I’m talking about the HD-DVD’s AACS Protection. The Advanced Access Content System is a standard for content distribution and digital rights management, which will allow restricting access to and copying of the next generation of optical discs and DVDs. Quite a fancy name, nothing to say about it. But it got cracked, in 8 days by a hacker that calls himself Muslix64.

The HD-DVD protection was initially considered unbreakable, and in his ambition, Muslix64 planned a month’s worth of hard work to break it. The surprise was the fact that he succeeded in only 8 days. That’s four times less than expected.

It seems that he considered the protection system as being unfair with the consumers.

when I realized the 2 software players on windows don’t allowed me to play the movie at all, because my video card is not HDCP compliant and because I have a HD monitor plugged with DVI interface, I started to get mad… This is not what we can call “fair use”! So I decide to decrypt that movie. I start reading the AACS specification I have found on the net. I estimate it will take me about 4 weeks of full time job to decrypt that. I was wrong, it was in fact, easy..

The original forum post can be viewed here.

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There’s no doubt that mobile phones are here to stay. But what will the future bring in their designs? Different manufacturers place their bets on different designs. The first one would be the “all-in-one” cellphones that have started to appear. Here I could remind the N series from Nokia, the new phones from Sony Ericsson (although we have seen exceptions from that), and some Samsung phones. The other type of design that has really started to catch on is the small thin design promoted mainly by Motorola. What could be said about each design? Read the rest of this entry »

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Since this is the last part of the article, I’ll try to be short. The contextual ads (for example the ones that Google uses) are created in such a simple manner than everyone can use them as long as they comply to the terms of use. Adsense is by far the quickest and easiest way to make money with your website. Google caches the page, scans for information and provides relevant-to-context ads. The targeting is therefore 100% user driven. Until now, this is the only web advertising method I’ve tried and I can tell you it works 100%. Why am I telling you that? Since it’s so simple and accessible to everyone, even unexperienced users make the benefit of it, and most of them since they lack the experience, they think it could be a scam. Have no fear, Adsense is near ;)

Anyway, I’ve been asking myself about the web advertising. How bad could it get? Read the rest of this entry »

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With the approaching release of Apple’s iPhone, rumours regarding its looks have not been few. Every artist has tried to represent his version of the iPhone, either by combining the iPod with well-known phone models, such as the Nokia E73, or the Motorola V3, or by using his imagination to create a different-looking model. Here are 50 models of the Apple iPhone, and the iPhone released by Cisco. Which do you think will be closest to reality? There’s plenty to choose from, so go ahead: Read the rest of this entry »

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Google looks different again ;) Holiday Doodle from Google.
It’s already know the fact that Google changes its aspect for the national holidays as well as for important events throughout the years.

For those interested, a list of logos can be found here.
Happy holidays, everyone.

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Well, as I promised, here I am writing the second part of the article. I’m going to try covering up the sidebar ads, different sized, popping up and floating ads in here.

Let me get straight to the point. After the banner ads proved to be defective, the skyscraper banner took its place. There were mainly two advantages of this type of publicity. First, unlike the horizontal banner, there’s little chance that this one would get scrolled off the screen, as it will be present on the sidebar, vertically. The second advantage is it’s size. A tall sidebar ad is much bigger than a banner ad, and it takes just 120px (regularly) from your screen’s width. Because of that, advertisers pay more for targeted sidebar ads, just like they do with targeted banner ads.
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