Blu-ray price hike.

According to an article at the SMH, the price of Blu-ray players has gone up 5% since the announcement that Blu-ray won the format wars.

To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised it isn't the discs themselves not only for royalties for other companies to make, but also for the movies they come out on (ie, hikes on two seperate fronts).

This hike in players isn't surprising. No more competition from another format, so manufacturers can afford to charge more for the product now as they're only competing against other manufacturers of the same format.

Source: SMH.

DDoS's make up 2% of all traffic in the tubes.

One out of every 50 packets on the internet is malicious junk intended simply to clog the tubes, according to a high level traffic analysis by Arbor Networks.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks or DDoSes aim to bring a site down by bombarding it with fake requests for a web page or image. It's like having 1,000 people continually crank calling a company -- the real customers can't get through.

Arbor now says those attacks account for about two percent of internet traffic, with peaks of up to five percent.

Some DDoSes are spurred by online grudges, such as the ones that occasionally target the anti-phishing site CastleCops or the large one launched against Estonian targets by Russian nationalists last year. Others are launched by cyber-criminals as part of an extortion attempt against an online retailer.

Plagerised from: Threat Level.

You can't help but laugh.

Sony, infamous for their proprietry formats, DRM, rootkits, and coming down VERY hard on anyone who doesn't use their products exactly the way they demand (including plugging a PS3 in to a powerboard), have been caught out as being the hypocrits you'd expect them to be.

PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev's products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG's assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG's servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG's computers could be pirated.

Comedy gold I tells ya.

Source: Ars Technica.