Terrifying Tower Climbing Video

This video shows the view of a maintenance worker while he’s climbing up a 1768 foot transmission tower. I dare you all to try and watch it till the end.

Edit: Sorry folks, had to remove the video at the request of the people who own the footage. They will apparently put it back up at one point, so we’ll be sure to publish it back when this happens.

[Via]

HD copy protection may have been busted

What’s purported to be the “master key” that protects Blu-ray and other HD content has been published online. But even if it is genuine, it’s debatable how much practical difference there will be.

A poster on the Pastebin site, designed for easy sharing of text and code, has published what’s billed as the HDCP master key, a grid of 1600 numbers, each made up of 14 hexadecimal characters. It also has the instructions:

To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is the source KSV. Add together those twenty rows of the matrix that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source private key. To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed matrix.

Now, I’ll be honest enough to admit that this hurts my head a little bit (this is where our more mathematically literate readers can jump in!), but the points is that if these instructions are correct, it’s a relatively simple task to generate your own key. That allows you to hook up a Blu-ray player or other HD device to a recording device, then use your generated key on the recording device to create a connection that both devices consider legitimate, thus allowing the content to pass through without encryption.

The leaks has already prompted speculation that plans by movie companies to stream protected HD video might have to be put on hold for fear that the movies would be pirated immediately.

There is a theory, though, that this isn’t the master key and that such a thing doesn’t exist. Instead what may have happened is that it’s a key used by many (but not all) manufacturers that get their HDCP hardware from the same source. That means that although in theory any key found to be used in equipment for piracy could be disabled by the people behind the HDCP system, doing so would be impractical as it could stop legitimate devices working and prompt legal action.

[Picture credit: Leo Reynolds]



Night of the Living Trekkies Trailer

Can you believe that this trailer was made to promote a book? Night of the Living Trekkies was released last month and is from the same publisher who released Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2009. Enjoy!

Transformers Test Film #1

Produced by Vimeo user Alexander Vladimirovich Semenov, this short transformers fan film was entirely shot in just two hours on a Canon 550D and a Nikon D5000. Post-production then took him around a month. Enjoy!

[Via Vimeo]

New Norton Ad Campaign Features The Hoff and Dolph Lundgren

I haven’t used Norton security products for home use in years (Anyone here knows if they improved recently?), but even though if I’m not a big fan, I have to admit that the company’s last marketing campaign made me crack a smile. This week, following the same formula as their previous ads, Symantec released 2 new commercials, one featuring David Hasslehoff, and the other one, Dolph Lundgren. Enjoy!

Chattanooga Choo-Choos to Gigabit Broadband

The city of Chattanooga has beaten Google to provide a 1 gigabit broadband service. But while Google is planning to one day offer such services at rates comparable to “regular” broadband, the Chattanooga deal is available today for an eyewatering $350 per month.

The service comes from the publicly owned Chattanooga Electric Power Board and will come through a fiber-optic network. The super speed service (which also comes with enhanced TV, phone and internet services) is part of a longstanding wider project to build a smart electronic grid that manages demand for electricity in the area, for example by better coping with local surges. That project received a major boost with a $111 million grant from the Department of Energy.

All 100,000 homes and businesses in the area will be able to access any of four high-speed packages: 30Mbps for $57.99 a month, 50Mbps for $69.99, 100 Mbps for $139.99 and 1 Gbps for $350. Unlike ADSL broadband, the speeds are for both downloading and uploading.

While it’s fun to daydream about sitting in your bedroom with near-instantaneous downloads, it’s clear that the real target is going to be businesses. If you’ve got 50 employees using computers in an office, the top-tier service will effectively give them all 20Mbps internet connections (provided that they all use it at the same time) for $7 a head per month. That’s not necessarily a positive if they are simply goofing about on YouTube, but for something like a graphic design company it could be a benefit.

Judging by several reports, though, it appears the board isn’t all that sure how much a gigabit service should cost subscribers, so prices may change depending on demand. It certainly appears the top speed package is there mainly because it was technically possible rather than a purely commercial operation.

Earlier this year, Google announced plans to test a 1 gigabit service in several smaller cities. It says it has received applications from “hundreds of communities and hundreds of thousands of individuals.” They include Topeka, Kansas, which officially changed its name to “Google, Kansas” during March, prompting an April Fool’s joke from Google, which claimed to have returned the gesture.