tensixtyone

Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC’s anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation’s iPlayer internet TV service. – The Guardian

I never knew how true my previous statement would be, while i’m a little late posting a follow-up I have to comment on the media’s perspective of the “technically-able” internet users. It seems if something is hidden in plain sight and discovered by the masses it will be classed as hacking no matter how idiotic it is. The media should change it’s perspective and chastise the BBC for their inepitude.

Of course, it’s easier to blame a bunch of people with no legal department…

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With the launch of BBC iPlayer for iPhones it seems they’ve let slip a little extra “feature”. You can now download programs from BBC iPlayer without DRM in a well encoded MP4 format. How? Easy.

First of all, install User Agent Switch for Firefox and setup the iPhone user-agent:

• Description: iPhone
• User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
• App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
• App Version: Version/3.0
• Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Now browse to any BBC iPlayer program page and you’ll notice that it tries to serve up a Quicktime video, the MP4. As the URL isn’t displayed raw in the code, you can use a little Javascript wizardry to redirect you to the raw stream:

javascript:(function(){url = document.getElementById('mip-flash-player').getElementsByTagName("object")[0].childNodes[0].value; window.location = url;})()

Or if you want a simple drag and drop bookmarklet: iPlayer Download

The BBC will either pull the iPhone beta or re-engineer it with the iPhone SDK to develop a full client, either way this will not last long. Initally when I heard the iPhone was supported by iPlayer I was outraged, Why does a device with only around 100,000 users in the UK get priority over a operating system? It almost seems like Karma is against them, but no doubt this will get into the news as “hackers exploiting the system” rubbish. Only time will tell, enjoy it while you can.

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Let me take you back, back to September 2003. I was working for Halton Borough Council as a phone jocky. I made a few posts which got me into some trouble. At the time I removed them from my site and I’ve never been able to extract them back out… until now.

Heres a prime example of the skills of the councillors running the Halton area… Be warned this may not be sutable viewing for computer literate people…

People reading this obviously wont appreciate the font layout and size he used…lets just say size 24 font, on 1280×1024 thats just a little excessive.

And also…

“THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH FOR THIS VERY THRILLING E MAIL KM ps its made my DAY

A councillor demonstrating that sarcasim really is the lowest form of wit.

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I’d been mulling over getting a N95 for a few weeks, and I was quite hyped up with moving to a intelligent handset (compaired my Nokia 3 Series mobile). To cut a long story short, I didn’t get the handset but Jo got it for me on Orange. I’m 6 days into my usage of the N95, so I feel now is a good time to air some initial views.

First of all, lets start on the obvious. The N95 is Nokia’s convergence product combining 3G, Wifi, and GPS with the Series60 3rd Edition (SymbianOS 9.1) software. The N95 has been a hit with few due to the ever crowded market place (HTC smartphones, iPhone) and a few minor issues. Nokia have recently addressed the major concerns with the launch of the N95-3 which has 8gb on-board storage, better battery, and larger screen, but it could be a little late with the impending arrival of the iPhone in europe. I’ve got the N95-1 version of the phone which was the main release version for the UK.

First boot, the phone showed the traditional “holding hands” Nokia branding, date/time setup, then dropped into the front screen. For the last year or so I’ve been using a HTC Wizard running Windows Mobile and have had to deal with a fair share of awful interface design from the hands of 3rd party developers, but the only way I could describe the front screen that came with the current firmware is a abomination. Orange had decided, in it’s infinite wisdom, to replace the plain and simple Series60 front screen with a menu driven nightmare that chews RAM and makes the whole phone sluggish. I had to get rid of it. I jumped into the familiar menus and tried in vain to remove the horrid front screen, it seems orange don’t want you to remove it.

I might as well admit, I’ve voided my warranty already, in fact, I voided it on the same day. Theres a few details available on-line to change your product ID to a generic Nokia one, then using the official Nokia Software Update to re-flash the phone with a nice generic firmware. This worked a treat. It might just be my opinions, but the Orange menu was just too much of a hindrance on the phone, enough to warrant trying to get rid of it as fast as I could. This is a carrier issue, not really what everyone would experience with the phone.

Bar the misfortune of the Orange menu, the interface is slick and easy to use. The menus for the phone are a tad over-complicated but you soon get used to the location of the commonly used functions. So, i’m keeping it, flashy menus and features win me over. The battery life could do with some improvement, and hopefully Nokia will release the improved battery for N95-1 edition handsets, but I guess only time will tell.

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In another news of an unrelated nature, I’ve finally got my arse in gear and decided to get back on the GTD horse. My recent exploits with Gmail and various other Google Apps have spurred me on, my success in organising my mail and rss feeds means I can spend more time on actual stuff…

I’ve previously mentioned Tracks as my central repository for all things GTD related, but the other day I bumped into What’s Next?, which is a boiled down version of Tracks that supports the pure basics of GTD. Running on Rails and SQLite its nice and portable, but I’ve slapped it onto my hosting box at home to avoid the hassle of Ruby instances on a USB drive. Really, I can’t comment on the usage of this new app, but i’m sure i’ll have more details in a few weeks.

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In the past I’ve mentioned about how insecure Windows is, generally I try and avoid it for any end users wherever possible. Today I spotted a article on Digg regarding the new Samsung printer drivers, and its got me wondering now, is it actually Windows that’s insecure or the developers who can’t be bothered developing correctly for the platform?

Usually, vendor provided drivers for Linux aren’t the best, and are only used in dire circumstances that a free driver hasn’t been wrote, Samsung’s April 2007 now contain a disturbing “setup” script that essentially gives setuid privileges to XSANE, OpenOffice and possibly a few other applications.

Take a look a this script on linuxfr.org

Without seeing the suwrap script I can’t be sure what it’s actually doing, but I assume its modifying the lib path with the specific Samsung drivers, the initial setup script is just punching massive holes in the security of linux, users would be able to edit /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow with these permissions.

So, are all Windows issues down to the OS?

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No POP3 support, I mean, come on guys! Your IMAP backend is based on Courier, you can’t claim that you dont have a compatible POP3 service. Migrating 6,000 emails over to a Textdrive mail account then to Gmail via POP is a pain in the arse.

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I just spotted a post by Nik Butler on Pownce saying that CUPS (a widely used printing system for *BSD, Linux and OSX) has been bought by Apple, no licenses will be affected and it’ll remain GPL2, but for how long?

I wonder how exactly Apple can buy this project, It seems that the Dev has been hired by Apple and he’s handed over the rights to Apple. So with Apple at the helm what can we expect? Personally, while i’m not anti-apple, I do feel that theres something to worry about here. With Apple being in control of the copyright it may be relicensed under the Apple opensource license or worse, close sourced.

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After a few days of thinking i’ve decided it’s time to move away from Textdrive onto GMail and my own hosting. Why? Well lets have a quick overview.

1. Memory allocation on shared servers

Recently i’ve been dogged with Mephisto spitting feathers after a few page requests, saying it’s hit its memory limit and the MySQL lib can’t run a command. This is a new change that happend on the TxD servers which i’m not impressed about, especially how the process never seems to tick over the acceptable limits for ruby processes.

2. Joyent

Joyent, the Gmail replacement, or so I thought. Over the last few months its suffered from developer time being concentrated on the wrong areas. Want to make a mail alias for your Joyent account? No you cant, but you can make spiffy lists…

If the guys at Joyent actually worked on features that are needed and not what they want to develop then its quite possible that i’d stick with it. Another fantastic example is that you can’t mark mail as read/unread, even simple webmail clients have this feature but it seems to escape Joyent.

3. Mish-mash of solutions

Textdrive shared hosting run via Webmin, Mail via Joyent or Webmin however you want to do it, Billing related changes via another control panel, Storage space via another panel.

I can understand that Textdrive/Strongspace/Joyent are three products that have been thrown together into the all encompassing “Joyent Core” but they should of worked on the integration before they announced it.

4. All or nothing

I like Strongspace, I like the idea, but now i’ve got to have Textdrive hosting and Joyent mail with it as well, all i want is Strongspace, nothing more. integration is a good thing but why an’t we allowed to buy seperate services? I could go for Bingodisk but that doesnt support rsync. After a quick investigation it seems that S3 is my best bet, and probably a bit cheaper.

So, theres a quick run down of my dealbreakers, the issues i’ve been living with for the last few months. I currently pay around £15 for a low powered dedicated server in London which I hardly make use of, due to the traffic I get to my sites it seems like a good candidate. I’ll use Google Apps for Domains for my mail and related stuff, and S3 for backup. Now, the long trawl of migration…

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I’ve finally got a invite to Pownce after a few days of waiting. So, what is it? To me it seems like a mash of several tools already in existance, like Twitter and various others.

Personally I like it, don’t know why, and i’ve not used it enough to give a full rundown of it but initally it seems quick and easy to use. The only disappointment is that the desktop tools use Adobe Air which doesn’t support Linux, yet. In the FAQ they mention it’ll be sorted as soon as Flash Core is sorted, which I guess wont be that long.

Check out my Pownce profile if your bored.

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