2005/06/10

ISPs and telcos have to retain data

Net4Nowt :: News Story

The law will mean ISPs will have to retain logs of who sent an Email where at what time (though the content of the Email doesn't need to be stored) and telcos will have to log call information. The logs will have to be retained for 12 to 36 months.

There is already criticism saying that criminals will just use public phones, pay as you go mobile and Email accounts outside Europe, however it's now law.

This will put a big burden on ISPs who will have to find ways to log the data (which increases loading on mail systems) and of course where to store it all. Since 70%+ of mail is SPAM, that could lead to a very watefull log of SPAM messages.

Telcos are in a less difficult position as they already log call data for billing, and generally billing data has to be retained for seven years anyway.


2005/06/08

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple Intel move 'could confuse'

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple Intel move 'could confuse'

Apple's move to Intel is a bold move. IBM/Motorola have had some supply problems with the PowerPC's used in current Macs and IBM has so far been unable to produce a G5 CPU that's cool enough to run in a laptop configuration.

Intel have had their Pentium-M for a while and it's a proven laptop worthy chip. Intel are still the biggest chip manufacturer on the planet, though they are suffering form increased competition.

It's always been rumoured that MacOS X has been available on Intel hardware inside Apple for sometime, and Steve Jobs told the world it was true at the developers conference.

This is a drastic move for Apple, especially with the rest of the world jumping on the PowerPC bandwagon (Xbox360, PSP3 using Cell and Nintendo Evolution), maybe Apple felt that as a "small" player compared to the console giants - Apple developments would be pushed to the side.

With Intel now supporting the x64 architechture and dual-cores, it could be a good move for Apple. Though it will be very interesting to see if Apple go for standard Wintel hardware or will have some Apple proprietry technology so MacOS X will only run on their speicific hardware. It will also be interesting to see if Apple stick with OpenBoot (whihc is actually a decent powerfull mini-OS all to itself - running Forth in the ROM) or move to the generalised PC BIOS. That could be the MacOS X lock-down (though as an open spec, other manufacturers could produce OpenBoot ROMs for their designs).

2005/06/07

UK developer quits DVD decrypting - ZDNet UK News

UK developer quits DVD decrypting - ZDNet UK News

There are other systems out there that can do this, but DVD Drecryptor wrapped it all together in a nice Windows program. Mac the Ripper is a similar tool for MacOS X users.

It looks like a big movie company (Sony?) served a writ on the author and he fell foul of the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (the UK's implementation of the European Copyright Directive), which amongst others things disallows breaking of copyright protection schemes.

This happened previously with the DeCSS case in Sweden, but a judge ruled there that the program itself wasn't illegal. Unfortunately it does look the author has given up without a fight.