A man faces a sentence of up to 101 years in federal prison after being the first person in the U.S. convicted under a federal anti-spam law, authorities said. Jeffrey Brett Goodin, 45, of Azusa, was found guilty Friday of running a “phishing’” scheme that tricked people into believing they were giving personal information to a legitimate business. Prosecutors said Goodin then used the information to go on a spending spree.

Goodin is the first person in the nation convicted under the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act, the U.S. attorney’s office said. The law forbids e-mail marketers from sending false or misleading messages and requires them to provide recipients with a way to opt out of receiving future mailings.

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Source: Mercury News via Neowin

Pirates decided that the copy protection scheme for HD DVD was worth a shot. The result? The movie is entitled Serenity and was made available as a .EVO file which is playable on most DVD playback software packages. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 resulting in 19.6 GB worth of hard disk space. The first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. Who knows, maybe this is yet another factor in the HD war.

An announcement less than a month ago by an anonymous programmer known as Muslix64 specified that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed. The open-source program to implement this was called BackupHDDVD. The software cleverly avoids (for how long?) legal justice by placing the responsibility of cracking on the user, not the software. To extract an unencrypted copy of the HD DVD source material the user has to fetch that disc’s volume or title key.

CyberLink, the makers of PowerDVD playback software, have already assured everyone that their software is not responsible for extracting the title keys from the media. Content providers, on the other hand, have declared that they reserve the right to invalidate known pirated keys in the future. Of course, they will have to figure out which application gets the volume keys (Cyberlink has not yet been cleared). Future titles could potentially require, as soon as a disc is inserted, that the user upgrade their software in order to play discs.

Source: Ars Technica via Neowin

Here is Episode 35 of our weekly PodCast, Consumer Apple Show.

The topics covered in this episode are:

- How do you fix a undersea cable?
- Victim spots stolen GPS on eBay, seller gets pinched
- ASUS Unveils External Graphics Card
- More details about IPTV on Xbox 360
- Apples keynote
- SanDisk Sansa View

You can subscribe to the PodCast by putting this link into your iTunes / PodCast program: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AustechNews.

Download: Episode 35: Consumer Apple Show (38:41, 17.7 mb)
View: AusTech News PodCast Forum

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy the 550 square metre principality of Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a ‘micronation’.

The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy the self-declared sovereign nation. Outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country, The Pirate Bays believes it could safely run the world’s largest ‘bit torrent tracker’.

Last year the Pirate Bay was closed down after raids by the Swedish police, and although it returned to a new Swedish server after a short stay in the Netherlands, the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and the US government have all lobbied for The Pirate Bay’s closure.

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I know this news is a bit old now, but just found a 14min video on the New Years Eve 2006 Fireworks in Sydney, and thought I would share it with you all.

Just a test post to see how GreyBox looks/works on the site.

Click the image to see a nice feature (needs JavaScript enabled)
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Show flower

Cisco Systems Inc. has owned the name “iPhone” since 2000 and today announced that it is suing Apple Inc. in federal court. Cisco obtained the trademark by acquiring InfoGear Technology Corp. over 6 years ago, which originally registered the name. It has been three weeks since Cisco’s Linksys division released a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone for which the trademark was put to use. Apple had tried to gain legal rights to use the iPhone name but upon failure chose to unveil their iPhone yesterday anyway, a touch-screen cell phone with music, video, web, voicemail and e-mail capabilities.

“Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco’s iPhone name. There is no doubt that Apple’s new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission.” said Mark Chandler, Cisco senior vice president and general counsel.

View: Linksys iPhone | Apple iPhone
Source: Breitbart via Neowin

Today Microsoft and AMD have revealed the rules and began the “Vanishing Point” sweepstakes, a large-scale online and offline collaborative puzzle game. Vanishing Point takes online games to new heights with tough challenges, big rewards and events scheduled around the globe. Microsoft will be spending nearly half a million dollars in prizes, and that the eventual winner will secure a ride into sub-orbital space, courtesy of Rocketplane Limited Inc. All this is being done to celebrate the upcoming release of Windows Vista.

“Vanishing Point” challenges players to solve an international game, drawing clues from spectacular events at various locations to decipher online puzzles. The game is only open for selected countries which include USA, Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, New Zealand, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain and Singapore.

The prize package includes a Windows Vista based AMD powered Dell desktop pc, 24″ widescreen monitor, Zune(tm) digital media player, an Xbox(r) 360 gaming console, three Games for Windows game titles, a Microsoft(r) LifeCam VX-6000, Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, and $50,000 cash to help defray the cost of taxes.

View: Vanishing Point Game
Source: AeroXperience

In his keynote address at Macworld in San Francisco Tuesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the oft-rumored and much-anticipated iPhone, although the device is somewhat different than what had been expected. Instead of launching a separate widescreen ipod and iPhone, Apple has combined three different devices into a single one. The iPhone is a widescreen iPod, cellular phone, and Internet communicator in one device, and would be a true smartphone according to Jobs. The phone only features one button, a “home” button, and a 3.5-inch screen capable of a 160 pixel-per-inch resolution. The entire device measures 11/16 inches thick. It is also compatible with the GSM standard. It will be available on the Cingular network. The iPhone attempts to change the entire concept of the smartphone. Its interface would switch based on the application needed. Also, the input is simpler. “Nobody wants a stylus,” Jobs chided. Instead, it would use multifinger gestures to control, a concept Apple has patented.

Source: WinBeta

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