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EU invests $22 million in open-source P2P technology

It's ironic how different Europe can be from the United States. While the U.S. continues its mindless rampage against the future of digital distribution with DRM, RIAA, MPAA, and other acronyms designed to stuff the 21st century back into the 20th century's ideas of how to package and sell property, Europe is actually investing in that future. To be exact, it's putting $22 million toward peer-to-peer technology, in a BitTorrent-minded project called P2P-Next.

Surely European broadcasters are against the move, right? After all, research suggests that 50 percent of those using BitTorrent are doing so to steal TV shows. As one TorrentFreak blogger noted, however, European broadcasters believe this situation presents an opportunity rather than a threat:

One of the biggest names taking part is the BBC, who will use the new BitTorrent client to stream TV programs. Other partners in the P2P-Next project are the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The main goal is to develop an open source, BitTorrent-compatible client that supports live streaming.… Read more

Where this weekend we're going waterboarding!

EPISODE 32

Today we talk about how Monster cables are overpriced (duh), how much Paris Hilton sucks, and how to "hack" T-Mobile. Plus, Comcast is covering its ass by amending the company's Terms of Service to allow for throttling of BitTorrent traffic.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Free tool blocks Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo ActiveX vulnerabilities

A researcher over at the Internet Storm Center has created a powerful GUI that will set the kill-bits on vulnerable ActiveX controls used in Facebook, Myspace, and Yahoo apps. These popular apps came under attack on Monday after researchers Elazar Broad and Krystian Kloskowski disclosed their findings to a online security newsgroup.

On Tuesday, exploits for the Yahoo apps were reported circulating. There is currently no patch from the individual vendors, so the only workaround is to disable the several specific, vulnerable ActiveX controls. (ActiveX controls were developed by Microsoft for use with Internet Explorer and other browsers.)

The SANS … Read more

Shirt lights up when love is near

With Valentine's Day just two weeks away, ThinkGeek is stepping to the aid of the gift-challenged with a proximity-based T-shirt that lights up when your paramour is near.

Suffering the aching emptiness and despair of being apart from your loved one? The 8-Bit Dynamic Life Shirt will register a meager two and a half pixelated hearts. But snuggle up to the object of your affection (who, incidentally, must be wearing a matching black and red T-shirt for this display of devotion to work), and all five hearts on both garments light up in a blaze of cheeky romance and … Read more

Bits from Beyond Binary--Dec. 13, 2007

Activision sued over 'Guitar Hero' for Wii--Suit follows admission by Activision that the Wii version of Guitar Hero III was outputting mono, rather than the advertised stereo sound. Office 2007 SP1 autoinstalls confuse Vista, XP users--While most users won't get the Office service pack automatically for some time, beta testers of Vista Service Pack 1 are having the update pushed automatically. Microsoft's Ministry of Truth--Blogger Long Zheng noted last week that Microsoft is hiring for a Director of Windows Client Disclosure, a position designed to making sure there are "zero surprises," when it … Read more

Bits from Beyond Binary--Dec. 12, 2007

Here's a collection of links from the "Stuff I'm reading" section. To see these as they post, come back to the Beyond Binary blog and check out the right-hand column. I recommend doing it ten times a day, but, the digest below is here for those that have other things to do:

Are Microsoft-served ads slowing down Web sites?--Blogger Long Zheng noticed that his recent visits to Digg had been slowed by ad requests to MSN. He did some more, well digging, and found that some other sites with MSN-served ads are also sluggish. (istartedsomething) … Read more

Prince to sue The Pirate Bay

Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries--including the United States--against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.

One of the world's best-known BitTorrent indexing sites, The Pirate Bay has defiantly linked to pirated copies of films, TV shows, music videos, and other content while often boasting that it ignores Hollywood's requests to remove them. The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized content, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective file-sharing tool.

Prince will file similar … Read more

Restricting insecure applications

Back in August I wrote about a free security program for Windows XP called DropMyRights. It comes from a trusted source, requires no maintenance, and incurs no overhead.

DropMyRights works by front-ending an application. To use it with Internet Explorer for example, you make a shortcut to DropMyRights and modify the shortcut to include the full path to the IE executable. When DropMyRights runs, it, in turn, invokes Internet Explorer. But, as the name implies, it first lowers the "rights" for IE. Thus, even if you are logged onto Windows XP as an Administrator, IE will run with … Read more

FCC urged to stop Comcast Internet blocking

Members of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition and Internet scholars from Harvard, Yale and Stanford law schools filed a petition and complaint with the Federal Communications Commission Thursday in response to claims that Comcast is blocking some kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.

The complaint comes after the Associated Press discovered, based on its own testing, that content was blocked on several Comcast broadband connections using the peer-to-peer filing sharing network BitTorrent. Other Comcast users have also complained that their BitTorrent content has been blocked.

In their petition, the groups claim that Comcast is violating the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, which essentially … Read more

How digital sound works

Speaking of Zeroes and Ones...

Among audiophiles, the analog vs. digital debate rages without end. I, like a lot of other musicians and music fans, have my own preferences--I own many more LPs than CDs, and have paid dearly to record some of my bands' music onto 2-inch tape instead of direct to hard drive. But included in those preferences are some preconceptions. You've heard it before: digital music sounds "colder" or "cleaner" or "more sterile" because it's delivering a stream of 0s and 1s, instead of a pure sound wave. Or something like that.

Audio professionals don't use terms like these, largely because they're subjective and imprecise, and sometimes inaccurate. Recently, one of these professionals presented the best explanation of analog vs. digital sound that I've ever heard. Here's a super-condensed version of an already simplified explanation.… Read more