Posted by Luke | Posted on 12-12-2009
Category : Random & Interesting
Tags: Anti-Piracy, Copy Protection, DRM, new media
The thought has crossed my mind a few times recently, well mainly when I go to the cinema or put a DVD in to watch, sit back in to relax and watch the movie I have either just rented out, purchased or paid an exorbitant ticket price for. Then you get the movie piracy message. Now personally I am just plain sick and tired of seeing this and I’m sure the rest of the 99% of the population who do the right thing are as well.
It really has become apparent to me that before you even consider illegally downloading a movie or song the Music & Movie industries already have you labeled as a thief and a criminal, otherwise why would they show the same rotten message at the beginning of every movie. In my opinion these industries are petrified of being left behind as new media overtakes them with more modern distribution methods leaving them with no means of income.
It is truly disgusting that after you go to the cinemas and pay anywhere between $15 to $30 dollars for a ticket and some overpriced food you then get accused of being a pirate with this message they continue to press on with. Does this seem a little wrong to anybody else? Shouldn’t these ignorant companies start moving forward with the rest of us in seeing that adding copy protection to absolutely everything isn’t actually helping any cause. Pirates know how to get around copy protection, and copy protection is only a major pain in the proverbial behind to all honest citizens of the world.
I say that its a pain for all honest citizens in that content we have legitimately purchased is so laden with copy protection that it is almost impossible without some level of technical knowledge to actually transfer a movie that you own from a DVD to your iPod to view on the go. These companies are actually game enough to expect us to go and purchase another electronic copy to achieve this same end result.
This plain insanity on the music & movie industries behalf became really apparent to me today when I came across this article Woman arrested for trying to record ‘Twilight’ on digital camera from American newspaper Chicago Sun Times. Essentially the gist of this story is that the Woman was holding a surprise birthday party in a Cinema, and legitimately enough was taking a video recording of the party on her camcorder. The insane theatre manager then decided to go on a rampage after seeing her video recording and call the police who proceeded to search the tape and arrest the woman because there happened to be footage of the Twilight movie ‘New Moon’. Which had been captured accidentally.
This is all a little over the top if you ask me and it might be about time for these industries to wake up to themselves and realise that trying to act like anti-piracy God’s isn’t going to get them anywhere fast. They need to accept that things change and innovate new ways of delivering their content while treating their paying customers like humans rather than assuming off the bat that they are criminals.
It was back in January of 2008 when Google first released their very own web browser by the name of Chrome, since that time it had only ever been available to people running windows as their operating system. Unfortunately for those of us who run either Mac or Linux as our main operating systems we weren’t able to get in on the action of this new browser. Ever since the launch however Google had said that there were plans for a Mac and Linux based version of the browser which has now arrived.
I downloaded it late last night and thought I would have a quick browse around with it. I almost always use Safari on the Mac which I consider to be a very fast web browser and on par with Firefox, but upon opening up Chrome and using it for a little while you do notice the speed in which web pages load. Speed is always something that we are looking for in a web browser because we all want the fastest load times possible and Chrome certainly doesn’t disappoint here.
As far as appearance goes, if you have used the Windows version of Chrome at all you will notice that it is all very similar but with a more…Mac’ish feel to it, the colour scheme has been adapted to better fit within the OS X environment. Although Google have equipped Chrome with a host of different themes that can be added to it as well to change up the look. It does offer the now expected feature of tabbed browsing, however it does so in a different manner to what we are all used to. As mac users if you remember back to when the beta version of Safari 4 was released the behaviour of the tabs was to sit above the address bar? Well this is the same way that tabs are implemented in Chrome – I really like this way of setting out the tabs as it maximises your viewing area which can be especially valuable if you are on a laptop and it is something that I wish had been kept in Safari.
The other neat thing that you will notice is that you lose the search bar that we have come to expect, it is no longer a separate box to type your search into. Google Chrome integrates the address bar and search box all into one and they call it the Omnibox. Therefore if you know the URL go ahead and type it in, but if your not sure use the same box and do a Google (or other specified search engine) search.
One of the other things that has become standard in all modern browsers is the ability to browse the web in ‘private’ mode, Chrome also has this functionality which they call Incognito. Essentially meaning that there will be no cookies or web history saved from sites you visit while ‘incognito’ this is a very good feature if you are using a public computer and would like to further increase your safety while doing internet banking or shopping. I do however like the rather humorous explanation that Google gives about the Incognito function.
All in all this is a very capable browser and I like it a lot! I’m glad it is finally available on the Mac and Linux platforms for all to utilise. Google Chrome is available for download here: http://www.google.com/chrome
And further information about the browser is available here: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html
