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I just read an article from Ars Technica that talks about a growing new trend, textbook torrents.  By now you are likely aware that the evil Bit Torrent protocol has been used for swapping all sorts of copyrighted material across the Internet.  Well this evil protocol just got even more evil.  According to Ars Technica, students at universities are now scanning books to PDF’s and posting them on specially designed book swapping sites.  Now a good point that the article brings up is that unlike ripping a CD, scanning a book takes a LOT more time and so it isn’t likely that average college student is going to be going down this route.  Naturally text book publishers are upset about this new activity.  But why is this occuring?  Having recently been through a University, I can tell you that the cost of books is just too darn high!  Now I’m not suggesting that students should download books through this service, but I think this is a good talking point to universities.  The price of books needs to come down to make college more affordable in these tough economic times.  One free and legal solution may be to leverage wikibooks and online tutorials for classroom topics.  Why does everything have to come from a textbook?  While some advanced topics in an obscure major may not have many resources available, I know that a wealth of information exists for IT majors yet instructors still require purchases of expensive books.  Hopefully this activity will be a wakeup call to the universities.

I just read a FANTASTIC article about how a CS graduate student and two faculty members of the Unversity of Washington received 9 DMCA takedown notices for printers, devices which can’t download anything, were caught downloading copyrighted material via BitTorrent.  Previously, the only way I knew anything close to this to be possible is through open access points.  But the article lists 5 ways that a client may be wrongly implicated for downloading infringing material.  In doing so, they examine a lot of mechanics of BitTorrent but not so much as to overwhelm a non-BitTorrent expert.  The article is a very neutral paper and is not meant to be be pro piracy or pro MPAA/RIAA and goes as far as making recommendations on how to improve the system so such false implications don’t occur in the future.  Nice work guys!

Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, Univeristy of Washington

I just finished reading a posting on Engadget about an armed robot that military may start deploying that “gets Kill commands via WiFi”.  Now unfortunately, I haven’t found much more about this robot other than what’s in the small Engadget posting and I’m guessing that given the limited range of what we know as WiFi (802.11a/b/g/n), that this isn’t truly WiFi, unless the army has plans to deploy access points throughout a warzone.  But if this IS WiFi, EGADS!!!  While WiFi has made some signficant strides in recent years with WPA2, what would happen if the opposing armies were able to hack this?!?!  No only would they be able to prevent their demise, but they would be able to use the weapon against OUR troops!  IF WiFi is truly used here, let’s hope that the engineers added some additional cryptography on top of native WiFi security measures and that the algorithms used have undergone public cryptanalysis.

Technorati Tags: A.R.E.S, WiFi, Cryptography

In the tenth anniversary edition of his Cryptogram (congrats by the way, Bruce), Bruce Schneier references an article that originally appeared in The Guardian talking about how the Transport Safety Administration (TSA) is now searching laptops in some cases when departing the country.   This means that when traveling, your data is not safe.  Moreover, they have the right to confiscate your hardware.  How can you ensure that your data is safe?  Schneier naturally recommends the use of encryption.  While there’s many ways to do this, what I personally have been doing lately is using TrueCrypt to create and encrypted file that I store on an external USB drive.  This way, not only is your data encrypted, but it’s not even physically on the laptop.  The nice thing about TrueCrypt is that it’s free (open source) and it’s cross platform.  So if you need access this data from various platforms, you have the ability to do so.  Go download this and start using it if you’ll be traveling out of the country any time soon.

Technorati Tags: TrueCrypt, TSA

I came across an article on SiliconValley.com that Google has just launched a new service, Google Health.  In a nutshell, Google is billing this as an aggregation service that allows you to pull your online health information from various sources into one place.  It also allows you to keep your own medical journal for information not found in any of the other sources.  When I first saw this, I thought it was another innovative idea.  However, one of the points that really jumped out at me was that the terms of service says that Google is not a “covered entity” under HIPAA.  This means that not only CAN they share your information with other parties, they can do so in a means that doesn’t protect this information from Joe Hacker.  In the spirit of not duplicating this, I’ll refer you to a ZDNet article that details this.  Now, to the defense of Google, the Google Public Policy Blog (likely in response to the various articles on this topic) does go through to explain that Google will protect your information.  However, if this is the case, then I personally wish they’d clean up their Usage Agreement.  Now, perhaps it’s because I’m very security minded from my job, but I personally think I’ll stay 10 feet away from this Google product.  What about you?  Would you put your information in Google Health?

Technorati Tags: Google Health, HIPAA

Well, I became one of the souls this evening as I created a MySpace account (link in sidebar). What I’m mainly after here is wanting to see how the new API’s that were released from MySpace, Facebook, and Google can integrate social networking with a site. So with any luck, you may see that in the near future. But step 1 was to establish a MySpace account. Now I’ll be honest, I THINK I’m pretty technologically savvy, but OH MY GOD!!! There’s like a million layouts out there. What’s the problem you ask? There’s like ZERO that are “guy friendly”. I finally landed on a cool Matrix one. Anywho, part 1 is done. Now to play with the fun part, writing code! I’ll post back here how it goes, of course.  By the way, if anyone has really good layout repositories that they use, let me know.  I prefer ones that I can actually read, something that many I saw were lacking greatly.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Google, Facebook, API’s

I’ll be you never thought you’d see this headline! But yes, Vanity Fair is currently carrying an EXCELLENT article on the state of piracy. As part of the article, it carries an in depth interview with the founders of TPB. This really puts a lot of recent activities into perspective. This is a bit of a lengthy read, but it is well worth your time.

Also, an article from Slashdot today states that the processing keys for the AACS encryption on Blue-Ray and HD-DVD discs has now been cracked. So it’s likely that TPB will be offering users a way to download BlueRay and HD-DVD backups in the near future. So this just goes to show that while Hollywood can raid those that are involved, they will never be able to completely eradicate piracy.

Technorati Tags: The Pirate Bay, Piracy, HD-DVD Cracked, Blue Ray Cracked

Virtualization is a great concept!  So great in fact that Microsoft has included virtulization in Windows Vista as part of it’s Complete PC Backup.  So great that VMWare has several free virtulization products.  So great that many large organizations are consolidating their servers now through virtulization.  But then there’s Apple.  To date OS X can only run on Apple Hardware.  No support for virtulization.  But that might soon be changing….  Two large virtulization companys, Parallels and VMWare were recently quoted in an article on Slashdot about virtulizing OS X.  What does this mean?  One could finally be able to run Mac software on a Windows, Unix, or any platform that had a virtual machine player.  No more need to by speciffic apple hardware!  Not only is this an ingenious idea, but I would imagine that if PC users could experience the benefits of OSX, there would be more widespread adoption.  I’d just love to see the commercials for this one…  “Hi, I’m a PC, but I’m also a Mac!”

Also, when I was researching links for this article, I came across this sweet story from enGadget.  Yes you are looking at full DirectX virtulization on a Mac!  So step one, run OS X on a PC to become comfortable.  Step 2, virtulize your PC apps AND GAMES!

Technorati Tags: Virtual OS X, VmWare, Parallels

So a couple of things caught my attention today that I wanted to share. The first of which is that my love affair with Google continues. There’s news today that from some documentation found on Google Docs, Google appears to be getting ready to launch “Google Presently”, a web based presentation application aimed to compete with Microsoft Powerpoint. At this point, Google’s office suite would be nearly complete! As a matter of fact just today, I ran into a problem with my install of Excel. That’s when I realized that I sitll had Google Docs to fall back on. For the limited operation that I was trying to do, I had all the tools there at my finger tips. With the introduction of “Presently”, this is just one more tool. Heck if I were a student now, I might even shun all MS Office products and use Google Apps!

On another note, just months after the whole Dell battery fiasco, it looks like there’s a bit of nasty press swirling around the computer giant again. It looks like a grounding problem on some Dell laptops could cause a nasty shock of between 19 and 139 Volts! Now before everyone panics, lets keep in mind that what really matters is current (I = V/R). So while 139 volts likely won’t kill you, let’s just say that this wouldn’t be an expericne you would want to repeat. From what I can tell, affected laptops are Dell 9400/e1705/m1710/m90.

And one final musing for the night. An esteemed New York State Senator is trying to impose a fine for using portable electronic devices while walking. His position cites three recent cases where people have been killed because they weren’t paying attention and were too focused on their electronic devices. Let me tell you something. It is certainly unfortunate that this happened to these individuals, but I’m thinking this is one battleground that the government needs to stay out of. I mean seiously, why did they get hit in the first place? Was it because the vehicle operator was too busy chatting on the cell phone? Or were they distracted by a digital billboard?

And by the way, the migration to WordPress 2.1 didn’t quite go as seemlessly as I was hoping for. As a matter of fact, I’ve had to look for some new plugins to replace/upgrade what I used previously for several things including my news feeds, links page, and del.icio.us link roll in the sidebar. Oh well, such is life!

Technorati Tags: Dell, Dumb Laws, Stupid Politicians, Google Presently, WordPress 2.1

My last note for the evening is that as of this morning (or yesterday morning since it is now 12:19 AM CST), Microsoft has officially released Windows Vista to retail stores.  I’ve had the privilege of running the Beta of Vista for the last month so I have some experiences that I plan to share with my faithful viewers.  For now a couple of points that I came across that will prove vary useful.  Firstly, Paul Thurrott of www.winsupersite.com has posted LOTS of content on both Windows Vista and Office 2007.  If you wanted to know what changed in Vista and get some objective feedback whether or not this is worth an upgrade, Paul has all these answers for you.   If you are considering an upgrade, you may want to first check out the different specials going on right now with various retailers.  Best Buy, for example will give you a stick of RAM with purchase of Vista.  Also, you may even want to by OEM.  OEM prices are much cheaper than retail   Example.  A full version of Vista Ultimate at retail is $399.  Through OEM, this is $199.  OEM versions can be purchased at NewEgg.  However, before you decide to buy OEM, you may want to hear what Ars Technica says about it.  With that said, I promise my own writeup about Vista coming soon.  My 2 second opinion is that anyone that can upgrade, should.  There are far more improvements over Windows XP, especially in terms of Security (some thanks to this guy).  Actually, as a matter of fact, it looks like Steve is taking recommendations on improvements to the Windows Firewall and IPSec implementations.  Until then, happy upgrading! 

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista, Wow Starts Now, OEM, Windows Firewall