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Digital control round-up

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 11, 2008 ⋅ One comment
Digital control round-up

Mac as a giant dongle
At Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood makes an interesting point about Apple’s lock-in business model:
It’s almost first party only– about as close as you can get to a console platform and still call yourself a computer… when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you [...]

Ed Felten: DRM Wars, and ‘Property Rights Management’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 15, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments
Ed Felten: DRM Wars, and 'Property Rights Management'

At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten has posted a summary of a talk he gave at the Usenix Security Symposium, called “DRM Wars: The Next Generation”. The two installments so far (Part 1, Part 2) trace a possible trend in the (stated) intentions of DRM’s proponents, from it being largely promoted as a tool to [...]

Friend or foe: Battery-authentication ICs?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 20, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments
Friend or foe: Battery-authentication ICs?

Via MAKE, an article from Electrical Design News looking at lithium battery authentication chips in products such as phones and laptops, designed to prevent users fitting ‘non-genuine’ batteries.
Now, the immediate response of most of us is probably “razor blade model!” or even “stifling democratic innovation!” (as Hal Varian or Eric von Hippel might put [...]

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