Way to go Disney!!

My Dad purchased a copy of Wall-E for my 2 daughters for Christmas. It was the 3 disc edition with digital copy. Only problem is that the leaflet with the code to acquire the digital copy wasn’t included. I’ve always thought that the digital copy feature was instituted in an attempt to stem the tide of movie piracy. Disney, if I’m correct then why is it obviously so unbelievably difficult to include everything your customers need to allow us to take advantage of the digital copy feature? I’m not the only one that has purchased dvd’s thinking I’d be able to just slide a dvd in my dvd-rom drive and get a pristine iTunes compatible copy ready to sync onto an iPod. I can’t

I guess you’re going to eventually go back and treat your own customers as thieves again right? Is digital copy just another trojan horse to “induce” people to commit crimes under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Even though it’s illegal under the D.M.C.A to use anything or do anything to break copy protection, it’s also against the law to put a law in place that supercedes laws that have come before it.

So thanks a lot Disney, I think you just lost a customer……… for good. Have a nice day!

Songbird 1.0 Review

I first heard about Songbird via an article at Cnet, oh I’m not sure maybe back during the first part of 2008. I really liked the fact that it’s built on top of Firefox, being the Firefox fan (note that I didn’t say fanboy =))  that I am. You have add-on support and available skins for installation called feathers, they are available directly inside of Songbird via the browser. Yes that’s right, this nice media player has it’s own browser. All you need to do is open the add-ons menu, then click “Get more extensions”. That web page open in it’s own tab from within Songbird, from there it’s just like Firefox, click the big install button, click the install button in the popup dialog and then restart. I really like that kind of simplicity.

Installation is very straightforward and if you can choose from Fairplay playback and WMA DRM playback support among a few others. In my case, once the Fairplay playback support is installed it will try to detect if you have iTunes installed. If you have, it’ll give you the opportunity to import your iTunes library, very nice and simple. You can add tracks to your iTunes library and Songbird can scan for library changes such as track adds or removal and make those changes to your Songbird library. It also has profile support for some multiuser love.  The only drawback to this is that once Apple decides that they need or want to upgrade Fairplay DRM, it will most likely break Fairplay support in Songbird. Also you must have iTunes and Quicktime already installed for it to work properly. I did try having Quicktime 7.5 installed without iTunes, but my tracks from iTunes weren’t playing properly. Once reinstalling iTunes + Quicktime and those files starting playing properly again. Hmm notice how much Songbird looks like iTunes? Actually, the bar at the top containing the playback controls as you see in the picture below is placed at the bottom by default and a setting change moves that to the top as you see here.

All in all I’d have to give Songbird 1.0 a  4 out 5 for it’s extensibility, great audio quality and the large burgeoning commuinity surrounding it.

Vista SP2 Beta Reg Hack

Copy this into a txt file and rename it with a .bat at the end and you should be good to go.

@echo off

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp2 /f > NUL 2>&1
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSP2 /f > NUL 2>&1

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp2 /v Beta1 /t REG_SZ /d C21A5C64-2530-CC19-042F-9ABDB4ED27F9 /f
IF NOT %errorlevel% == 0 ( goto ERROR)

:SUCCESS
@echo.
echo ================================================== =========
echo Windows Vista SP2 registry key has been set successfully.
echo Please check for updates in Windows Update.
echo ================================================== =========
@echo.
goto END

:ERROR
@echo.
echo ================================================== =========
echo FAILED to set Windows Vista SP2 registry keys.
echo Please run this script by right clicking and selecting
echo “Run as Administrator”.
echo ================================================== =========
@echo.
goto END

:END
pause

UPDATE!! – The Windows Vista SP2 Community Preview Program has been made publically available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx

ATI Radeon HD 4830s 560 stream processors? I thought it was 640

Bit-tech.net recieved word yesterday that the Radeon HD 4830’s have been using approximately 560 stream processors instead of the 640 that the card should be using. Even though these are production samples, when hardware gets to this point, it’s supposed to a sample from production just as the moniker implies. Bit-tech.net heard various stories from AMD, from it being a “known issue” to there being problems with the application calculating the number of stream processors.

AMD finally came out and admitted there was a problem with the production samples after their “no comment” earlier in the week.

Here is their quote ….

“AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card’s performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation.

Through consultations with AMD board partners, it has been determined with a high degree of certainty that fewer than 400 ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards from one AMD board partner, HIS, have reached the market with the pre-production BIOS incorrectly provided by AMD. As only a small number of HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 cards are impacted, we ask any customers that purchased an HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 to test the board using the GPU-Z utility (available at http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz). If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility.“

Kudos to AMD for publically recognizing this problem and working to fix it. For people that are complaining and wanting replacement, would you rather fix the problem keeping your new video cards installed, or not be able to use your computer for a period of time while someone else flash upgrades the bios on your video cards for you? I would rather do it myself, fix the problem and keep my video cards and save the money it would take for shipping. In other words, shut your mouth and flash the bios and enjoy your new fully functioning hardware. You’re not making any sense other then you’re making people think that your anger is due to your ignorance on how to take care of this. AMD is offering full instructions for this. You people I’m speaking about at this point, you know who you are. (:

Thank you to Bit-tech.net for posting this artickle at http://is.gd/4VbV

WiFi no longer secure…

The following was found at http://is.gd/3P4u.

WiFi is no longer secure enough to protect wireless data.

Global Secure Systems has said that a Russian’s firm’s use of the latest NVidia graphics cards to accelerate WiFi ‘password recovery’ times by up to an astonishing 10,000 per cent proves that WiFi’s WPA and WPA2 encryption systems are no longer enough to protect wireless data.

David Hobson, managing director of GSS, claimed that companies can no longer view standards-based WiFi transmission as sufficiently secure against eavesdropping to be used with impunity. He also said that the use of VPNs is arguably now mandatory for companies wanting to comply with the Data Protection Act.

He said: “This breakthrough in brute force decryption of WiFi signals by Elcomsoft confirms our observations that firms can no longer rely on standards-based security to protect their data. As a result, we now advise clients using WiFi in their offices to move on up to a VPN encryption system as well.

“Brute force decryption of the WPA and WPA2 systems using parallel processing has been on the theoretical possibilities horizon for some time – and presumably employed by relevant government agencies in extreme situations – but the use of the latest NVidia cards to speedup decryption on a standard PC is extremely worrying.

“The $64,000 question, of course, is what happens when hackers secure a pecuniary advantage by gaining access to company data flowing across a WPA or WPA2-encrypted wireless connection. Will the Information Commissioner take action against the company concerned for an effective breach of the Data Protection Act.”

My Thoughts :

These guys used the massive parallel processing in Nvidia’s GTX200 series graphics cards to accomplish this, and all with freely available software; Nvidia drivers and the CUDA SDK. That’s right. I would imagine that this was done with a pair of GTX280’s most likely in SLI mode. Not only does this underly the immense power, flexibility and number crunching power of Nvidia’s latest high end graphics cards, who ever thought this was even a remote possibility? Anyone that runs a wireless access point/router in their home as I do should continue to use the highest level of signal encryption available. Most wireless-n routers are compatible with WPA/WPA2. Keep using it. I don’t think anyone such as I and yourself will be in any danger for a period of time. Should this be released in the wild (as of writing this blog post I’m not sure) that’s when we all should worry but I think this will be aimed more at the enterprise then home users, again for a time.

about:iTunes 8

iTunes 8 was released today shortly after the keynote. The mentionables are a new album art grid layout. When you click on an artist with multiple albums listed under one heading, it then goes into a list mode with the album art for each album to the left of their asscioated tracks just like previous versions of iTunes.

What’s the most notable is the Genius bar. Not to be confused with everyone’s favorite bar at the Apple Store, it sends info on your entire library to Applet to mix playlists of tracks that Apple thinks goes well together. While the keynote was ongoing I was hanging out with Bwana McCall @ Bwana.tv and he was concerned about not being able to opt-out at the onset. Well, I’m happy to say that it’s disabled by default and you do have to opt-in. Thank you Apple for not pulling another Chrome on the populace.

The only problem I had was with one particular part of the install.  The installer said it was stopping all applications, then all of a sudden avast! popped up a message in the center of my screen stating that something was trying to stop avast! On-Access Protection. I guess it really was trying to stop all applications lol. It gave me a choice of whether to let it end by clicking yes, or to keep it running by clicking no. I clicked no of course. I’m not entirely sure if this is due to running Vista X64. A XP Pro SP3 x86 virtual machine I run in VMware Workstation did not exhibit this behavior with the same antivirus installed so I’m not sure why this happened in the first place. You mileage may vary.

Windows XP Pro X64 is still not supported while Vista X64 is.  Again why I don’t know. XP X86 and Vista X86 is fully supported as well.

All in all, this upgrade to iTunes is working very nicely and I’m liking the grid view better then cover flow. I don’t care about ram usage, I know I got plenty of ram to start with.

iTunes 8 from Apple is available at the following URL http://www.apple.com/itunes/download Enjoy!