Tag: DRM

In news that will no doubt shake the very bedrock of your belief system, Apple has asked Toyota to remove its Scion theme and its advertising from ModMyi, a Cydia repository. The Scion theme has been available for weeks, but after it received a ton of press in the last couple of days, Apple finally lashed out. It's not like we should be surprised, considering Apple has claimed in the past ...

Like a fiery phoenix rising from the ashes, Firefox Friday is back! Mozilla has been incredibly silent since November, with the only real news being the adoption of two adorable red pandas (firefoxes) at Knoxville Zoo, Tennessee. The entire engineering team has been in crunch mode, churning through as many bugs as possible to get Firefox 4 into shape for late-February or early-March release, ...

Intel will launch a full HD 1080p streaming video service called "Insider" in the first quarter of 2011. Deals with Warner Bros and CinemaNow have already been arranged, and it's expected that a very broad library of movies will be available at launch -- and if that wasn't exciting enough, Intel's streaming movies will be made available at the same time as Blu-ray and DVD releases! It's a ...

Google's been on an acquisition spree lately, and their newest buy is Widevine, a company that does streaming video optimization and DRM for a slew of big companies. AT&T, Blockbuster, Netflix, and Zip.ca (the "Netflix of Canada") are among the companies that have licensed Widevine DRM for their online video offerings. Widevine does multiplatform streaming video -- Netflix, for example, ...

Bluefire Reader is an e-reader app for the iPhone and iPad that, along with letting you read e-books in EPUB and PDF formats, has a unique twist compared to its competitors -- support for Adobe DRM. Not only that, but starting today, it supports the unique DRM used by public libraries, so you can download free e-books from hundreds of public library websites, transfer them to your iDevice using ...

The upcoming version of Canon's document management system, Uniflow 5, will have a keyword-based security system. A user will not be able print, scan, copy or fax any document that contains a banned word. Uniflow (or 'uniFLOW'), which is only available on very high-end (and expensive) Canon products, is a management suite used by large businesses -- such as law firms -- that need to keep track ...

In what will surely become a landmark case -- or at least a massive thorn in the MPAA and RIAA's clubbed, pygmy feet -- a judge has ruled that bypassing DRM via hacking, reverse engineering or any other means is not in itself illegal. The case itself ruled that General Electric, in using hacked security dongles to repair some uninterruptible power supplies produced by another company, did not ...

UltraViolet, with its prehistoric-looking ooh-Web-2.0-reflection!! logo, is about to make a big splash in the world of content distribution. If you thought the days of DRM were behind us, you were wrong. Unless you're using an Apple device, actually -- but more on that in a moment. Be it music, movies, TV shows or books, UltraViolet has enough clout (some 60 major partners) to significantly ...

A few days ago there was a smattering of reports on NEC's new pirate-detection software. In essence, this software scans the original content and creates a digital signature for each and every frame. The signature is very small (only 76 bytes) and can then be compared against videos on sites like YouTube or Vimeo. NEC touts an accuracy of 96% and only five false-positives per million. But ...

Gamers almost universally groaned when Ubisoft announced a new DRM scheme that requires its latest games, including Assassin's Creed 2 and SIlent Hunter 5, to be connected to the Ubisoft servers to function. Everyone wondered, "What happens when the servers fail?" Well, we found out over the weekend, when -- surprise! -- the servers temporarily went down, rendering legitimately-purchased copies of ...

Don't get me wrong, I know that people have been posting digital copies of copyrighted books online for decades. While recent technological advancements have made digital distribution of music and movie files easier than ever before, eBooks are tiny, tiny files. It didn't take very long to download a book over a 56k connection. But it's not internet bandwidth or digital distribution channels ...

eMusic is a solid place to purchase and download music. They've always had a great catalog of music that is "off the beaten path," as well as recordings of live performances. Their catalog is about to get even larger: eMusic has finally reached an agreement with Warner Music and will be adding around 10,000 new albums. No, those new albums won't include current popular music - that's something ...

DivX may have started out as a codec used by pirates to distribute movies, usually illegally, over the internet. But DivX has grown up, put on a suite and tie, and gained a bit of respectability over the last few years. And today online video distributor Film Fresh announced it will begin selling movies from the four Hollywood movie studios in the DivX format. The file format offers ...

It's been 25 years since 1984 came and went. But if you ever needed proof that we're living in a world where Big Brother is watching, all you need to do is look at Amazon's recent actions regarding the book, 1984. Basically, the company was offering a digital version of the title in its online Kindle store, but at the book publisher's request, Amazon pulled the title. And not just from the store, ...

Apple announced earlier this month that iTunes music sales were dropping the DRM, and now almost entirely in AAC format. It was a significant announcement and made the DRM-loathing camp (myself included very happy). One of the few bones we had left to pick was that to upgrade existing DRMed purchases to the new higher-bitrate DRM-free files you basically were held to ransom: upgrade your entire ...