Friends of Fair Use, rejoice: it appears that the encryption on high-def movies, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has been broken.Consumer content encryption is a fool’s gameThis looks like a war the movie industry can’t win.

This past weekend a series of posts from some of the more influential bloggers prompted me to ask the question: do we trust Google? Results of our spot poll indicated that at least our readers were almost evenly split into three camps - those who trust the company, a third who are smart enough not to trust any corporation, and a third who view them as the new Microsoft, and hence don’t trust them.

Happy new year, folks!

Infomania consists of Messaging Overload and Distractions. So far I’ve discussed only the former in these posts; time to look at the latter, because the productivity damage caused by Distractions and Interruptions may be less obvious than an overflowing Inbox but can actually be more severe.

By distractions I mean those unplanned micro-events that cause the knowledge worker to stop whatever they were doing: the phone ringing, an Instant Message chiming, an on-screen alert heralding an incoming email, a coworker popping into the cubicle to chat… the causes are many, but the impact is the same: you stop what your brain was engaged in and have it go do something else.

Some music industry executives are finally figuring out that their Digital Rights Management (DRM) strategies are anything but strategic, unless you count choking the life out of your business a strategy. Among the many predictions for 2007, Reuters thinks that the music majors will get the message and the DRM walls will start to crumble. It kind of makes me a little sad - I’ve always told newspapers and broadcast to not feel so bad about things because it could be worse: At least they’re not in the music industry, which has mangled every single digital move since the appearance of Napster. Fun fact: The uber cheesy ringtone market accounts for more than half of the current digital revenue stream for the music industry. Wait, make that a scary fact. How low-fi is that?

Over the past few days, I've enjoyed reading lists of tech predictions for 2007. Some favorites include Mashable, R/W Web, Ypulse, Web+, Lynetter's predictions and Jason Caplain's series of VC Predictions. A bunch of these lists include predictions about how social networking will change in 2007. Some I agreed with, some I didn't - so I figured I'd contribute my own thoughts on what 2007 might hold for the SNS space.

Over the holidays I had a chance to talk to some of my old compadres from the XML team at Microsoft and we got to talking about the JSON as an alternative to XML. I concluded that there are a small number of key reasons that JSON is now more attractive than XML for kinds of data interchange that powers Web-based mashups and Web gadgets widgets. Expect a series of posts on this later today.

Yet another massive U.S. government database -- OneDOJ:

The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, according to Justice officials.

The system, known as "OneDOJ," already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

January is always a fun month -- first with the superlarge, large, large CES shindig in Las Vegas for all things electronic (and more) and Macworld 2007 in San Francisco for all things Apple.

Fedora Legacy, a project to provide long-term support for Red Hat’s Fedora version of Linux is closing its doors.Red Hat offers two versions of Linux, but only Red Hat Enterprise Linux come with long-term support.

Some call it Commercial Open Source. Others Professional Open Source. Whichever way you call it, it's all about leveraging an Open Source software development process for the benefits of a for-profit business and the customers it serves. But because Open Source shares roots with the Free Software movement, defining commonly-acceptable terms for Commercial Open Source has proven to be a challenge. Philosophical pursuits get in the way of business, and lack of proper due diligence can lead even the most respectable players in the field to fall into the trap of disinformation. The question of what makes an acceptable use of the term Open Source for a capitalistic venture is not new, but it has become a fairly complex one over time, as best illustrated in this well-researched article from David Berlind. Following Intalio's recent announcements related to Open Source, some questions have been raised regarding the legitimacy of our claims. Here is an attempt at giving an answer and moving the discussion forward. [Continue...]

Quintura For Kids launched just before the holiday rush to offer children a new way to search the web. Similar to the adult version of the Quintura visual search product, Quintura for Kids displays search results in addition to a keyword tag cloud. Quintura for Kids also offers children five pre-configured quick search categories (animals, games, music, TV and science). Quintura for Kids is powered by the Yahoo Kids search index, which ensures that the search results presented are suitable for children.

Community. Wisdom of Crowds. Collective Intelligence. The new emphasis on net-enabled collaboration is all goodness and light until somebody gets an eye I poked out. Is it merely a coincidence that Apple, run by (as James Gosling put it) "a dictator with good taste" leads the way in tech design, while risk-averse companies using design-by-committee (or consensus) are churning out bland, me-too, incremental tweaks to existing products? And if that's true about companies, why do we think consensus will work on an even larger scale with "users" in Web 2.0?

The secret may be to to be a messy extrovert who had a business catering to dog walkers in high school. Or at least to say you are. The New York Times has an interesting article on how Google evaluates interviewees.

Apple released a developer beta version of Dashcode, a widget development environment included in its upcoming Leopard operating system. The preview software is available for Tiger until July. (via Brent Simmons)