Rambus loses patent fight Patents 5/5/2001; 10:24:37 PM This is news I've wanted to pass on for months now. 'Rambus, the pugnacious memory IP designer, has received a bloody nose its US court fight against Infineon, with the judge dismissing the three remaining patent claims against the German chipmaker.'

Videocard->Monitor Protection System Details Leaked Misc. 5/5/2001; 10:03:43 PM This is the stuff that's supposed to prevent us dastardly consumers from tapping into our monitor lines and obtaining copies of content that way. Technical reading, leaked to cryptome.

Coalition Developing DVD Watermark DVD & DeCSS5/5/2001; 9:51:19 PM 'An alliance of seven technology companies has developed a digital watermark technology that it says could be available on DVDs as early as September. 'The Video Watermarking Group (VWM) is a combined venture of Hitachi (HIT, info), NEC (NIPNY, info), Pioneer (PIO, info), Sony (SNE, info), Digimarc (DMRC, info), Macrovision (MVSN, info), and Philips (PHG, info). The companies have come together after months of negotiations to combine their technologies and produce a digital watermark that will be embedded in original DVDs, says John Fread, director of public relations for Digimarc.

While the finer points of the Digital Millennium Copyright A DMCA5/2/2001; 2:27:54 PM 'While the finer points of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act take center stage in a New York appeal's court, a team of researchers continue to protest the heavy-handed use of the law by the recording industry.''On Tuesday, a trio of federal judges heard arguments about the legality of distributing the DVD-descrambling utility DeCSS. The panel, which appeared to be taking a pro-entertainment industry stance, gave both sides until May 10 to file 10-page supplemental briefs.

Engelbart to Help Prodigy Fight BT Lawsuit Patents 5/1/2001; 10:57:31 PM 'User interface pioneer Douglas Engelbart, who demonstrated a mouse-driven hypertext system called NLS in 1968, said in an interview Wednesday that he will help Prodigy defend itself against a patent infringement lawsuit filed by British Telecom. BT is suing Prodigy for infringement of BT's patent on hyperlinks.' (Admin note: Apologies for the paucity of posts... my school year ends this Thursday and the final projects are consuming the usual 150% of my available time.

Attorneys general: Law lagging behind technology Administrative4/30/2001; 10:37:51 PM 'States have fraud-protection laws they could use to pursue egregious offenders, but little for run-of-the-mill Web sites. Attorney General Janet Napolitano thinks having an Internet-specific privacy law would offer consumers basic protections and make prosecutions easier.''Other attorneys general echoed Napolitano's frustrations this past week at a National Association of Attorneys General meeting devoted to online legal trends. Their chief complaint: The law simply cannot catch up with technology.

Napster Judge Utterly Frustrated Music & MP34/27/2001; 9:59:16 PM In the RED cor-NER, weighing in at ten to the forty-three kilos, REALITY! In the BLUE cor-NER, weighing in around ten to the second kilos, THE LAW!SEE the law and reality collide! FEEL the bone crushing hits of the reigning champ as it rains down holy terror on the newcomer! WATCH as THE LAW tries the mathematically IMPOSSIBLE! LAUGH MANIACALLY as your intuition is proved correct!

Uncopyable CD Strikes the Wrong Note Music & MP34/27/2001; 5:23:28 PM 'Consumers love the compact disc, but the recording industry doesn't always feel the same love for the humble CD. Sure, it's cheap and sounds good -- but it's also cheap and easy to duplicate and share with a few hundred million friends and family members on the Internet....''This interrogate-the-owner tactic used to be the standard procedure with software in the '80s, when programs routinely asked you to type some phrase or word from a page of the manual.

How to Crack Open an E-Book Hacking & Cracking4/27/2001; 5:17:33 PM 'A hacker claims he or she has cracked the code and can remove the encryption on e-books in the RocketBook format, allowing the extraction of the content as plain text.''At the end of March, the hacker started making this information available publicly, and posted one URL to Gemstar's forums and the code and instructions to other Web forums.' '"

I Have a (Digital) Dream Digital Divide4/27/2001; 4:55:02 PM '"You don't want to reach a fatalistic attitude," said Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at MIT, and co-organize the conference. "You have to hope for a utopian world. Martin Luther King held up the dream we have to frame for the digital population of the United States. '"We need a diverse cyberspace. Not a race-blind cyberspace."'Question for pondering: What is a "