Monday June 25, 2007
- BD+ Protection System is Ready - Lionel - 09:22:15
Source : Dailytech
The AACS LA group really trusts its AACS protection system, and keeps updating it despite the recent hacking released on the net. Many movie majors are waiting for a more reliable protection such as the BD+:
This is an advanced protection system dedicated for Blu-ray and developed by BD+ Technologies LL.
This is a rather complex system. Once a BD media is inserted, a virtual machine is loaded in memory and executed. It will have several functions:
- It controls the firmware integrity, in case it was modified, the virtual machine will stop the BD media to be further played.
- It will decode on-the-fly video contents found on the BD media which will not be playable by any other mean.
So, even if one can obtain the AACS key for the media, one will also need to hack the decoding set found in the virtual machine to be able to play BD video contents. The BD+ technology allows watermarks to be added on the video contents, we might not seen them for BD media dedicated to consumers, but it might be a way to track down the black duck among Jury or production members. This new protection might convince movie majors to adopt Blu-ray rather than HD-DVD as the main format for HD video.
As usual, the game will start again, and one will have to define how long this protection will be active and unbreakable by hackers.
[translation by Linathael]
- Apple Stores Getting Reading for the iPhone's Day - Lionel - 09:18:48
Today, Apple and its iPhone are probably going to attract most of the IT news network. The story initiated by Steve Jobs in January kept the entire mobile phone business under pressure and waiting for the release of this log rumored Apple-branded device.
AT&T Shops as well as Apple Stores will catalyze this event and will most likely be the most visited shops on June 29th.
Hereafter are 2 photos taken from Apple Store New-York and sent by Bertrand :
While visiting the Apple Store New York (central park), they were unpacking a Giant iPhone in the middle of the shop, stunning most visitors. In its pod, there is a dedicated space for installing a MacBook which will most likely provide the video animation displayed on the giant iPhone screen.A video of the giant iPhone unpacking is available from the French Swiss TV channel www.tsr.ch
[translation by Linathael]
- 802.11n Wireless Networking for (Almost) all Macs - Lionel - 09:14:08
Adding 802.11n wireless capabilities to previous model was our goal for the first Intel-based Macs as illustrated by many articles. As we reported it last week, Quickertek will offer in a near future a 802.11n PCMCIA card to be used in PowerBook and giving to those previous generation notebooks access to 802.11n wireless network. They announced a new PCI 802.11n card which should be compatible with all PCI ports of Power Mac G3, G4 and G5 running OS X 10.4.
The price remains the same, US$149. As for the previous 802.11n PCMCIA card announcement, information is rather limited and details are missing. The 802.11n PCI card is expected in July.
According to this offer, all Macs, beside the last iBook and Power Mac G5 PCI Express, can benefit from 802.11n wireless network. But USB2-based 802.11n compatible with OSX might be the simplest way to make this technology back compatible with all Macs (not available yet).
[translation by Linathael]
- Windows Vista: The Most Secure OS? - Lionel - 09:11:05
Jeff Jones reports on the CSO blog a study about vulnerabilities in different OS within the last 6 months.
Windows Vista appears to be the most secure OS, with the lowest number of flaws reported, all of them being fixed.
A detailed PDFdocument provides the basis and protocol of this study. The study seems to be serious, even though some flaw-containing UNIX modules are considered to be activated by default while it varies from one user to another. In addition, Vista is far from being massively used worldwide, and this could explain why pirates did not start exploring in details its back doors. But we should also celebrate this success as it will reduce the number of ghost computers being used by pirates to spread viruses or by spammers to overload our email boxes with undesired messages.
[translation by Linathael]
- Upgrade and Overclock a Xeon in a Mac Pro - Lionel - 09:01:07
Intel currently offers 2 FSB for Xeon 5xxx (Woodcrest). The most powerful (and expensive) Xeon feature a 1333MHz FSB, while the cheaper models have a 1066MHz FSB.
Our friend Tommaso from the Italian website o0o.it reports a procedure to force the bus of a Quad Core Xeon 1066MHz to 1333MHz.The processor initially clocked at 1.83GHz is then overclocked to 2.33GHz.
He was using the simple Pinmod procedure to achieve this overclock:
One "simply" needs to insulate one of the CPU contacts to overclock the processor. If the system does NOT visualize the increase of either the processor frequency or the FSB; it does work and the computer is indeed faster. One can then replace Dual Core Xeon by cheap Quad Core Xeon then overclock them to 2.33GHz, for a rather low price.
[translation by Linathael]
