IT News
Blu-ray and HD DVD Hacked Already
There’s a hole in the copyright protection for Blu-ray and HD DVD movies that you could drive a truck through. The funny thing is, it’s an alarmingly easy and obvious hack: Print Screen. Sure, you’d have to hit Print Screen and save each one for days to capture the thousands of frames that make up one HD movie, but it’s no big deal to automate this process and then stack the frames up, and there you have it—a near-perfect pixel-for-pixel copy of the Luddite movie studios’ buried treasure.
According to German computer magazine CT, Toshiba acknowledged the vulnerability and vowed that it would be plugged up with the next release of DVD player software. But still. We can only laugh when we recall the interminable demos where smug Blu-ray and HD DVD hucksters blathered on about how it was impossible to hack their invulnerable copy protection. You can’t lock down eyeballs. Information wants to be free, and this is just the first crack in those walls of Jericho, soon to be tumbling down.
Source : Gizmodo
Romania: Software piracy made us what we are today
Romania’s president delivered an encomium to software piracy during Bill Gates’ world tour promoting Windows Vista.
President Traian Basescu reportedly told Gates that software piracy helped build a vibrant technology industry in Romania.
Appearing with Gates at the opening of a Microsoft global technology center in Bucharest, he said. “Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania,” he said. Cue sound of Microsoft PR jaws dropping.
“[Piracy] helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world… ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.”
Gates is not reported to have responded, but his company campaigns against piracy and works vigorously with prosecutors to bring criminals to justice.
The Romanian IT service sector is expected to grow 16.8 per cent during the next few years to hit $356m in 2009, according to IDC. However, 72 per cent of software in Romania, one of the EC’s newest member states, is pirated according to the Business Software Alliance (BSA). That costs companies like Microsoft $111m in lost revenue each year.
Experts have called for stronger action from Romanian officials on software piracy, with prosecutors encouraged to stop dismissing potential cases. The International Intellectual Property Alliance in 2006 said dismissals are acting as a disincentive on police to clamp down on criminals, who are mostly end-users and distributors. ®
Source : The Register UK
Google loses GMail in Europe
Google has failed to win the right to register the term “Gmail” as a wide-ranging European trademark.
The Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), the body which is responsible for European community trademarks, rejected Google’s appeal after a stiff battle with German-born venture capitalist Daniel Giersch.
Giersch, who has held his trademark for six years, has been fighting this battle since Google launched its email service in 2004. The German entrepreneur founded a same-day mail delivery service called GMail designed to offer a swifter alternative to the Deutsche Post.
Last year, a district court in Hamburg already handed Giersch victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the litigation and Google was ordered to remove all Gmail references from its German service.
After the ruling, Giersch also announced lawsuits to defend more recent registrations of the trademark in Switzerland, Norway and Monaco.
Google has always argued the two names are not confusingly similar. The company even offered to buy the trademark rights from Giersch for $250,000, but the German entrepreneur declined. He called Google’s behaviour “very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful”.
In 2005, Google also had to rename its Google Mail service in the UK where research firm IIIR claimed “Gmail” for its financial analytics software in an out of court settlement
Source : The Register UK
Adobe wants to make PDF an International Standard
Adobe plans on submitting its Portable Document Format (PDF) specification as a world standard. PDFs files have become a de-facto standard around the world because of their WYSIWYG nature both in viewing and printing. Now, Adobe wants to cement that in stone and possibly hamper the adoption of Microsoft’s competing format XML Paper Specification (XPS).
The company is submitting version 1.7 of the PDF specification to AIIM which is the Enterprise Content Management Association of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). You can read the full specification at Adobe’s website here.
Apple sued by Cisco for iPhone brand
Everyone knew this move had to be coming. While Apple may have popularized the little “i” with products like iMac, iBook, iPod, iTunes and iLife, the iPhone name has already been taken. Cisco has owned the trademark for iPhone since 2000 when it was purchased from Infogear. Infogear originally filed for the trademark in 1996 (well before Apple jumped into the “i” business). Cisco just recently ushered the name into service with a new line of VoIP devices marketed by Cisco’s Linksys division.
Although Apple and Cisco have been in talks for quite some time over the iPhone name, no agreement was ever reached. Nevertheless, Apple boldly decided yesterday to announce the iPhone at MacWorld. Cisco isn’t too happy about the move and has filed a lawsuit against Apple, Inc.
“Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco’s iPhone name,” said Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel for Cisco. “There is no doubt that Apple’s new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission.”
Cisco isn’t going down without a fight on this one and it intends to fully protect its line of iPhone products. “Today’s iPhone is not tomorrow’s iPhone. The potential for convergence of the home phone, cell phone, work phone and PC is limitless, which is why it is so important for us to protect our brand,” said Chandler.
Source : Daily Tech
