Lately, I have tried a lot of software which was supposed to help me catalog my disc collection. I was impressed with the features Disk Inspector has to offer. It has 13 scanning presets, which you choose depending on the content of the volume you want to scan. Discs containing photos, audio, video, or miscellaneous data can be catalogued using their corresponding preset.

Beside disc scanning, the program can be used to index files from your hard-disk. The search function is quite advanced. It allows you to specify the size range, the modified date, and the type of the file you are searching for. This kind of functionality is available in almost all cataloging utilities. However, there is an extra feature, which you may find useful: search duplicates. By using this feature you can avoid writing duplicate files to your discs.

Pluses: Disk Inspector can create reports, containing information about any of your disc catalogs. These reports are exported using HTML format.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: It may take some time to index all your data, but once you are finished, you’ll be satisfied with the result. Disk Inspector will give you information about files from your CDs and DVDs, without having to insert them into your optical drive.

And then there is the emerging contest for the digital living room, which already has Apple saturating the airwaves with ads for its revamped iPod music players and iTunes digital music and movies.

On November 14, when it launches its Zune digital music player just in time for the holiday spending seasons, Microsoft will dramatically raise the stakes in that tussle - and in doing so spend a fortune on advertising.

On the face of it, the iPod-Zune contest should matter a lot more to Apple than to Microsoft. Digital music has grown from nothing to almost half of Apple’s revenues in less than five years, and allowed the once-struggling maker of quirky computers to capture a commanding position in the increasingly blurred space between computers and consumer electronics.

By selling 67 million iPods over the past five years, and winning an 80 per cent share of the digital music market, Apple has both reinvented itself as a company and become one of the world’s most valuable and known brands.

And by finding a pricing, usage and digital rights management formula that balanced the interests of consumers and content owners, Apple both opened the way for the piracy-stricken music companies to survive into the digital era and became an indispensable part of their future.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has in recent years largely looked beyond the consumer PC markets where in the late 1980s and 1990s it built the foundation for its subsequent dominance of the whole IT industry.

The world’s largest software company has instead focused on continuing to sell more software to businesses, on competing with Sony and Nintendo in games, on security, and on emerging threats to its business model from web-based services such as Google and open-source software such as Linux.

Compared to the vast potential of the enterprise and gaming markets and the internet, or the immense downside if Microsoft’s Windows and Office monopolies are eroded by new types of competitor, digital music and other digital media looked like small beer, until recently.

The gradual shift in the way consumers use computers that is moving them out of the den and into the living room was not ignored by Microsoft - it has developed a version of Windows specifically for media-oriented consumer users, and has invested heavily in areas such as media formats and digital rights management - but it was not a top priority.

That changed with the dawning realisation that Apple had built its initial success with the iPod and iTunes into a position where it could conceivably dominate the consumer digital media market.

The boom shows little sign of slowing as yet: Apple’s latest results show it shipped a record 1.6 million Macs and 8.7 million iPods in the third quarter of 2006, on its way to $US4.8 billion in revenue and $US550 million in net earnings.

The company’s year-on-year growth rate is currently north of 30 per cent for both its computer and media arms, and it has $US10 billion in cash on the balance sheet.

While not quite a money machine of Microsoft-like proportions, the sheer scale of Apple’s success finally forced Microsoft to move earlier this year, and so the Zune - an iPod-like portable device capable of playing digital music and video, plus some extra capabilities for wireless communication - was secretly born.

This is not the first time Microsoft has sold hardware wrapped together with its software - the xBox gaming consoles have shown it can be successful using this approach, and the xBox team has apparently led the Zune push.

While it is easy to criticise Redmond for sitting on its hands for five years and allowing an old rival it almost wiped out in the 1990s to re-emerge as a new threat, it’s important to also appreciate how different Apple’s tightly-coupled iPod and iTunes software and hardware strategy was to Microsoft’s preferred model.

In fact some have suggested Apple’s success with this integrated model may be another sign that it is coming back as the most effective way to deliver technology products - as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, but not in the 1980s and 1990s when computers were assembled using “open standards” components - software from Microsoft, chips from Intel, and the rest from other vendors.

There may be some truth to this - in certain current IT products sold to both consumer and enterprise buyers, the advantages of end-to-end bundling seem clear today in a way they were not a few years ago.

But it is still early days for the consumer digital media market - albeit 67 million iPods into it - and it would be premature to write off the model that made Microsoft (and Intel, for that matter) so successful at delivering technology over the past 20 years.

In the meantime, anybody who consumes media in the US can look forward to some further education on the relative merits of the Zune and the iPod this holiday season.

However, sometimes release groups find a way to remove these watermarks. An example can be found in the NFO of the Mission Impossible III release by SaGa. In the NFO SaGa thanks ORC, for helping them out with “de-dotting” the release.

Here’s an interesting email I received from a reader who actually worked for an anti-piracy company. Some good info, and useful tips and tricks that “might” keep pirates under the radar ;) .

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Thought I’d let you know how the authorities are able to track down where CAM, TS, TC, SCR, DVD SCR, etc. copies are from. In all cases, the individual copies are watermarked and then kept in a database for later comparison. These watermarks are developed and instituted either by the companies responsible for the film (i.e. Kodak) or the prints (i.e. Deluxe, Technicolor). Each has a different method, some more effective than others.

Here is a Wikipedia article about them:

Generally the CAP codes are more for film elements (i.e. CAM, TS, TC releases). For the disc and tape copies (i.e. SCR, DVD SCR) there is usually some form of watermarking combined with a time stamp or individual code of some sort.

These types of protection sometimes work and sometimes don’t. A lot of groups have experience with obfuscating them and (usually successfully) hiding where they got their copy from.

Fortunately most of the companies focusing on anti-piracy are not actively trying to target the groups themselves, leaving that task to the DOJ or FBI to handle. Because of this, most of the media attention and an overwhelming amount of the resources are dedicated to people who are not close to the scene at all, so a lot of these anti-piracy methods don’t really work very effectively.

Most of the attention is actually on users and first propagators on BitTorrent and eDonkey, so I’d actually recommend using various forms of protection such as PeerGuardian and generally staying on private trackers or at least the less popular ones (NTI being a good example). Also safe is jumping on hugely popular torrents once they reach critical mass. There are simply not enough resources for anti-piracy companies to track what 5000 seeders and 8000 leechers are doing all at once and gather data that will be usable in a court of law.

—

Another reader pointed me at the new anti-piracy watermark system that Philips has started to rollout. Philips successfully equipped over 1300 cinemas with their new system called “Cinefence”. CineFence watermarks are believed to be harder to erase by pirates, and contain the time, place and date of the recorded Film. Forensic marking of digital Films is now a mandatory requirement, as specified in the Digital Cinema System Specification

“The concern was high because it is a computer that controls an important infrastructure system, and if, for some reason, it caused it to fail, it would have disrupted service,” said Special Agent Jerri Williams of the FBI’s Philadelphia field office.

The Columbus Day weekend intrusion is the fourth recorded cyber-attack on a U.S. water supply in the past four years, according to the records of WaterISAC, an industry information sharing and analysis center with members from among more than 1,000 drinking water and wastewater systems in the United States.

The hacker operating on the Internet tapped into an employee’s laptop and then used an employee’s remote access as the point of entry and installed a virus and spyware in the water plant computer system. Following the intrusion, the plant changed all passwords to the system and eliminated home access to the system.

“This is very common…computer hackers try to gain control of systems to use them as a resource to distribute e-mails, pirated software. It does not appear that this particular computer was hacked into for any other reason,” said Special Agent Williams.

In one of three past attacks cited by WaterISAC, hackers used a Korea-based telecom to launch a denial of service attack on one water supply. In a second, they penetrated a top-level data control and acquisition system on a California irrigation district wastewater treatment plant. And in a third, they announced their entry into the computer system with a message, “I enter in your server like you in Iraq.”

“We are seeing an increase in reporting,” said WaterISAC Executive Director Diane Van De Hei. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, most of the incidents were managed locally, she said.

WaterISAC was established in December 2002. The private sector group uses “push” e-mail technology to distribute information from the Department of Homeland Security, EPA and other government agencies to more than 10,000 clients in the water utility sector.

According to a 2006 Computer Crime and Security Survey by the San Francisco-based Computer Security Institute, 52 percent of 616 survey respondents reported unauthorized use of their computer systems in the past 12 months.

In doing so, the ad companies hope not simply to get a return on their investment, but to better serve clients with a local presence and learn the ins and outs of a platform that some say could bring Google-like efficiency and accuracy to the $74 billion TV ad market.

Spot Runner plans to use the investment to quickly expand, such as extending its platform to both the radio and Internet markets, putting it squarely in competition with Google.

“We don’t want to miss this one the way we did when we said Google AdWords has nothing to do with us,” said Steve Hayden, vice chairman of WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather. “It has everything to do with us.”

Along with other investors, including CBS, IPG and WPP are contributing to a $40 million round of funding. Spot Runner, which has only operated since January, now has $60 million in backing. The company offers canned TV spots and a self-service system for planning and buying airtime, mostly from local cable companies.

“We know that some of the changes that have taken place in search and online media will apply in TV over time,” said Mark Read, director of strategy at WPP, the holding company’s digital strategy group. “All media will become digital, so there will be no division between new media and old media.”

Using Spot Runner’s system, clients choose from a library of thousands of stock TV ads, customized by adding voiceovers and local business information. Advertisers create a media plan based on the neighborhoods and demographics they are targeting. A four-week run can cost as little as $1,000 and be up and running in two weeks. Creative goes for $500. “That’s a very different price point than you’d see to have a large agency make a 30-second spot,” said Spot Runner CEO Nick Grouf.

Spot Runner is not alone in trying to make local TV advertising more like its Web counterpart. Outfits like Cheap TV Spots and National TV Spots both offer similar services. Other startups like Visible World hope to deliver household-level targeting of commercials. And a larger shadow looms from Google itself, which already has a self-service system for radio spots and has experimented with print media.

“Those have been the first ladder steps for us to move into terrestrial media,” said Pat Keane, head of sales strategy at Google.

While Spot Runner’s main business is serving small, independent companies, it has also been courting agencies in an attempt to include national brands with significant local outlets or franchises. It’s signed up to provide TV ads for Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and ERA customers. And national brand Orthoclear, the teeth-straightening treatment, is using the system to help thousands of dentists run spots touting the service.

A few WPP agencies already work with Spot Runner. JWT signed a partnership agreement with the company in July, and it has been at work crafting spots on behalf of client De Beers for local jewelry stores. Through Spot Runner’s platform, jewelers can choose from a half-dozen commercials touting diamond gifts, then customize them with local contact information.

And the company’s Ogilvy & Mather is using Spot Runner as a creative test bed for clients, something Hayden said could be a huge benefit, provided the upstart’s media placement system is not only robust enough to gain data on what is working, but agile enough to quickly shift creative to new markets. “If a double cheeseburger promotion works great in Cincinnati, will I be able to run that [in other markets] from my desktop sitting here at Ogilvy?” Hayden asked.

Neither IPG nor WPP agencies will get preferential pricing for their clients, said Grouf. Bant Breen, global director of strategic development and innovation at IPG, said the investment would help the holding company’s shops like Wahlstrom Group, which has clients that have strong local presences such as Ace Hardware and UPS. “We’re not going after the mom-and-pop market,” he said. “We’re more interested in figuring out how this is relevant for our franchise and co-op clients.”

While IPG and WPP execs believe Spot Runner has enormous potential, there are others who doubt it will ever move beyond cheap executions for unsophisticated businesses. Mitch Oscar, evp at Aegis Group’s Carat Digital, questions if a Google-type system can work in a visual medium. “How can they make it look terrific for so little money and not have the consumers say, ‘That looks inexpensive; I guess that guy doesn’t care?’” he said. Even the company’s targeting is not perfect, noted Tim Hanlon, svp of ventures at Publicis’ Denuo: “They’ve figured out the creative part of it, not the media-targeting part.”

If Spot Runner keeps its focus on building its platform and running successful campaigns, it will withstand the competitive pressure, said Roger Lee, general partner with Battery Ventures, a Spot Runner backer. “I don’t think it’s a winner-take-all market,” he said. “There’s a lot of room for big companies to participate and coexist.”

Grouf, who started and sold two previous Web businesses with fellow founder David Waxman, professes admiration for Google, which he calls “one of the most breathtaking businesses that we’ve ever seen.” But a key differentiator, according to Joe Ianniello, chief development officer at CBS: Spot Runner lets media companies set their prices, while Google’s model takes it out of their hands.

“We don’t want to just turn over our inventory to Google,” he said. “We want to get paid our fair share. We view this as an alternative.”

Drive Trust has been developed as a complementary platform for the security specifications of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and Seagate expects the platform result into a formal TCG storage specification that is scheduled for public release in early 2007. The company describes the approach as a “fully automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation,” that enables content owner’s software developers to take advantage of the drive’s data security features on their own terms.

Locking down data has become an increasingly important topic in a time when more and more data is exchanging hands and data theft is a growing concern. In addition to already existing encryption and copy protection mechanisms, securing data directly on the hard drive is an almost logical step. And according to Seagate, Drive Trust is easy to manage, as it “automatically protects all drive data, not just selected partitions or files, at all times, and its security functions operate independently of the hard drive, preserving the hard drive’s full performance.” Also the company claims that the technology, which is marketed as a “feature” of certain hard drives, does not require any security patches, updates or upgrades.

The first drive to offer Drive Trust is Seagate’s DB35 series, which is primarily used in digital video recorders. In the first quarter of 2007, Seagate will add a Drive Trust version of its 2.5″ Momentus 5400 FDE notebook drive.

As of now the impact of the technology is unclear as its use will largely depend on content owners and their ideas how to leverage Drive Trust. However, the fact that the technology is available first in a consumer electronics hard drive at least indicates that we will see DRM related uses before there will be any applications that will be focused on securing critical content on corporate notebooks.

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Now, the rumor forge is heating up again, thanks to an interview with Richard A. Knaak, author of three Diablo-based books–Diablo: Legacy of Blood (2001), Diablo: The Kingdom of Shadow (2002), and Diablo: Moon of the Spider (2006). Knaak has also written novels based on Warcraft and the Dungeon & Dragons Dragonlance spin-off. He is currently penning a series of novels featuring the classic fantasy character–and future massively multiplayer online role-playing game hero–Conan the Barbarian.

To promote his forthcoming Diablo book, Diablo: The Sin War: Book One: Birthright, Knaak spoke with Blizzplanet.com and took questions from its readers. However, the biggest bomb came from a site staffer going by the handle “Medievaldragon,” who casually asked if his latest book–the first of a trilogy–would “impact in the storyline of Diablo 3 the game.”

Knaak responded candidly, saying, “The ramifications here will be used for any future project…and I ain’t writing for a dead game. .” (Emoticon in the original.) Later, when asked by a reader about Diablo, he repeated his loaded words. “I am not writing for a dead world…but a world with dead,” said Knaak, adding, “‘Nuff said!

The official story: As it has in the past, Blizzard danced around any inquires about the status–or existence–of Diablo 3. “We love the Diablo universe and are definitely interested in returning to it at some point in the future,” a rep told GameSpot. “However, at this time, we’re wholly focused on completing the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft.”

Bogus or not bogus?: Not bogus that someday there will be a new Diablo game. But with the WOW expansion being delayed until 2007, it appears that Blizzard has its hands full at the moment.

When I start Windows, a dialogue box appears, which tells me that my Windows is not genuine. Please suggest a solution.

Varun Aggarwal

Microsoft is now becoming more advanced in its attack on pirated versions of Windows XP or Microsoft Office. The company is including a Windows Genuine Advantage security patch in the updates of Windows XP. This new patch produces pop-ups on the login screen and on the desktop explaining that this version of Windows XP is not genuine and the owner may be the victim of software counterfeiting.

To help determine whether the copy of Windows installed on your computer is genuine, please visit

http://www.microsoft.com/genuine. The Windows Validation Assistant performs a check on a user’s computer to determine if the Windows operating system installed on his/her computer was installed using a valid product key.

Depending on the result of the validation, a success or failure page is displayed.

If Windows XP-based computers that were installed by using a Volume Licence product key might

be marked as non-genuine, then follow this URL: and if

your Windows licence is OEM XP version, then refer to this URL:

http://forums.microsoft.com/Genuine/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=638811&SiteID=25

If your version of Windows XP is not genuine and does not pass the validation schemes, you will

not be able to download security patches from Windows Update, or install the latest version of

Internet Explorer 7 and other software.

Even though some of the cracks and workarounds (to bypass or remove WGA or Windows Genuine Advantage) are available on the Internet, it is strongly recommended to buy a legal version of Windows XP or Windows XP (Home or Pro) Edition licence kit. The Windows Genuine Advantage Kit for Windows XP will include a new 25-character Product Key and a Windows Product Key Update tool that will allow customers to convert their counterfeit copy to genuine Windows XP.

If you have a Legal copy of Windows XP but your computer still fails validation, please follow these steps:

Your computer may not be properly configured to allow the validation process to get completed. Login your system as administrator or a member of administrator group. First check the following link, Microsoft Genuine Advantage - Diagnostic Site

http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/diag/.

This will check your computer’s configuration and fix any problems that may exist. After checking for problems, you can click on the link to validate Windows. You may directly download and run the WGA Diagnostic Tool:http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52012

Another reason for validation failing may be the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool has been disabled.

Please follow the steps below to make sure the ActiveX is enabled:

Open Internet Explorer - Click Tools - Internet Options - Programs tab - Manage Add-ons button. Find the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool and click on it. Verify the Add-on is enabled, if it is not, then please Click Enable and Ok twice to exit back to Internet Explorer. Close Internet Explorer and reopen it. Now try to validate Windows again.

For more information, please refer Windows Genuine Advantage Problems and Solutions at these URLs:

http://www.pchell.com/support/windowsgenuineadvantage.shtml and

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/win_genuineadvantage

The 1st International Cybercrime Investigation Training Conference, held in 2005 by Interpol, identified a global lack of hi-tech training initiatives that would help harmonize both the knowledge and working methods of law enforcement agencies. EU enlargement has also been a major challenge, as many new member states have not had the same access to key training as police forces in countries such as the UK, Germany or France. In comments made to siliconrepublic.com Detective Inspector Paul Gillen of the Garda, who will run the new training courses in Ireland, has indicated that this was one of the major reasons behind the initiative. “Obviously, high-tech crime is a global phenomenon: evidence might be in one jurisdiction and the crime in another,” he said. “All investigators should have access to high-quality training and work on a level playing field.”

Both national and European bodies, including the European Commission, which is extremely keen to promote harmonized educational projects, will provide funding for the courses. The intermediate training course has been developed by the Garda in conjunction with University College Dublin, which already offers police officers a two-year part-time Masters program in forensic computing and cybercrime.