'Experts': Ban Won't Stop Online Gambling

"It has put a terrible scare into people," said I. Nelson Rose, who teaches gambling law at Whittier Law School. "But it won't by any means wipe out Internet gambling."  Going on later to say that: "The regulations are clearly going to prevent banks from doing electronic fund transfers to gambling sites, but that is no big deal."

This is exactly what I've been saying for years.

As this article notes, we will see a move to ewallets and other non-U.S. based payment processors.  It'll be very interesting to see what Neteller decides to do. In the meantime, who wants to get in on a pool of when we see big gaming in Nevada step into this newly created online gambling void?  I'm thinking 18-36 months, you?

DoubleTwist's Secret Sauce: A FairPlay Smash-and-Grab

Remember Jon Lech Johansen?  The 15-year old Norwegian that brought DeCSS and QTFairUse into the world?  Well he's still free and still up to his reverse-engineering ways - but now with DoubleTwist Ventures up in SF, CA.

Their pitch is very interesting.  They are selling "iTunes-compliant" Apple DRM (Fairplay) so that you can protect your content - but with the rub that you do not have to go through Apple.  It is a concept that I considered a year back but dismissed due to my concerns around legal ramifications.  I’m not sure they won’t get slapped (enjoy the double negative) with a TRO and C&D from the get go.  I see no reasonable and viable way to achieve this without reverse engineering Apple's work - which normally would be legal - but in this case, runs afoul of the DMCA (IMHO).

Presumably there is a link embedded in FairPlay protected content that instructs the player (iTunes) where to get a license from.  DoubleTwist embeds their own link, auths the user (within iTunes or independently through a web-session), and determine which license, if any, to send.  It's all fine and dandy until our Apple Overlords get all litigious.

Apple's DRM licensed to others by DVD Jon
Jon Lech Johansen’s Blog

ithmb: an iPod kludge (sponsored by Seagate?)

So today my good friend Larry (aka: Larmo; ArcaneC5; Lawrence of Polesmokia) brought the iTunes photo cache kludge to my attention. 

What iPod photo cache kludge you ask (as I did)?  Well according to Google, no one is talking about this.  According to Larry, everyone is too busy kissing Apple's ass.  I believe them both.

Apparently the folks at Apple, in their infinite knowledge of how to create amazingly functional products decided to store each and every image uncompressed.  Not once or twice, but four times.

That's right, each and every image on your iPod has four versions:

1. The first thumbnail is 720x480 and in YUV 4:2:2 format, interlaced.
2. The second thumbnail is 176x220 and in RGB 565 format.
3. The third thumbnail is 42x30 and in RGB 565 with swapped bytes.
4. The fourth thumbnail 130x88, RGB 565 with swapped bytes.

So when Larry took his 1,848 images and scaled them down to 640x480, he had about 130MB of JPG's sitting on his hard drive.  After copying them to his iPod using iTunes, his cache folder for those pictures was a whopping 1.5GB! That's a 11.5x increase in size above and beyond his low-res 60kB source files - meaning each photo takes up about 800kB worth of thumbnails on his iPod for display to a silly 320x240 screen.

Maybe my brother was right.  Long live the Zen Zune.

(ty ipodlinux.org)

Bruce Schneier talking at USC

Bruce Schneier, of international security fame, is speaking at USC tomorrow, Tuesday September 26th @ 7pm.  I'll be there...

What is a Hacker?

Absolutely fantastic essay written by one of my favorite technologists, Mr. Bruce Schneier.  If you know me, or you know technology, I urge you to read his essay that appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of 2600.  It summarizes my exact view and beliefs of many things, including what must be one of the most dynamic technology-related words: 'hacker'.