SDMI (the “Secure” Digital Music Initiative) offered hackers ten grand if they could break SDMI’s proposed music protection technologies, so they did. The entertainment industry has a lot to learn about encryption. I doubt that it’s possible to build a system that will protect content but at the same time allow it to be played on millions of players built by various manufacturers. Either people will crack the system or graft something onto the players that allows them to extricate the content and store it in an open format.
Hot on the heels of Netscape 6 PR 3 is Milestone 18 from Mozilla. I imagine I’ll be able to download it successfully, which is more than I can say for the Netscape-branded release.
Steven Feuerstein’s replaced the staid examples normally found in computer books with socially conscious examples in his book on Oracle 8i. I’m so jealous that I didn’t think of this idea myself. The best I came up with was using the names of coworkers in the examples.