000213.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 13 Feb 2000 13:00:00 GMT
3dHardware - DVDead? The FMD-ROM has 10 layers and can store up to 140GB, more than seven times a double-layered, double-sided DVD. That's "20 hours of HDTV (MPEG-2 compressed) video, a small library or the contents of your entire CD collection, uncompressed, on a single 120mm disc!" The new standard was created by Constellation 3D. It uses flourescence, not surface pits, to encode information. They say that transfer rates could be as high as 1 GB per second, apparently due to reading all layers at once. They also work fine as WORM drives (Write Once Read Many), and will be packaged as 30mm disks that store 4 GB. They'll also be building "ClearCard" ROM, credit card sized devices that store 10 GB. Should be ready for production before the end of 2000. Wow!

The Register - UK gov't reveals Big Brother bill: "Yesterday the UK Government published details of its plans to allow law enforcement agencies to access email correspondence... Failure to hand over a text-only version of a suspected email or give the police access to the encryption key you are using could result in a two year prison sentence. Another area of concern is that the police will be able to grant their own warrants to use the proposed Act's powers to put someone under surveillance." That this legislation could even be proposed is a sad day for liberty. You can bet there are U.S. congress critters drooling over this. Now what was it you do to cows that foam at the mouth?

NY Times - Tough Court Fight Expected Over DVD Code BugMeNot "Judge Kaplan, to put it mildly, did not endorse the view that DeCSS was strictly a way to play back movies. At one point during the hearing, he asked sarcastically: 'What do you think people are going to do with DeCSS, put it on floppy disks and use it to fertilize the garden?'" The Times thinks the fight in New York will be over the constitutionality of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Kaplan apparently believes that DeCSS violates DMCA. Someone remind me of why his opinion matters? It certainly doesn't matter to me.

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