Roumazeilles.net

Category: Social issues

  • Al Qaeda may not be using video games to recruit terrorists

    While the American Congress saw earlier this month a video seemingly proving that extreme muslim militants used modified American video games to recruit kids and teenagers in the fight against the great American Satan (Reuters news), it appears that this was a kind of hoax. As a matter of fact, we just learned that the…

  • June, month of HDMI graphic cards

    June, month of HDMI graphic cards

    All information points to June 2006 being the month when we will see the first graphics cards compatible with the HDMI standard for HD television and screens. Up to now, none was available. But ATI and others are preparing their first HDMI-compatible cards and it seems that the price difference between HDMI-compatible and plain cards…

  • MPAA fights silicon vendors now

    it’s been years that you can find on the open market DVD players that can be more or less dezoned (made insensitive to the differences between DVD bought on different continents – more compatible than the DVD standard would like). The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) decided this would end and, with that in…

  • Baidu, the Chinese self-censored encyclopaedia

    Baidu. This is the name of a company, of the largest Chinese search engine and of an open encyclopaedia just starting now in China. While Wikipedia is actively censored in China, Baidu wants to offer an answer to the need for an open encyclopaedia written by its visitors. Wikipedia let everybody directly modify the articles…

  • DRM techniques battling for your computer

    The small world of technical solutions to protect the copyrights starts seeing the same issues as the software industry observed fifteen years ago when trying solutions for software copy protection. For example, we start seeing cases where two DRM solutions (Digital Rights Management) cannot live simultaneously on the same computer. This wasn’t enough that you…

  • Nuclear war in Iran in 2006? It’s gonna flash!

    In a private circle, I had made the prevision that the United States of America would initiate a military action against Iran in 2005. Time proved I was a poor prophet. But, now, I wonder whether 2006 is time for celebration of my failure. From voices usually well informed, we hear repeated stories that the…

  • RIAA says “Jail the ghost!”

    Gertrude Walton is probably not the last person and certainly not the first to be facing the wrath of the RIAA while this association fights against music pirates. She is a bit unusual in the sense that she is an 80-year old Granny and stands accused of downloading 700 songs off peer-to-peer (P2P) networks under…

  • Portable phones allowed in plane! more or less…

    It’s been years that flight attendants repeat to bored flight passengers that portable phones should be switched off during the flight because they may interfere with navigation equipment of the plane. Also, it’s been years that Boeing and Airbus tested this hypothesis and found no risk at all. But nobody wants to take the risk…

  • HDCP/HDMI security: virus comes to HD TV

    HDCP/HDMI security: virus comes to HD TV

    As we are interested into the HDCP/HDMI technology that the manufacturers are preparing for a wide distribution, we start finding a few amazing facts. We had seen previously that HDCP was a technology doomed to fail in front of the attacks by the media pirates, but there is already worse (for the legal users).