News for Thursday, 20 January 2005

Sony is introduced with the recently launched movie "The Forgotten" with Julianne Moore, a new anti-copy protection system, named ARccOS.
However, a small detail makes SONY new initiative a bit ridiculous. The night before the official DVD launch, the protection-killer PC software "AnyDVD" had been updated to be able to avoid ARccOS protection.
CEO of SlySoft, the company developing AnyDVD, has declared that the movie industry should reconsider its position regarding anti-copy protection because those are useless, and quite often prevent the DVD to be played properly in a standalone DVD player.
Sony will probably have its revenge with the protection of movies on Blu-Ray media. Indeed, it will be much more difficult to crack that one, and if a cracking key is released, it will be possible to inactivate it for all new media produced after this release. However all devices using that key will not work anymore...some calls it collateral damages...

As it was the case last year, Apple will be presenting at the MIDEM (The world's Music Market, 39th edition) which will take place at Cannes, 23-27 January 2005.
For sure, Apple's presence will be more welcomed than previous years when Apple was considered as nothing but a MP3 player manufacturer... and pronouncing MP3 is considered as swearing for the music business in this type of congress.

Following the video, we were just referring to, we have learned that the tool used in this video is indeed the one recommended by Apple!! Apple is even proposing AppleCenter and reseller to buy the tool from them.
If you are interested hereafter are both its reference and a photo:
Mastic Knife made by Stanley with the reference: 28-241.

You should find it in a shop near you.

Thank to our readers to report that smashsworld is proposing a video showing how to disassemble a Mac mini.
http://www.smashsworld.com/2005/01/taking-apart-mac-mini-how-to.php
It is not complicated, but we will advice to use a credit-card type plastic board to avoid scratching the box.
We have also learned that opening his Mac mini for installing RAM modules will not void the warranty so far you do not scratch the box or break something inside. So nothing new, so far there is no visible damage; they have no reason to refuse to take back your default computer under warranty.

Thanks to our good friend RS250, we learned that Australia has received 650 units of Mac Mini 1.25ghz, and that iPod Shuffles were delivered to Apple resellers all across the country today, though only the 512MB model is available. No 1GB units as of yet.

Since last night a large phishing attack is in progress and is specifically targeting Paypal users. So be careful! It is a quite nasty and well designed version since the illegal URL is mixing up official Paypal links with fake links. This site does have a real URL, but only an IP address: 67.15.40.4.
Of course this IP might change quickly.
With time, and this type of attacks getting usual, we think that one should seriously think of an "Internet Police" which should be able to block such threads, and even fire-back on websites hosting such action.

Thanks to Pierre-Yves for this nice one

I could not resist... Microsoft is sometimes so misleading:
Get connected to MSN maps:
http://mappoint.msn.com/DirectionsFind.aspx
- country : choose Norway
- enter start and end points of your route: from Haugesund to Trondheim.
Select the quickest route.
Hereafter is the map which is displayed!! Try it yourself it is amazing!
No sense information... if it keeps going like that, one knows already what to expect from Longhorn :-D !!!!!!

For Microsoft, the quickest route which is not distance-wise the shortest: around 47 hours...
Do not forget that to switch off a PC, one need to click bottom left on "start" icon...