Lex,

The technology in cellphones is known as Near Field Communication.

It's still a work in progress, but there may be implementations in Japan already.

A couple of researchers at Cambridge University published a paper on smart-card-based attacks that is generally applicable to the technology. Very cool stuff.

Cheers
Matt

Right, glad that got sorted..

I came across iSquint earlier in the week, looking for a quick'n'easy way to go from a flv (from YouTube) to a straight mp3.

This seemed to the be Swiss Army knife of tools - ffmpegX (http://homepage.mac.com/major4/) - not surprising, given its a GUI wrapper around a set of Unix tools. I didn't have any luck getting it to do what I wanted, but its handled all the other video conversion I've thrown at.

I've had no problem getting VLC to play the FLV files - I just open them via VLC's Open File dialog. This is on a MacBook.

Cheers

And TVNZ should stop saying the episodes can be "downloaded" from its website, because (unless you know a trick or two) they can't. It's in a streaming video format that means it can't be downloaded and saved to disc. Viewers without broadband will find the postage stamp-sized dial-up version a little unsatisfying.

It's less than a 'trick or two', I think. You can get a directory listing of all their TV shows by looking at the right directory. More details are available here. It's in FLV format, but the 300k files don't look too shabby on a CRT TV, from my experience.