(Not only aiming at two targets with one blog – how economical is that? – but giving it a spurious biblical aura.)

This blog tends to the belief that ID is the personification of evil in (two-alphabetic-character form and in two repellent variants (Intelligent Design and National Identity Card) that we rant about with a pleasingly symmetrical regularity.

But the previous post here mentions, in passing, the differently demonic horrors emanating from its three-alphabetic-character rival for demonic rulership CSS.

We may be forced to form a new anti-css cult, dedicated to blaming all the ills of this world on ranndom initial pairs or triads.

Don’t think its only manifestation on the human plane is just the newly emergent life form CSS, able to resist any human efforts to make it place anything on a blog or webpage where you expect, in a remotely similar way at different resolutions on different browsers.

The cursed initials have meme-wormed their way into the wonderful world of copy protection.The Register said:

Buying a DVD and then copying it for use on your PSP, iPod or laptop could soon become impossible, if the DVD Copy Control Association gets its way…. The association wants to amend the licence underpinning the use of its DVD copy-protection technology, CSS (Content Scrambling System).

(see – the evil letters appear in another context :-))

The amendment would force, say, DVD playback software from displaying ripped content. It would also imply the use of software built into PCs and optical drives to prevent ripping software from saving an unscrambled copy of a disc’s contents for later playback on a device without a DVD drive, such as a PSP or an iPod.

The plan is that the DVD tech will only let you run something while it is physically present in the drive. This is already getting challenged by companies trying to make multiroom home cinemas. However as the Register points out, there is no way that crackers won’t have already got round it. )

Anyone spot in the market for a device manufacturer who takes this stuff into account? From the BBC today, when it refers to a (surprisingly modest) 61% of the population having admitted to crimes from a list of ten:

Presumably, that 61% would be higher still if the list had included a wider range of crimes, such as downloading music and copying software illegally.