Category: Cool Stuff

Halo 3 announcement

I just saw this at Joystiq.

halo3promofall07.jpg

I can see the appeal of Halo, even though I never got that into the game. So for those of you who are really looking forward to the next Halo, there is the most solid release date indicator yet. More information from the official Bungie weekly update. We’ll keep an eye on Bungie for narrowing down the release date – I’m betting mid-November to get all the holiday sales while still giving as much time as possible for bug hunting.

[tags]Halo 3 release date firming up[/tags]

Oooops. Crap. Now we might have a cancer cure

A serendipitous moment that was almost missed by the discoverer.

Her carefully cultured cells were dead and Katherine Schaefer was annoyed, but just a few minutes later, the researcher realized she had stumbled onto a potential new cancer treatment.

. . .

Schaefer was looking for drugs to treat the inflammation seen in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, both of which cause pain and diarrhea.

She was testing a compound called a PPAR-gamma modulator. It would never normally have been thought of as a cancer drug, or in fact a drug of any kind.

“I made a calculation error and used a lot more than I should have. And my cells died,” Schaefer said.

A colleague overheard her complaining. “The co-author on my paper said,’ Did I hear you say you killed some cancer?’ I said ‘Oh’, and took a closer look.”

They ran several tests and found the compound killed ”pretty much every epithelial tumor cell lines we have seen,” Schaefer said. Epithelial cells line organs such as the colon, and also make up skin.

It also killed colon tumors in mice without making the mice sick, they reported in the journal International Cancer Research.

So, let’s see what further research and testing bring out of this.  The article makes it sound like something similar already exists and has limited success, but perhaps further research can make something good happen with this.  Since my father died from cancer, anything that decreases cancer lethality interests me. (via /.)

[tags]Potential cancer treatment found via serendipity[/tags]

Next-gen video discs fully cracked

Not long ago, there was news of a successful crack of Blu-Ray and Hi-def DVD copy protection, but it wasn’t a general crack.  The crack relied on a weakness in extracting decryption information from discs, but it was a non-trivial effort.  The new method builds on that to successfully break any AACS protected disc.

As I can understand some of you are interested in how I retrieved the Media and Processing Keys. I will tell what i did.

Most of the time I spend studying the AACS papers. A good understanding of how things worked have helped me greatly in knowing what to find in the first place (and how to recognize something). I may write an explanation of (my understanding) of how AACS works in particular the subset-difference technique (which is by far the hardest to understand) at a later date if you guys want to.

But anyway. Since the moment I found the Volume ID (which was much simpler than I had thought) my thought was to try to find the Media Key. But after some discussion I thought it might be better to go directly for the Device Keys (bad mistake). After looking at files created and changed by software player and trying to recognize Device Keys in memory dumps I was starting to get worried a bit. I wasn’t making any progress.

So I went back to my original idea: do a bottom-up approach. So first I tried to find the Media Key. One of the logical things to do even before that was to search for the Verify Media Key Record in memory. But it wasn’t there. I then started to work on a little proggy that would scan a memdump and see everything as a Media Key: thus trying to verify it with the Verify Media Key Record. No luck.

This was frustrating: all kinds of information was in the memdump but not the Media Key (I sort of assumed/hoped it would). I made several memdumps at different moments but nada, nothing. After throwing it all away I remembered I still had a “corrupt” memdump from WinHex (it failed to finish it because WinHex said the memory had changed). It was really small compared to the others so I didn’t have much hope. But when running it with my proggy: voila! I found it. Which finally gave me hope I was going in the right direction.

There were just two major problems left: how do you detect the Processing Key and if its not in memory how do you find it at all? Well since I now knew how things worked I knew the Processing Key had to be combined with a C-value to produce the Media Key.

OK, I don’t get any of that.  But clearly others do, so I share this for their benefit.  (via boingboing)

[tags]AACS copy protection broken, Next-gen video disc format protections broken[/tags]

Amazing news on the cancer research front

If you spend a lot of the time reading news on the web, keep up with the newspaper, or watch the news regularly on television, you have probably already heard some about the potential new cancer treatment via dichloroacetate (DCA). DCA is a long used compound previously known for combating mitochondrial diseases. It also is known to have very few and mild side-effects. This could be huge in treating cancer.

dichloroacetate.jpgDr. Evangelos Michelakis, a professor at the U of A Department of Medicine, has shown that dichloroacetate (DCA) causes regression in several cancers, including lung, breast and brain tumors.

Michelakis and his colleagues, including post-doctoral fellow Dr. Sebastian Bonnet, have published the results of their research in the journal Cancer Cell.

DCA functions by normalizing the behavior of mitochondria. Cancer has been known to alter the effects of mitochondria, and the belief has long been that this damage was permanent. The testing Dr. Michelakis has done shows that at least for some cancers, this is not true.


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A comparison of online photo editing sites

If you have tons of photos and are looking for a way to work with them and edit your images, there are a number of good online services. Since the annoyance of uploading images, editing them, and downloading them again is pretty high, TechCrunch takes time to point out some that have sufficient value to justify the extra legwork.

Most of these online services also offer editing tools that go beyond simple rotation, resizing and cropping and start to creep into Photoshop territory. Here’s a few of the better ones, along with our most recent testing notes:

Highlighted are Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Preloadr (by the way, what the hell is up with the Web 2.0 hang-up on dropping the ‘e’ from site names?), PXN8, and Snipshot.

[tags]TechCrunch’s profile of online photo editing sites[/tags]

A (loooong) analysis of the cost of DRM in Windows Vista

I’ll admit to posting this before I’ve finished reading it, but if I don’t, I’ll have forgotten it all by the time my readers get through it. I am still working through this massive Cost Analysis of Windows Content Protection by Peter Gutmann (and a shorter link for extra goodness). As the title suggests, it is a deep look at the cost of content protection and user rights restrictions in Windows Vista. There is also a response at the end to a rebuttal Microsoft made of the analysis (shorter link for linebreak protection).

Here is the executive summary. If you are going to read this (I will, and I hope others do as well), be prepared to invest some time so you really understand it and the rebuttal.

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Do you think rights restrictions are a good idea? Does this analysis change your view of digital rights mangling (DRM) controls?

[tags]A cost analysis of Windows contect protection, Analysis of Vista DRM costs with MS rebuttal and author’s reply to that[/tags]

Netflix working to changehow you watch movies. Again.

The New York Times recently ran a post about how Netflix is again changing the way we watch movies (also here is a shorter link in a). After changing movie rentals via DVDs by mail, Netflix is taking on video downloads via streaming which monitors time watched rather than time since downloads. It’s really clever, and it should have been obvious, but this beats the streaming video options from all the other providers I have seen.

Already, you can buy movies from iTunes, for example, but the selection is tiny (250 movies), and you pay about as much as you would for a DVD. CinemaNow and MovieLink offer online movie “rentals” for about $4. But again, the selection is fairly small, at least once you subtract the mind-boggling gigabytes of B movies – more like C or D movies – like “Addicted to Murder III: Bloodlust” and “Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood.” The copy protection is a bit overbearing, too. You can download a movie, all right, but it self-destructs 24 hours later.

All of these services permit you to start watching a movie after only a minute or so, before it’s been fully downloaded – but you can’t fast forward (or, in some cases, even rewind) until you’ve got the whole thing on your hard drive.

Continue reading “Netflix working to changehow you watch movies. Again.”

Try City of Heroes/City of Villains free -for 14 days

Occasionally, I write about things in CoH/Cov, because this is easily my favorite game on the market now. If you haven’t tried the game and want to see if it is something you would enjoy, read this post at the Co* forums about FileFront’s 14-day free trial. As an added note, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this week-end (January 26th through 28th) are double XP weekend, so any character you play this week-end will advance more quickly than normal, which will give you a chance to taste a bit more of the character’s abilities more quickly than normal.

[tags]Free CoH/CoV 14-day trial, Try City of Heroes/City of Villains for free[/tags]

Model and toy trains – Lionel starts it all

I’ve been catching up on my non-geek reading lately, and the particular focus of my magazine time has been American Heritage magazine and American History magazine. While there are a number of really cool articles in the latest American Heritage, the one that most made me want to write is something of a history of how Lionel trains came to be (and here’s a shorter link if that one is broken).


AmHeritage-Lionel_train.jpgAround 1900, when electrified toy trains were in their infancy, a battery-powered railroad car appeared in the show window of Robert Ingersoll’s novelty store on Cortlandt Street in downtown Manhattan. It wasn’t intended as a toy. Rather, the little car that tirelessly circled its loop of track was meant to draw attention to the other items on display.

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Samurai saves the day, disappears

masioka.jpgPolice in the UK are trying to find the mystery samurai who protected the men responding to a call for help.

A samurai sword wielding vigilante has come to the rescue of two Police officers when they were attacked by an armed gang in South Shields, England.

A group of men had forced their way into a house and were ransacking the place when passing plain-clothes officers were alerted by a woman inside screaming.

The criminals outnumbered them and were armed with a hammer, knives and chains and attacked the Police officers.

As one of them stabbed at a Policeman with his knife, a mysterious do-gooder appeared from nowhere and attacked him with a samurai sword.

One of the burglars began running away but was stopped by the stranger who struck him on the arm with the sword.

Two of the criminals were arrested, but in true hero style the samurai disappeared before police could speak to him.

Now I don’t know who the mystery man is, but I have a suspicion who it isn’t.


[tags]Mystery samurai saves UK police, Heroes hero not hero – who is?[/tags]

Next-gen Hi-Def disc formats cracked?

We’ll let the torrent freaks give us the scoop on this:

The HD-DVD has been cracked, and high definition content is now being distributed freely over BitTorrent. We all knew this would happen sooner or later, looks it was “sooner”. The first HD-DVD to be uploaded to BitTorrent is Serenity, the Firefly movie.

One of the functions of these new formats is the ability to lock out players with known cracked keys.  I wonder if somehow this (mighty damn early) break of the “security” of the formats will lead to some players not working with future discs.  The crack occurred because those distributing the movies were able to find decryption keys for the movies, and I’m just wondering if this somehow will cause changes to keying in future movies that will break compatibility with current players.

[tags]Next-gen Hi-Def “security” cracked, Hi-Def movie rips being distributed on via torrents[/tags]

On the iPhone

Let’s pretend for a minute that Apple successfully defends the iPhone name from Cisco’s claim of ownership. Instead, focus on the features and benefits of the phone. apple-iphone-specs-narrow.jpg With a 2 year contract, the iPhone basic runs $499, which gets you a 4 gig iPod+phone combo. For $599, you get an 8 gig iPod+phone combo. Of course, that’s not all the features of the phone:

Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the screen when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quad-band GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. Apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode — no word on standby time yet.

What I’m wondering on this, though, is why get a phone with all those features if it is going to cost that much? I’ll admit that I’m probably not the target demographic for this whiz-bang gadget. I like to get single task gadgets for the most part – I want a phone that is just a phone, a camera that is just a camera, and an MP3 player that is just an MP3 player. For a geeky, dorky, gadget-whore like me, that probably sounds bizarre, but I want functionality at reasonable prices. What happens if next year you want to carry around more music? What if you decide you really want a 6 megapixel camera? Sure, you can choose to carry around those in addition to the iPhone, but why would you given what you’ve spent on the multi-function phone?

Continue reading “On the iPhone”