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I don't play or copy CD's DVD's or Blueray discs and have avoided programs that allow you to save those forms of media to another system. I saw one available for free today on give away of the day dot com.
One of my clients is in the business of total home automation where lights, appliances, window shades can be controlled via an iPhone. That includes TV's and sound system throughout the house. He has software that allows him to copy any DVD, including protected ones and migrate those movies to a huge hard drive so the clients total library is accessible and they don't have to flip DVD's to watch movies.

Since I'm avoiding Geekdom, much of that process uses ISO files. A quick read says it's a compressed single file of the contents of data or possibly an operating system. So copying an entire DVD to one ISO file so it can be played directly from the system without having to play the DVD.

Most of the people I know who are deeply into streaming, have Netflix or some other service so they pull whatever video they want via internet to see from a huge library. Unless they have a big collection of movies, they probably bypassed the ISO phase.

I'll probably read a little more for the knowledge as I'm told you can copy an entire Windows operating system to ISO for future retrieval.

Rights activists, journalists and lawyers around the world have been targeted with phone malware sold to authoritarian governments by an Israeli surveillance firm, media reports say.

They are on a list of some 50,000 phone numbers of people believed to be of interest to clients of the company, NSO Group, leaked to major news outlets.

It was not clear where the list came from - or how many phones had actually been hacked.

NSO denies any wrongdoing.

It says the software is intended for use against criminals and terrorists and is made available only to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with good human rights records.

It said the original investigation which led to the reports, by Paris-based NGO Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International, was "full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories".

But it added that it would "continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action".

The allegations about use of the software, known as Pegasus, were carried on Sunday by the Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Monde and 14 other media organizations around the world.

Pegasus infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones and cameras.

What do we know about the people targeted?
Media outlets working on the investigation said they had identified more than 1,000 people spanning over 50 countries whose numbers were on the list.

They include politicians and heads of state, business executives, activists, and several Arab royal family members. More than 180 journalists were also found to be on the list, from organizations including CNN, the New York Times and Al Jazeera.

Many of the numbers were clustered in 10 countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the reports.

When contacted by the outlets involved in the investigation, spokespeople for these countries either denied that Pegasus was used or denied that they had abused their powers of surveillance.

It was not clear how many of the devices on the list had actually been targeted, but forensic analysis of 37 of the phones showed there had been "attempted and successful" hacks, the Washington Post reported.

This included people close to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018 and his body dismembered.

The investigation found that spyware was installed on his fiancée's phone days after his murder, and that his wife's phone was targeted with spyware between September 2017 and April 2018.


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What do you think?

It could have a camera, microphone, it automatically follows you at a distance you do not even know it is there. Perhaps, it could even be armed. Your own guardian angel....

You send it to pick up things from the store for you, you use it to give you up to date road/weather conditions.


Is something in our near future?

Apparently, the release from Microsoft will start tomorrow, but will be done in waves.
This means that it might not be available for your machine until later.
The free upgrade should be complete by mid 2022.

For more info see;

I think that many people have this phobia without even realizing it.

Do you suffer from NOMOPHOBIA?

The term NOMOPHOBIA or NO MObile PHone PhoBIA is used to describe a psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity. The term NOMOPHOBIA is constructed on definitions described in the DSM-IV, it has been labelled as a “phobia for a particular/specific things”.


I doubt very much if I could fire on all cylinders without my phone.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – AI has the potential to both benefit and harm the U.S. in unknown and unimagined ways but Congress has hardly any experts on the rapidly developing technology, lawmakers told Fox News.

"AI is going to help us in many ways. It can also kill us," Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat said. "As a recovering computer science major, my understanding of AI on a scale of one to 10 is about a five. There's a lot I don't know."

Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis said: "We've got a long way to go before we have any sense of its true capabilities and understanding what people like Elon Musk see as its capabilities going forward. I put my knowledge on a scale of one to 10 at about a 1.5."

Musk and more than 1,000 others called for an immediate pause on "giant AI experiments" last month, warning the rapidly developing sector may pose security threats. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman disagreed, saying pausing development is not an optimal way to address the issue.

AI "has the potential of civilizational destruction," Musk told Fox News' Tucker Carlson this week. He said if the industry is left unregulated, the consequences could be dangerous.

"I don't think Congress is prepared intellectually and resource-wise" to regulate AI, Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, told Fox News. "There's no doubt that AI is going to be highly consequential."

"I don't want to say the Congress knows nothing," Takano continued. "Staff has been going to briefings on AI."

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