Interesting Stuff

It seems that users of Digg posted the AACS key (the DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) recently. In response to fears of DMCA-based lawsuits, the Digg executives attempted to remove the key from their site. However, so many Diggers fought back by reposting the key that Digg now stands with them and will no longer attempt to remove it. As Digg founder Kevin Rose wrote,

[Y]ou’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Hurrah! This, coupled with Steve Jobs’ take on DRM (which caused Apple to sell DRM-free music on iTunes), makes it look like industries are thankfully turning against DRM. The whole idea of DRM is laughably otiose; I’m still surprised anyone thought it would work in the first place. “Gee, let’s take data we want users to have, encrypt it, give the users a way to decrypt it, and hope that they don’t watch our decryption process when they run it.” Even without considering the analog hole, this isn’t going to work. If you give someone data in a format that they can use, by definition they will be able to use this data for their own purposes; there’s no way around it.

While I’ve been home this break, I’ve been ripping my CDs to MP3s. To accomplish this, I’ve been trying out my brother’s copy of iTunes. It’s quite an impressive little piece of software, particularly concerning its ability to recognize CDs. Apple must have an absolutely huge database to aid in this: it has been able to recognize all but one of my CDs so far (the one being Wave by Antonio Carlos Jobim, a Brazilian artist who helped invent bossa nova back in the 1960s). As anyone who has seen my music collection knows, it’s quite full of obscure, strange titles. However, iTunes had no problem identifying the Israeli techno, the local Tacoma band, or anything else. I was pleasantly surprised. A bit more standardization as regards punctuation and capitalization would be nice, however.

On a tangential note, the Macworld Expo was earlier this week, at which Steve Jobs revealed a Mac running on Intel’s x86 architecture. I am a bit saddened to see this happen, because the ppc architecture is vastly superior to the x86 (except for the clock speed, which is marginally worse but could almost certainly be improved). However, I can understand why Apple would want to switch architectures: the x86 sports a larger code base, a smaller price tag, and is already manufactured as a dual core chip. Still, the idealist in me wishes this hadn’t occurred. Well, we shall see how this all pans out…