News written by Jari Ketola (November, 2005)

The one millionth post was made just a few minutes ago in the AfterDawn.com discussion forums. The discussion forums were opened in late March 2001, so it took about four and a half years to reach the 1,000,000 post milestone. Obviously the majority of the posts have been made during the past year. Meanwhile our Finnish forums, which are very active indeed, are 1,000 posts short of 300,000 messages.

AfterDawn.com currently has about 450,000 registered members. Since we launched our site back in 1999 we have served over 47 million software downloads and 2.5 million legal MP3 downloads through our sister site MP3Lizard.com.

Thanks go out to all our loyal visitors! Keep an eye on our site for new, exciting features we will be launching to all our members in the not-so-distant future.

A new technology for watermarking movies has been unveiled at a conference held by the DVD Forum in Paris. The new technology relies on unnoticeable watermarks on the audio track instead of more commonplace image based watermarks. Future movies will include the watermarking on the audio track, and HD-DVD players will look for these marks on discs played on the device.

The watermarking works by encoding a digital signal to the audio track by varying its waveform. Even though unnoticeable to the human ear, the player can easily Decode the signal and detect if the copy has been made in a movie theatre.

Similar watermarking will be implemented on consumer discs as well. When such a watermark is detected, the player will check if the disc played is genuine or not, and if it's not, the player will shut itself down.

In order for the player to determine the copy illegal the watermark signal must be present for an extended period of time. That should prevent the "false positives" that could be caused by, for example, taking a home video in an environment with a watermarked movie playing in the background.