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On Tech Brief today: The hidden history of a picture that became a sensation in Japan.

• You know how it is with the internet. You write a blog entry or upload a pic, it gets posted here, there and everywhere and boom! you are the leader of an international movement. How about that happening without your knowledge, for ten years, from when you were a baby? Stephen Rout knows how that feels after an image of him as a nipper became a sensation in Japan, as .

"Somehow, Stephen's smiling face had permeated a corner of Japanese visual culture. It showed up on wacky television game shows, and occasionally it blotted out images of genitalia in pornography, to comply with Japanese law. There are so many iterations that, for a time, if you did a Google Image search for "happy baby," the original photo of Stephen was the first result."

• Film pirating has become easier as Intel has confirmed that the key released on the net early this week is the master for the High Definition Copy Protection system. This locks away high-definition content as found on Blu-ray discs. what this will mean.

"HDCP is the content encryption scheme that protects data, typically movies, as they pass across a DVI or an HDMI cable. The bitstream now can be recorded and decrypted, allowing an encrypted film to be copied - a huge blow to Hollywood. "

• Technology has adversely affected many standards of behaviour and, it seems, more courtesies look set to come crashing down, if the survey , is to be believed.

"29 percent of Americans are OK with being 'plugged in' while honeymooning (a descriptor that other news outlets seem to interpret as 'all sex, all the time'), while six percent say it's OK during a wedding. Eight percent are cool with checking the iternet during a religious service - hey, gotta set those fantasy football lineups before the benediction - while 41 percent think it's acceptable while having dinner with family and friends."

• There are many ways in which a nation can improve its efforts to catch up on technology. that Brazil is taking its own idiosyncratic route - via the ears of cows.

"The South American giant is preparing to use its first locally-designed microchip in cattle earrings, a device that could eventually help authorities crack down on destruction of the Amazon rain forest caused by roaming herds."

• Facebook rival Diaspora has unveiled the first chunks of code it hopes will knock the social networking giant off its plinth. .

"I think the Diaspora dev team is well-intentioned but naive. I just wish they had used that part of the $200,000 they raised from the community on things other than paying lawyers to sabotage their vision before it even got off the ground. The only things that can save Diaspora from just being a social network for Free Software and privacy nuts now are for the developers to publish the protocol documentation and change the reference implementation license to something less restrictive (like the BSD license)."

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