The Null Device

I noticed a number of Fight Club references in the latest issue of Transmetropolitan (#42)... "Use (Tyler) Soap"; "Durden Demolitions"; Heh.

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Things to do in Melbourne: This Monday evening, Splodge, the freeish movie screening night at the Empress Hotel, will be showing a number of cool-looking shorts, including Powers of Ten, which appears to be an animation zooming between levels of scale, from atoms to galaxies, and Buñuel and Dali's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou.

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Apple's new G4 Macs will contain something called the SuperDrive. No, not the old 3.5" floppy drive which could read and write any disk format, but rather a DVD recorder, with software for making your own movies. So can those scurrilous scurvy dog hax0rs find it useful for pirating DVDs? Yes and no. No, because, firstly, recordable DVDs cannot contain CSS encrypted content (the session key area is pre-burned with zeroes), so copying an encrypted DVD disc image would yield garbage. They could always find a copy of DeCSS (possession a criminal offense in most WIPO treaty signatory nations, and given the USDOJ's new computer search guidelines, you don't want to be caught with a copy of DeCSS when you take your laptop through U.S. Customs; I've heard federal prisons are pretty nasty places to be) and decrypt the disc into a nice, unprotected, easily copied format, but then they would come up against the slight problem that recordable discs can only hold 4.7Gb, less than many feature films. Having said that, one could imagine some nefarious fiends starting a business pirating music videos or TV show episodes (once recordable DVDs come down in price considerably, that is).

More positively, 4.7Gb would be enough space for a not-overbearingly-long indie film (I suspect something on the level of Clerks would fit with room to spare); so once we see DVD pressing plants that can duplicate from DVD-ROM discs, we may see a new wave of independent movies in a convenient, inexpensive format (as DVDs should not be much more expensive to duplicate than CDs).

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