Development of the new LNX-BBC is going pretty well, thanks mainly to Nick Moffitt's cool GAR system (an integrated build environment implemented in gmake). I think there will be a new release early this summer. It's been almost a year since the previous release (1.618).

I got a nice new computer at work; our sysadmin put Red Hat 7.3 on it and I realized that it's been a long time since I had a Linux desktop with current software on it. There are unfortunately plenty of things I don't recognize, and features which come as a surprise to me, like large file support.

I'm spending most of my time working on EFF court cases and understanding and fighting Hollywood's legislative agenda. It's extremely worth reading this MPAA document, called "Content Protection Status Report", which sets out quite lucidly what America's most powerful copyright companies want and expect to accomplish in Congress in the near future. Among other things, they'd like to see a watermark detector legally required in every analog-to-digital convertor, in order to deal with the "analog hole" (the fact that you can avoid DRM restrictions by starting with analog media).

I'm calling it "Hollywood's new science-fiction and horror summer blockbuster".