Google Video Browser Already Hacked

06/29/2005 - 12:01 PM >> Death of TV, Future Formats, Hack the Planet

Remember DVD Jon? He’s the scandinavian wunderkind who cracked the infamous content scrambling system that was the thin nighty that protected a voluptuous naked DVD from the prying eyes of the, arrr, internet pirates. After tearing that sheer garment from the bosom of the movie biz cash cow he proceeded to rape all other sorts of media as well (including at one point Apple’s iTunes Music Store).

Apparently less that 24 hours after Google introduced their video browser so that you could watch some nerd’s dog barking at a toy robot, DVD Jon has cracked the tool so that you can use it to watch any movie and not just google’s precious movies:

Google Video Viewer included code to prevent it from being used to play non-Google hosted videos. Jon’s patch disables that, allowing the player to be used with any videos. Given that VideoLAN is open source, all I can say is, what was Google thinking? When you take an open source tool and try to make it proprietary, you’re inviting a fight, and it’s fitting that Jon was the one to take the fight to Google.

Sorry Hollywood, box office receipts are gonna be in a slump for a while because there’s an awful lot of dancing baby movies out there…

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Google Video now with…Video!

06/27/2005 - 03:32 PM >> Broadband, Death of TV, The Digital Revolution

I am sure that you all remember with trepidation the day that we breathlessly reported how Internet Cosmonauts Google had launched their rocket- er campaign- to destroy TV. Of course, the problem back then was that you could only search TV transcripts (translation: the really boring text for deaf people that you get when you accidentally hit the “mute” button on that mutant Japanese remote for your Hi-Fi entertainment center).

Then we revealed that Google was accepting user-submitted uploads of video! Knowing the kind of horrible crap most people record onto their given-to-me-by-mom-and-dad-on-xmas camcorders, we trembled with anticipation: surely the next Steven Spielberg would be found!

And today fair readers, you can finally see (and search through) these uploaded videos.

I’ve been amazed by your cool videos. I had never seen a robot dog harassing an iguana before, or a monkey doing karate, and I had no idea you were such good dancers. There’s more than home video, too - like this UNICEF story featuring David Beckham.

If that isn’t an explanation of the current box office slump we don’t know what is…

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Turn Your Computer into a TV Station

06/25/2005 - 02:21 PM >> Copyfight, Death of TV, Hack the Planet

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that some students at U. of Texas-Austin have developed software allowing people to stream shows off of their computers:

The software, called Alluvium, uses peer-to-peer technology to let people stream video to multiple users nonstop—even without high-speed Internet connections. It’s not just for tech enthusiasts and struggling artists, says Joseph T. Lopez, a graduate student who co-founded the software project.

The program specializes in “swarmcasting,” says Mr. Lopez. Much like BitTorrent, the file-swapping program popular with movie downloaders, the swarmcasting program breaks video files into small pieces, so that a computer user can download component parts simultaneously from any other machines that are storing or streaming the files.

But unlike BitTorrent, Alluvium—which was designed by Brandon Wiley, also a graduate student at Austin—orders those component parts before downloading them. Users of the software can simulate the experience of watching live TV, by streaming video as they finish downloading it.

The idea here is that because the focus is on streaming video rather than downloading it, they will be able to avoid the copyright infringement pitfalls that have befallen other p2p networks. Unfortunately for them, this very technical argument will be lost on the copyright regime enforcers.

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The Death of TV has Begun

06/23/2005 - 02:40 PM >> Death of TV

And who better to comment on it than Jeff Jarvis, former TV critic for TV Guide, People and creator of Entertainment Weekly:

TV just exploded

: The inevitable just happened: The broadcast networks earned less in upfront (preseason) ad buying this year than last year. That’s a big deal. It’s not a cycle. It’s an explosion. Mark this date as the day TV exploded and the mass market went pfffft with it.

It had to happen. Year after year, network audiences declined, yet ad rates and buying went up: Marketers were paying more for less (and I thought only cable customers did that). The delta between those two lines on a chart is a measure of advertisers’ inability to change or worse. But now that has changed.

It’s all downhill from here. Oh, this doesn’t mean that broadcast is dead. But it will not grow again. It will shrink. Ditto other big, old media outlets. And with that, the media industry will change as it is forced to find new ways to produce lower-cost programming and as advertisers are forced to abandon easy mass-market buying in favor of putting together ad hoc, targeted, and more efficient networks in more measurable media, including media created by people outside media companies (aka you). The dollars will flee to online and its many media at a higher, faster rate than audience declines on the networks as advertisers finally begin to value online appropriately (though online is a scarcity killer with unlimited content and traffic and that will depress rates).

Check out the rest of his post for more poignant thoughts.

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Stream your favorite MP3s to your cell phone, FREE!

06/20/2005 - 03:48 PM >> Convergence, Hack the Planet, The Digital Revolution

We found this amazing little piece of software through our friends over at BoingBoing:

HOWTO Stream from iTunes to your mobile phone (without Apple’s permission)

DittyBot is a script for OS X that uses a clever combination of mobile email and VoIP to stream music from your iTunes collection to your cellphone. Using your phone, email the title/artist info for a song in your iTunes library to DittyBot, which is running on your Mac, pulling down mail every minute. DittyBot receives the request, calls you with Skype, and plays the song back to you over voice-over-IP using iTunes. Wow.

This a good example of the law of unintended consequences. As all of our daily interactions become digital it becomes very easy to turn anything into a dumb pipe. Using your cellphone to stream music from your home computer may not be very practical for the average joe today but this is just a sign of what is yet to come.

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DVD Decrypter is Officially Dead

06/14/2005 - 03:27 AM >> Copyfight, Death of TV, Tech & Society

Engadget has a column on the official death of one of our favorite products, DVD Decrypter:

The scene - as I imagine it - was straight from the movie Brazil: in the dead of night lawyers from “a certain company” cut holes in the floor of the apartment above the “offender’s” flat. Quickly, these men in black repelled down ropes, tasered the unsuspecting software developer, and presented him with legally-binding contracts. In their ever-so-subtle way, they explained that the software developer had two options a) sign over his life’s work now or b) fight the good fight, go broke, go to jail, and *then* sign over his life’s work. Not surprisingly, DVD Decrypter’s author chose option a.

For those unaware, DVD Decrypter was a DVD archiving program that had garnered the respect of novices and hardcore users alike. Simple to use yet full-featured, DVD Decrypter laid the groundwork for those among us who like to do such things as create our own media servers or watch our DVDs on our Smartphones, PDAs, etc. It was a great program whose uses were far greater than the assumed nefarious purpose of distributing DVDs over the Internet.

As the MPAA struggles with trying to put the digital Genie back into the proverbial bottle we’d like to point out that everything that this proprietary product does is still available, for FREE, from open source software on the net. While it will be easy to shut down people who sell such software they better start planning how to live in a post-Copyright control world.

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Hollywood Uses iChat to Find Work

06/13/2005 - 09:14 AM >> Tech & Society, Tech Trends

According to Wired, you no longer need that coked-up agent, that fancy-pants manager or your massive rolodex to find work anymore:

Instead of displaying simple “away from my computer” messages, Hollywood buddy lists now overflow with come-ons, from “need work” to “wrapping up shoot.” Producers hiring for a new production can tell at a glance who’s available now, who’s not and who might be free in the near future.

“Ninety percent of my work is given to me through a pop-up (chat window) on my desktop,” said Simon Foster, 32, a freelance production coordinator living in Santa Monica, California.

If our buddy lists are any indication, work in town is pretty hard to come by. Somehow we think that Wired is over-hyping this IM thing.

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Yahoo! and Skype in Merger Talks?

06/13/2005 - 03:19 AM >> Broadband, Convergence, Tech Trends

Gizmodo has late breaking news on the imminent death of Telecom:

Everything is still rumors so nobody knows whether it will be a merger or if Yahoo will be buying Skype outright, but regardless it will a big step up in the world of instant messaging.

Skype is one of the most popular Voice-over-Internet providers and adding their technology to Yahoo! Messenger could bring vritually free phone calls to tens of millions.

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Nerds make better lovers

06/12/2005 - 03:14 PM >> Hack the Planet, Tech & Society

Today is Public Service Announcement Day here at BBB. We bring you this breaking news from the international authority on modern sexuality, the New York Daily News:

“A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first,” says E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine’s love and sex advice columnist. “He’ll turn out to be a great father and a great husband.”

And, she insists that a woman who is willing to stick it out with a nerd and get past his quirks will be handsomely rewarded. “Don’t give up on him too fast,” she said. “If you stick with him, he’s going to turn out to be really great.”

To all you lucky ladies out there, feel free to email [email protected] .

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Smile for the Google 3D mapping truck

06/09/2005 - 11:05 AM >> Broadband, The Digital Revolution, Tech Trends

There is a surreptitious war taking place right outside your door and you don’t even know its happening. Amazon’s A9 and Google are fighting over who will provide better photos of your front door:

Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities.

The move would trump Amazon’s A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets.

The trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped. This would complement the mostly top-down view of San Francisco available through Google’s Keyhole satellite photo application.

The goal is to create similar 3D online versions of other cities in the US and overseas.

We can’t wait for people to create the first 3D San Francisco quake level so that we can blow up the cross on Mt. Davidson.

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