Sunrise

Smooth Variety

Mmm, gotta love that smooth placement variety from Tribe Media.

SanDisk puts DRM on memory cards

SanDisk puts DRM on memory cards (CNet News.com)

And I give it two weeks after going to market until it’s cracked. Plus it’s hardly as though it takes particulary advanced technology to manually circumvent copy controls: whilst we’ve still got analogue I/O for our digital devices, it’s perfectly possible to circumvent pretty much any DRM technology out there, cracking efforts aside. Got a line-in on your soundcard? Got a TV tuner with S-Video or Composite input? There’s your home piracy studio.

And if we can do it, the only people you’re fooling when you say it’s not possible are your investors: the professional pirates are yards ahead of you.

(Gosh this post makes me sound like a raving Marxist, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, the point is DRM is only ever going to succeed in a limited capacity. Then, the masses will revolt and overthrow the bourgeoisie oppressors and their control of a false commodity! Socialist order will rule!! erm. Then, circumvention will become the norm, rather than a temporary force. Innovation will be out-innovated. Until DRM is at the point where hardware is in some kind of stasis, and software can be updated at the whim of content purveyors. I don’t say creators, because content’s creators aren’t generally the ones heavily pushing the agenda we’re seeing from various recording lobbies — and also because I do find myself agreeing that the ownership of ideas is a fundamentally flawed concept.

Aside: I think this fits without difficulty into my political views — Liberalism follows the principle of government/legislative intervention only where this is seen to be of greater benefit (e.g. where there is no privately operated/owned alternative to state-owned/operated infrastructure/services)… and the notion that individuals rather than the state be creators of wealth is fairly irrelevant here, because there’s no defined need in liberalism for the creation of wealth in all spheres, plus the present intellectual property climate that we see exists because of legislative (read: government) intervention in matters best left to free market forces. I’ll stop myself from launching into a full-scale rant here… hopefully some other time.

So, I think SanDisk are digging themselves a hole. Rant over.

ImageBox Flash gallery app

I stumbled across this post on RMW Web Publishing’s blog today, and it struck me the app they mentioned could be useful for doing this whole CD/DVD thing for the year 12 photo website.

The purveyor’s website is horribly Flash encumbered (i.e. I’d have never found it if I were looking for it in a search engine — I actually temporarily lost the developer’s URL for a bit there, and had to trawl through my browsing history to find it again!), but the app itself is rather useful if you’re looking for a run-from-the-desktop gallery kinda thing. My only qualm is the difficulty of generating metadata for it to do interesting stuff with, but a quick spot of shell scripting should see that problem met, hopefully. (Or even just nagging Ben until he hacks support for this gizmo into Cat-scan natively… wink wink? :P) This is the kind of app that’s a prime candidate for XML application, not in the least because of Flash’s reputedly excellent support for that kind of stuff… but it uses boring and rather confusing (mostly because I don’t speak German so a few words are odd) flat files instead. With that one caveat, it’s an otherwise helpful application. Just don’t make the mistake of confusing applications with websites.

Why I’m glad I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2

So I hadn’t upgraded until a few days ago, when trying to solve a problem someone was having with CurlyEnc. The main reason was that I was simply lazy, and that it was trivial to plug the security flaws addressed by the 1.5.2 update (which seemed inconsequential in terms of actual features mentioned on the WordPress development weblog). However, there’s one minor feature change to WordPress in this release that’s important in my eyes, to the way RSS feeds are built.

At long last the comment feed item title includes the name of the post people are commenting on! This makes things infinitely more sensible, and I’m no longer reduced to hovering my mouse over the URL in order to see the link stub to determine who is commenting on what. Good stuff.