The Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Have you been targetted by a "takedown" letter threatening you if you didn't take down your posted video? The EFF is looking for you.

Were you or someone you know unfairly caught in Viacom's dragnet? If your video was hit with a bogus takedown, contact information@eff.org -- we may be able to help you directly or help find another lawyer who can. In this situation, as in so many others, EFF will work to make sure that copyright claims don't squelch free speech.

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Remember that neat gizmo in Back to the Future II? The one where Doc put some garbage into "Mr. Fusion" to power his time machine? If not, shame on you. Go rent the movie.

Anyway, they've now figured out how to make a machine that turns garbage of almost ANY variety into fuel and electricity. Not only does the start-up process only take a normal household amount of electricity to start, but it's over 100% self sustaining in that it produces more electricity than it uses while destroying anything from dirty diapers to old rusty metal. The only waste it produces is a gas that can be used for fuel.

Wow.

Bump keys defeat your locks in seconds

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Come home to a robbed house, but they didn't break in? Your insurance company may give you grief if you don't know about this trick for opening any door with no traces.

Here's a video that explains how to "bump" locks, or to make a simple modification to your front door key to open any lock by that manufacturer. This would be classified as "What the hell?" as in, the manufacturers know about this problem, but aren't doing anything about it. Thankfully, videos like this may force them to make some quick changes as criminals learn this ridiculously easy technique and use it.

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CASPIAN warns that Verichip, the ones who have brought the human-implant RFID to the market had to publish a report of risks associated with the technology to satisfy the Securities and Exchanges Commission before they could IPO. In almost 20 pages of risks (holly clap!) they still neglected to mention that their RFID chips can be cloned… easily. So much for their claim to "tighten security in facilities like nuclear power plants".

"Potential investors should be told how a hacker can simply walk by a chipped person and clone his or her VeriChip signal, a threatdemonstrated by security researcher Jonathan Westhues months ago," says McIntyre, who is a former federal bank examiner.

And most creepily:

The VeriChip implant is a glass encapsulated RFID tag that is injected into the flesh to uniquely number and identify individuals. The tag can be read by radio waves from a few inches away. The highly controversial device is being marketed as a way to access secure areas, link to medical records, and serve as a payment instrument when associated with a credit card or pre-paid account.

So you get to be tagged like an animal with something you can't get rid of without surgury, and because your credit card information is in it, all someone has to do to steal your identity is stand near you for a few seconds. Wonderful.

Let's be clear about this: Human implantation of RFID is the most dangerous development in technology ever created. I really need to write an article about this sometime…

Oh no! Our profits!

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Though the RIAA would like you to believe it, it seems that P2P doesn't actually affect music sales at all. That's kind of embarassing for the RIAA who no longer has any justification for their music property crusade.

Of course, I always said that most people who use P2P to get music wouldn't have bought the CDs in the first place. Therefore, the number of people who download music doesn't necessarily equal the number of CDs that would have been sold.

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Today on Schneier's blog, he describes in farily decent detail why the DRM in Windows Vista is bad. Some choice bits:

And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good.

What the entertainment companies are finally realizing is that DRM doesn't work, and just annoys their customers. Like every other DRM system ever invented, Microsoft's won't keep the professional pirates from making copies of whatever they want. The DRM security in Vista was broken the day it was released.

In the meantime, the only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade to Vista. It will be hard. Microsoft's bundling deals with computer manufacturers mean that it will be increasingly hard not to get the new operating system with new computers. And Microsoft has some pretty deep pockets and can wait us all out if it wants to.

Searching

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Apparently, there's a company named Powerset that's trying to implement natural language search for Internet searches. Granted, this has been tried before (Ask Jeeves), but never really worked. Ars Technica is listing Powerset as a possible competitor to Google, but cautions that Google will probably also include this technology soon (especially if Powerset shows any measure of success).

Describing natural language search is hard, but here's an example:

Searching for "book by children" and "book about children" should produce greatly different results, but search engines today generally throw out the prepositions and treat both queries the same way

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Found on Slashdot, this article explains how writing fake reviews about your own book or hotel to boost its rating will become illegal in the UK and perhaps all of Europe.

This practice is very similar to the fake blogs that marketers made in the United States recently.

I don't really know why they had to specifically illegalize this… Wasn't it already fraud?

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Scot Finnie, a Windows expert who has been following the development of Windows Vista has given Macs a try for the first time.

After living with the Mac for three months and comparing it to my Vista experiences, the choice is crystal clear. I've struggled to sort out my gut feeling about Windows Vista (see "The Trouble with Vista"), but the value and advantage of the Mac and OS X are difficult to miss. While I continue to work with Windows XP and Vista on a number of other machines, I am now recommending the Macintosh for business and home users.

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In his review, he's quick to point out that 80% of the changes in Vista are good. In fact, it's very good. However, the company has shifted its focus and it shows. Some highlights from his article:

Microsoft stopped focusing on end users and now seemingly makes many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy the deep focus on milking the installed base for every penny goes against my grain. I fault the DRM stuff quietly baked into Windows Vista in part because it is quietly baked in. The people who gain from this technology aren't the people who are paying for Windows. Microsoft has already made ardent enemies of previously more or less happy Windows users through the use of its previous-generation antipiracy measures, Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications and Windows Product Activation.