Those servers are central to validate the “Microsoft Genuine Advantage” service. In plain words, they provide the verification that you are really a registered user authorized by Microsoft. But these servers are currently down (some kind of network failure?) and Microsoft forecast about two days before going back to a normal situation. This simply means…
Category: DRM
Bioshock is having real DRM problems
We have been speaking a lot about Bioshock the newest First Person Shooter (FPS) PC video game from Second Take. We expected a very nice game in a complex environment with varied adversaries and game tactics. But we did not expected the most poweful adversary: The Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection against copy. TwitchGuru video…
News from the P2P front line
It has been quite some time that I did not write about the P2P news. They start popping up everywhere and it is time to talk about the wonderful things happening right under our eyes. First, the Internet users start to find again -in Europe- some protection since a decision from the European Justice Court:…
Brazil against DRM
IDEC – Institute for Consumer Defense – is the largest consumer association in Brazil. It lauched a campaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM) titled “Tehcnological Restrictions – You pay for it, you get less“.
Is Windows Vista crippled?
This is the right question to ask. I waited quite some time before writing about a bizarre issue with Windows Vista. Initially I thought that it was a small bug to be quickly corrected by Microsoft: file copying, file deleting and file moving is apparently very slow in Vista. When we say slow, understand “10-50…
Music without limits
The recent news lead me to talk again about digital music and its cohabitation (or lack of) with network technology. As a matter of fact, we learn this week that our new French President is in favor of a strong action against pirated music and downloads. This is not very new, indeed, but the confirmation…
AllAboutJazz.com is DRM free
This is free advertising for a major launch of a DRM-free online store: AllAboutJazz.com sells jazz music online without any DRM included.
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0, prohibited number
Since the AACS (the protection of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray against copying) is technically broken, there was only one lock left: after unlocking tools, there was the need for the publication of the needed key to allow easy operation. The MPAA tries to ban this famous key number from the Internet while it keeps popping up…
DirectX 10 on WinXP
Microsoft promised that the new graphics standard for Windows (DirectX 10) will not be applied to anything older than Windows Vista. This was enough to push some people in looking for ways to make it work on Windows XP (WinXP), or on Mac, or on Linux. A guy, named Cody Brocious from San Diego, California,…