Nobody looks good wearing a Bluetooth headset. Nobody.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music. — Steve Jobs

Link

Based on the number of empty HDTV cartons I am seeing in the garbage on the way to and from work each day, I proclaim the HDTV era is finally here.

Come July, this badboy is mine.

First pirated HD DVD movie hits BitTorrent

The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.

So, basically, all the honest people who purchased legitimate HD-DVD content have to suffer though a bunch of performance debilitating checks and balances in the OS to watch their content on Vista, while the pirates get an unfettered version to watch wherever they want.

And HDCP is good, how?

The content protection technologies embedded in Vista are scary enough for me to hold off on installing it for the foreseeable future. WTG Hollywood for treating honest people like crooks and WTG Microsoft for bending over to accommodate them.

“Certainly much less time than it will take Microsoft and the recording industry to realize they’re playing a losing game, and that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.” — Bruce Schneier

As if Microsoft didn’t rob the entire Apple playbook with the Zune, they have managed to copy the “Designed by Apple in California” logo and replaced it with “Hello from Seattle” on the back of the device.

Problem being, Microsoft hail from Redmond, not Seattle. I guess that Seattle was the closest “cool” city so they had to perpetrate. It all kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and those weekend warriors from Connecticut who would come down to the CBGB Sunday Hardcore Matinee showing off their NYHC tattoos.

It took about a week for YouTube to go to pot since Google bought them out. Every time somebody sends me a YouTube link I am greeted with the, “This content has been removed,” message. It’s totally Napster all over again.

The cynic in me says Google paid 1.6 billion just to dissolve YouTube.

Remote Desktop is an excellent tool for accessing Windows machines across locations. While there have not been many security exploits involving RD, I do not feel comfortable leaving the service directly open to the internet. Also, many corporate internal firewalls restrict outbound traffic to a handful of ports, and in my experience port 3389 which RD runs on is often blocked.

I’ve come up with a simple method of accessing a Remote Desktop machine over SSH which buys A) Port 3389 is no longer open “to the wild” on the host machine B) If port 3389 is blocked outbound on the client’s network, Remote Desktop will still be accessible if the common port 22 (SSH) is available.

All that is needed for this method is an SSH server either running on the host machine or on its local network. If you’re using a Linksys router DD-WRT may be an option as it offers a full SSH server that runs right on your router. In this example I will be using DD-WRT, but any SSH server will work.

Step 1) Enable the remote access SSH service under Administration->Management in the DD-WRT configuration:

Step 2) You must also enable the Secure Shell service under Administration->Services:

I strongly suggest disallowing password login and instead use the authorized keys method with a strong passphrase.

Step 3) At this point the host-end is set up. Ensure the router has access to the machine running Remote Desktop by pinging it from the router’s shell. In this case the host machine is at 192.16.1.100 on the internal LAN:

You’ll need a SSH client on the client-side. For Windows PuTTY is the best game in town. The key here is to set up access to your host and tunnel a local port through SSH to the host’s Remote Desktop service. With PuTTY it’s just a couple of settings.

Step 4) Add the remote router or SSH server IP address to the Session settings:

Step 5) Configure the tunnel under Connection->SSH->Tunnels:

What’s important here is to pick an open port on your local computer because we are going to point Remote Desktop at that port. Under Windows XP Pro port 3389 is already taken by the local Remote Desktop service, so in this instance the port we use is 3390.

The destination is the internal IP or hostname of the host as it is known to the machine running the SSH server (in this case 192.168.1.100). The destination port will is 3389 (the listening RD service on the remote host).

Step 6) Connect to the host with SSH and login. At this point if everything is working correctly you should have a Remote Desktop port live on the client PC on port 3390. That port is being tunneled securely over SSH to the SSH server and forwarded on to the host machine. Keep the PuTTY session open or you will shutdown the tunnel.

Step 7) Time to test things out. Start the Remote Desktop Connection client and point to localhost:3390.

If all was configured correctly you should pop into a Remote Desktop session on the host computer. The speed is snappy enough for me on a 45KB/s connection with all the bells & whistles turned on, even with the additional encryption overhead.

Enjoy!

But it gets better. To attract current iPod users Microsoft is going to let you download for free any songs you’ve already bought from the iTunes Music Store. They’ll actually scan iTunes for purchased tracks and then automatically add those to your account. Microsoft will still have to pay the rights-holders for the songs, but they believe it’ll be worth it to acquire converts to their new player.

Link

With 1-billion+ iTunes tracks out there, MS is willing to burn a lot of money to try and gain market share. Ouch.

The RIAA is now sending cease-and-desist letters to people who have uploaded to YouTube videos of themselves dancing to “unlicensed” music.

Holy shit, how far away are we from them raiding grandma’s house, Dallas SWAT style, for singing “Happy Birthday”?