n3wblog tech commentary and observations from the future

Freedom

Privacy, Legal matters, Copyright, DRM, Patents, …

A Cage With Golden Bars

Y’know I like Apple hardware, right? Some of its stuff is downright magical. The close attention to detail. The minimalist design. The shiny. As a hardware company, I believe there’s nobody that can really touch them. But as a software company, I find many of the arbitrary restrictions Apple places on software developers and vendors [...]

Apple locks out application developers they don’t like

The recent fiasco about Apple limiting an application on iTunes’ AppStore is well-documented. A great comment from the Twittersphere even hints at the kind of dark times this may be the harbinger of. I’ve babbled about how DRM is bad for consumers and bad for the world before. I think it’s important to keep in [...]

Free Music Downloads!

An internet citizen flying by the name of “john” just posted a reply to a 3-year old blog piece, titled, The Music Pirate Police are Now Mounted! A bit of a scare piece about copyright reforms in Canada which were eventually overturned and later ratcheted up several notches into what has become a terrifying legal [...]

Apple pulls out of Black Hat security conference

Black Hat Director Jeff Moss, “nobody at Apple is ever allowed to speak publicly about anything without marketing approval.” So engineers at Apple don’t get to talk to anybody? Ever? That kinda sucks. MacNN | Apple backs out of Black Hat security conference

Bell Throttling DSL

After struggling for a couple of weeks to get a working ADSL connection installed (and eventually giving up and getting a cable connection), I see the following article on Ars Technica: Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada’s traffic throttling Not that Rogers is any better. This leaves exactly zero alternatives for a residential internet connection [...]

Canadian Privacy Commish: Down with DRM!

From Ars Technica: Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Just say no to intrusive DRM. It’s rare, but once in awhile, you hear something come out of the canadian government that actually makes sense. It’s very nice to see that our privacy commissioner has some excellent people guiding her through the current morass of copyright crap that’s being [...]

I’m digging 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

From Kevin Rose on digg’s blog: Digg the Blog » Blog Archive » Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0: If you read digg, you may have seen something like this last night around midnight: it turns out, those 48 little characters that everyone was appending to everything happen to be a key to unlock HD-DVDs, thereby giving people [...]

Xbox 360 Replacement + AAC iPod Support = @#%^&!!

The past few nights, I’ve been trying to hook up my iPod to my Xbox to get some LCD Soundsystem out of my speakers while playing the new 3D Ultra Miniputt on the Xbox Live Arcade. This is usually a pretty trivial thing. The past few nights however, I’ve been plagued by the inability to [...]

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