Category: drm

Fix stuff, earn big awards? Maybe, if this idea for repair bounties takes off. The group is dubbed the FULU Foundation, for “Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users,” and was co-founded by right-to-repair activist Kevin O’Reilly and perennial Big Tech thorn-in-the-side Louis Rossman. The operating model works a bit like the bug bounty system, but […]
After the news cycle recently exploded with the announcement that Google would require every single Android app to be from a registered and verified developer, while killing third-party app stores and sideloading in the process, Google has now tried to put out some of the fires with a new Q&A blog post and a video […]
As long as there have been games, there have been crackers breaking their copy protections. “Digital Rights Management” or DRM, is a phrase for copy protection coined near the end of the 1990s, and subverted shortly thereafter. But how? [Nathan Baggs] show us what it took to be a cracker in the year 2000, as […]
It’s been a busy week in space news, and very little of it was good. We’ll start with the one winner of the week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon’s surface on March 2. The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and carries ten scientific payloads, […]
With the news that Amazon will no longer be allowing users to download their Kindle books after February 26th, many are scrambling to download their books before it’s too late. The most up-to-date project for automating this process appears to be Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader. As the company that famously removed 1984 from thousands of […]
Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of any developing tech scandal is the way that the target company handles criticism and feedback from the community. After announcing a new authentication scheme for cloud & LAN-based operations a few days ago, Bambu Lab today posted an update that’s supposed to address said criticism and feedback. […]
The dialogue that greets you when you try to open an unsigned application in MacOS Sequoia 15.1. Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for an Apple Developer ID […]
The back of the 2View VHS box. The instructions are all in Dutch, as its (sole) launch market. (Credit: Techmoan, YouTube) Over the decades the video and music industries have tried a wide range of ways to get consumers to buy ‘cheaper’ versions of albums and music, but then limit the playback in some way. […]
It’s a well-known secret that inkjet ink is being kept at artificially high prices, which is why many opt to forego ‘genuine’ manufacturer cartridges and get third-party ones instead. Many of these third-party ones are so-called re-manufactured ones, where a third-party refills an empty OEM cartridge. This is increasingly being done due to digital rights […]
Making a copy of a purchased game used to be as simple as copying a disk. As the game industry grew, so did fear of revenue loss which drove investment in countermeasures. These mainly consisted of preventing the easy duplication of magnetic diskettes, or having users jump through tiresome hoops like entering specific words from […]