Hello world,

I've got some good news and some bad news. Let's start with the good.... (tumble weed passes by)Ok, and now onto the bad: DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0 is the last version you'll ever see.We hoped this day would never come, but it has, and I can promise you, nobody is more gutted about it than I am.


What started as a bit of fun, putting a GUI around some existing code, turned into something that I can only describe as "part of me" � yes, I know that's sad ;-) As I've recently been made aware (by a letter, hand delivered to my door, last Tuesday), due to some law that was changed back in October 2003, circumventing copy protection isn't allowed. ... more

Firefox will be one of the most critical delivery vehicles for Gecko and XULRunner technology in 2005. Our goal is to continue to build a "best of breed" browser product for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. We have ambitious goals for the workload between now and our next major release set. This document is a description of our current thinking on how we intend to get to Firefox 2.0. At this stage it is brief, but over time it will grow much as the 1.0 roadmap did.Structure



We are planning for a Firefox 2.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.1 (July 2005), 1.5 (unscheduled) and 2.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done ... more

At 3 PM Pacific on Monday, May 16, Sony will hold its E3 press conference on a sound stage in Sony Pictures' complex in Culver City where it is expected to publicly unveil the next PlayStation for the first time...Microsoft already announced earlier this week that they plan to announce their next Xbox, aka Xbox 360 or Xbox 2, also on May 16th.



Sony will present the PS3 on a sound stage in Sony Pictures' complex in Culver City, just outside Los Angeles, at 15.00 PST on Monday, May 16th.
Microsoft will show their Xbox 360 three hours later (smart move by Sony) in downtown Los Angeles. At least both announcements are in the area of LA where the E3 is. ... more

How would you like to pay tax on top of paying your ISP for your internet connection?
An influential congressional committee has dropped a political bombshell by suggesting that a tax originally created to pay for the Spanish American War could be extended to all Internet and data connections this year. The committee, deeply involved in writing U.S. tax laws, unexpectedly said in a report Thursday that the 3 percent telecommunications tax could be revised to cover "all data communications services to end users," including broadband; dial-up; fiber; cable modems; cellular; and DSL, or digital subscriber line, links.



The congressional report comes not long after the Internal ... more

The BBC is reporting that there has been a 50% increase in the number of viruses released in 2004; as many as 100,000 viruses were seen 'in the wild', many of them doing serious damage to their targets. Bot-nets, computers infected with remote control software featured largely in 2004; equally prominent was the use of viruses and these bot-nets for cyber-crime and sending spam.2004 also saw the release of the first proper virus for mobile phones. For PC's, in first place on the top ten viruses of 2004 was the Netsky worm variant, Netsky-P. The worm ... more

Two new Internet domain names—".post" and ".travel"—could appear online as early as next year as the Internet's key oversight board announced preliminary approval on Wednesday.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in advancing the applications for postal services and the travel industry, said they were still considering eight other proposals including ".asia," ".jobs," and ".xxx." Separately, ".eu" for the European Union also is in the works.
ICANN said the decision on ".post" and ".travel" had less to do with relative merit and was primarily based on the level of technical and commercial details their sponsors were able to quickly provide.
MoreI ... more

AOL, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo file seven spam lawsuits, the companies' second round this year using the federal CAN-SPAM law. A coalition of the country's leading ISPs on Thursday announced another round of lawsuits against spammers, relying heavily on the CAN-SPAM law enacted earlier this year.
In seven federal lawsuits, America Online Inc., EarthLink Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are targeting at least 85 purveyors of unsolicited messages, many of which were named as "John Does" because their identity was uncertain.
Each of the lawsuits, filed across four states, allege violations of the federal CAN-SPAM law as well as other state and federal charges. CAN-SPAM too ... more

An anonymous researcher has reported through several sources that anti-virus products from six vendors fail to detect malware when it is contained in a corrupted Zip file.The modification to the Zip file prevents the anti-virus programs from detecting files in it, but it doesn't prevent users from accessing those files, according to an advisory from Internet security research firm iDefense. The vulnerable products are from McAfee Inc., Computer Associates International Inc., Kaspersky Labs, Sophos plc., Eset Software and RAV, according to the advisory.



The problem has to do with the products' handling of an error condition in Zip files, which store information about compressed ... more

Tom's Hardware Guide has decided to take a stance on ATi's and NVIDIA's rush-to-market launches. Reviews of cards with pre-launch buggy drivers and yet-to-come updates do no service to the user. We explain why we will no longer play that game. Today, NVIDIA is launching its GeForce 6200. We were told of the launch at the last minute with only a few days to prepare and to deal with the usual last minute changes that follow these rushed launches. This has happened four or five times in the past year. It's always the same, with no time to do thorough testing, constant last minute changes, and a rush to print. If we were cynical, we'd have to think that the companies involved do not want ... more

RECENTLY, graphic games are getting more and more intensive and in that light we have some WHQL scores that we can trust. An Nvidia WHQL FUD document against Catalyst claimed that after Catalyst 4.8 driver, ATI will need to remove their optimisations or it will lose its WHQL stamp.



The Catalyst 4.9 driver is out and ATI still has WHQL, meaning that its driver is fine from Microsoft WHQL test point of view. When we talked with Microsoft we learned that there is a set of tests that you can run in order to see if your driver is WHQL material or not. In other words, you test in house, see whether you can pass the tests and then later submit your driver for certification and get the s ... more