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Domain: webnoize.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to webnoize.com.
Stories · 3
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Thomson's Vision: Smart Cards For Everything
ideaspin writes: "Thomson Multimedia is pushing the adoption of its smart card technology (SmartRight) in all kinds of devices ranging from TVs to PCs and set-top boxes -- basically, anything that might play digital media. Information Week has an article about it as does Webnoize(subscription only). This doesn't smell like something that would survive on the PC and consumers aren't going to be thrilled about the restrictions that such technology will bring -- no recording, limited archivability, no sharing and additional hardware for every viewing device. Interesting thing is that they are trying to convince the government to require the computer industry to adopt such a standard. Along with the copy protection schemes built into portable media and hard drives, this is one of the many ways that they are trying to lock down 'rogue' PC devices." -
Sonicblue Acquires ReplayTV
rakeshagrawal writes: "This article reports that Sonicblue is buying ReplayTV. It's an interesting step in Sonicblue's transformation. They have quite an array of media devices/software items ranging from audio products, web tablets, home networking and now video. And as for ReplayTV and the PVR industry it means that TiVo may may have even less competition now ... WebNoize has another very interesting article on the acquisition and SonicBlue's overall strategy, but it's a subscriber-only thing :(" (Quick note to WebNoize -- wouldn't you like more people to read this?) -
MPEG, Patents, and Open-Source
Eric_Scheirer wrote in to send us a decent summary of the situation regarding MP3 and patents. Its a fairly good summary of a side of the MP3 that we don't think as much about.