The music industry is likely to replace the copy protection (DRM) with digital watermarks.
Recently the worlds 4 main record companies have all started selling digital music without Digital Rights Management (DRM). Amazon’s MP3 service is the first company out offering MP3’s from all 4. But even though the DRM is gone it doesn’t mean the companies are opening the doors for unlimited copying.

That being said, there’s no real copy protection any more. But if you share your newly bought MP3 in a file sharing network (P2P) it’s not unlikely that the file can be tracked back to the initial buyer through a hidden number placed in a digital watermark inside the file.

According to Wired, none of them has taken it to this level yet. Sony only uses “anonymous” watermarks that only gives some information about the “spread”. Warner and EMI have not yet implemented watermarks. Attorney Fred Von Lohmann at Electronic Frontier Foundation says to Wired that anonymous watermarks may be used to filter content by the ISP’s, given the record industry gets their way.

Mitaka is an application (software) for visualizing theoretical, computational, and observational astronomical data, developed by the Four Dimensional Digital Universe (4D2U) project of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). Users can seamlessly navigate across the universe from Earth to the edges of the known universe.

Mitaka is optimized for 3D visualizations on multiple screens at the 4D2U theater in NAOJ’s Mitaka headquarters. However, it can also be used on a single Windows PC.

After reading the on-line tutorial for a few minutes, even my kids started exploring the universe. Fun and interesting was their response. Give it a try and download the latest release found a bit down on the front page. A few issues and suggestions are found in the FAQ.

Comedian/Film-maker Mark Malkoff’s New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

Mark moved in early morning Monday January 7th to the IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey and will stay for the week through Saturday January 12th. You can follow his daily routine on marklivesinikea.com.

Daniel Pistelli, the man behind NTCore.com, recently released an extremely useful Windows Vista management tool. If the following applies for you as well you should give it a go [download].

Vista4Experts is kind of a treat for computer experts who don’t want security center notifications, User Account Control dialogs, automatic Windows Defender scannings, automatic update installations (which cause you to reboot your system if you don’t react quickly enough). People who want MSDN (or google) set as default search engine in the Internet Explorer search bar, who want the start menu power button to shut down the system instead of hibernating it, etc. These and many more fixes are included in Vista4Experts. All of these changes can be discarded, enabled or reversed. Vista4Experts is the first expert utility of its kind and works on every platform.

It may reduce the security level of your Vista installation, but if you know what you are doing you will finally escape from all those annoying security alert boxes. Besides other applications probably keep the security (AV, Firewall, etc.). Best of all, it’s FREE (and comes with the standard “avoid lawsuit disclaimer”).

As some of you might have noticed I’ve been a bit slower than usual and not kept my daily post routine. Main reason for this being work on a new client website,  a new theme for WordPress and possibly a few new WordPress plugins.

The client site is done (single info page) and will be featured on my development site as soon as I get the clients approval. The new theme is currently available for preview on the same location.

Please consider it an early alpha release as I need to work heavily with the styling (CSS). However I’m quite pleased with the jQuery Accordion implementation found in the sidebar when browsing by date or category. Also the simple toggle effect when clicking the Archive link in the top menu seams useful (for now).

I would be happy to get some feedback on what you all think, and will release the code if anyone shows interest for the sidebar add-ons.