Slashdot are reporting that for one title at least, the new AACS HD-DVD copy protection technology has been cracked and the special keys that protect the high-definition content for Serenity have been leaked.

Also, apparently, a decryption utility is available which will strip the encryption and bundled DRM from the high-definition video.

In the battle for content producers to ‘win the war’ against piracy, and to further restrict consumers in what they can do with their purchased content (or at least give themselves the ability to do this) they built the new AACS standard, which will feature on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray movie discs. Apparently, though, they didn’t build it well enough and these early cracks seem to be echoing what happened in the early days of the DVD when its Content Scrambling System was cracked.

I think the question here is have the content industry gone too far? Ever since the home taping days, the big media giants have been obsessed with protecting their content with technical measures. The new AACS includes technology that can ‘blacklist’ devices that have been compromised (they’ve had their encryption keys published, for example) which means that should the media giants so decide, they can blacklist that whole model of player with the release of new HD-DVD/Blu-ray titles.

Will the public accept this? Do people even know and understand and is the ever-increasing restriction of DRM becoming too much for consumers?

We’ll have a full analysis coming here soon, but here’s a very quick round-up of what happened at the MacWorld keynote.

iPhone announced

Check out more in-depth details from TUAW, but for now, here’s the most important stuff. Yes, despite the recent Linksys iPhone, it really is called the iPhone.

• Touch-screen interface, only one button on the front to go back to ‘home’.
• 3.5″ widescreen display
• 2 Mpixel camera
• Available on US mobile operator Cingular only
• iTunes synchronisation
• Apparently runs OS X (but it’s probably cut-down) and features mobile-enhanced versions of the Safari web browser and Mail email clients.

The iPhone will be available from July in the US.

Apple TV (formerly iTV) announced

Apple’s new linking device which allows you to play all your purchased media from iTunes (for Windows and OS X) on your TV. We first heard about the Apple TV at the WWDC late last year, then called the iTV. It has all the features you’d expect, including 720p HD support, 802.11a, b, g and n wifi support and a 40 GB internal hard drive.

More info is also available at TUAW.

The Apple TV is apparently shipping in February.

No Mac announcements!

Absolutely nothing on Mac OS X Leopard, Apple’s next operating system release and no word on updates to their flagship iLife and iWork software suites (traditionally they’ve released new versions of the suites at MacWorld). In fact, from what I can tell, nothing Mac at all!

As I’ve said, we’ll have a bit more in-depth post here on Gizbuzz fairly soon, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Apple’s site has been updated with some new product pages for the iPhone and Apple TV.

Today is the first birthday of Gizbuzz (as you may have guessed from the celebration picture on the site), and we’ve come a long way from that first post.

Here are some of the highlights:

Peter joining us. I went on holiday for a week, and asked around a forum to see if anyone would deputise for me. Peter agreed, and was so good that he stayed. He’s now been joined by Chris and most recently Sam.

Switching from Google’s Blogger (the old blog is here) to WordPress. WP even allowed us to import all posts and comments. For the first few months of this arrangement Gizbuzz was hosted on a dedicated server, which happened to be an old laptop of mine running Ubuntu.

Getting to the front page of Digg. This brought a traffic spike of about 10,000 in the first day, and a great deal more over the coming week. It also ensured that the change of address for Gizbuzz didn’t result in a loss of Google juice by getting us serious linkage. Unsuprisingly, however, my laptop crashed, which meant that the spike wasn’t as high as it could have been. I have sinced moved over to Dreamhost.

The launch of the Gizbuzz podcast. The first episode of the podcast was with Raju Vegesna of Zoho, and after a break of a couple of months we have interviewed some fantastic people. Our most popular episode was with Sam Schillace and Jen Mazzon from the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team.

The new Gizbuzz design. Gizbuzz isn’t running on just another WordPress theme any more, but on a custom design by Chris. Note the adaption to celebrate the birthday! Our redesign went somewhat better than TechCrunch’s rather green effort last year.

The founding of Oratos. Peter, Chris and I, as well as Jacob (who doesn’t write here but does on other network sites) founded Oratos Media, a tech blog network. If you look on the sidebar of Gizbuzz you will see a widget showing the latest headlines from our four blogs.

So, what for the future. We’ve got some exciting things to announce:

The launch of Gizbuzz Consulting for Web 2.0 companies. I have already conducted consulting for Web 2.0 companies who have contacted me through Gizbuzz, but have not advertised this service before. I think now is the time to start doing this, as we now have some great experience under our belts. You can find out about this here.

The development of Megaphone. Peter, a PHP genius, has been working on a new web application to support Oratos. We have said from the very beginning that Oratos will not be just another association of blogs, and Megaphone is a key part of that. Initially, Megaphone will allow users to submit ideas for posts (and submit their companies) and these will be accessible to all writers. They will also be able to upload segments for our podcasts. After the initial release, hopefully in this quarter (it’s well under way), we are looking to get even further into user generated content, possibly with you even writing some posts for us, and then deciding which ones get published. That should make our lives easier!

So thank you to both readers and writers for a great year. January’s going to be a busy month for us, and by the looks of things 2007 will be a big year as well. Here’s to another year of Gizbuzz!

Slashdot is reporting that a hole in Gmail could potentially allow nasty people to view your entire Gmail contact list remotely. This type of vulnerability is commonly called Cross-Site Scripting or XSS.

All you have to do is have Gmail open, and browse to a website with some malicious JavaScript. The loophole in Google’s code means that this website can siphon off all your contact information.

This attack appears not to be very widespread at the moment, and I have no doubt that Google will be fixing it very quickly – especially now that it’s made the headlines.

This seems a perfect opportunity to explain XSS – some of the ways it can happen and how much of a problem it poses.

(more…)

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Gizbuzz post frequency hasn’t been at its finest over the Christmas period. It seems all of us have had much better things to do than post about the latest tech news (ranging from coding to singing to eating), and I for one have spent no more than about 1 hour on a computer over the past 10 days. That’s probably a good thing!

Peter, Chris and Jacob (all members of Team Oratos) are also working on a super secret project which isn’t part of Oratos and is launching in the new year. They’re accepting names for a private beta so if you’re interested head over to the site. They also explain a bit about the project there.

Gizbuzz’s first birthday is also coming up thick and fast, and hopefully we’ll be able to talk about some exciting new things coming up for Oratos then.

See you in 2007. For a look at what’ll be happening, Chris’ predictions are a good way to start.

We’re really on fire with the Gizbuzz podcast at the moment – we’re even managing regular episodes! This will, however, be the last one before Christmas.

This one breaks away from our trend of doing interviews with people behind web applications, although you can’t get much more Web 2.0 than what the folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation are doing with the Democracy Player, and associated services. Chris (editor of YouMakeMedia, another Oratos blog all about how to jump into the world of new media and do a good job) and I interviewed Nicholas Reville, executive director of the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation.

Some of the things we discussed in the interview were:

• The goals of the Democracy Player project
• Whether new and old media can co-exist. What will old media’s role be in 10 years?
• The importance of the long tail
• Running an open source project
• New media’s place in encouraging engagement in politics, and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

You have a couple of options now:

Subscribe to Gizbuzz (you can also add this to iTunes, via Advanced >> Subscribe to podcast)
Listen to the episode

Digg announced several new features today, the most interesting being a new category of podcasts. As Digg say on their blog:

Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don’t forget – every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.

What this tries to solve

This may fill a niche; in my opinion there are few, if any, places on the internet at the moment where discoverability of good podcasts which are outside the realms of tens of thousands of listeners is possible. Odeo tries to solve this problem, with their ‘recently starred’ section on their homepage. However, that’s too random to be of any use. Pluggd is trying, too, but a quick glance through the upper echelons of their directory merely reveals podcasts I have already heard of. As far as I can tell the benefit Digg brings to this, which could potentially solve the problem, is the time-critical nature of its social bookmarking. In other words, the top of the directory will hopefully be different every time I look at it, because of the site’s basis in social news. This increases the chance that there will be something new which I haven’t seen before, but which the community has judged is interesting, presented to me.

However, I fear that whilst this may be the most effective attempt at solving this problem so far, it still doesn’t take an approach which stands a real chance of helping me find that gem of content which only appeals to a very few people. Read on after the jump for why, and what I think the solution might be…

Getting down the tail

The phenomenon which Chris Anderson called the Long Tail (in the context of media, essentially that anyone can now create and publish their own content, resulting in a far greater quantity of content with each item potentially able to reach some sort of audience) has meant that there is likely to be the perfect podcast or blog out there, just ‘made’ for me, covering exactly the subjects that I am interested in. However, it may only appeal to a very small number of people, perhaps less than 100.

Digg fails

An example: A plumber starts a podcast about domestic plumbing; he talks about the latest tips, new products, funny anecdotes. A really well put together podcast, of great interest to all plumbers but of no interest to anyone not a plumber. Our podcasting plumber submits his podcast to Digg to promote it. Just by chance, 10 of the Digg members who are plumbers, and the podcasting plumber’s friend, who isn’t a plumber, find the podcast in the depths of the site and digg it, delighted that they have found such an interesting podcast.

So those 10 plumbers have found the new podcast. Great. But the podcast didn’t make it onto the front page, because 10 diggs isn’t enough to do that. That means that the rest of the plumbers who watch Digg, but don’t have time to look any further than the front page, didn’t find the podcast, which means that that podcast has only reached a tiny fraction of it’s (tiny) potential audience.

We can see that a new system is needed – the Digg model doesn’t work.

One possibility

There are two options, then, which could have worked. If there were such a site as ‘Plugg’ (Digg for Plumbers – get it!), to which a reasonable percentage of the potential audience of this plumbing podcast were subscribed. So, to widen this out from the example, someone within every ‘microcommunity’ (in this case plumbers) could set up a Digg-like site for the community to recommend content to itself. The problem with this model is that the audience could potentially be too small to effectively prevent gaming. The podcasting plumber would only have to pay 5 friends to get his podcast to the front page of ‘Plugg’ if he wanted to cheat, rather than 100 or so for Digg.

My preferred option

The other option is a robust recommendation algorithm. We’ve seen this sort of thing for websites with Stumbleupon, and for music with Pandora. To use my example, the podcasting plumber submits his podcast to this service, which has the same broad audience as Digg. Those 10 plumbers find the podcast in the depths of the system, and recommend it, because they find it interesting. The algorithm then first sees what those 10 have in common, and notices that they all liked a plumbing blog that was submitted a while ago. So it works out that this podcast probably appeals to everyone that that plumbing blog appealed to, so it automatically suggests it to everyone who liked that blog. Whilst it would obviously be more complicated, you get the sort of approach I am suggesting. If this were technologically possible, and it could gain traction (remember, you have to have those 10 plumbers who find the podcast without it being recommended to them, and you also have to keep people patient whilst the recommendation engine works out what they like) then it would seem that this would be the superior solution.

Digg is excellent, but it takes the one-size-fits-all approach. It is valid, and it is genuinely useful. However, it can’t and doesn’t solve all our content discovery problems. I think there is room for another company doing something similar to what I outline above, and I hope we see one.

Apologies for the obscenely long post. I’ve stuck this post in the future challenges series, as I was planning on writing a post about this problem in that series anyway, but it made sense to do it in the context of Digg. The series talks about some of the problems which we need to solve as the web, and new media, go forward. We’ll know we’ve reached Web 3.0 when we’ve solved them!

PS: Warm welcome to Sam Davyson.

Google have launched Google Patent Search – as the name suggests, a search engine for patents.

On the main page, Google show some interesting patents – like the toothbrush and sunglasses, which randomly update and you can obviously search an impressive number of US patents (Google claim 7 million) for what you are looking for. All of the content is sourced from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

But aside from the amusement value, what does this actually give you? The USPTO is already searchable, so apart from slapping the Google name and brand on top of the database – and perhaps providing some of Google’s algorithms to make the results better, how is this actually helpful?

Or am I missing something?

We have a Gizbuzz Exclusive today. As you can read everywhere, Sam Sethi, the publisher of TechCrunch UK was ‘dismissed’ yesterday, and TCUK has been put on hold. Mike Arrington’s been dealing with the issue over at CrunchNotes. I managed to catch up with Sam to ask him for his side of events, which haven’t really been heard yet. Sam seems far calmer about the whole thing than anyone else!

We discuss what actually happened, what he was hoping TCUK would achieve, the UK startup scene and what his future plans are.

Sam has now managed to get back into his website (listen for details!), which is at vecosys.com.

Just a note of caution – the ‘Mike’ that Sam’s planning on working with in the future is Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK, as opposed to Arrington. I wonder why!

Listen to the podcast

Subscribe to the podcast (We have already recorded episode 5, which is a good one – coming soon)

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft are going to open up their online book search tool, Live Search Books, tomorrow.

Intended to compete with the already started Google Book Search, Live Search Books will start with a library of books from the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto.

I think it’s really good that there’s good competition between Google and Microsoft in these web-based services. It keeps both Microsoft and Google on their toes and producing really good products.

For example, Google really pushed the envelope (pun intended) with Gmail, and it has forced Microsoft (and Yahoo as well, but I’ll come to them) to get to work on updating their email services.

Meanwhile, Yahoo seem to be struggling. I’m sure you’ve already read elsewhere about their recent corporate reorganisation, and while Yahoo are doing some good things, they’re not keeping up with the pace of innovation Google and Microsoft are setting in the web service arena. A large proportion of people are aware of Google Maps/Local or Windows Live Local (or both), but how many people would fire up Yahoo Maps? The new Yahoo Mail Beta does have Ajax and nice features, but to me it seems a lot more bloated than both Gmail and Windows Live Mail Beta.

I’m not saying Yahoo Maps or Mail are worse products – for the most part they’re actually on par with Google and Microsoft’s offerings, but Yahoo is increasingly being seen as a company from the ‘old web’ and rapidly losing their appeal to Google and Microsoft.

Yahoo will have to do some serious thinking if they want to get back in this game. They won’t die quickly – they still do a lot of content providing (like Yahoo News) and have a good share of the webmail market, for example. But alarm bells must be ringing at Yahoo HQ, because they need to innovate now if they’re to survive.