Posts tagged “drm”

Amazon MP3 gets my full endorsement: no DRM, 256kbps quality, seamless downloading, and genuinely fair pricing. Albums at 50 cents a song finally feel like what music is actually worth. I'm already impulse-buying. Go get 'em.

I tried Amazon Unbox for Battlestar Galactica season 3 and it works fine, but $2 an episode adds up fast. This is the "law of small numbers": people tolerate huge margins when the dollar amounts seem small. Combined with Amazon's predatory DRM terms, I'm going elsewhere.

I spent the weekend being antisocial and exhausted. Also, I posted an "illegal" number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. The MPAA is trying to suppress it, Digg revolted, and I explore what happens when you empower users enough to destroy your own site.

I steal music and I know it's wrong. But record companies are technological dinosaurs charging 10x what music is worth, crippling their products with DRM, and offering a terrible experience compared to piracy. I'd pay a fair price for a convenient, unrestricted product. Nobody's offering me one.

Been busy with work and comics, so here are some links: evil giraffes, Cory Doctorow on DRM, a quiz about strong black women, a map of queer America, and the troubling anti-Muslim backlash following recent beheadings.

Microsoft's Windows XP product activation is backfiring badly. Locking software to hardware configs is stupid enough already, but it's triggering on routine upgrades too. Swap some memory, lose your license? This kind of greed might just be what finally does Microsoft in.