Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Kevin sends news of an event: Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 @ 1:00 PM ET -- two expert video gamers take your questions and comments regarding kids' gaming habits and how new advances might actually be healthy for them. http://www.connectforkids.org/node/3203 11:45:06 AM    comment []

Iran censorship and SmartFilter censorware / Secure Computing. A little while ago, the OpenNet Initiative produced a report on censorware used by the government of Iran, exposing that Iran used SmartFilter censorware. I've stayed out of the ensuing controversy, since given the history of (Secure Computing PR flack) David Burt's tactic's, I'm more than happy that Harvard people get to tangle with him in pure unalloyed form. But since the issue has settled down now, I'll summarize and add some references that won't be found anywhere else.  . . . [Infothought] 8:27:08 AM    comment []

White House mum on CIA leak, Rove. On CNN [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] 8:27:00 AM    comment []

".mobi". Consumers will soon be able to recognise web sites specially designed for use by mobile phones by the new ".mobi" suffix,which will be introduced alongside the popular ".com" and other top-level domain (TLD) names",News reports."The new suffix was approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) at a Luxemburg meeting on Monday". New TLD for mobiles [Smart Mobs] 8:25:05 AM    comment []

dark news about the archive. Bill Patry has a very depressing account about a "a horrific DMCA et al. suit filed against the Internet Archive." [Lessig Blog] 8:21:56 AM    comment []

A Guide to Getting Things Done. If you spend a lot of time not accomplishing your goals, you might benefit from the Getting Things Done movement, otherwise known as GTD for those of us too productive to waste time on extra syllables. By Robert Andrews. GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age. The manual Getting Things Done, which preaches tips for time management, has inspired a cult-like following online. Enthusiasts share tips and tools for doing more work, reducings stress and keeping inboxes clean. By Robert Andrews. [Wired News] 8:21:48 AM    comment []

Hymn Project. The Hymn Project exists to break the iTunes mp4 copy-protection scheme, so you can hear the music you bought on any machine you want. The purpose of the Hymn Project is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. The various software provided on this web site allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases (protected AAC / .m4p) from their DRM restrictions with no loss of sound quality. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes and on hardware not supported by Apple. Initially, the software recovered your iTunes password (your key, basically) from your hard drive. In response, Apple obfuscated the format and no one has yet figured out how to recover the keys cleanly. To get around this, they developed a program called FairKeys that impersonates iTunes and contacts the server. Since the iTunes client can still get your password, this works. FairKeys ... pretends to be a copy of iTunes running on an imaginary computer, one of the five computers that you're currently allowed to authorize for playing your iTMS purchases. FairKeys logs into Apple's web servers to get your keys the same way iTunes does when it needs to get new keys. At least for now, at this stage of the cat-and-mouse game, FairKeys knows how to request your keys and how to decode the response which contains your keys, and once it has those keys it can store them for immediate or future use by JHymn. More security by inconvenience, and yet another illustration of the neverending arms race between attacker and defender. [Schneier on Security] 8:19:48 AM    comment []

Iranian Podcaster. Rebecca MacKinnon reports on a new Iranian podcast. HonorTagJournalist [Dan Gillmor's blog] 8:19:31 AM    comment []