A Turner Broadcasting Systems exec complained last year that using a PVR is the same as stealing. Hollywood has subsequently waged war on them, going so far as to convince federal judges to order ReplayTV founder SonicBlue to spy on ReplyTV users in an effort to determine if users were skipping commercials.

Now I read that the new owners of the ReplayTV are removing the features that separated it from the Tivo: the abilities to remove commercials and to share programming over the Internet. What you have now is a dumbed-down Tivo wannabe.

Hollywood must evolve or die. If its business model depends on advertising, and the market no longer responds to advertising, tough beans! Guess its time to get a new business model! Strong-arming the electronics industry (a much larger industry, dollar-wise but with not nearly the lobbying clout) is not the way to do it. Convincing the courts to block PVRs is not the way to do it. Accusing your customers – the viewing public – of being crooks is not the way to do it.

I am so tired of the media mafia in this country. If I had a million dollars, I’d launch some initiatives to forever keep Hollywood’s hands off the rights of citizens to decide what media they absorb. The lengths that Hollywood is going in order to maintain their control over viewers is truly frightening.

I support the efforts to build open-source, freely-available PVRs. Not every program is the product of Hollywood. I’d like to see people everywhere producing their own TV shows and sharing them through the Internet or satellite feeds. I’d love to see a new television network, born of PVRs, sprout up across the world, driving a stake into the heart of the idea of rigid, centralized control.

It can be done. The technology is there. And such an idea is guaranteed to produce content far more interesting than what comes out of the brain[dead]-trusts in Hollywood studio boardrooms.

Hollywood should fear the PVR. The PVR, along with the Internet, is destined to relegate Hollywood to the scrap heap of entertainment history.

Swiss students have perfected a way to crack Microsoft Windows passwords in a matter of seconds, taking advantage of a design flaw in the way Microsoft creates passwords. Since Microsoft doesn’t include any random data in the password hashes it creates, the same password on two separate machines will create the same hash.

The students created a large (well, somewhat large: 1.2 Gig) lookup table of all the possible hashes. The result is that 99.9% of Windows passwords can be cracked within five seconds!

Since Unix and Mac OS X adds random data to the hash, they are 4,096 times more secure. Attacks against these boxes would also require 4,096 times more memory.

The students have a webpage which allows you to submit your own Windows password hashes for cracking. Check out the paper here.

I am strongly considering disabling password logins on my home machines and changing them all to 1024-bit SSH keys instead. Typeable passwords are too easily sniffed, logged, or cracked!