News about what is happening in technology today!

From a developer’s blog, Windows Vista will no longer support DVD-ROM drives that do not handle region coding in hardware (RPC1 drives) - thus preventing playback of DVDs that are region/CSS encoded with those drives. Not a big problem, as RPC1 drives haven’t been officially manufactured since 2000 (and Microsoft claims their drives are all broken), but for those with hacked drives (RPC2 with RPC1 firmware), or move the RPC1 drive to new computers, well, no more DVD movies for you!

The Chinese government has shut down nearly 600 pornographic web sites, and arrested over 200 people for distributing “obscene” content. The Chinese government has also started performing covert surveillance of mobile phone text messages in order to crack down on banking fraud and prostitution organized and perpetrated with text messages. Ars Technica has the story: ‘With more than 100 million Internet users, China has the second largest population of web content consumers after the United States. Although the Chinese government promotes web use for business, education, and government activity, the communist regime has committed its resources to crushing web sites that challenge government authority, or distribute content that the government considers to be detrimental to society’

Because of the discrepency between an ephemeris second (the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time) and the second of atomic time (the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom), we’re left with more than leap years. In order to ensure that the the atomic time and civil stay coordinated, “Civil time is occasionally adjusted by one second increments to ensure that the difference between a uniform time scale defined by atomic clocks does not differ from the Earth’s rotational time by more than 0.9 seconds.”

After less than a four days after original mailing list posting there are reports about a new Instant Messaging worm exploiting unpatched Windows Metafile vulnerability. This worm is using MSN to spread, reports Viruslist.com.

ZDNet is reporting on another blockbuster year for online shopping. Online shopping was up almost 30 percent over last year.” From the article: ” Clothing was the top seller in terms of dollar amount, at $5.3 billion total, up 42 percent from last year’s revenue, the report said. Computer hardware and peripherals showed the most growth, 126 percent, at $4.8 billion. Consumer electronics was the second fastest growing category, garnering $4.8 billion, up 109 percent. People spent $3 billion on books online, up 66 percent, and $2.3 billion on products in the toys/video games category of hardware and software, a drop of 9 percent from last year, the study found.