December 9, 2007, 11:28 pm
Another milestone has been reached in DRM lameness: Western Digital, which I considered, at least until today, to be the clear leader in the hard drive wars, has instituted DRM on its hard drives:
Western Digital's 1TB MyBook external hard drives won't share media files over network connections (UPDATE: Don't install the "required" client software! See workaround below). From the product page:
"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common
audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using
WD Anywhere Access."
It doesn't matter what
the files are: If you try to share these formats over a network,
Western Digital assumes not just that you're a criminal, but that it is
its job to police users. You see, MP3, DivX, AVI, WMV and Quicktime files are copy-protected formats.
Here is the list of 30 file extensions the hard drive won't let you share. It does not matter if those mp3 files are just dictation files you created yourself using an MP3 recorder -- you still can't share them. Really lame. Why WD feels the need to get into the business of policing this stuff is beyond me. Can you imagine the product meeting. Gee, I think we should jump into the DRM fray, even though we don't receive a dime from the media companies and it will really piss all of our customers off. Corry Doctorow also comments.
October 28, 2007, 9:50 pm
My first climate movie, What is Normal? A Critique of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming Theory is now available for free download. If you have the bandwidth, I encourage you to download the full 640x480 version as Windows Media Video, but be forewarned that the file is 258MB. This is actually a pretty small file for a 50+ minute movie, and the full resolution version looks much nicer than the streaming version.
Right-Click Here to Download Climate Movie in Full Resolution
Right-Click here for full resolution 144MB .mov quicktime version of Climate Movie
Make sure you turn up your volume -- I think I recorded this with a pretty low audio level.
If you are bandwidth-challenged, or you can't view a .WMV file, you may stream the video from Google video or download a reduced resolution version here. Unfortunately, to make the video stream effectively, the resolution is cut to 320x240, but having watched it, it still looks surprisingly good streamed.
Note, on the streaming version, the video stutters between the 12 and 17 second marks in the movie, but runs fine after that. By the way, thanks to all the commenters who gave me some good alternatives to using my own fairly week narration voice. I decided for this first release I wanted to see what I could achieve with a pure solo effort. Many thanks to Adobe Premier Elements, which made this effort possible.
Finally, you can stream the reduced resolution Google video version below:
