Please enjoy the “12 Days of EFF” animation below — ’tis a merry, animated jaunt through some of this years’ milestones in the fight for your digital rights.
Archive for the 'Technology' Category
This dialog box popped up when I tried to watch an IT Crowd DVD from the UK. (By the by, IT Crowd is hilarious and awesome; if you’re even the least bit geek-inclined, you will probably be rewarded should you make the bit of effort required to watch it if you’re not in the UK.)
I didn’t quite expect that I would be allowed to watch the DVD, but I also wasn’t counting on being given the option to change my computer’s region code. Not that this makes me happy — region codes are just another bullshit way that Hollywood tries to control culture in the name of profit.
Edit: My notes on the CC Salon are here.
Goofing off at a CC Salon last year.
Judging from the Upcoming.org page, this CC Salon looks like it’ll be well-attended. If you’re in town, join for drinks, music, and some presentations on citizen journalism from Wikinews (community-written news) and Spot.us (community-funded reporting). It starts at 7pm!
I’ve been growing annoyed with Apple, thanks to some of the decisions they’ve made in the name of business development. It seems that they’ve made another deal with the devil in order to get HD content into the iTunes Music Store — David Chartier writes in the Ars Technica “Infinte Loop” journal that the new MacBooks won’t allow you to play HD movies out to non-HDCP compliant hardware.
(Photo of Detalle de la conexión al MacBook by iBuffet under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
What does this mean? Well, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is an insidious form of DRM that prevents video sources from transmitting to non-compliant receivers. Conventionally speaking, it was designed so that new generations of disc players would only output to HDCP-compliant TVs and projectors — and not a DVR, computer, or general-purpose recording device.
To my limited knowledge, it works by encrypting the video coming out of the device’s port, then having the devices “know” what’s on the other end of the cable. If the player doesn’t “recognize” the device that’s displaying the movie, then the player stops*. (In the screenshot in the Ars article, the MacBook error message tells the user: “This movie cannot be played because a display that is not authorized to play protected movies is connected.”)
It’s extremely vexing to see Apple implementing DRM on its display ports — and it’s pushing me even further away from choosing an Apple laptop as my next computer.
* Depending on the devices being used, the player may instead simply lower the quality of the image, completely ignoring your hard-earned dollars of investment in “high definition.”
Theremug from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.
You can find some instructions on the Create Digital Music blog.
tech activist, nerd, gamer