This weekend was great. Saturday evening went to the Sunset Catina with DJ for some excellent food and drink. Sunday I went to Tropic Thunder with film club, which was good dumb fun.

A variety of things to comment on:

• I've heard some people suggest John McCain secretly wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade. That's simply not the case; it can hardly be ( Read more... )

Apparently, some hackers have broken iTunes DRM (again), so that all your protected m4p files can be decrypted to m4a format just by installing and running a simple tool, with no loss of quality and no duplicate entries in the iTunes library (which is updated to point to the new files ( Read more... )

AACS (the content protection system for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies) has been cracked. Cory Doctorow's analysis is right on: DRM costs years and billions and is rendered totally useless by some hackers in a week or so of spare time.

To make the story more amusing, the AACS is now sending bogus legal threats against everyone who posts a number. ( Read more... )

I keep forgetting to post. I feel like there's a lot to comment on, but my life is pretty uneventful. However, when there's not much going on in my life, my consumption of media seems to rise to near-epic levels.

( By which I mean this post is long... )

I'd say "Thugs vs. Pirates", but the RIAA has terrible aim.

Anyways, I recently ran across this excellent article: The RIAA vs. John Doe, a Layperson's Guide to Filesharing Lawsuits. This is a must-read for anyone who's not already super-informed about the issue.

On a related note, I linked to Cory Doctorow's talk at Microsoft recently. Here's ( Read more... )

Links to share:

• DRM and MSFT: A Product No Customer Wants- Corey Doctorow's speech at Microsoft. The guy has guts.
• Everything I Want to do is Illegal- An essay lamenting the downfall of traditional agriculture.
• Examples of the President's Signing Statements- In which Bush thinks he's above the law and says so. (On a related note, here's the American ( Read more... )