Thinkcorps

CNet reports on the FCC’s approval of the broadcast flag proposal, which prevents cosumers from sharing ‘pirated’ copies of digital TV shows. This applies to digital TV and new equipment must be able to read the broadcast flag.

Apparently, you haven’t heard: I have a 1.6 Gigahertz processor in my PC —and I’m nothing but old news. I have 100+ Gigabytes of storage and 512Mbytes of RAM. And again, my equipment blows.

Bear with me as I gase into my crystal ball. Someone, probably in Finland or the Ukraine, is going to write a nice little Linux app which gets ported to Windows in 3 days and blogged and Slashdotted and then makes the New York Times which has crafted some oblique and not all that well reported angle on where did all the good TV go now that everyone is an Internet pirate? And this app is going to rip that broadcast flag right out of the data stream, perhaps even re-encoding the entire file, which just isn’t a big deal because that little application is built around a batch function, so I just crank it up, feed it the 12 new episodes of Smallville, CSI, or whatever else garbage I happen to have found that evening, and let it run ALL night.

Did I mention that I have Gigs of cycles and bytes to spare?

FCC moves to squash digital TV piracy online | CNET News.com