Saw this guy, Levi Roots (real name Keith!!!) on Dragons’ Den on BBC Two, he was completely mad but brilliant and now has a contract with Sainsburys’ for his “Raggae Reggae Sauce”. See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6424021.stm
and
The BBC has struck a deal to provide YouTube with content and create 3 new YouTube channels, one for news and two for entertainment. The channels will be called ‘BBC‘, ‘BBC Worldwide‘ and ‘BBC News’. The image quality of the content does appear to be great, like most things on YouTube, but it is good to see a major broadcaster working with new media in a constructive and legal way. Check it out.
Australia is the first country in the world to ban the sale of energy wasting incandescent light bulbs. By 2015 Australia believes this will reduce CO2 emissions by 4 million tons. Hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit soon and we can start saving our planet.
More information: Dept. of Enviroment Press Release (PDF), ABC News and TreeHugger.com
British Citizen’s sign the e-petition on the Number 10 website:
In a survey carried out by Jupiter Research, many music company executive admitted that digital rights management (DRM) was is “not fit for purpose”. The majority also thought that removing DRM from music downloads so that music could be played on any music playing device would boost sales.
At last it seems that music industry seem to be understanding that DRM is not a good idea and along with Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) who condemned DRM last week and said that it was only part of the Apple iPod and iTunes because of the music industry DRM could be on the way out.
In the two separate but related stories, it appears that a group of crackers have managed to break the encryption algorithm for Blu-ray (Sony’s high resolution DVD style format) and HD DVD allowing them to rip the disc’s and make copies and Sony executive David Bishop has said that the format war can be official declared over as they have won already.
The news of the cracking of the “Advanced Access Content System” (AACS) came in a posting on the Doom9 forum which had previously had user post cracks for individual title on Blu-Ray or HD DVD but the discovery of a “processing key” now allows the cracking of all titles encrypted using AACS.
Mr Bishop, citing recent sales figures that show Blu-Ray out sold HD DVD by approximately 2:1 simply declared the format war “official over”. The sales figures Mr Bishop was reference to only cover a 2 week period, hardly enough time to decide the format war and considering that only a handful of players and DVD of either format are available that is a ridiculous claim by any standard.
Ok, going to start off with something funny I saw earlier today via Boing Boing on the The Times website.
Ok, basically the story is this guy went on a Ryan Air flight, someone pitched some sunglasses out of his bag, whilst it was in the care of the airline and they point blank refused to compensate him in anyway, so he sued and of course won hands down. However the really funny part of the story was that Ryan Air were ordered to paid him £100 comp, plus the £30 it cost him to take them to court and they asked for a 1 week grace period to pay him. A company valued at over £4.2 billion for some reason needs a week to fine £130!!! What is that all about… go take a read…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2100-2155143.html
Ryan Air really know how to do PR well… I will being booking a flight tomorrow… NOT…
Andrew.