Watch DLTV online: Episode 165 episode 165

Ever want to see the inside of an AppleTV? You will on this episode. • Sanitize your hard drive? It's a good idea whether you'd donating old work machines for recycling, or giving your home PC to a charity. In fact, we'd say wiping your drive clean is critical before that old PC leaves your home or office. Doing it at work can keep you out of jail, or at least lawsuits. Think Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and who knows how many state laws. Wiping a hard drive before it leaves your home means now sharing your private information with strangers, whether it's banking info or those naughty pictures from Miami. • Is there a better free tool for wiping/sanitizing a hard drive than Darik's Boot 'n Nuke??? It's free, it can do a DOD 7 pass or Gutmann 35 pass wipe, will boot from the CD or floppy drive on just about anything... the only downside is waiting for it to run on large drives. If you're, say, disposing of dozen or hundreds of drives, degaussing or professional destruction is probably a more practical way to go. • Want to try a new tool for wiping a drive? Robert's curious about the Disc Drive Secure Erase tool from the Center For Magnetic Recording Research. The tool is all about the ATA "drive internal secure erase command." And a DOS boot disk. No, you can't run it from a command window in Vista!. • DOS isn't dead. It's at BootDisk.com • PS: Physical destruction of drives is still good, too! • Will Corsair's Flash Survivor GT survive Patrick's coffee, and a laundry machine and the city bus test torture test? Tune in on Thursday's show to find out if the premium USB thumb drive is worth the premium price. • The Mouse Jiggler: constant cursor movement to keep your PC from falling asleep. You could, of course, turn off the screen saver and sleep (if they aren't locked down on your machine). Just plug it in a USB port and instant cursor madness: it's like strapping a cat to your mouse: it just keeps moving in a high speed figure eight that makes your mouse unusable. How did this thing go viral for a billion clicks on Digg and sell out its first run? Oh... yeah... you can use it to prank folks. We've tried it on a half dozen machines, someday we hope to find the 'Slow Jiggler' setting so we can actually use the machine when this thing is installed. • What USB to IDE/SATA connector do you recommend? James, WiebeTech's ComboDock v4 is definitely the Cadillac, but they cost $100 to $150. We've had pretty good luck w/ a $20 Vantec CB-IUSB20 USB to IDE adapter we picked up at the local PC shop. (It even came with a 2.5 inch adapter for notebook drives.) • AppleTV + 160GB drive = four times the storage. You could DIY an Apple HD upgrade and spend 24 hours copying and formatting the new drive, not to mention spend lots of quality time in in a terminal window typing commands. Or you can pony up $249 and have Weaknees install a 160GB AppleTV Upgrade for you. (They can't send you the drive, or they'll run into legal difficulties with Apple. A shame, since it's takes about 5 minutes to install.) Or spend $549 for a new AppleTV with a 160GB drive pre-installed. Weaknees is known for their Tivo hard drive upgrade kits, we've had no problems so far with our AppleTV upgrade. (BTW, Systm Episode 7 has a stack of AppleTV hacks, including the verrrry long process to upgrade the drive. Patrick co-hosts for that episode, btw.) NEWS • Today is the 40th anniversary of Video Games... hooking up to your television. • Microsoft: Open Source Violates 235 Patents 45 for OpenOffice alone? Hmmmm. MS says they'd rather pursue licensing deals over legal action. Open Source leaders call it desperation. • Piracy is bad. But, if we're reading it right, The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007... sucks. Proposed by the US Attorney General, IPPA goes after harsher punishment for DMCA violations ('cause 10 million and up to 10 years in jail isn't enough). Intending, not committing, certain acts would be a punishable crime. Homeland Security should report to the RIAA. Shouldn't our governement be, uh, fighting terrorism or something? Maybe we're missing the fine points. Declan McCullagh's writeup on it at News.com is outstanding. It's dry, but you can read the entire proposal right here. MORE STUFF • Did you have trouble watching the show live? Don't feel bad. Everybody did, thanks to a routing problem betweeen our studio and Limelight, our CDN. We'll be trying a new system for delivering the show live shortly.

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