Monday, May 28, 2007

In an interesting turn of events, CSS (the "copy protection" system used on regular DVDs) is no longer considered an "effective technological method" to prevent copy protection under the law. The direct result from this is that it does not qualify for the European DMCA's anti-circumnavigation laws.

The European DMCA only bans the circumnavigation of "effective technological methods" thanks to an amendment what was pushed through a while ago. It seems that once a method is well and truly broken then it's no longer illegal to circumnavigate the DRM on your favourite DVD's, Bluray discs or HD-DVD discs.

More info here: http://www.valimaki.com/docs/finnish_css.pdf

Sunday, May 20, 2007

I gave mono.nat a onceover yesterday and chopped about 15% from the codebase through an ingenious set of refactors (basically i turned proof-of-concept code into maintainable code).

It has more complete support for uPnP than before, i think i now support every method exposed by the routers. So if anyone wants uPnP support in their application, grab the source from the MonoSVN (websvn link: http://anonsvn.mono-project.com) in the "Mono.NAT" folder.

For an example on how it works, look at the program in the Examples folder. And as always, send me all bug reports. Finally, if you have a uPnP router, and it is *not* detected by the example program when it's run, or some of the methods do *not* work as expected, let me know and i'll get some special debug builds to figure out the problem.

Finally, if anyone wants to supply me what a NAT-PMP capable router, or knows how i could easily host a NAT-PMP "server", i'll implement support for that aswell (over the coming weeks).

Saturday, May 19, 2007

For those die-hard fans of Starcraft who've been waiting eagerly for Starcraft 2 to appear, you need wait no longer. Click. While i don't expect this game to hit the streets for quite a few months (if not a year or more), it's because of scenes like this that i can't wait to start playing. Thankfully Blizzard are the ones developing the game. I have full faith in them to not screw it up like so many other sequels.

Hell, if we're really lucky there'll be an open beta (or maybe a closed beta and someone gets me an invite ;) ) where we can test everything out for some multi-player zerg rushes.

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