Category: Copyright

The Web Goes Dark Over SOPA

Wikipedia Goes Black

This has been in the mainstream news a bit but I thought I’d cover this off briefly here for the sake of awareness. Wikipedia, one of the most popular websites on the web has gone dark in opposition to SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) which is a bill that will be tabled in the United …

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Some Anti-Piracy Measures Might Actually Encourage Piracy

You may or may not have seen mention of the “giant pink scorpion” in Serious Sam 3 but I thought the concept proposed an interesting point of discussion. In a nutshell, if you have pirated the game you’ll soon encounter the “giant pink scorpion” from the outset of the game which is seemingly invulnerable to …

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Apple Quietly Pulls iTunes TV Show Rentals

A quick entry for tonight. Just under a year after Apple introduced the ability to rent TV episodes for 24 hours it has quietly shelved this offering from the iTunes store leaving the ability to buy individual episodes for a higher charge. According to AllThingsD, rentals have been removed due to relatively poor take up …

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Boydo’s Tech Talk – The First Year

Perhaps hard to believe but the blog has been up and running for a full year and many things have happened over the course of the last twelve months. At times, it has been a bit of a challenge to do a daily entry particularly with the demands of full time work as well as …

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Spot Interesting Software License Agreement Clauses with EULAlyzer

EULAlyzer License Agreement Analysis (Google Chrome)

Just a quick tip for tonight. Looking at those end user license agreements (or EULAs) every time you install a new piece of software can be very time consuming exercise. Of course, EULAs are there for a reason but the fact that they can run into thousands of words in length its not surprising that …

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Amazon: Lend a Friend an eBook

For those of you that use the Amazon Kindle platform or are in the market for a new eBook reader and have yet to make up your mind then this development may pique your interest. In a nutshell, one Amazon Kindle user can lend out a book to another Amazon Kindle user for a period …

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Microsoft Pulls the Plug on Office Genuine Advantage

In news that largely went under the radar, Microsoft has quietly disabled the use of Office Genuine Advantage in its Microsoft Office products in the last round of updates. In a nutshell, OGA provided a mechanism to verify the legitimacy of a software installation as a prerequisite step prior to allowing various add-ons for Microsoft …

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SlySoft Discontinuing Lifetime Upgrades

It seems that many good things come to an end far sooner than we would expect or would hope. SlySoft, the creator of such software including CloneCD, CloneDVD and AnyDVD will be ceasing sales of software including free lifetime upgrades for software from 1 January 2011. Whilst this is disappointing news, this does mean you …

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Mod Chips – Are They Really That Bad?

Scattered across the various news publications I scan everyday, I came across reports that Sony won a court battle to prevent the sale of mod chips for the PS3 console. For those of you who don’t know about  “mod chips”, they are usually a small circuit board, chip or even USB stick that alters and/or …

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Freeware and Shareware – Know the Difference

Over the years, I’ve seen people incorrectly use all sorts of terminology when it comes to computing. Sometimes you feel like you are obligated to point out the mistake but in other cases you might wonder whether or not you are up to the challenge. One such example is a misunderstanding of the concepts of …

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