hack

Making (illegal) backup copies of movies you purchase on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs may have just gotten a little easier. Just a month after the first HD-DVD rips began showing up online, it looks like members of the Doom9 forums have found the holy grail of DRM stripping: a universal processing key used by every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc. Up until now, the only way to get past the AACS copy protection was to find a specific key for each individual movie you were trying to extract.

In other words, ripping a high definition disc just became almost as easy as ripping a DVD. In the short term, you can probably expect to see an explosion in high definition films torrents available online. In the long run, we can only hope someone will wrap this hack into a nice little GUI and create an easy high-definition disc backup utility that anyone can use.

Last night, Stephen Colbert devoted his popular Colbert Report segment "The Wørd" to everyone's favorite site for questionable research, Wikipedia. The word for the day was "Wikiality", citing that, due to the site's format, any assertion can become fact if enough of the site's users agreed with it.

To prove his point, he encouraged viewers to edit entries about elephants with the absurd statement that the population of elephants in the world has tripled in the last six months. Indeed, such an edit -- as well as one Stephen said he'd make about him saying Oregon was "Idaho's Portugal" -- were found under an account named "Stephencolbert" around the time the show was taped. As a result, the Wikipedia admins have protected a bunch of elephant-related pages and blocked the "Stephencolbert" account until they can verify that it was actually Stephen (or his producers) making those edits (I guess if it's him, it's funny. If it's not, it's vandalism).

For those who are curious about the segment, the funny video is on YouTube. You can see it after the jump.

[via Bloglines]

All right, kiddies, let's continue our review of Andre Braugher's television shows in preparation for his new show, Thief, which premieres on FX laster this week. As we mentioned, after Braugher left NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street, he headed for New England and donned the role of Dr. Ben Gideon on ABC's Gideon's Crossing. While that show was a critical success it only lasted one season.

He returned to series television again in 2002, this time co-starring with David Morse (St. Elsewhere) on the CBS drama Hack. In the series Morse played Mike Olshansky, a disgraced former Philadelphia police officer who now drove a taxi while attempting to rebuild his life. Braugher played his friend and former partner, Marcellus Washington, who was still on the force.