Real Networks, the company behind the popular RealPlayer® and the Rhapsody music service, has just announced RealDVD, a program that lets you “legally” save the contents of protected DVDs to a PC hard drive.
Once movies have been copied to your PC, you can restrict access based on the MPAA rating such as PG-13, PG or G.  With the ratings turned on, kids can only watch movies at or below their rating (kids allowed to watch PG-13 could also watch a G movie) but parents can watch whatever they want by entering a password.
This is the first DVD ripping program from a well known U.S. company that can handle protected commercial DVDs.  Hollywood studies put encryption codes on almost all commercial movies to prevent copying and, until now, respected software companies avoided letting people get around those codes.

There have long been workarounds.  For example, DVD X Copy from 321 Studios allowed PC users to make backup copies of DVDs. 321 was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and ultimately closed up shop after its product was found to be in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). Similar programs are still floating aroudnd the Internet. PC Magazine recently did a round-up of DVD ripping programs.
I’ve been testing a pre-release of RealDVD and it pretty much works as advertised. I copied several movies from my DVD collection to my PC’s hard drive and, after putting the original DVDs back on my shelf, was able to play the movies on my PC.  By recording to an external drive, I was able to watch the movies on both my desktop and laptop.
For families, having movies on a PC hard drive could be very convenient, especially if you have children who love to watch movies over and over.  By putting them on the drive, your kids don’t have to fiddle with DVDs and you don’t have to worry about the discs being damaged. And the ability to restrict kids to certain ratings means that the adults in the family can still have age-appropriate movies in their collection while preventing kids from watching them.

by Larry Magid

Street view of home with bedroom window

As if the TV series “To Catch a Predator” wasn’t enough paranoia, now there’s a campaign to protect our children against predators who use Google Street View.

I admit, there may be some privacy concerns as a result of Google taking pictures of homes and businesses around the country but StopInternetPredators.org’s “campaign to highlight child safety concerns over Google’s ‘Street View’ strikes me as absurd. The organization, which is headed by Stacie D. Rumenap, former Deputy Director for the American Conservative Union, argues that Google Street View “can be misused by child predators to target children.”

In a video that appears on the site, Rumenap says that it’s “frighteningly simple” for anyone “to find out detailed photographic information about you and your family.” The video and accompanying text make it seems as if Google Street View is a predator’s best friend for targeting children for abuse. Rumenap calls it “an entirely new threat to our families and children” that “makes it simple to map the most likely route your child walks to school… view entrances to community parks and even find the location of your family’s bedroom windows.” She wants people to “urge local leaders to ban Street View in your neighborhood until the technology is safeguarded.” She does, however, admit that “banning Street View might not safeguard our children 100% from child predators.” › Continue reading…