The web is packed with video content, and sometimes you want to save it to your PC. A few sites (like the excellent educational TED.com) actually offer their videos as ZIP files so you can grab them at will, but others discourage the practice. In some cases it’s that pesky copyright issue, while in others I suspect they just don’t want to lose control of the media.

Many applications are available to help you grab video from these sites. One of the easiest to obtain is Download Helper, which is a free Firefox tool that can capture from many well known sites. It’s aware of many URLs and basically knows where it’ll work. Once installed, an icon in the Firefox toolbar will highlight itself whenever you’re visiting a site with grabbable (is that a word?) video.

A friend tells me he found a batch file that will allow the use of another free tool known as ffmpeg to capture a number of video formats. Sometimes it works well, but in other cases the captured video is full of artifacts (i.e. bits of the frame that are missing data or incorrectly rendered).

In other cases (Hulu is a good example) it’s very difficult to capture video. It also may be illegal, since the material on this and various TV network websites is copyrighted. If they wanted you to capture it, they’d provide a mechanism on the site itself. This said, you can apparently grab at least Hulu content using the commercial package Replay Media Catcher ($39.95 from Applian Software).

As you can see, many options are available and I’m sure there are many more I’ve not mentioned. Capture away. Just remember to be aware of legal and ethical issues around this sort of activity — recall that it’s illegal to sit in a movie theater capturing a film using a hand-held video camera, for instance. Capturing for personal use probably won’t cause a problem, but don’t be stupid or you might find humorless people in black suits standing at your door. A free copy of the latest episode of “House” just isn’t worth spending time in jail.

I know a number of people who enjoy ripping their DVDs into MP4 or some other format so they can store them on their PC hard drives. One of the ongoing complaints I hear from them is the amount of time required to re-encode a movie into a format they can actually store on disk. Another is that they really don’t care about many of the DVD “extras” (language options, etc.) and hate the fact that they’re stuck with storing this info on disk as well.

Happily, one just stumbled across a package called DVD2One, which allows users to “make a movie-only or full disk copy of your DVD for personal use on a single DVD-Recordable.” It does so without requiring the intermediate re-encoding everyone hates, and is available both for Windows and Mac.

If the company’s promotional material is accurate, this little package is a user’s dream come true. Not only can it make movie-only copies, but also provides a “join mode” that lets you stitch (for example) multiple episodes of a TV show together, or even parts of a movie that were split between multiple DVDs in the original packaging.

It also provides the ability to make full-disk (e.g. bit-by-bit) copies of a DVD, so you can copy your masters to cheap DVD-R discs and store the masters away for safekeeping. Obviously no one should use this software to make illegal copies (pirates certainly use commercial grade multi-disc duplicators anyway since they’re in a high-volume business), but having a duplicate is handy if you’re traveling or just don’t want to risk your pristine commercial copy of some prized movie.

As a handy plus, you can use it to copy your audio collection to DVD media.

The package is apparently composed of all new code — the developers say it’s not based on old software or existing open-source libraries. It’s also relatively fast, and is “multi-processor, multi-core and multi-computer (grid) compatible” so apparently it’s able to use multithreading to speed up processing. Not a bad deal overall at 40 Euros (about $50 at the exchange rate in place when this was written).

I read a statistic several months ago suggesting that literally millions of laptops are stolen or lost every year. Just imagine how many machines have been left in subways, taxis, airports, and (I blame caffeine) coffee shops. There’s probably the equivalent processing power of several supercomputers sitting in lost-and-found bins all over the planet. And, of course, many of those machines end up stolen — either intentionally or just because whoever found them decided not to contact the original owner.

Interestingly, there are ways to track down lost machines. First we had Lo-Jacks for cars. A version for computers came out a few years ago, and now we have Frontdoor Software’s “Retriever” newly released recovery service, which is even more interesting in a way.

Basically, both packages use IP addresses in the same way advertisers do these days — i.e. by tracing the rough location of whatever address the machine is connected to after being stolen. The software connects to the network via WiFi (or, if the thief is dumb, via a standard hardwired connection) and figures out what network it’s on. In many cases it’s possible to trace an address to a specific building.

The Retriever is interesting because it allows the legitimate owner to access and interact with the stolen machine remotely. Not only can you get an idea where the system has ended up, but you can literally talk to the thief (or Samaritan-to-be in need of motivation to return the lost system). According to a review of the product, once you’ve determined the system is missing you can log into the company’s web site and “check a box indicating the computer is missing. Now during start-up, a big yellow and red banner appears on the screen, boldly declaring the laptop lost or stolen. This message is set to reappear every 30 seconds, no matter how many times the thief closes the window.” It’s like legitimized nagware on steroids.

The latest version can be even more aggressive, since it allows you to tell the machine to whine about being stolen. Apparently under the new version, “when the ’stolen’ screen pops up, the laptop cries for help. Use a canned message (’Help, this laptop is reported lost or stolen. If you are not my owner, please report me now.’) or record your own.”

Just imagine the possibilities. You may not get your machine back, and a thief could obviously reformat the hard drive to remove the software. But in the meantime, you can let off some richly deserved steam.

The technology available to the typical Internet user today would be so astounding to our ancestors as to be unbelievable. A great example of this is our ability to navigate, and the amount of sheer geographical data that’s at the tips of our fingers. Next time you fire up your TomTom or Garmin GPS, think about what life would be like without it. Try navigating an unfamiliar place using a paper map or (my preferred method) by the seat of your pants. Then turn on the GPS once you’re well and truly lost to see how wrong you went.

Google Earth is another example. Can you imagine what someone would have said a decade or two ago if you’d told them that in the very near future anyone with a PC and network connection could view high resolution photos and maps of nearly the entire planet with the click of a mouse? Such high resolution maps have already been used to find a number of previously unknown sites on the Earth’s surface, including a lost Roman villa and “a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species.” In fact as early as 1992 researchers had used satellite imagery to find the lost city of Ubar in Oman.

So why shouldn’t this type of technology help us find Atlantis?

That’s what some people thought they’d discovered when they looked at a particularly suspicious area of seabed via Google Earth last week, anyway. Those interestingly perpendicular lines do look somewhat human-created, after all. As it turns out though, it’s just an artifact of the survey of that particular area (ships performing this work steam in a grid pattern in order to map the sea floor). This isn’t unusual. Such artifacts often appear in photographs or reproductions, and have been the source of unwarranted speculation in the past by people who should have enough sense to know better.

This little faux pas shouldn’t dissuade others from perusing these maps for interesting features on the Earth’s surface. You have access to unprecedented levels of information — vast quantities never before available to any previous generation, in fact. Use it well.

“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” That’s what my Dad (and probably every other Dad in the US) told me when I was a kid. Work with what you have, try to make the best of it, but keep going. It’s good advice, and definitely better than adopting a gloom-and-doom attitude.

The current economic downturn is a great case in point, and numerous entrepreneurs have taken advantage of it to start businesses geared specifically to capitalize on the poor economy. No, I’m not talking about “cash for gold” places or companies selling dubious anti-foreclosure advice — instead I’m thinking about sites like TellOnU and their newly announced website widgets.

Probably the most interesting of the current widget crop is the Layoff Tracker, which you can install on your website or even (apparently) a desktop system. It provides semi-realtime updates on companies that have laid off employees. The downside to this is that you might find out your employer is getting ready to dump hundreds of people even before your boss calls you in to that “important all-hands meeting” that no one knew about until 5 minutes ago.

This is a pretty cool idea, and it’s one that’s bound to make some money. The application itself is probably not really even that difficult — I suspect the author is just aggregating numbers from news stories published on various business-related websites and totaling up the figures. This is no different from websites that track stories about various countries, diseases, or political events; it’s just a bit more depressing. Yet trendy.

So if you’re an out-of-work (or soon to be) developer, start thinking about interesting and potentially lucrative concepts related to the downturn. Capitalizing on tragedy is nothing new, and being proactive in the face of tragedy is probably a lot more useful than sitting at home playing Xbox games.

Maybe it’s time someone wrote a Plummet Potential Plotter that judges the relative chances various corporate executives will be seen moving in a negative vertical trajectory outside their own office buildings. Remember, you heard it here first.

In an interesting announcement during a major economic downturn, Microsoft announced last week that it’s opening a series of retail stores in order to push more of its consumer-grade products (e.g. the Zune and Xbox) as well as Windows-oriented products. Is Redmond taking a page from Apple’s playbook by opening its own branded outlets, or is something else afoot?

I suspect it’s a combination of both. Apple’s stores have been wildly successful (it seems like every time I walk past one, it’s filled with shoppers). They’re excellent venues for impulse purchases. Someone wanders past an Apple store while buying jeans in a mall, sees the latest iPod or even a MacBook, and ends up carrying one home. But Apple has the advantage of owning both its OS and its hardware. Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn’t have a PC to call its own. Will the stores carry Dell PCs alongside other brands, as big-box stores like Best Buy and the now-defunct CompUSA have done?

One thing these stores would do for Redmond is provide better control over PC specifications. If only PCs that were vetted as fully Windows compliant were sold, it might help eliminate some of the problems faced by consumers (and by Microsoft) when picking a PC/OS combination. By selling pre-vetted machines Microsoft might avoid lots of annoyed calls from consumers who got halfway through an installation only to encounter a hardware compatibility issue.

Retail outlets might also allow better control over all the nagware and bloatware often found on typical PCs (and which most people invariably hate). And of course each in-store PC sale would put a few dollars in Microsoft’s pocket. It’s business, after all.

Thing is, opening retail stores is a tricky business — and it’s a step Microsoft has never taken before, so it’s new ground for them. One motivation is obvious: Apple is gaining ground in terms of machines sold, while Windows sales are falling. According to the article, last December “Apple neared 10 percent of personal computer sales while Windows lost a full percentage point of share for the second month in a row.”

My impression is that the boys in Redmond see the writing on the wall. Between Linux and Apple, their market share is in danger and falling more all the time. Vista hurt the company’s street cred, and they can’t afford another mistake. Retail stores might be expensive to open and maintain, but they may just provide more consumer confidence and thereby help sales. Or they could cost the company a bundle without providing any real benefit. Which will it be?

One of the consequences of the Internet revolution is social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, where users can share huge amounts of (often highly personal) data. Unlike old-style “personal web sites” where users were in complete control of their own content, social networking sites are hosted by third parties who deal with things like backups, archiving of data, and so forth. One of the most obvious questions about such sites is: do you still own the data after you’ve posted it, or does it become the property of the site?

In general, the first question is answered by the Terms of Service (ToS) agreement you probably ignored when you signed up for the site. Most social networking sites state pretty explicitly that users continue to own data they’ve posted and don’t surrender any rights by making the information public. Thus it was interesting last week when a storm of outrage erupted over Facebook’s recent change to its ToS agreement.

The problem appears to have been the legalese phrasing of the new terms, which seemed to indicate that Facebook was taking ownership of any data posted to the site. As you can imagine, users took serious exception to this and apparently bombarded the site with complaints. No one apparently noticed the change (does anyone ever read ToS agreements that are more than 10 words long?) until a blog called The Consumerist broke the story with a posting entitled “Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: ‘We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.’”

Needless to say, Facebook has since backtracked on its position and is reverting to its older (and apparently less legalese-infected) ToS.

Personally, I doubt the company ever intended to claim ownership of user data. Given today’s intellectual property rights debates, attempting to do so probably would have driven away a huge percentage of its user base. And just why would any company want to assert ownership over users’ vacation photos, personal musings, and diary entries? What would be the point?

This said, it might be a good idea to read those ToS agreements before signing up blindly for access to any site. Unless you do, you’ve no idea what rights you might be signing away.

For years researchers have been looking for new and improved ways to manage system authentication. The standard login/password paradigm has been with us since the early days of computing, and really isn’t that secure. It also doesn’t guarantee “who you are” when you log in — instead it relies on “what you know” (the login and password). Anyone can steal those pieces of data and impersonate you.

One of the Big New Things in authentication has been biometrics, which involves technologies like fingerprint and retina scanners, as well as facial recognition software. The latter started showing up on certain laptops several years back, and was touted by vendors as practically unbreakable.

Oops. Not so much, as it turns out.

Today it was announced that Vietnamese researchers broke facial recognition as implemented in Dell, ASUS, and Lenovo laptops by the simple expedient of…showing the system a photo of an authorized user. They broke it again, just as easily, by “showing the camera pictures of other people’s faces after playing around with light and shade settings.”

You’d think someone would have tested this before the product was released into the general market.

The researcher who discovered the vulnerability has flatly stated that “there is no way to fix this vulnerability. ASUS, Lenovo, and Toshiba have to remove this function from all the models of their laptops…” It does sound that way, but other labs still need to confirm the system is that easy to defeat before millions of laptops are recalled.

If this finding is confirmed, I suspect lawsuits will follow. All those laptops were purchased under the assumption the biometric system had been tested rigorously under varying conditions, and companies were certainly led to believe the facial recognition authentication system provided increased data security in the field. Apparently it does not, but I guess this isn’t too surprising.

The Mythbusters showed it was possible to fool a fingerprint scanner a few years back, so why should facial recognition be any different?

While there’s been a lot of positive buzz about Windows 7 lately — some of which has emanated from these very pages — it turns out there are some decidedly unfriendly aspects as well. Possibly the most Machiavellian and downright unfriendly one I’ve heard of so far is the presence of very restrictive DRM (Digital Rights Management) related components, obviously designed to help media companies keep a firm leash on distribution. Who’d have thought such a thing could happen?

The story, as I’ve heard it so far, is that “Windows 7 allows application developers to write DRM that bypasses your firewall, refuses to let you modify or disable DLLs, and to block you from mixing your audio inputs (to prevent you from recapturing DRM’ed music, presumably).” Wow. Talk about spyware, zombie networks, and other evil software all you want…here’s Windows itself allowing legitimate (and I use that word with caution) software vendors to alter system settings without a user’s knowledge.

The objectives are obvious: media companies want total control over distribution of their works, and Microsoft is aiding and abetting that desire by adding hooks to the OS. Plus, they’re helping companies force users to allow applications free access to the network in order to verify licensing is in order. As an example: “Win7 allows programs like Photoshop to insert themselves stealthily into your firewall exception list.” Don’t want to register your copy (and thereby receive junk mail from Adobe)? Too bad.

Or is this all just paranoia and Microsoft-bashing? According to the discussion on Slashdot, all the above is “one user’s (not yet duplicated, AFAIK) reported experience, with no screenshots or other supporting evidence.” Did the user in question jump the gun, or does Windows 7 really contain some truly nefarious and Draconian new features? For now, the jury’s still out. But you can bet more users will re-test this in an effort to find out for certain. If it’s true, I suspect lots of people who know better will abandon the OS altogether. If not, this little incident will show how a premature assertion by one person on a major Internet forum can cause a lot of unnecessary and pointless worry.

If you have a newer US passport, you probably know it’s been embedded with an RFID (Radio Frequency ID) chip containing a unique identifier keyed to your personal data. Many credit cards, drivers’ licenses, and other ID paraphernalia also contain RFID chips to speed identification and (allegedly) lower the possibility of fraud or unauthorized duplication. Like the old “hologram on credit cards” idea, it was thought too difficult for fraudsters to obtain equipment capable of overcoming these measures.

As usual, the experts (and the governments) were wrong. A researcher has managed to sniff and clone RFID data from passports, drivers’ licenses, and other cards using off-the-shelf equipment that costs less than $250. And he did it in his spare time. As a test, he managed to grab 2 passports with the device while cruising the streets of San Francisco for 20 minutes.

Mind, these aren’t the standard-sized US passports most travelers are used to seeing. Instead, they’re special use alternatives and “about 750,000 people have applied for the passport cards, which are credit card-sized alternatives to passports for travel between the US and Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, and Bermuda.” Plus, only 2 states are using the “EDL” or Enhanced Drivers’ License units at present.

To show how easy the process was, the researcher’s device is just a laptop, RFID scanner and antenna. To this he added easy-to-write software that he developed. This application “continuously prompts the RFID reader to look for tags and logs the serial number each time one is detected.” Adding insult to injury, “he bought most of the gear via auctions listed on eBay.” It “a range of about 30 feet, making it ideal for discretely skimming the EDL and passport card tags of people who pass by his vehicle.” There’s little difference between this and skimming credit card data from a hacked ATM.

I really don’t know when governments will figure out that they need better technologists and solid peer review of new systems prior to deployment. As it is, they’ve exposed 750,000 unwitting citizens (at least) to identity theft because officials didn’t want to believe the new system could be hacked. But any system can be hacked, as any hacker can tell you. All it takes is talent, will, and a willingness to challenge assumptions.