Month: April 2001

Games Domain reports that the DVD version of the Dungeons and Dragons movie will ship with a demo of Baldurs Gate II. Big deal. The real challenge would be to release a version of the D&D movie that was actually watchable.

A worldwide effort to eradicate polio by 2005 appears to be making great strides — since 1998 reported polio cases have dropped by 99 percent.

In 1988, 350,000 cases of polio were reported, but worldwide only 3,500 cases of the disease were reported, with all of those cases occurring in only 20 countries in Africa and Asia.

“Victory over the polio virus is within sight,” World Health Organization director-general Gro Harlem Bruntland told the Associated Press. Last year WHO managed to immunize 550 million children under the age of 5 against polio, but reaching that last 1 percent of cases may be difficult since they tend to occur in remote areas plagued by civil strife or in areas that will require massive vaccination efforts, such as in India, to ensure the disease is truly eradicated.

Still even with those obstacles to overcome, the WHO and other organizations are confident they can meet their goal of ridding the world of the disease by 2005.

Sources:

Polio eradication draws closer. The BBC, April 3, 2001.

U.N.: Worldwide polio eradication at 99 percent. The Associated Press, April 3, 2001.

When the Secure Digital Music Initiative conducted its much-publicized SDMI Challenge — which offered a cash reward for anyone who could crack its protection — a group of Princeton researchers claimed they had found away around SDMI copy protection but refused to enter their solutions in the challenge because they preferred to publish them academically instead.

Now the SDMI is suing, and for now the researchers are backing down, to prevent the researchers from presenting their findings. Of course it’s a bit late since the paper that SDMI doesn’t want presented was already published on numerous web sites.

The interesting thing about SDMI is that, based on what the Princeton researchers found, the SDMI system was even less sophisticated than even its biggest critics had thought. SDMI utilize a watermarking scheme and the researchers used relatively straightforward methods to remove the watermarks without seriously degrading the quality of the sound (as they put it, the sound does degrade, but no worse than the degradation caused by the presence of the watermark itself).

In fact the methods the Princeton researchers are so obvious that quite a few Slashdot posters on the topic seem to think that the SDMI intentionally included techniques that it doesn’t plan to use and knows would be broken (though it is difficult to fathom why they would do this given that music companies were already a bit nervous about whether or not SDMI would actually provide copy protection that was reasonably difficult to circumvent).

As the Princeton researchers sum it up, all such copy protection schemes are likely doomed,

Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering. Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization recently released the first of its three annual reports on the state of food shortages in sub-Sharan Africa. The annual reports are required since so many of the countries in this region perennially face food shortages. But why are these countries always running short of food this time of year? Lets look at the 16 countries cited in this years report for a possible pattern.

Here is a list of affected countries followed by the reasons the FAO gives for the existence of a food emergency,

• Angola – civil strive, population displacement
• Burundi – civil strife and insecurity
• Congo, Democratic Republic of – civil strife, internally displaced persons and refugees
• Congo, Republic of – past civil strife
• Eritrea – internally displaced persons, returnees and drought
• Ethiopia – drought, internally displaced persons
• Guinea – civil strife, population displacement
• Kenya – drought
• Liberia – past civil strife, shortage of inputs
• Madagascar – drought/cyclones
• Rwanda – drought in parts
• Sierra Leone – civil strife, population displacement
• Somalia – drought, civil strife
• Sudan – civil strive in the south, drought
• Tanzania – food deficits in several reasons due to drought
• Uganda – civil strife in parts, drought

So out of 16 countries facing shortages, in 12 of those civil strife and the inevitable refugees such strife creates are at least partly responsible for the food problems.

In Angola, there is an ongoing civil war with over 2.5 million internally displaced persons and rising. In Burundi, fighting between government and rebel forces has escalated in the past couple months with almost 400,000 internally displaced people within the country. Both the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo continue to be the focal point of a multi-country war that still has no end in sight. Eritrea and Ethiopia did finally reach an agreement to end hostilities between the two countries, but each country has hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons and crop production has yet to return to pre-war levels. Guinea is being drawn into the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, with guerillas attacking areas of the country that border those two nations. The situation in Somalia has actually improved significantly over the past year, but civil strife will still leave half a million people without enough food to eat. Sudan’s 40+ year civil war shows no sign of abating, and finally Tanzania has some regional problems of civil strife combined with two years in a row of lower than normal rainfall.

Overall, the FAO says that sub-Sahran Africa will require 2.8 million tons of total food aid in 2000-2001, a 5 percent increase over food aid levels it needed in 1999/2000.

Source:

Millions face food shortages in Africa. The BBC, April 9, 2001.

FAO/GIEWS: Africa Report No. 1, April 2001. Food and Agricultural Organization, April 2001.

ZDNet has a story about a bizarre decision by Microsoft. Basically, if you want to use their upcoming Media Player 8, you’re going to have to upgrade to Windows XP. My question is who the heck in their right mind would want a copy of Media Player 8?

All the Media Player programs that I’ve used are excessive resource hogs (the version shipped with Windows Me literally makes working on my 400mhz laptop impossible if it accidentally gets invoked) combined with an interface that is so bad that my cat could probably put a better one together.

I don’t care if they bundle it, I just hope MS leaves a way to uninstall it.