Technolotics #19 – One vulcan, two geeks and a monkey spanker

Technolotics - An antique show about technology

Listen: Episode 19
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Notes

Police State Miami

Although Miami hasn’t been hit by a terrorist attack – authorities convinced it is a credible target
To confuse Al Qaida and other wanabe terrorist – displays of force
And maybe [1] maybe not [2] unconstitutional random ID checks
Police state anyone?
News Sources disagree as to whether displays of force

random collections of large amounts of officers at hotels, banks etc
more worryingly on trains and buses – plain clothes and uniformed + long term surveillance
will include ID checks

Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said. “We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don’t want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears.”
Interestingly – sources disagree as to what the ACLU have to say!

Washington Post: officers on street patrol (making informed decisions on which individuals to stop), which is more effective and more consistent with the Constitution,” Simon said. “We’ll have to see how it is implemented.”
Associated Press: “What we’re dealing with is officers on street patrol, which is more effective and more consistent with the Constitution,” Simon said. “We’ll have to see how it is implemented.”

I feel safer already

Science Under Attack

Dvorak on Dead Media

Are DRM and quirky vendor only cables, connections and formats, leading us into a world of unreadable data
Dvorak has lots of media tech – cameras, memory sticks, DAT and video cassette tapes – which are, or will shortly be unreadable
He compares this – rather disingenuously – to the burning Great Library of Alexandria – where much of the collected knowledge of the classical world was lost
What if the *.gif liscence enforcement had been stricter
What if *.jpg had been DRM’d
Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and its European equivalents – cracking these obsolete and abandoned formats is as illegal as DVD Jon’s cracking of the DVD so he could watch his movies on Linux
Dvorak’s forum in PC Magazine has some interesting suggestions from readers [6]

Interestingly, and to his credit, Dvorak responds to comments (even negative ones) on his forum

Short Stories

ATI speeds up video * 5

ATI’s new “Avivo XCode” encoding tool – which only works on its latest X1000 series GPUs
can massively speed up video encoding of MPEG 4 (Divx, Xvid), H.264, Windows Media 9, DVD etc
An example of what happens when software functions are moved to hardware
This will have a huge impact 2 – 3 years down the line on home video incoding
Only a drop in the ocean compared to the future impact of fully featured rendering on the GPU

Googleblogger: Google Space, Google Boutique Store Opens

Londons Heathrow airport is home to google first shop
where everything is of course free

iTunes Music Store (finally) on Linux

DVD Jon has released a free (as in beer & speech) interface to the iTMS [8]

Engaget: How to stream anything with VLC

Get the most out of the best media player ever [9]
Stream your movies and music around your lan or wan

Jason’s Friend’s Friend in drug blog hot water

A malaysian blogger has been forced to take down all drug related posts on his blog
The guy had been blogging about his experiences while on various substances (crystal meth, heroin etc.)
A Malay tabloid newspaper found out and put him on the frontpage
The authorites contacted him and he is considered *very* lucky to only have to remove the posts

[10]

Media Pimp

Jason

Cloud [11] - A truly original game?

Download [12]
Controls [13]

Francis

Porn Hacks [14]

Gareth

Boingboing.net [15]