If indeed this device is real it seems needlessly convoluted and aimed at people who have little knowledge of computers and who think that in order to deny someone else access to the information you have to fry the HDD.

A much simpler approach would be to encrypt the entire HDD(s) and have some way to remotely cut the power to the systems. Problem solved.

If they're worried about rubber hose cryptanalysis, though that's another matter altogether.

Jeff,

At least in Great Britain, France and Canada they would have to work within the law, and if that wasn't possible they'd have to work pretty hard to change it. In the US, at the moment, all the government has to do to be able to tap major backbones is to ask nicely.

Of course a government can do pretty much what it wants to do, if it is determined to do it. That's why there are checks and balances put into place.

What makes the US case special right now is that the ones put into place there are eroding at an alarming rate.

I don't really see why Google is the whipping boy here apart from the fact that the media likes a big juicy name to throw into stories.

This problem applies to all data being hosted by any American company, or indeed passing through backbones located in the US, in other words pretty much a large percentage of all internet traffic.

Also, KDE has had this for years in the taskbar clock applet. It's pretty handy.

Although I don't see how putting this functionality inside the browser is useful, except maybe for other platforms who don't have something like this in their desktop environments.

No one actually knows if it has indeed been broken or not. All we have to go on is the press release from SlySoft, which of course has a vested interest in selling its products.

They made the same statements last year and eventually it was discovered that it wasn't exactly "broken", you could just rip the titles protected with BD+ to your hard drive, where they could only be played back using a specific version of PowerDVD.

If they did indeed break it this time, then it's great news, but at least let's wait until more details surface before we start running headlines like "BD+ Broken!"

Only when we can rip the video and audio content from a BD+ and AACS protected Blu-Ray disc, and play it back on anything from a Linux PC to an iPod, only then can we declare it's been broken.

The music is all shit, unsurprisingly, and also pretty chilling stuff.

Imagine yourself being waterboarded, beaten, sleep deprived and god knows what else listening to these tracks. Now imagine your screams being drowned out by them.

The second I saw a half naked guy wearing a horse's head holding a poisonous mushroom with an anime character plastered over his wall and the intro theme to Final Fantasy VI playing in the background... I knew I'd better put my headphones on and make sure no one was around.

And you even hear Kefka laughing... which is kind of appropriate...

I ran into this problem many times while traveling and using public access points (cafes, hotels, airports, so on...). Basically there's always someone that blacklists the public IP of the location, or in some cases entire IP blocks.

I've found that the quickest way to evade this blacklisting is to use the TOR network (if you can connect to it from where you are). Of course it suffers from the same problem since exit nodes are often blacklisted as well, but if you cycle through a few you usually find one that Google allows.

It's slow, but if you absolutely must use Google it's usually the most straightforward way. Just remember that with TOR your traffic is bound to have lots of eyeballs pointed at it, so don't use it for anything sensitive without a layer of encryption.

Didn't he kinda do just that?

He was referring to tiny cell phone screens, the parent was referring to living room setups, which was what I was commenting upon.

I don't consider a 3.5 inch screen to be a "setup" by the way, it's more like a poor substitute, which I believe was the point he was trying to make.

As for people going all "ZOMFG! He's insulting me!", he's really just expressing his opinion, he's not trying to make Neven stare at the back of a seat for 6 hours, as his statement didn't apply to all video content like it's being made out to be.

For the record I have a Nokia N800, and while it's saved me from many boring trips and waits by watching short youtube clips and the odd documentary, I would never watch a full two hour movie on it. It's not at all immersive, which is the whole point of a movie, and by the end of it my neck and eyes would be killing me.

"everyone should have their lynch approved HD projector home theater setups by now"

Oh get off the FUD, he never said anything of the kind. Apart from his perk of not putting chapter stops on his DVDs I never heard him deride people's setups.

Remember, we're talking about the guy who shot Inland Empire on a cheapo semi-professional DV camera.

I'm a huge David Lynch fan and this is the first time I've heard him swear, the way he says "fucking telephone" with so much feeling behind it had me in stitches.

And to all the people who think he's being an elitist asshole, please realize he's talking about "proper" movies, not youtube clips or flimsy comedy sitcoms. And I happen to agree with him. Provided you have the right setup why the heck would you want to squint at a tiny screen watching a movie that's had both audio and video compressed to hell?

And yeah, the headline is misleading, this isn't about the iPhone specifically.