The Electronic Frontier Foundation drove three deep wedges into the US prohibition on breaking DRM today. EFF had applied to the Copyright Office to grant exemptions permitting the cracking of DRM in three cases: first, to "jailbreak" a mobile device, such as an iPhone, where DRM is used to prevent phone owners from running software of their own choosing; second, to allow video remix artists to break the DRM on DVDs in order to take short excerpts for mashups posted to YouTube and other sharing sites; finally EFF got the Copyright Office to renew its ruling that made it legal to unlock cellphones so that they can be used with any carrier.

I wonder how far this will go. DVD ripping capabilities built into iTunes? Maybe not, but at least it's a start.

Hopefully this will put an end to SIM locking and all that other carrier-specific mobile phone nonsense.

With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM.

It's almost as if Ubisoft has done this on purpose in order to promote piracy of their new game. Almost.

I would love to be in the meeting where the people who build these kind of DRM abominations manage to sell them through to publishers. I'm not sure if it's an internal team, or all their DRM security controls are built by a third-party, but whoever is selling publishers on this crap has to be seriously good at selling rubbish to senior executives. What kind of bullshit charts and graphs do they show to convince publishers that forcing their consumers, who've already paid for a product, to jump through hoops is a good idea?

How dumb do you have to be to fall for this kind of nonsense? You would think that someone in a senior position over at Ubisoft would, you know, go on the Internet once in a while. Ever single time someone comes out with a new DRM measure it's cracked within hours of release. If it's a popular game, it's often cracked and released before the game even hits shelves. Investing in DRM is like flushing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet. There a grand total of ZERO use cases where DRM has effectively controlled media piracy.

I wanted to let you know that on April 15, 2010 Microsoft will discontinue Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox 1 games playable on Xbox 360. Our first step in this process will be to turn off auto-renewals for those members who only use Xbox LIVE on a v1 Xbox. While I can’t comment on the specifics, this change will allow us to continue evolving the LIVE service with new features and experiences that fully harness the power of Xbox 360 and the Xbox LIVE community. We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration and review we realize that this decision will allow us unprecedented flexibility for future features.

Unfortunately, this is how all closed systems are destined to end. It's sad to see this happen so soon, but expected from a company like Microsoft who integrates this kind of forced consumer upgrade path into the business model. When they want you to upgrade they just decide to stop supporting the older version. If the product has DRM, they just turn off the activation servers and you can never use it again.

This is one of the reasons why I've been so hesitant to ever buy anything on iTunes. It's only recently that I've started downloading episodes of my favorite TV shows. One day iTunes will take their activation servers offline. And when it does the billions of pieces of content that have been downloaded will be rendered useless.

Modern games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft will suffer a similar fate. The companies that run them will turn off the servers one day and all your information will be lost and your software becomes useless. What about massive collection of games you bought through Steam? One day those will likely be rendered useless as well. But in 20 years I'll still be able to play Diablo II over a LAN, and it will still be awesome.

Xbox LIVE, iTunes and Steam are great for their convenience but you always have to remember that you don't really "own" anything you buy from an proprietary service. You just pay for a license to use their content until they either decide they are going to force you to upgrade or they go bankrupt.

How do you make a heatmap? This came from kerimcan in the FlowingData forums, and krees followed up with a couple of good links on how to do them in R. It really is super easy. Here's how to make a heatmap with just a few lines of code, but first, a short description of what a heatmap is.

Great article by Nathan Yau of FlowingData on how to use R to create a heatmap. I'm not sure how it is that I'm just finding out about R today. It's like the open source SPSS/SAS alternative, and it's pretty well documented to boot. I wish I knew about this a year ago. It's a really great application, and definitely something I'm going to spend more time with in the future.