Bag of Beans

This article from the Economist touches on a recent case involving fair use and digital rights. Now, if only we could convince companies like Microsoft to stop crippling their products (*cough* Vista *cough*) with draconian DRM measures.

IS IT legal to make a copy of that DVD you’ve just bought so the family can watch it around the home or in the car? In one of the most watched copyright cases in recent years, a judge in northern California ruled last month that copying DVDs for personal use was legal, given the terms of the industry’s licence and the way the copies were made.

The wider implication of the ruling remains clouded—not least because the DVD Copy Control Association, the loser in the case, has 60 days to appeal. But whatever the video industry may like to think, the writing is on the wall for copy protection.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Further Reading:

• The Vista Suicide Note (a.k.a. A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection)

Just like CRTs, someone can eavesdrop on the electromagnetic emissions from your LCD display.

Back in 1985, Wim Van Eck proved it was possible to tune into the radio emissions produced by electromagentic coils in a CRT display and then reconstruct the image. The practice became known as Van Eck Phreaking, and NATO spent a fortune making its systems invulnerable to it. It was a major part of Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon.

CRTs are now well on the way to being history. But Kuhn has shown that eavesdropping is possible on flat panel displays too. It works slightly differently. With a flat panel display the aim is to tune into the radio emissions produced by the cables sending a signal to the monitor. The on-screen image is fed through the cable one pixel at a time. Because they come through in order you just have to stack them up. And Kuhn has worked out how to decode the colour of each pixel from its particular wave form.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Engadget has posted part 1 of a detailed how-to on converting an Xbox 360 into a laptop.

The making-of How-To for the Xbox 360 laptop will be in three parts. In today’s segment we’ll discuss the parts list, stripping down an Xbox 360 motherboard, and modding / reattaching the DVD and hard drives. The next installment will cover case design, construction and hacking the LCD display, as well as wiring the video. Part 3 will then describe wiring all the separate parts together, troubleshooting, and finishing up the unit.

• Link

This site takes pictures of the fast food you actually get at the counter and compares them to the promotional images.

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 was released with an improved UI and some new features like Saved Searches and Vista support:

• Link
• Release notes

If you are curious how the C language came to be, read this paper by Dennis Ritchie himself.

The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today. This paper studies its evolution.

• Link (via reddit)

Use this useful utility to recover files from damaged disks.

Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.

• Link (via Freewaregenius)

Run another instance of Firefox inside a tab with this trick.

… With all these favorites inside Firefox, How about Opening Firefox inside Firefox? Not bad huh? and its really easy too just type in this url in a new tab in Firefox and there you go! Firefox inside Firefox!

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

• Link (via Digg)

Watch out for this scam. Not only do they hike up the price once you are trapped there, they also don’t allow you to take pictures with some flimsy excuse about people dropping their cameras.

We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question Answerer” came by and made it clear why it was taking so long: the sales people had to explain the “packages” and pricing to each and every person in the line. This was not because the package was that complex, but because each person in the line thought they were going to be paying $25 per person. In reality, the tribe was charging another $50 on top of the $25 for each person. You read that right, 75 bucks a pop. The “Question Answerer” explained it to us:

“The investor wants to get his, that’s the $25. But it’s our land, and we don’t get any of that $25, so we have to get ours too, you know?”

• Link (via Digg)

This is an interesting video podcast from Robert Scoble where he follows photographer Thomas Hawk on a few of his (daily!) photo shoots.

• Link
• Thomas Hawk’s photos on Flickr
• Thomas Hawk’s photos on Zooomr
• I’d also recommend checking out Thomas’ blog.

Read ComputerWorld’s list of over-hyped failures of the tech industry.

Hype is the coin of the realm in the technology business. If you listen to vendors and the media, it may sometimes seem as though every new product, service, concept or even security threat will be the Next Big Thing. Some live up to all the fuss, but many don’t — and some fail spectacularly.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Space Invaders in stop-motion using humans as pixels. Brilliant!

• Link (via Boing Boing)