Tag Archives: news

HD-DVD copy protection

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Apparently the HD-DVD copy protection system has been compromised. Is this really a big surprise? I mean, if you actually go and talk to the engineers who designed AACS, would they think it’s totally unbreakable? Behind all the PR and marketing hacks who don’t know the first thing about cryptography are the people who actually designed this system, and I’m sure they would list a load of standard caveats like “assuming a bounded-complexity adversary” But even then, perhaps twixt design and implementation someone screwed up and weakened the protections.

The whole approach to copy-protecting media via controlling the hardware is a little odd to me. Its like having a secret decoder ring made of a piece of red cellophane. If you make a media format which is useful for carrying data and holding movies, you’re inviting attacks far more complicated than those envisioned by scenarios in which you have an average user buying a player and plugging it into their TV. Is it really that the design specs were for the latter and didn’t even think about what would happen if someone popped the disc into their computer?

Personally, I thnk these guys knew it would happen all along and were surprised at how little time it took. The truth is probably that people in the company who were ignorant of the technology ended up approving something that was a lot weaker than it should have been, and not that the guy who hacked the standard was somehow a super-genius. This is not to take away from his accomplishment, but it seems like you can either build a watertight security system or one that leaks like a sieve, and this is more of the latter.

The classics make a comeback

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Colombian gangsters face sex ban:

Wives and girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia’s most violent cities have called a sex ban in a bid to get their men to give up the gun.

Lysistrata, by Aristophanes:

LYSISTRATA
Now tell me, if I have discovered a means of ending the war, will you all second me?…if we would compel our husbands to make peace, we must refrain… We must refrain from the male altogether…

Harvard ends early action

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Harvard is getting rid of early action — This strikes me as an all-around good thing. The early-action system is a bizarre opt-in system whereby wealthy, reasonably bright high school students voluntarily enter a meat-market of academic recruiting. In my view, a lot of the psychotic behavior you see from these applicants and their parents (harassing admissions offices, spending thousands of dollars on prep courses, and worse) comes from the fact that it really is a buyer’s market out there. The applicant has no real power, which leads fo a kind of desparation on their part. The universities love it, however — they make out like bandits. All this crap about how “doing away with early action won’t help diversity” is just their way of trying to keep the status quo, which I would argue is a morally indefensible position.

The grad school application process is completely different at the top, from what I gather. There are a few top applicants in each year for a given program/area, and it’s a seller’s market, with the student having all the decision power and the universities trying to come up with attractive fellowship packages. Perhaps that is just as pathological, but the scale seems so much smaller…

dadaism month in Lawrence, KS

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This is apparently not a joke:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis “Boog” Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, April 1, March 28, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006 as “INTERNATIONAL DADAISM MONTH.”

I fully approve of these developments in Kansas. Via Metafilter.

A good year for archaeology

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And to think, we’re only 6 weeks into it and an Egyptian and Macedonian tomb have come to light.

I kind of wished I had taken some of the archaeology classes at MIT — they did some cool materials analysis stuff and it’s pretty technical as historical professions go. But I don’t think I could get over my fear of mummies. They’re just so… creepy.

On a related note, I was pretty underwhelmed by the DeYoung’s special exhibit on Hatshepsut. The upcoming Frank Lloyd Wright thing could be interesting though, and I’m definitely looking forward to the Jasper Johns retrospective.

medical exploitation of India

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Via Krish, a story in Wired about how India is now the big site for clinical trials and drug development. Costs there are low, and as the editor of the American Journal of Bioethics noted:

Individuals who participate in Indian clinical trials usually won’t be educated. Offering $100 may be undue enticement; they may not even realize that they are being coerced.

I heard a radio program on this a few months back and tried to get my mother riled up about it, but it’s really just another strand in the rich and varied tapestry of India’s exploitation by the West/North/what-have-you.

As with most issues surrounding technology development, it boils down to an issue of pragmatics versus ethics. Pharmaceutical companies in Europe and Asia can’t find people willing to do clinical trials of their drugs in the US, even with some generous incentives. After all, who wants a placebo? On the other hand, you can get lots of volunteers for just $100 a pop in India plus paying the doctor to administer the trial, and the FDA will approve your trial. You get your drug approved, patent it, and prevent anyone in India from actually being able to afford it.

It’s not a problem specific to India either — patients in Russia are exploited in similar ways. When access to quality healthcare is limited, desperation is the primary motivating factor. Is it ethical to give a placebo in these situations? Should there be restrictions on how these studies are marketed to the public? Bioethics is going out the window in our rush for progress and refusal to shoulder the risks ourselves.

the ship is headed nowhere good

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According to a BBC article today, Jean Charles de Menezes was, in fact, behaving relatively innocuously before being shot in the head while being restrained. He picked up a paper, ran to catch his train, and sat down. No bulky jacket, no leaping over ticket barriers, just a guy trying to catch his train.

In the aftermath of this incident I was willing to give the cops just a little sympathy — perhaps it was a tense situation and things got out of hand. I could, with little effort, construct scenarios in my mind that would have led to the same outcome and a less-than-clear-cut assignment of good and evil to the players involved. However, with this new information my dramatic imagination is stretched to its utmost. I’m left with the premise of “cops see swarthy/brown man running, shoot to kill.” Hopefully there will be some accountability here rather than the parade of official deceptions to which we were treated in the aftermath.