Internet browser, but this marks the first time Apple has sanctioned images of naked women for the popular device.

The change in Apple’s porn policy is likely a result of expanded parental controls in the new iPhone 3.0 OS software.  Age restrictions can now be set to prevent mature downloads from the App Store.

Read more


Apple
UserpicJavascript and Quick Time
Posted by Moxietype

Important: Starting with QuickTime 7.1.5, you can no longer issue javascript:// URLs or call JavaScript functions directly from within a QuickTime movie. This feature was removed from QuickTime for security reasons. This document includes techniques for working around this change.

Introduction to JavaScript Scripting Guide for QuickTime

Full Guide (next page) includes Movie Commands Reference, Quick Time properties, etc.

Important: If QTSRC is set to a relative URL, it must be relative to the movie specified in the SRC parameter, not the web page in which it is embedded.

Note: URLs cannot cross local/remote zone boundaries. In other words, a local movie (file:// protocol) can invoke only local URLs, such as another local movie, and remote movies (http://, https://, or rtsp:// protocol) can invoke only remote URLs, such as another remote movie or a web page. Furthermore, remote URLs are restricted to http://, https://, and rtsp:// protocols. Other protocols, such as javascript://, are prohibited.

More here

HTML Scripting Guide for Quick Time

If you do have QuickTime Pro, there might be a workaround:

  1. Open the movie in QuickTime Pro;
  2. Display its properties (by pressing Command-J or Control-J);
  3. Select the master track;
  4. Click the Presentation tab;
  5. Enable the checkbox beside "Enter fullscreen mode when opened."
  6. Set the webpage to launch the movie in the QuickTime Player by assigning the target parameter to quicktimeplayer.

Needs to be tested.


Mr. Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, who gives 50 speeches a year for an estimated $35,000 to $50,000 apiece (up to 2 and a half million dollars just for speeches) promoting big ideas, writes best-selling books such as “The Long Tail” has yet to come up with one big enough to save Wired's business. According to today's NYT article:

The magazine has lost 50 percent of its ad pages so far this year, ranking among the worst off of the more than 150 monthly magazines measured by Media Industry Newsletter.

Mr. Anderson seems to believe that by redesigning the Wired magazine three times and winning National Magazine Award design category two years running he would reinvegorate the struggling print business model.

But it is still one of the least popular magazines at Condé Nast, with a circulation of only 704,000. Its Web site, meanwhile, is the most popular of Condé Nast’s magazine sites, with about 11 million unique visitors a month, according to the company’s internal figures. That suggests that technology-forward readers prefer to read articles in a technology-forward way.

And yet, when publication had to downsize it eliminated a quarter of its Web employees and only four print employees.

Mr. Anderson belives in Free. He even wrote a book about it “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which comes out in July and is guaranteed to be another best-seller. Another thing Mr. Anderson belives is the buzz. It takes a lot of it to be a tech guru and get paid for it.

“The problems are obvious, the range of solutions are obvious,” he said.


Social Web
UserpicPrimates of Social Web
Posted by Sasha

Will social networks increase in size is not an obvious hypothesis. There could be more networks and more groups but cognitive power of the brain is limited to the number of friends one can develop. "Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148," quoting the related article by The Economist. Even more worrisome is the fact that with the rise of social networks, the number of "core" friends is on downward trend.

 


DRM, E-Commerce
UserpicVideo on Demand is Not Digital Property
Posted by Moxietype

By statutory definition, the term “digital property” does not include:

  1. video programming services, including video on demand television services; and
  2. broadcasting services, including content to provide such services

Read more on what qualifies as Digital Property and is taxable in the State of New Jersey.


"There are many tools available for working with Amazon S3 without having to write a software application. For this article, we’ll be using a plug-in for the Firefox browser, called S3Fox. You can also use one of the many code samples and tools available through the Amazon S3 Resource Center, or use a product built on Amazon S3 in the Solutions Catalog.

First, create a bucket in your Amazon S3 account that corresponds to the domain you’ll use to host your media files. For our web site, we’ll create a bucket called “media.webscalecomputing.info”.

Important: Use lower-case letters only to name buckets that will be used in DNS redirects. This requirement is a function of the way that DNS handles names (always lower case).

Why use this specific bucket name? Amazon S3 has a virtual hosting feature that allows inbound requests from a web site, so it will serve up content from the bucket by the same name. We’ll talk more about this feature in the next section when we configure our domain.

Next, add your media files to the new bucket in Amazon S3. Using the Firefox plug-in, it’s as simple as selecting the files on your local system, then clicking the transfer button."

Read full article for instructions


Web Site Optimization
UserpicHow to set up Amazon S3 server
Posted by Sasha

One of the typical ways to improve scalability of high traffic website is to serve it contents from several web servers. This way all request for html pages will go to first sever and requests for media content will go to the second one allowing each server to perform better under high load. Amazon S3 offers you unlimited scalability and pay as you go model. You pay only for what actually is stored on your S3 account and pay only for the actual traffic.

Read more on how to set up Amazon S3 account

 


If Time Warner is concerned about cable and VOD sales, one can only imagine the impact on the DVD sales.

Cable companies are getting worried that more people are watching TV over the Internet. Glenn Britt, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, voiced his concern in February during a quarterly earnings discussion with analysts.

"We are starting to see the beginning of cord cutting," he said. "People will choose not to buy subscription video if they can get the same stuff for free."


More and more television programming and movies are available online, through sites including Hulu, Netflix Watch Instantly, YouTube and Amazon.com's Video on Demand. "This time there is a real, viable alternative" to cable, said Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Time Warner Cable, which operates under the Road Runner brand, said it has been offering tiered, capped service in Beaumont, Texas for some time and in March began testing that pricing in four new markets: Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Rochester, New York; and Greensboro, N.C. Still unpriced is Time Warner's maximum available offering: 100 GB per month, said Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley. Usage exceeding those caps is charged at $1 per gigabyte.

Others among the nation's largest ISPs are also experimenting with caps and tiers.

Source

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Internet Service Provideers (ISPs) will start storing details of user e-mails and net phone calls under an EU directive.

The plans were drawn up in the wake of the London bombings in 2005.

ISPs and telecoms firms have resisted the proposals while some countries in the EU are contesting the directive.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said it was a "crazy directive" with potentially dangerous repercussions for citizens.

All ISPs in the European Union will have to store the records for a year. An EU directive which requires telecoms firms to hold on to telephone records for 12 months is already in force.


DRM
UserpicAdobe Protected Streaming
Posted by Moxietype

The Media-Streams are encrypted "on the fly" by the Flash Media Server (the protocol used is rtmpe or rtmps). In addition the client player can be verified via "SWF-Verification", to make sure that only the official client can be used.

Encryption:

All contents are encrypted by the Flash Media Server "on the fly". This means, there is no encryption of the source file needed (which is different to Microsoft DRM, for instance). For data transmission, a special protocol is used: rtmpe or rtmps.

rtmps uses SSL-encryption, rtmpe makes use of proprietary encryption algorithms. rtmpe causes less CPU-load than rtmps on the Flash Media Server. In the past, some tools were able to capture rtmpe Streams by taking advantage of a security hole within the flash player object. Adobe fixed that issue in Jan. 2009.

Currently, there are no known hacks for rtmps and for rtmpe and also there are no known tools to perform rtmpe/rtmps decryption, but it is known that private groups have found a way to rip those streams (HorribleSubs ripping Crunchyroll)

SWF-Verification:

This technique is used to ensure that only the official Flash client, delivered by the content owner, can be used to request the streaming data.

All officially allowed clients (which are in fact *.swf Files) need to be placed on the Flash Media Server. Any unknown client requesting a connection will receive a "connection reject".

The combination of both techniques ensures that streams cannot be sniffed and stored into a local file. SWF verification is needed to avoid that manipulated clients can access the content. Those clients could possibly write the unencrypted content to a file.

Besides that, it is possible to restrict connections to the Flash Media Server to a list of known hosts, to avoid that the whole player (the flash client) is placed on a foreign site.

Source


According to the article the major spy network has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world. The spy network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.

I already implemented on multiple web sites IP bans on incoming traffic from China due to the numerous coordinated and yet unsuccessful hacking attacks coming from the particular regions of that country.


Offbeat
UserpicLove at First Sight
Posted by Sasha

According to the recent study it took on average 8.2 seconds for a male to fall iin love. I personally think that 8.2 seconds hardly qulifies for a "first sight" as to spend that much time staring at someone one has to be looking for some redeeming qualities.

As the figures revealed, a man who rated a lady attractive held eye contact for about an average of 8.2 seconds, which increased his chances of falling in love at first sight, researchers said.

Oppositely, if the gaze lasted for about 4.5 seconds or less, the man in question was not interested in any way in the woman he had made eye contact with, which meant he did not consider her good-looking enough. Ladies, on the other hand, did not make this distinction, since they paid the same amount of attention and held eye contact for just as long with both men they were interested in and those they did not fancy, for one reason or another, the same study showed.


4 comments 4 comments ( 1258 views )

A wealth of information in NY Times article on how to use Skype with your mobile:

Both SkypeOut and SkypeIn carry a relatively low fee. SkypeOut calls to land lines can be as little as 2 cents a minute, while calls to mobile phones are usually a bit more. In Italy, for example, Gary’s call cost me (not him) 30.8 cents a minute (not including tax). A SkypeIn subscription, meanwhile, costs $60 a year or $18 for three months. All I have to do before I leave home is set my American cellphone (an older-generation iPhone) to forward to my SkypeIn number, and all I have to do when I arrive in a new country is get a SIM card, go online and set the Skype software’s preferences to forward all calls to the new number.

So, here’s how Gary’s call to me worked:

He dialed my regular American cellphone number, which forwarded to my SkypeIn number, which, in turn, forwarded (via SkypeOut) to my Italian cellphone number.


"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

theconnor

"Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web."

timmylevad / Tim Levad Cisco channel partner advocate


In this enchanting article from Vanity Fair Michael Lewis draws parallels between a gentle people from Scandinavia who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything and "a horse that pretends to be broken."

“The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery.” The brilliant paper was written back in 1954 by H. Scott Gordon, a University of Indiana economist. It describes the plight of the fisherman—and seeks to explain “why fishermen are not wealthy, despite the fact that fishery resources of the sea are the richest and most indestructible available to man.” The problem is that, because the fish are everybody’s property, they are nobody’s property. Anyone can catch as many fish as they like, so they fish right up to the point where fishing becomes unprofitable—for everybody.

This insight is what led Iceland to go from being one of the poorest countries in Europe circa 1900 to being one of the richest circa 2000. Iceland’s big change began in the early 1970s, after a couple of years when the fish catch was terrible. The best fishermen returned for a second year in a row without their usual haul of cod and haddock, so the Icelandic government took radical action: they privatized the fish.

2 comments 2 comments ( 1195 views )