Such a process isn’t entirely unheard of in software. Registration keys for Microsoft Windows work in a similar way. But Microsoft’s product registration usually only kicks in after a major system change, such as a motherboard upgrade. Ubisoft’s DRM is apparently a bit more sensitive.

This was discovered by Guru3D when they attempted to use the new game Anno 2070 for graphics benchmarking. Though aware of the game’s DRM, the site figured that swapping out video cards would be OK. They were wrong. Swapping cards required that the software be activated all over again. That would be fine if Ubisoft offered unlimited activations, but they don’t. Many of the company’s titles only come with three activations. If you use them up, you could be out of luck.

Ubisoft’s support does state that further activations can be provided if you use them up, but Guru3D’s initial attempts to obtain them were refused. The site has since been contacted by Bluebyte, the developer of Anno 2070, and activation for the site’s copy has been unlocked. But this action is almost certainly a unique response to Guru3D’s complaint.

If you’re going to buy an Ubisoft game, you’d better be careful about your hardware upgrades.

Source: Guru3D

Now it seems that the next trick up their sleeve is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which has been introduced to the US Congress as possible legislation. The Bill has its prominent supporters and opposers both inside Congress and outside it, as they argue either the Bill’s benefits or its disadvantages.

Here to lay it all out for you below is an infographic by the Business Insurance Blog.  It explains what SOPA is, who supports it, who opposes it and what the advantages and disadvantages of it are.  It also tells you what you can do if you want to get involved in the debate.

After looking at the infographic, what are your views on SOPA?  Are you for it or against it?  Will it protect creativity and innovation, or destroy the freedom of the Internet?  Let us know in the comments.  Don’t be shy.

Click on the infographic below to be taken to a larger clearer version

Via: Business Insurance Blog
Image Source : Toms Baugis

BDlot DVD ISO Master is a free piece of software that does what very few free programs can do – bypass the various Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies used to stop people from ripping DVDs, including Disney’s infamously tricky protection.

Watching movies on a computer, especially a laptop, is convenient. Sometimes it’s not convenient to watch them from a DVD, though. Perhaps your laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive. Perhaps you’re about to travel and don’t want the clutter of a physical DVD along for the the trip. Whatever the reason, ripping your DVDs can make them easier to watch on the go.

We’ve shown you how to rip entire DVDs to your hard drive in the past, but that tutorial focused on ripping DVDs to video files. With BDlot DVD ISO Master you can easily create an ISO file containing all the information on a DVD, which can be watched on your computer or burned to a blank DVD as a backup.

A Brief Explanation

We all know what a DVD is – a disk with files on it. These disks have a variety of uses, but most DVDs people buy in stores are movies. So that’s clear, but what is an ISO? And what is DRM? Good questions.

An ISO file is, simply put, an exact copy of a DVD disk. This means that an ISO file from a ripped movie DVD includes not only the movie itself but also the menu and the special features. These files are a useful starting point if you want to burn DVDs, but can also be a great format from which to watch DVDs on your hard drive.

What is DRM? It’s basically software added to DVDs, and many other kinds of media, to make it harder to copy the contents. This is meant to stop piracy, but can also stop innocent people from watching a DVD they legally own from their hard drive. BDlot gets around this.

Using BDlot DVD ISO Master

So, with that cleared up, let’s take a look at BDlot. To begin, of course, you’ll need to download BDlot DVD ISO Master. This Windows program is easy to install, and once you get it running you’ll see a simple interface. The first thing you’ll want to do is choose your source and destination:

This is simple enough: pick the DVD you’re trying to rip as your source, then pick where the file should be made. Note that this file will be rather large – typically upwards of 5GB – so choose a hard drive with lots of space.

You can also pick which sorts of DRM protection you want to remove:

There’s nothing wrong with leaving everything checked, of course, and doing so makes it more likely that you can actually play the DVD later. Once you’re ready to rip, all you need to do is click the big blue button – that will start the process. It may take a few hours, but at the end, you’ll have a ready-to-play ISO.

A variety of video players can open ISO files; I recommend VLC which plays just about everything. Most media centers, including Boxee, can also open ISO files. Let us know any other programs you find that can open ISO files in the comments below.

Want to burn an ISO to DVD? This program supports that too; just enter the burn mode and get started. You’ll need a DVD burner, of course.

Supported DRM

So what DRM can this tool remove? Here is the official list:

• CSS
• CPRM
• CPP
• APSUOPs
• ARccOS
• Rip-Guard
• Disney X protection

Conclusion

This is a great tool for ripping your DVD collection so you can watch it on the go. While it may not work for watching DVDs on portable devices like the iPad, it is great for those of us who want to watch our DVDs on our computers.

Do you have any similar tools to recommend? Share them in the comments below, along with any ripping tips or ISO playback tips.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s a great format and I’ve enjoyed many wonderful books on my Windows Mobile device using the MobiPocket reader. However, most of these encrypted files are a real pain if you want to throw them on different devices or use other software.

Today, we’ll show you how to crack the encryption of these files, so you can enjoy them however you want. In other words, we’ll show you how to remove drm from MOBI and PRC files. When you’re done, you’ll be able to read them on any system or device, convert those MOBI or PRC ebooks to PDF or any other format you’d like and you’ll – once again – own those books that you’ve payed for.

DISCLAIMER – Stripping the encryption of your ebooks might be illegal in your country of residence. Distribution of decrypted ebooks almost certainly is illegal. MakeUseOf is not responsible for any legal problems you might face. Act wisely, or face the consequences personally if you don’t.

With that said, let’s get going.

MobiDeDRM

A tool that has been able to break nearly every mobi/prc encryption is MobiDeDrm, courtesy of pdurrant. This download contains four simple python scripts; versions 0.01, 0.02 and 0.05.

Downloading Python

These scripts should run on any OS, given you’ve got the right files installed. So, before we can get started, you’ll have to download Python and a Python extension module like wxPython. What you need to do is to visit this site and you will be greeted by a webpage as seen below:

In both steps 1 and 2, choose the Python and wxPython module according to your operating system.

After these applications are installed, Python scripts should run flawlessly on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Finding Your PID

Your PID is the personal key that your reader uses to encrypt and read the file. We’re going to need this key if we’re to permanently strip the DRM from the ebook.

Because MobiPocket is designed to be used with different devices, the PIDs are out in the open for the user to grab. If your ebook is hosted on another device (i.e. Kindle), simply sync it up with the software before you proceed.

In MobiPocket on your desktop, go to Devices, and you’ll see the PID of said reader in Details. Note that a PID is both device and ebook-specific. Upon transfering your ebook, the PID is also altered, so you’ll need the PID of the right device or the decryption will fail.

When buying a Mobi ebook online, you’re most often asked for your PID before downloading. Obviously, this is the PID you’ll need to use. However, sometimes the process is turned around.

If you’re asked for the store username and password upon adding the book, it hasn’t and won’t be matched with your PID. Instead, you’ll first need to transfer the ebook to another device (e.g. Kindle or Windows Mobile) and use that PID. With me so far?

Removing Encryption

Once we have the right PID, most of the work is already behind us. We’ll now deploy the scripts to permanently remove the encryption. For accessibility, it’s advised to put your eBook and the python scripts in the same folder.

First, open the Terminal or command screen.

In Windows XP, go to Start – Run, type cmd and hit enter. In Vista, go to Start, type cmd in the search box and hit enter.

The Terminal application is located in /Applications/Utilities for Mac OS X.

And if you’re using Linux, you’ll probably know the location. In most distributions, this will also be located at Applications/Utilities.

Next, you navigate to the folder containing your files. To do this, type cd, followed by the full file path to your folder, and hit enter. In my case, that’ll make for cd /home/simon/ebook. If your filepath contains spaces, put single quotes ( ‘ ) around it.

Now, all you need to do is run the script. Type python mobidedrm005.py infile.mobi outfile.mobi PID and hit enter. Substitute “infile.mobi”, “outfile.mobi” and “PID” with the appropriate filenames, file extensions and the PID respectively. In my case, that’ll make for python mobidedrm005.py ebook.prc outfile.prc 1234567$ab

If you’re experiencing trouble, try putting your PID between single quotes ( ‘ ) or using one of the previous script versions (e.g. mobidedrm002.py). Some ebooks refuse to work with the later versions (strangely) but work perfectly well with the first one.

If all went well, you’ll now be the proud owner of another, unencrypted version of your ebook.

You can sync this with any device you want without too much of a hassle, or convert it to an easier to use format like pdf, rtf or html. Calibre and ABC Palm are great free resources to help you achieve the conversion, and a simple Google search will show even more.

How did that work out for you? Do you like reading your ebooks on one device or prefer the liberty to choose your own? Let us know in the comments.

Sadly, they also brought some bad things; DRM amongst others.

With internet as a news medium, a lot of companies saw their chance to deliver a strike to piracy, by introducing new levels of security. Sadly, this had an immense effect on the everyday music lover as well.

The (then) new DRM protection refrained users from pirating, but shielded them from a lot of their proper rights as well. Consumers could now only put their songs on a limited number of devices, or burn them to a CD a limited number of times.

Also our beloved Apple went all-in on this, chaining audiophyles all over the world in a way that would’ve given most other companies tons of trouble. After quite some time they’re discussing other protection formats, but there are still plenty of DRM songs out there that need to be freed.

Freeing Your Music From DRM

Today we’ll look at how to obliterate your music’s DRM protection restrictions.

Mind, this is for lawful purposes only, so you can enjoy your music the way you want to. Don’t rob old ladies, steal babies, or use this method for any piracy-related activity.

There have been several different DRM-freeing methods. New ones have appeared and others have disappeared, due to the constant patching/cracking race.

Two methods have always remained though, both using an analog backdoor.

The CD Burning Technique

This is probably the most easiest (free) way to rid your music from DRM. The process is simple. We burn our music to an audio CD, and rip the disc to MP3.

In theory, any application can be used, but in reality most protected files only work with specific programs like iTunes, Napster, Windows Media Player and such.

The principle is always the same. Burn the files to a CD, and rip them back to your computer.

iTunes How-to

Burning the files is relatively simple. First, we create a playlist, and fill it with the DRM protected files.

Next, select the playlist and burn it to a disk. There’ll be a button at the lower right of the screen, or you can use right click on the playlist.

Once this is finished, we’ll specify the ripping format. In iTunes, go to Edit – Preferences, and press theImport Settings button in the General tab. Here you’ll be able to choose the desired encoder.

Finally, insert and rip the burned audio CD to your computer. You can also use other applications for this, in which case you won’t need the previous step.

Stream Copy Technique

The principle is even simpler than before. We play the songs, and record the audio output to a new file.

This one will work always, but is a bother at the very least. Freeing large batches of files will almost be impossible, as each time the conversion must be started and terminated manually. There are applications that will do this automatically, but sadly none of them are free; those that were are abandoned and stopped working.

A good, free and simple recording tool is Audacity. To capture any audio, simple press the record button at the start and at the end of the song.

This is a tiring process, and is more of a way out than an actual solution.

Do you know another way out to free your music from DRM, something we missed? Or are you having problems with the methods described above? Tell us in the comments.

Now you are that insufferable know-it-all at family gatherings who descends from his Mac OS X Leopard nirvana only to lecture the rest of the brood on their miserable digital lives. In which case, brace yourself for what I am about to say: It’s true – you can make the user experience on your Mac even better!

Back in March, Jackson Chung reminded you of the 10 Essential Mac Apps to Install After a Reformat. Here, in this post, I will endeavour to purloin some of his ideas and add some of my own. If you are a Mac newbie, I hope that the suggested applications are new and useful to you. If you are an old hand, read ahead and correct me with your own better alternatives.

1. Quicksilver

This one’s so obvious that they should just ship the OS with it pre-installed. Instead, Mac OS comes with Spotlight, which is nice – for Grandma. For a slick cat like you, Quicksilver is the rare application that qualifies for that over-used metaphor: a Swiss army knife. With simple keystrokes (default invocation keystroke is Ctrl-Space) it lets you launch applications, look up contact info, navigate your directory tree, send email, and interface with other applications using plugins.

2. VirtualBox

Sure you may have taken the path to enlightenment, but the rest of the world is taking its time getting there, and you do have to communicate with them once in a while. I am speaking here of course of the Microsoft Windows world which imposes itself into your beatific world with that occasional annoying banking site that works only in Internet Explorer. For those cases, there is the free virtualisation tools VirtualBox, which lets you run Windows (a licensed copy of course) on your Mac.

(Image courtesy of virtualbox.org)

And while you are on the job (of making peace with the Windows world), you might as well grab Flip4Mac (Windows Media Components), a tool that will install plug-ins for the QuickTime media player on your Mac, in order to enable playback of Windows Media audio and video files.

3. The Goodies at iSlayer

Choose one or more of the free goodies (donationware) at iSlayer: iStatMenus, iStatPro, iStatNano. They are all applications that will display various useful bits of information about your system.

The first (iStatMenus) sits in your menu bar (see 5 Free Tools to Add to your Mac Menu Bar for this and other useful menu bar add ons) while the other two are Dashboard Widgets. They all display system information such as: the utilisation of your CPU, disk and memory, the top 5 processes that are using your CPU, the status of your laptop battery, and so on.

This is useful, especially for a new user, since such information gives you a clue to those unexpected OS behaviours that even a Mac user encounters, such as slow system response. In the screenshot , you can see that Firefox is using up 20% 15.5% of my CPU even though I am not actively using it (perhaps a misbehaving Firefox extension?). iStatMenu also provides a nice little date and time display in your menu bar and a pull down that brings up a calendar.

4. Jumpcut

A neat solution to a common problem of maintaining and accessing multiple entries in your clipboard i.e., copying multiple bits of text before pasting them. Jumpcut sits in the menu bar and harvests your copy buffer as you work away on the Command-C’s.

When you are ready to paste these bits into an email message or editor, they can be access by clicking on the menubar icon or, even better, using a hotkey (default: Alt-Space) that can be used to rotate through the clipboard.

5. Freeing your Music

Remember that music you bought from the iTunes Store with your hard-earned money that Apple now refuses to give up to you, locking it into their proprietary format or making it inaccessible from your iPod? Two applications that will set that right are FairGame, which will let you convert DRM’ed iTunes Store in your iTunes library to an unprotected format, and iPodDisk, which conversely, helps rescue music stored on your iPod. To this bundle, you can add SimplyBurns which completes the loop by enabling you to burn your media to CD or DVD.

There are other useful tools (here is one example: Open With Manager) for a Mac newbie that we can explore in a later post.

Liberating Your Media

As big stores continue to move away from DRM and give more rights to their customers so that they have more control over the music which they’ve bought, DoubleTwist is a new and different software which lets you liberate your media with ease. We know that there are huge numbers of such software available, but DoubleTwist makes the task very easy by playing the media and stripping off its DRM label, if any, in the background.

Sharing Media

DoubleTwist lets you share media with your friends and recommends using the iTunes software.

Media you can send using DoubleTwist -

Video: 3gp (used by most cell phones), MPEG4 (.mp4, .m4v), wmv, avi and MPEG2 (.mpg, .mpv, .mpeg)
Audio: mp3, aac/m4a, wma, wav
Pictures: jpg, gif, png, bmp

Sharing with doubleTwist from Jon Lech Johansen on Vimeo.

The DoubleTwist software allows you to login to your Facebook account and add friends or share media with friends by emailing them. If your friends are using DoubleTwist then you can share stuff using simple drag-n-drop in the software.

Facebook App

DoubleTwist also provides a Facebook app named Twist me! which can integrate with the desktop app and act like a media drop box, enabling you to privately send audio, video and photos to your Facebook friends. For files sent through this Facebook app, there is a 10 MB limit per file.

Syncing Media

As I’ve already mentioned, DoubleTwist works best with iTunes and lets you sync your iTunes playlists to a number of devices. It also lets you convert the legally purchased iTunes files to other formats like MP3.

Currently it supports syncing with the following external devices :-

• Nokia N & E Series phones, including the N95, E61i, E62, and others
• Sony Ericsson Walkman & Cybershot phones
• Windows Mobile 5.0/6.0 platform (e.g. Treo, HTC, Palm)
• BlackBerry Curve and Pearl
• LG Viewty and LG Voyager
• Sony PSP
• Amazon Kindle

However it doesn’t support the iPod or iPhone yet.

Overall it looks like a nice software, especially for those who love to share media with friends. This is still a new app and we can expect many more features in the future.

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

(1) iJigg

iJigg is a community where independent artists post their tracks for iJigg users to rate them. Top rated tracks appear on the front page. Users can easily play tracks, share them with friends, embed tracks elsewhere (i.e. Myspace), create playlists and in many cases download them.

(2) Jamendo

Slightly different in nature but no less of a cool community for indie fans. Hosts over 2500 free to download music albums and provides a bunch of handy additional features, i.e.

• comprehensive Tag cloud, where each tag functions like dynamic playlist
• targeted RSS feeds (albums of the months, latest releases, genre specific…)

(3) Stage.fm

Based on the Alexa website popularity stats, Stage.fm seem to fall behind when compared to iJigg and Jamendo. Nonetheless, it’s the only listed service that provides its users with an option to search for free indie tracks that are similar to popular big-name tunes. For instance, searching for ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’ brings up all indie tracks that are similar to RHCP tracks.

(4) AmieStreet

‘…independent music (DRM-free) download website. All songs on AmieStreet start FREE and can rise upto 98 cents depending on how much the community likes it.’

To quickly navigate to those community-admired 98 cents tracks, just jump to the category of your choice and switch to “Buzzing-All Time” view. On the other hand, switching to the ‘latest’ view will bring all those yet to-be-rated tracks which for the time being can be downloaded for free.