Filed under: Home Entertainment

Looking for a new way to use FairUse4WM? Have a Netflix account? If so, go on and roll your sleeves up, as a crafty (and acrimonious) fellow has managed to find a workaround that enables you to not only decrypt the DRM-laced "Watch Now" movie files, but save them to your hard drive for future viewing. Admittedly, the process is somewhere between painless and potentially frustrating, but the gist of it involves Windows Media Player 11, FairUse4WM, Notepad, a Netflix account, and a broadband connection. Through a series of hoop jumping, users can now strip the "Watch Now" files free of DRM and watch them at their leisure and on any video-playing device they choose. Granted, there's certainly issues of legality mixed in here, but where there's a will, there's a way. [Warning: Read link language potentially NSFW]

[Via TVSquad]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Sky gloomy

Virgin Media (VM) took another sound kicking from Sky last quarter, losing customers and money in the battle for broadband and pay-TV supremacy.

Even if it would break their privacy policies

A series of legal events means that companies that have no business reason to retain documents or records may be compelled to create and retain such records just so they can become available for discovery.

Red faces over coding snafu at IM security firm

IM security firm FaceTime has explained how programming errors led to the exposure of customer contact information on its website.

Chinese authorities have long viewed "internet addiction" as a real problem for the country's youth, even though some research says that in and of itself, internet addiction isn't really a clinical disorder. The government classifies 13 percent of the country's 20 million internet users under 20 as addicts, and it's tried some radical approaches to "curing" them, such as shock therapy and detox units with electric acupuncture and drugs. It's also tried some other, less invasive, ways to get kids offline, by limiting net cafes and forcing game companies to cut back the points games award after certain periods of time. The problem with all of these methods, though, is that they only seek to stop people from spending a lot of time online; they don't attempt to do anything about the underlying reasons and problems causing them to want to do so. When a halfway house for young internet addicts was opened in China, their first visitor was a 17-year-old with some problems at home, so he talked to a psychologist and the house's staff went to his house to talk with him and his parents. It seemed like the kid was going online as a means of avoiding or dealing with the issues in his home life, and fixing those issues is where the focus should be, not on trying to keep him offline through aversion therapy. It now looks like this message might be starting to sink in, as word comes that authorities in China are opening an experimental summer camp for 40 supposedly net-addicted kids, where they'll be treated for depression and other underlying issues that could be prompting them to spend inordinate amounts of time online. So-called internet addiction, in many cases, isn't an ailment, but just a symptom of some deeper problem. Working to solve that problem is the real solution, rather than the band-aid approach of "curing" the addiction.

Filed under: Laptops

In celebration of the "one-year-out mark for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games," Lenovo has just announced that it will be conducting a series of back-to-back, week-long auctions to gift high bidders with its svelte Olympic-themed machine. Beginning on February 8, 2008, a "Cloud of Promise" laptop will be available for bidding each week leading up to the Olympic Games, and a number of them will even be "autographed by athlete ambassadors." Reportedly, "100-percent" of the proceeds will be distributed through the Lenovo Hope Fund to select philanthropies, including Right to Play, and the auctions will take place at the currently unavailable www.lenovohopefundauctions.com website.

[Via TechDigest]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

While Google maintains its innocence

Eight new groups of rights holders have joined the legal action against Google-owned video sharing website YouTube. Among the eight is Robert Tur, the cameraman who has dropped his existing suit against YouTube to join the case.

Minimising heat and power waste

Green is the new black, it would seem. With many organisations now trying to "out-green" the competition, we are rapidly running into the problem seen with the majority of bandwagons - just how real are some of the arguments coming in from the vendors on the topic?

Despite no copyright agreement

A computer programmer has been granted royalties in systems he developed even though no proper copyright agreement existed when the material was commissioned. The programmer was awarded more than £45,000.

Interoperability by another name

LinuxWorld Microsoft has defended vendor-led standards and interoperability work rather than waiting for industry bodies to reach an open consensus.

Firedoglake.com has offered intensive trial coverage, using some six contributors in rotation.