At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten has posted a summary of a talk he gave at the Usenix Security Symposium, called “DRM Wars: The Next Generation”. The two installments so far (Part 1, Part 2) trace a possible trend in the (stated) intentions of DRM’s […]
All posts filed under “DRM”
Neuros: ‘Freedom by Design’
Following on from the last post about the Neuros MPEG4 recorder, looking on the Neuros website reveals something pretty unusual for a company involved in consumer product design – a clear statement of design philosophy, ‘What do we stand for?’ that’s heavy on content and […]
EFF: Another Endangered Gizmo – the Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2
Image adapted from Neuros website Via EFF DeepLinks, details of the Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2, a product specifically designed to allow users to break through the arbitrary architectures of control imposed by other video devices and formats, and hence make the most of the content […]
Oh yeah, that Windows Kill Switch
I know the furore surrounding Microsoft’s ‘Windows Genuine Advantage’ is a few days old, and perhaps I should have blogged about it at the time, specifically the rumoured ‘Kill Switch’ which would remotely deactivate any PCs apparently running ‘non-genuine’ copies of XP. That’s certainly a […]
DRM now the ‘biggest issue’ in preserving information for the future
The Guardian has an interview with Richard Masters, of the British Library’s digital objects management programme looking at the impact of technology on archiving. The usual worries about file formats, media incompatability and how to select what to preserve and what not to are discussed, […]
Friend or foe: Battery-authentication ICs?
Via MAKE, an article from Electrical Design News looking at lithium battery authentication chips in products such as phones and laptops, designed to prevent users fitting ‘non-genuine’ batteries. Now, the immediate response of most of us is probably “razor blade model!” or even “stifling democratic […]
Freedom to Tinker – The Freedom to Tinker with Freedom?
At Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson asks whether, in a world where DRM is presented to so many customers as a benefit (e.g. Microsoft’s Zune service), the public as a whole will be quite happy to trade away its freedom to tinker, whether the law […]
‘Fair use, Xbox hacking, and how far will Linux users go to get a cheap PC?’
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, in ZDNet’s Hardware 2.0 blog, asks whether it is ‘ethical’ for users to install GNU/Linux on an Xbox, or in general, to use hardware they have bought in whatever way they wish. “First, is it ethical to hack an Xbox or any other […]
Mostly a mistake, partly a psychological experiment
Scott Carpenter of Moving To Freedom is (I think) the first person to comment on the fact that for the last 11 months, every time someone posts a comment on this blog, he or she has been redirected to www.danlockton.co.uk (my homepage) rather than returned […]