HomeWeekly News Roundup (September 25, 2016)
Finally getting back into the swing of things, and also the right time zone. Luckily for me, it wasn’t one of those hectic news weeks where news stories just oozes out of every crevice. Nope, it was one of those nice and quiet ones where just the right amount of ooze is present, and I can write this WNR without feeling like I’m writing a novel.
So on to the news!
Coffee pods, light bulbs, and now printers – all with DRM that won’t work
Who doesn’t love a DRM news story? It’s always interesting to see which industry, and which company has come up with a new way to screw their own customers, and then wait and see how long it takes before the DRM is inevitably broken anyway (broken in the sense that it no longer protects the content or product, and also broken in the sense that it doesn’t work and causes legitimate users to suffer). This time, it’s the printer industry, HP, and not very long before their latest attempt to curb competition will fail. HP has sneakily added in a new DRM to their printers that prevents them from using third-party ink, giving users an misleading “damaged ink cartridge” message.
I say sneaky because the new protection scheme was added in via a firmware update more than half a year ago, but was set to activate only this week. I guess HP wanted to give their customer service department more time to prepare for the barrage of complaint calls.
And as with most DRM implementations, it was buggy. Some users have reported that their HP branded cartridges are being labeled as “damaged” as well, and one user reported the printer refused to let him exchange the cartridge at all.
Worst of all, but totally expected, this new anti-competitive measure may end up being broken sooner rather than later. Third party ink manufacturers are already promising new updated cartridges that will be able to bypass the new DRM scheme.
So lots of bad publicity, user complaints, lost customers and in the end, all probably for nothing. Yep, that’s DRM for ya! Why won’t they ever learn?
Dr. Downloadlove or: How I Learned To Love Piracy. Having finally realised that constantly complaining about piracy is not a cool things to do anymore, more and more industry peeps are now learning to embrace it. Or rather, they’re finally admitting that piracy isn’t always the Big Bad Wolf that they’ve been telling us all this time.
The latest declaration of adoration occurred at the All That Matters content conference in Singapore, when former Sony India exec Samir Bangara declared his unending love for piracy in front of unimpressed movie studio execs. So okay, it wasn’t as controversial as I’ve made it sound, but Bangara did state that piracy may be the solution to one of the biggest problems facing media companies at the moment: discoverability. Bangara also pointed to the value of piracy data in determining what users wanted to watch, data that companies like Netflix and Warner Bros. have also admitted to using in the past.
Or to sum up, piracy rocks!
PS4 Pro can do 4K gaming, kind of
More fallout from the PS4 Pro launch, and the subsequent rubbing-it-in-ness that Microsoft have been engaged in ever since. It’s not helped by the fact that Sony promoted the PS4 Pro as a 4K console, but possibly due to legal reasons and more prodding by tech journalists, they’ve had to clarify their statement quite a bit. Most people who had a detailed look at the PS4 Pro specs realised that this thing was not going to do native 4K. Sony has also said that the majority of of PS4 Pro enabled games will be upscaled to 4K.
So instead of being pedantic about this many pixels or whatever, Sony says it’s all about whether gamers are able to see a difference and how close to a real 4K gaming experience it will be. To be fair, it would take an enormously powerful machine to do native 4K without compromises (think PCs with $1000+ GPUs), and not even Microsoft’s Xbox One Scorpio, coming a year later, will be able to do 4K without taking a few shortcuts.
Microsoft has been keen to point out they their effort, with 6 teraflops of power, will get gamers much closer to true native 4K than the Pro’s 4.2 teraflops (which was never really going to be good enough for 4K). But even Microsoft has admitted that there will be “asterisks” when it comes to the Scorpio claiming to do 4K gaming, but just fewer of them than Sony’s effort.
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So that’s another week done and dusted. Hoping for more and more interesting stories to update you on next week. Until then, have a great week!