AACS, a DRM scheme used to encrypt data on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks, would appear to be cracked wide open by that short string of hexadecimal codes, as previously, only disk-specific Volume Keys were compromised. The new hack is the work of Arnezami, a hacker posting at the doom9 forums, fast becoming the front line in the war on DRM.

The new crack follows that from earlier this year, when a hacker by the name of muslix64 broke the AACS system as it applied to each movie. While the earlier hack led to 100 HD-DVD titles and a small number of Blu-Ray movies being decrypted one-by-one, the so-called "processing keys" covers everything so far made.

It's not yet clear what it means for the consumer's ability to copy movies, or, for that matter, that of mass-market piracy operations. The short form is that the user still needs a disk's volume ID to deploy the processing key and break the AACS encryption — but getting the ID is surprisingly easy.

How might the companies respond? The processing key can now be changed for future disks. However, the flaws inherent in the system make it appear easy to discover the replacement: the method of attack itself will be hard to offset without causing knock-on effects. For example, revoking player keys (in advance of obfuscating the keys in memory in future revisions of the system) would render current players unable to view future movies.

The group of disgruntled newspapers in Belgium that sued Google for copyright infringement has emerged victorious after a decision was granted in their favor today in court. The judgment echoes a previous ruling from the Court of First Instance in Brussels that found Google in violation of copyright law when the company published extracts of articles from Belgian newspaper publishers.

Copiepresse, the Belgium copyright group representing the nearly 20 papers scandalized by Google News, now gets its wish: Google News may no longer link to the news resources in question nor cache any of their materials for use in Google News.

They actually resented the fact that Google News might direct readers to their content, because they feared that a search engine might do what it is designed to do: get people what they want the first time. Copiepresse's member companies would prefer that you hit their home pages and wander around aimlessly instead. No, I'm not joking.

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

"Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample," the study reports. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero."

Video download services such as YouTube are pushing Interweb capacity to breaking point, a Google executive warned.

Vincent Dureau, head of TV technology at Google, said that the web will soon struggle to meet rising demand for online video.

Speaking at the Cable Europe Conference in Amsterdam this week, Dureau said: "The web infrastructure, even Google's, does not scale. It is not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect."

In its Predictions 2007 report, Deloitte says increased demand for online video and social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo are "pushing bandwidth to breaking point".

Teenagers taking risque photos of themselves are prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

Combine unsupervised teenagers, digital cameras and e-mail, and, given sufficient time, you'll end up with risque photographs on a computer somewhere.

On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified "sexual behavior." The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber's house to Jeremy's personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

In other words, under Florida law, Amber and Jeremy would be legally permitted to engage in carnal relations, but they're criminals if they document it.

Wolf speculated that Amber and Jeremy could have ended up selling the photos to child pornographers ("one motive for revealing the photos is profit") or showing the images to their friends. He claimed that Amber had neither the "foresight or maturity" to make a reasonable estimation of the risks on her own. And he said that transferring the images from a digital camera to a PC created innumerable problems: "The two computers (can) be hacked."

At 9:15 one Thursday morning, there came a polite knock on my mostly closed office door.

I recognized the speaker as a network-security technician in my university's office of information-technology services. The other men were not familiar, but a quick glance at their cards told me they were detectives on our campus police force. They closed my office door behind them, sat down, took out notepads and pens, and asked if I had a few minutes to speak with them about Tor.

My reason for downloading and installing the Tor plug-in was actually simple: I'd read about it for some time, was planning to discuss it in two courses I teach, and figured I should have some experience using it before I described it to my students. The courses in question both deal with controlling technology, diffusing it throughout society, and freedom and censorship online.

When I cover online censorship in countries with no free press, I focus on how those countries rely on hardware, software, and phalanxes of people to make sure citizens can reach only government-approved media. Crackdowns on independent journalists, bloggers, and related dissidents all too often result in their being beaten, incarcerated, or worse. Technologies like Tor represent a beacon of freedom to people in those countries, and I would be doing my students a disservice if I didn't mention it.

Nonetheless, my visitors made two requests: that I stop using Tor, and that I avoid covering it in class.

All Internet service providers would need to track their customers' online activities to aid police in future investigations under legislation introduced Tuesday as part of a Republican "law and order agenda."

Employees of any Internet provider who fail to store that information face fines and prison terms of up to one year, the bill says. The U.S. Justice Department could order the companies to store those records forever.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, called it a necessary anti-cybercrime measure. "The legislation introduced today will give law enforcement the tools it needs to find and prosecute criminals," he said in a statement.

Because there is no limit on how broad the rules can be, Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, or e-mail conversations indefinitely.

That broad wording also would permit the records to be obtained by private litigants in noncriminal cases, such as divorces and employment disputes. That raises additional privacy concerns, civil libertarians say.

Natsuko Sone is a petite 21-year-old who stands 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs just 95 pounds. But she can eat 183 pieces of sushi in half an hour and down 20 pounds of food in one sitting.

Presented with a gigantic bowl on a weekly variety show, Sone says, "I can eat this easily!" The human food vacuum takes a pair of chopsticks and digs into the 20-pound tub of curry, noodles and rice. For the next hour, the crowd looks on as her slender hand carries giant gobs of food from bowl to mouth. When asked how she's doing, she simply says: "This is delicious!"

According to an estimate from a company called Power-levels.com, it would take someone starting from scratch 768 hours to reach the highest level you can hit in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

These game consultants sell what are known as power-leveling services. Essentially, that means that for a fee, they will take over your account in any one of a large number of online games and put in the work required to get you where you want to be.

"Using a service to level a character is pretty universally regarded as a 'lamer' move," said Eric Haller, a San Francisco investor and long-time WoW player. "You will definitely not earn anyone's respect if they know you have paid for your levels."

The "creator" of the Dance move known as the electric slide has filed a DMCA based takedown notice for videos he deems to infringe and because they show "bad dancing". He is also seeking compensation from the use of the dance move at a wedding celebration shown on the Ellen Degeneres Show. Next up, the Funky Chicken, the moonwalk, and the Hustle? More seriously, does the DMCA have any limit on its scope?