MediaDefender Attacks Revision3

You may have already know Revision3 experienced problems over the Memorial Day weekend due to a denial of service attack. But this turned out to be not your run of the mill DOS attack. Usually the IP addresses of the computers sending the DOS request packets sent are spoofed, masked to where it is difficult or impossible to tell where they originated. Not this time.
As Jim Louderback explains in his excellent, highly detailed blog post, it turns out the vast majority of request packets came from none other than MediaDefender. The same MediaDefender involved in setting up a fake movie download site that was nothing more than an entrapment scheme. The same MediaDefender that exists for the sole purpose of attempting to disrupt illegal file sharing on P2P networks, particularly BitTorrent, on the behalf of numerous big name studios. There's just one problem with this (ok, there are actually several, but for now we'll focus on this one): P2P networks can be and are used for legitimate, legal activities such as people distributing their own content. Open source software is also distributed over P2P.
Jim and Kevin (and their backers) over at Revision3 aren't going to take too kindly to another company disrupting their business. After all it's shenanigans, MediaDefender may finally be in some trouble as the FBI are reportedly looking into the matter. Denial of service attacks are illegal according to the Economic Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

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Indy Sets Box Office Record After All

Counting worldwide box office receipts, Indiana Jones captured moviegoers over the Memorial Day weekend, raking in a record-setting $311 million. For a while there was some concern over how well the fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise would do when early numbers seemed less than impressive.
The film was released officially on a Thursday, which is somewhat unusual, and meant some theaters started showing it on midnight Wednesday. Even so, numbers coming in late Friday concerned Paramount over how well the film would end up doing over the entire weekend.
Reportedly families went in droves to catch "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the first film in the franchise in 19 years. Nearly a third of the domestic audience was made up of parents with their children, said Rob Moore, president of Paramount Worldwide Distribution.

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Phoenix Probe Lands Successfully On Mars

Despite the success of NASA's Spirit and Opportunity missions, directors remained anxious today over the first-ever landing of a probe near Mars' north pole to find signs of life. The Mars Phoenix Lander was wrapping up its 296-day, 422 million-mile journey with about a 50-50 chance of a successful touchdown, NASA officials said. The landing -- dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" -- was a nerve-wracking experience for mission managers, who have witnessed the failure of similar missions.

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Faceparty Institutes 'Logan's Run' Policy

In an effort to cut down on sex offenders using their site, up-and-coming networking site Faceparty.com has instituted a policy that reminds some of the 70s film 'Logan's Run.' The site has deleted what it describes as "a huge number of accounts" of its users over the age of 36.
Um, what? "We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which," the company says in a bizarre explanation of the deletion of users’ accounts. "New [British] government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list," the company notice continues.
"This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme."
So I suppose their response is to assume members over the age of 36 are sex offenders. A quick look at the site leaves me the impression that it's an amateurish MySpace imitator and those of us over 36 are probably just as well off being deleted.

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Netflix Set-Top Box Released

Today Netflix introduced its Roku set-top box that allows subscribers with high speed internet to stream movies right to their TVs. The small box, the size of five CD cases stacked together, comes with a remote control, costs $99, and there is no additional cost for watching movies on it for any user on a $9 plan or more.
Before you go out into the streets proclaiming the end of rental stores or the DVD itself, let me mention the drawbacks. Although there are component and HDMI connections on the device, it is not HD. It streams video at 480p, roughly DVD quality. You evidently cannot browse and select movies directly from the device. You already have to have added the movie to your queue in order to watch it over the Roku box. It also can only stream movies that have the 'instant watch' option indicated.
This is the biggest drawback to the device, because although Netflix boasts some 60,000 titles, only about 10,000 have the instant watch option. This is due to the fact that, unlike DVD, Netflix must negotiate rights with each movie studio to stream their content over the service. If you look at the titles available for instant watch, there are notable omissions. Popular recent releases like National Treasure 2, Untraceable, I Am Legend, The Golden Compass and others are not found.
This is reportedly the first of several planned set-top devices Netflix plans to produce.

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Wii Fit Hits Stores Today

Nintendo's Wii Fit hits U.S. stores today promising to be the latest exercise fad to draw weight-conscious Americans to Nintendo's Wii console. Wii Fit allows you to break a sweat in front of your TV to 40 fitness activities including strength training, aerobics, yoga, skiing, and snowboarding. The game's activities all take place on a small balance board that can sense when you are leaning forward, backward, to the side or even crouching.The mini-games are the most enjoyable part of Wii Fit — games that Nintendo claims will help you work on your aerobic strength and balance. Much like Wii Sports, you import your Mii avatar into the Wii Fit and then use the Balance Board to have it do things like go skiing, or twirl hula hoops or perform a dance routine.
What fun!

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Universe Suddenly Twice As Bright

The universe is twice as bright as it appears, astronomers now suggest. The light bulb went on when they calculated that dust blocks about the half the light emitted from stars and galaxies. Astronomers have known about interstellar dust for a while, but they haven't been able to quantify just how much light it blocks. Now a team of researchers has studied a catalog of galaxies and found that dust shields roughly 50 percent of their light.

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The Universe Is Expanding At Sci-Fi

This article, posted at New York Times, explains that the Sci-Fi Channel is expanding its content from typical fare like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone to shows like Ghost Hunters and movies like Field Of Dreams.

The letters still keep coming to the Rockefeller Center offices of the Sci Fi Channel. Please, they all say, pick up “Jericho,” the science fiction show with a small but passionate following that was canceled in March by CBS, for a third season.
But those letters are falling on deaf ears. The Sci Fi Channel, still viewed by many as a niche network, is no longer a repository for failed fantasy shows cast aside by the broadcast networks. Instead, through a mix of original shows, movies and syndicated reruns (including old “Jericho” episodes but no new ones), the network has expanded its audience, especially among women, chiefly by stretching the definition of science fiction.

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The X-Files: I Want to Believe Trailer

CBS To Acquire C|Net For $1.8 Billion

CBS has announced plans to acquire C|Net for $1.8 Billion. C|Net would become part of CBS Interactive.
Known in recent years for it's popularity with the senior set, this is no doubt an effort to remain relevant to a younger audience. I have to say CBS has done some interesting things; like recently putting a lot of it's content online to watch for free. This move will bring all of C|Net's content under CBS's wing, including ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, C|Net news.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon and TechRepublic. Hopefully this will bring some C|Net type content to CBS's broadcast programming. Hmm. CB|Net? C|BS?

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Download Now: Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope Released

Microsoft has released its highly anticipated Worldwide Telescope software, which can be used by astronomers and non-astronomers alike to explore the heavens with a desktop client akin to Google Earth. Any Star Trek fan knows that space travel is not always easy, but Microsoft Corp wants to make traveling the "final frontier" as simple as turning on your computer. The world's largest software maker launched a free software application called WorldWide Telescope on Monday that allows everyone from space novices to astronomy professors to easily explore galaxies, star systems and distant planets. The WorldWide Telescope stitches together 12 terabytes -- the data equivalent of 2.6 billion pages of text -- of pictures from sources including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

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The Clone Wars Poster Revealed

Thanks to CGI animation, the Star Wars saga is coming back to theaters this summer. Star Wars: The Clone Wars, due August 15, will lead into a weekly animated television series of the same title that will air on both the Cartoon Network and TNT beginning in the fall. The new film and series will fill in gaps between "Episode II: Attack of the Clones" and "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" with stories of Anakin, Padmé Amidala, Count Dooku and other second-trilogy characters. Here is the theatrical one sheet as posted on Latino Review. What do you think?

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Consumers Not Buying Blu-Ray Despite Format Win

A Blu-ray win over HD-DVD in the bloody format war hasn't translated into a sales victory for the next generation DVD technology. A recent study by the NPD Group has shown that Blu-ray sales only increased by 2 percent from February to March and that Blu-ray sales dropped 40 percent from January to February.
I think three things are contributing to this:

• Hardware is still expensive compared to DVD. In a slowing economy where the average person is starting to feel the pinch at the gas pump as well as the grocery store, spending $400 on a new disc player (not to mention the more expensive discs) is just not on the agenda for a lot of people.

• Many can't tell the difference. Videophiles aside, many consumers are hard pressed to tell a substantial difference between upconverted DVD from a $40 player correctly connected to the display and true HD material from Blu-ray, especially from across the living room.

• It's too soon. Many consumers feel they 'just' upgraded to the DVD format, though for some that was more than a decade ago, and are not in haste to start replacing their video collections like they did with DVD. Add to this the expense of upgrading to a new flat panel HDTV, which many have recently done or are doing this year (whether they need to or not) in light of the February 2009 digital transition, and the consumer is hesitant to spend another $400 + discs in light of the previous two arguments.
  

At any rate, I don't see Blu-ray overtaking DVD as the dominant format at any time in the foreseeable future.

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The Closest Look At A Black Hole Yet

By Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com posted on UsaToday-
While we may never know what it looks like inside a black hole, astronomers recently obtained one of the closest views yet. The sighting allowed scientists to confirm theories about how these giant cosmic sinkholes spew out jets of particles traveling at nearly the speed of light.
Ever since the first observations of these powerful jets, which are among the brightest objects seen in the universe, astronomers have wondered what causes the particles to accelerate to such great speeds. A leading hypothesis suggested the black hole's gigantic mass distorts space and time around it, twisting magnetic field lines into a coil that propels material outward.
Now researchers have observed a jet during a period of extreme outburst and found evidence that streams of particles wind a corkscrew path away from the black hole, as the leading hypothesis predicts.

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Iron Man Has $100M Weekend, Guarantees Sequel

Iron Man was pure gold at the box office. The Marvel Comics adaptation, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the title character took in $100.7 million during its opening weekend and $104.2 million since debuting Thursday night, the second-best premiere ever for a nonsequel, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Released worldwide on the same day, the film pulled in another $96.7 million in 57 additional countries for a total of some $201 million. One thing you can take away from these Monday morning greenlights is if you want to see a sequel to a particular film, supporting the release on opening weekend goes a long way to ensure one gets made.

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New Dark Knight Trailer

This is the new trailer you should have seen in front of Iron Man this weekend, although some are reporting not seeing it. So if you didn't see Iron Man or your theater removed the trailer, here you go.

Happy Anniversary! 30 Years of Email Spam

This week marks the first known spam email that was sent 30 years ago on Saturday. But the message sent on May 3, 1978 by a marketer for the now defunct DEC computer company to around 400 people on the west coast of the United States wasn't called spam, and the sender dispatched it without ill intent.
How things have changed. For one, instead of having to type each email address individually, programs can send out millions of automated emails in minutes.
Another drastic change is that spammers don't have to try to find ISPs to send spam. Now botnets, hijacked personal and office PCs that carry out remote commands, have control of some 30% of PCs. Yes, thats probably you, blog reader that still uses IE version 5.5 or earlier. See my post from Feb of 2007.

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