Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

In an attempt to be more proactive rather than simply reactive, the MPAA has recently approved the DreamStream system and its 2048-bit “military strength” anti-piracy encryption technology to protect content streamed to viewers online.

First introduced to the MPAA in March of 2008 by Laura Tunberg, MGM’s former vice president of intellectual property enforcement, it was since reviewed by the MPAA and found it to be a viable means for securing digital content. Chief development officer for DreamStream, Ulf Diebel, is excited by this acknowledgment of their product.

“We are very excited to have the MPAA stand behind our technology.”

MORE »

Omar Khan, an 18-year-old student from Coto de Caza, California attempted to pull a move straight from the movie War Games. And I am not referring to the whole “lets play Global Thermonuclear War” incident, but instead the hacking into his schools computer to change his failing grades to passing grades. Mr. Kahn was “allegedly” changing his D’s and F’s to something a little more positive, A’s. Wow, talk about an improvement, you would think he would have settled to at least pass and just move them up to a C in an effort to avoid detection. But instead he went all the way up, because it seems his intention was not only to avoid failing and the potential summer school, but to get into a good college. I can only assume that he would have continued to hack his grades after he started college as well.

MORE »

The latest mod to come the ever-hackable Eee PC seems like one that should have been done a long time ago. For just about $15 you can somewhat easily add a backlight to your keyboard. The mod is estimated to take about 3 hours and requires you taking your keyboard off as well as some soldering. After all your work you will indeed have a nice backlit keyboard that will allow you to comfortably type at any time of day or night, sadly the light is powered by an external battery back that runs on two AAA-batteries. While a nice little trick, it would be much cooler if this could be powered internally. Personally I would opt for a cheap external USB light as opposed to having a battery pack stuck to the top of my Eee. Keep reading to check out another pic of the battery pack, and click the Read link below for the full set of instructions.

MORE »

Score one for the UMPC hacker community again, for just recently, a hacker named TFR revealed in OQO Talk that he successfully installed and ran Mac OS X Leopard on his little OQO e2 UMPC. Taking into account that his device came with Windows Vista pre-installed, it’s not that hard to imagine why he’d want to do something like that and run Leopard on the poor thing. As of this time’s writing, the hacker still hasn’t provided any details on how he performed the trick because he’s still not finished with the project and needs to take care of two final issues: video resolution and wwan. However, he promises that he will do so once he gets done. For now, you can take joy in viewing a photo of his Leopard-toting machine (log-in/register to view) and watching his YouTube video proof. Psystar should hire this guy.

Read [OQO Talk] Via [Tech Radar]

There has been some great debates among the Muslim-majority Asian nation about whether or not to ban the access of pornographic materials. The government of Indonesia took the first step to restrict the access of pornographic materials from the web and went as far as making the “transmission of pornographic material on the Web” a criminal offense. Well it goes to show that when people want their porn they will stand up for what they believe is right, in respond with the government’s action, a couple of “web criminals” hacked into the website of the Information Ministry, and added their personal message and thoughts.

MORE »

Intel has announced plans to release an anti-theft initiative for laptops by the end of the year. The rate of data hacked from stolen or misplaced laptops has been increasing, and Intel has planned to release this technology to help prevent your vital data from being widely misused.

“It basically locks the system, lock the disk, so people cannot be maliciously using and getting the data,” stated executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobility Group – Dr Dadi Perlmutter at his presentation.

Based on what Dr. Dadi had elaborated, The Intel Anti-Theft Technology is apparently a method to lock a laptop down to the component level, and prevent any access to data. But information about this technology is still limited. As for Intel, they said that Intel would announce more details when it’s nearing the release. So let’s just sit back, and wait for the good news

Via [InfoWorld]

After three days of Hack-a-thon, one victor remains standing after CanSecWest’s PWN 2 OWN competition, a Sony Vaio running Ubuntu Linux.

On Thursday, the MacBook Air fell under the hands of Charlie Miller, who pocketed $10,000 and left two other machines still standing: a Fujitsu U810 running Windows Vista SP1 and a Sony VAIO with Ubuntu. After another day and relaxation of the rules, the U810 was conquered by Shane Macaulay, of Security Objectives, by using a flaw in Adobe’s Flash. If “Shane Macaulay” sounds familiar to you, that’s because he was on Dino Dai Zovi’s team when they hacked the MacBook Pro at last year’s CanSecWest.

MORE »

How long does it take you to earn $10,000? For Charlie Miller, of Independent Security Evaluators and former NSA employee, it takes him about two minutes. Last Thursday, Miller won the PWN 2 OWN competition at the 2008 CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, by successfully hacking a MacBook Air. In fact, Miller isn’t a newcomer. He is well-known as the first to successfully hack the iPhone back a year ago. 

MORE »

Benjamin Heckendorn, or mostly known as Ben Heck, is a legend for his semi-godlike ability to recreate and modify electronic devices. Among those popular devices are the Xbox laptop and the popular reincarnation of Atari 2600. Ben started all with all of these “crazy” ideas from his basement, warming up by modding the Atari 2600 – taking the first gaming console and reviving it back in the form of a handheld console.

As he goes on with his hobby, his professional on modifying has captured a lot of attention and in turn he gets just about any request you could imagine, some of which he goes on to complete just because “it sounded so weird I did it.” There’s even an Iraq soldier who lost an arm in the war who has asked Ben to build him a one handed gaming controller. Ben goes on to say that while “no offers to throw bundles of money” at him have come he does get some offers and has been gotten the attention of people from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and is even working with a peripheral maker to sell a packaged product that came from the previosusly mentioned one handed game controller.

Read [Ben Heck] Read [Reuters]

Nokia has, after a long delay launched their N-Gage service. The release, being called N-Gage First Access sounds to us a lot like a glorified beta testing group, but if you are one of the lucky few, you can still get excited. The service is currently available just to those with an N81. Once you have the First Access installed you will be able to download and test games as well as buy them and continue to play. In addition to the games Nokia also hopes you will take part in the development, so when something goes wrong you can provide them with feedback. Honestly we have no reason to think you will have issues, but with all the initial delays in getting the service launched, they just seem inevitable. Of course like anything else, someone has found a ‘work around’ to the N81 only limitation, if you have another recent N Series device and are feeling lucky you can check out Symbian-Guru for some more details.

Read [N-Gage] Via [Boy Genius Report]