Sony’s Playstation Network DRM of Doom
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
Been a while so its time for another fun rant from me. Back in June of this year I decided to bite the bullet and buy a PS3, 40GB model ofcourse, I ain’t paying an extra $100 for 40GBs more of space and at the time 40GB was $399, guess I should have waited a few months eh? Since getting the PS3 I haven’t had too many problems with the console, its done what its advertised and while I don’t own any blu-ray titles I’m set for the future when I finally do begin buying them. So why am I going to write a rant then? Well the title of this post should be a fairly good indication. I know Sony has a horrible track record with DRMs, there was the grand rootkit debacle with audio CDs, and the recent waves of complaints against SecuROM. I firmly believe that WE the consumers bought the CD/DVD, therefore we OWN the content on the discs, we are not just “buying the rights to use the content” as media companies love to claim.
Anyways, recently I decided to give PSN’s video store a try out and purchased two tv show downloads at $2 a piece. Should have read the fine print because as per usual I got to thinking “ok, how do I put this on my NAS so I can watch this stuff on my other PCs”. Well of course, I begin searching the web and find a variety of websites discussing the many problems with content downloaded over the PSN network, and one stuck out to me, claims that once you downloaded a video thats it, you only get one download, if the drive dies and you don’t have a backup then too bad. “There has to be some spin to this” I thought to myself and went to Sony’s only Playstation website to verify, and there it was in Section 9, Paragraph 5 of the PSN Terms of Use and User Agreement..
Downloading will be not permitted outside the Authorized Term. In addition, once the Video Content has been downloaded from PSN, you will not be able to download it again for any reason without purchase of another copy.
Wow…just one download? I paid money to get the file just once? I’m sorry Sony, but I’m going to have to use a Internet meme to sum this all up: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!!!!! Seriously, how do you screw something like this up? Valve seems to be the only content publishing company that can get DRM done the right way with Steam, at least with Steam once I purchase something I can download it as many times as I want as long as I’m logged into my Steam account. You can’t tell me its impossible to at least say “well this guys account is linked to this PS3 serial number, so as long as hes logged into his account and using THAT PS3 then he can download to his hearts content”, or, I don’t know, give me 50 downloads, I can’t see any reason for needing to download a TV episode that many times. “Well you can back your stuff up to a external storage drive”, yeah how many people are really smart enough to do that on a regular basis, Sony?
This DRM scheme is unacceptable and is a complete rip-off to the consumers, if this had been maybe a free download I could understand, limit 1 per customer, but for me to have to pay for the privilage of downloading my paid-for content just once….just..no, no thats not acceptable at all Sony, what were you guys thinking? No wait, don’t tell me, I already know, “$$$”. Well, this is one PS3 user that will be advising people NOT to download off of the PSN store, at least not until utilities become available to break the PS3 DRM system, you’d be better off going to the pirate bay or mininova to grab this stuff. Oh, and Sony, since I told you here, I won’t feel bad about using said utilities to break your DRM :3
Mount Samba Shares Based On WiFi Networks
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
This is probably a common occurance amongst Linux users like me, you have a share you want to mount every time your computer or laptop starts up on a WiFi network (my desktop connects via WiFi), you write a handy little script to do for you at start up only to find the script is trying to mount your Samba share on every network you connect to, needless to say this can cause security problems, espcially when you’re broadcasting passwords over a wireless network. I ended up doing some googling and found a way to modify my script so it would only try to mount the shares when the script knew it was on my home network, heres what the script looks like:
#!/bin/sh
sleep 20 #Hold here, allows for the wireless to connect.
ESSID=`/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 | grep ESSID | cut -d ‘”‘ -f 2` #Get the ESSID.
case $ESSID in
“yournetwork”)
gksudo “mount -t cifs -o credentials=/path/to/cred //ip/share /mnt/dir”
;;
*)
exit
;;
esac
Obviously you get to fill in your own details, but with this, and adding it to the start up list in Gnome’s sessions this script will automatically wait 20 seconds before checking what wifi network it is on, if its on your network then it will mount the share, if not it will just exit. There is also a handy forum post here to solve shutdown issues related to CIFS.
RSN 2.0 Is Underway
Posted by voice | Filed under RSN2.O
So, its finally begun, the construction of RSN 2.0. Actually, I’ve been working on it for a few days now, but its finally starting to take shape. As of right now all thats done is the user registration system (though disabled at the moment), the user login system, and most of the user control panel.
One of the new features on this site will be the optional Censored mode. This mode is primarily aimed towards the younger crowd and all it essentially does is take swear words and other “inappropriate” words and replaces them with the well loved asterisk (*). There are other advantages to it for normal members which will come around as the site nears completeion.
Comcast’s Bandwidth Cap
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
As you may have heard in recent days, Comcast has instituted a monthly bandwidth cap of 250GB/mo. My personal opinion about this is that we the Comcast Customers are going to get screwed over big time. Why so? Well, first off lets go over the cap itself, 250GB a month, a lot of people are saying “well, thats not bad, I never reach that so its A-OK with me”, CNET’s Peter Glaskowsky has even gone on to ridicule people who are against the idea of a cap by claiming those of us against it are simply crying that the sky is falling. Let think about this for a second, Comcast instittutes a bandwidth cap, they see that people are ok with it, so what does it tell them? “Oooh, we can get away with this!”, and after that you’ll see the cap begin to tighten, maybe to 200GB/mo on the claims that not enough people are hitting 250 so theres no need to set it that high, don’t put it past Comcast, they’ve pulled stunts before and I’m sure they’re itching to find a network management method that won’t get them in hot water with the FCC.
Google Releases Chrome
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
For those who haven’t heard the news, Google recently released their web browser onto the world, Chrome. So far its beta, of course, but from what I’ve seen the browser is considerable when compared to Firefox. Theres also some claims that Chrome will spy on you but since its open source thats about as true as President Bush being the best thing to ever happen to the world.
The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude
Posted by voice | Filed under Humor, Techie
Anyone in the IT field can appreciate this video:
Sonic Gives Advice
Posted by voice | Filed under Humor
Thank you, Sonic. This was so insightful!
Courtesy ytmnd.com
The Mojave Experiment
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant, Techie
Old news, but I feel I need to chime in my two cents about this ad campaign. For those who don’t know what its all about, The Mojave Experiment is a campaign by Microsoft to prove that all of the “hate” towards Windows Vista is baseless claims. They collected a group of people, sat them in front of a computer, told them they were testing a new version of Windows, after they were “amazed” it was revealed to them that they were actually using Windows Vista. But heres my problem, these people never actually had the Vista experience everyone knows and hates. How so? Well first off, Microsoft was doing it, they had their techs there and the computers the random people were using were fine-tuned by the Microsoft techs beforehand. Secondly, these people never had to install anything, hardware or software. What does that translate into?
Tell you what, Microsoft. Give them a new laptop or desktop from Dell or HP with Vista on it, let them play with it for a week, then we’ll see how “amazed” they are with your OS, or heck, have them install the OS and get it online.
How To Download A Song From Seeqpod Without Registering
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
As you probably remember from earlier this month, I discussed a website called Seeqpod which allows you to listen to mp3s you search for over the internet. The problem with the site is that if you want to download anything you need to register with their website and that can raise a whole bunch of privacy questions in our sue-happy media days we’re currently in. So you think its pretty pointless being there because you can’t save the file. This actually isn’t 100% true though, theres alot of methods to retrieve music files and I’ll go over one.
iTunes….Destroyer of Lives?
Posted by voice | Filed under Humor
Its funny yet sad, mainly because someone was stupid enough to install iTunes on one of these listed devices, heince it being there. Sigh.
