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Tech News

BBC Episodes Legally Available Via Peer To Peer

Kript writes "According to the BBC they are going to make a number of their shows available on the Azureus network. A number of old favorites will be available such as Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and even Little Britain."
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Autodesk Suing to Keep Format Closed

An anonymous reader writes "AutoCAD is by far the industry standard CAD tool for engineering drawings. When I was an engineering student it was on every computer in the college of engineering. Autodesk, the makers of the AutoCAD software, are attempting to quash an effort to reverse-engineer the proprietary binary format used by AutoCAD. Looking at the court order, their whole argument revolves around something called TrustedDWG that basically looks like a digital signature that verifies the file was created by an Autodesk product."

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes in to say "The December 1st release of Psiphon has sparked renewed interest in the various software programs that can help circumvent Internet censorship in China, Iran, and other censored countries. (Some of this interest undoubtedly being motivated by the fact that many of these programs also work for getting around blocking software at work or school.) Have you ever wanted to understand the science behind these programs, the way that mathematicians and codebreakers understand the magic behind PGP? If you loved the mental workout of reading "Applied Cryptography", have you ever wanted a tutorial to do the same for Psiphon and Tor and other anti-censorship programs?" The rest of his editorial follows.

Tighthead Prop writes "Sony executive Phil Harrison has made some brash comments about the Cell processor and the PlayStation 3. Harrison says that the current PS3 game lineup is using less than half of the machines power, adding that 'nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capacity.' Is he right? 'The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM.'"

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