Hollywood to Require 64-bit Intel/AMD Processors for HD-DVD and BlueRay Playback ?

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From El Reg:

Speaking in Australia this week, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Steve Riley effectively revealed Windows Media Player 11 will not play HD content from HD DVD or BD sources unless it’s running under a 64-bit version of Vista. According to Riley, 32-bit mode is too open to hacks designed to bypass the optical discs’ copy-protection mechanisms.

Given MS’s current current track record with security, it remains to be seen how effective this push to use the UnTrusting Computing platform will be for this..

According to Riley, the decision to drop 32-bit HD DVD and BD playback from WMP 11 was made because “the media companies asked us to do this”. What’s more, he added, “they don’t want any of their HD content to play in [32-bit] at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection”.

So presumably anyone else not MS who wants to beg leave to create an official player is going to have to play along with the media companies attempts to wrest control of your computer from you.

It also probably means that Apple Mac users will have to buy 64-bit Intel Macs if they want to be able to watch this new content and high quality (as I don’t believe that the PowerPC line of processors supports the lock in that Hollywood requires).

With Sony and Toshiba supporting BD and HD DVD playback, respectively, on select PCs running 32-bit Windows XP, playing content from pre-recorded discs may not seem to be much of a problem. But it will become more of an issue once content companies begin enforcing region coding and HDCP compliance for full-resolution output. That may require new software for playback, and the updated code could well meet Hollywood’s demand for 64-bit computing.

Given that I don’t run Windows anyway, the whole question is likely to be moot..

The Vacation Mail Responder – 1.2.6.2 Released

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The Vacation Mail Responder has been abandoned for over 5 years now, so I contacted the former maintainers and asked them about taking on the project. They were happy about that and so now I find myself looking after it, along with Brian May.

I’ve made a minor bug fix (to add the Precedence: bulk header to all responses it generates) and updated the maintainer information and just released 1.2.6.2, over 5 years from the 1.2.6.1 release.

The main question is now, of course, where do we go from here ? One of the options we’re seriously considering is whether we should rebase from the native packages in Debian & Ubuntu as their version has been independently developed and gone much further than this one.

But for now I can go to sleep tonight feeling happy that I’ve taken on my first open source project and started to breath some life into it once more..

Open Source Data Center Management

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Was reading PLOA and found a blog post by Jon Oxer about setting up Xen systems for hosting and what he saw at the SLES/SLED 10 launch today. I think he should take a look at something else I stumbled over today – OpenQRM – which claims to be an open source data center management/provisioning tool.

Currently they support RPM based distros but their source build docs include destructions for Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo as well. Certainly I think they’d be very happy to get assistance to have Ubuntu and Debian as tested distros as well…

They have a live CD to play with too..

Time Team – Archaeology by TV ?

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I was watching Time Team on the ABC where they were excavating a suspected crannog and henge monument at Loch Migdale in Scotland back in 2004 when they showed a quick bit of video of the remains of a stone causeway underwater.

Whilst watching the fly over of the rocks something caught my eye, something that looked too regular to be natural and what appeared to me to be a round circular container. I had recorded it on the DVD recorder so I grabbed a few frames to show, but whilst it can be hard to see in still images it’s a bit more obvious when you see it moving so I’ve also got an animated GIF of those put together here.

Animated GIF

Continue reading →

Ajax Going Under

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So you have a single point of failure for the Australian automotive industry, with Ajax Fasteners making parts that not one, not two but three different car companies (Holden, Ford and Toyota) based here are dependant on.

Now they pressure that company to cut costs so they can keep competing, and eventually that company goes under.

Given that the three car companies literally cannot keep building cars without the parts they make and will have to stand down workers (Ford say they may need to do this on Wednesday, less than 2 days from now) they would be falling over themselves to keep it going.

But no, they’re actually fighting over how much each of them will pay to keep it going and I’m starting to wonder if the fact that Ford say they’ll need to stop production before the other two is part of what’s going on here. It certainly wouldn’t hurt Holden or Toyota if Ford lost a few days or a week of production whilst they kept going..

Odd Comment About Spam

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I was very puzzled to see Russell Coker write:

Therefore the only acceptable method of dealing with spam is to reject it at the SMTP protocol level. Currently I am not aware of any software that supports Bayesian filtering while the message is being received so that it can be rejected if it appears to be spam, it would be possible to do this (I could write the code myself if I had enough spare time) but AFAIK no-one has done it.

I’ve been doing exactly this with Postfix, amavisd-new and SpamAssassin for many years now with great success, rejecting spams at the SMTP level via Postfix’s pre-queue content_filter mechanism using SpamAssassins Baysian filtering, anti-spam rules and blacklist support.

Unfortunately because Russell is using Blogger and requiring people to register I can’t leave a comment for him (as I’ve no desire to sign up for an account with them just to leave a comment).

Update: Corrected link to point to the actual post on Russells blog that I’m talking about!

Fallout from the Israel/Hezbollah/Lebanon war ?

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Seeing that the 1982 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon resulted in the creation of Hezbollah I’m now pondering what the result of the 2006 invasion will be.

Having watched tonights news on the ABC and seen what’s happening with people returning to the south of Lebanon to confront the devastation I’m wondering whether this will result in Hezbollah winning the next election in Lebanon ?

That would really put a cat amongst the pidgeons in the region, but given the results of Israels interventions in the West Bank and Gaza I wouldn’t be that suprised..