Joe_User - Slashdot User

Draconian DRM Revealed In Windows 7 1127

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 16, 2009 @10:18PM from the just-who-did-you-think-owns-your-machine dept.

TechForensics writes "A few days' testing of Windows 7 has already disclosed some draconian DRM, some of it unrelated to media files. A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version. With regard to media files, the days of capturing an audio program on your PC seem to be over (if the program originated on that PC). The inputs of your sound card are severely degraded in software if the card is also playing an audio program (tested here with Grooveshark). This may be the tip of the iceberg. Being in bed with the RIAA is bad enough, but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons. Many users will not want to experiment with a second sound card or computer just to record from online sources, or boot up under a Linux that supports ntfs-3g just to control their files." Read on for more details of this user's findings.

Comment Re:My condolences (Score 1) 148

by Joe_User on Thursday November 23, 2000 @04:44PM (#604633) Attached to: The Author of Ping is Reported Dead

Just to remember another key person in computer history:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/may00/katz210 52000a.asp

I think very few people knows this about a software that all of us have in that old 3,5" disks.

>The Associated Press
M I L W A U K E E, April 22 - A man who developed one of the world's most popular pieces of computer software has died at age 37. Phillip W. Katz died of complications from chronic alcoholism, according to the Milwaulkee medical examiner's records. Katz's file-compression software is used around the world. "In early days, compression was all done with software because there was no hardware to do this stuff," said computer science professor Leonard Levine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "So Katz put together a program called PKZip, the Phil Katz zip program." The compression software made communication between computers faster and less expensive. "His program was instrumental in inexpensive, dependable communication," Levine said. But, he added, "what I felt was most important about it is the fact that you can get it for free and not pay for it." Nearly all program files downloaded from the Internet have the suffix .zip, meaning they are compressed in the format Katz developed.

Slashdot Top Deals