News about what is happening in technology today!

We have received reports that certain XBOX 360 consoles have caused damage to GameFly videogames. Unfortunately, we have been notified that you recently returned a damaged XBOX 360 game. As a precaution, we have removed all XBOX 360 games from your GameQ. Please contact Microsoft at 1-800-4MY-XBOX. Please do not rent XBOX 360 games until you have resolved this issue. In the future, should GameFly receive XBOX 360 games from you that have been damaged, you will be charged a replacement fee.

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Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it’s transferred from DVD to VHS tape. The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras with balloons, lasers and infrared devices. And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded.

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The Netherlands - Reports from a game console enthusiast site, apparently verified by independent members of its forum just before Christmas, state that Microsoft distributed to retailers who display Xbox 360 consoles in their store kiosks, a self-booting playable demo disc without incorporating the company’s usual security protection. As a result, .ISO binary images of the disc can be made, redistributed, burned to CD-R media, and played from those replicated discs.

While such an inadvertent release poses no immediate threat to Xbox 360 commercial products, since none were included with the kiosk demo, the existence of a non-secure disc whose binary image can be run from ordinary media, could expedite the efforts of individuals seeking to discover the secrets of Xbox 360’s file system.

A copy of the .ISO image from the kiosk demo disc was immediately distributed via a Usenet newsgroup, by “Team PI Coder” - the same Dutch group responsible for extracting .ISO images from commercial discs, and distributing those images over the newsgroup over the holidays. Although the copied commercial images, when burned to CD-R, cannot be played on an Xbox 360 console, their contents can be examined on an ordinary Windows computer.

An information file accompanying the kiosk demo image contains this rather non-cryptic message: “It seems Microsoft was in such a hurry to get this stuff out that they forgot to set the media protection on this disc. This leaves hackers with the possibility [sic] to hack around with this disc that load from a normal DVDR5 backup!… We hope this encourages all hackers, coders and crackers out there to take up the challenge. Enjoy!” The message contradicts statements by defenders of the practice who say the team is merely practicing its rights to tinker with its own equipment.

Within a day of the Team PI kiosk disc posting, other members of the Usenet newsgroup posted what they claim to be code fragments that make copied CD-R discs self-booting from the Xbox 360 console, though subsequent posts indicate those fragments to be non-functional.

HONG KONG (AFX) - Sony BMG Music Entertainment has tentatively settled at least 15 consumer class actions brought against the music company over its use of copy-protection software on CDs, the Wall Street Journal said.

In its online edition, the newspaper said the deal offers consumers a copy of the CD without the software or the CD contents by digital download and other compensation depending on the type of software that was on their CD.

The paper cited Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which brought three of the lawsuits involved in the tentative settlement as saying: ‘We think it’s a good settlement for people who bought the discs’.

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