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Toner Cartridges new DMCA victim
anarkhos writes "Lexmark leads the curve by being the first to invoke the DMCA to prevent 3rd parties from making Lexmark-compatible toner cartridges." It's gonna get worse before it gets better. Update: 01/12 14:13 GMT by J : Yep, it's a
dupe;
see
here
and here
for more info; for more on the DMCA, see
our next story
;)
other story here: lexmark sues
"Static Control Components" buckled under the threat, and agreed to stop making the chips.
Story here
Looks like Lexmark won round one. I hope they don't get too much further.
At any rate, this is just *another* example of how stupid the DMCA is and how it's being used way out of its scope.
How many more examples do we need? Geez..
Ford is offering up to two years worth of petrol (gas) when you buy a new car here. I think its 1200 maximum over 24 months.
The catch? They give you a card you can use like a credit card at only one type of gas stations (total-fina-elf associates), and each time you fill your car, you have to enter the odometer reading on the keypad. If you put another brand of petrol in, then you lose the remainder of your free petrol because they can detect you suddenly got a large increase in kilometrage between fillups.
Its the same as a rebate, but tied into making you a habitual customer of their partner gasoline company.
When you sign up for the free petrol offer, you agree they can share the data with their "business partners". They are approaching other companies offering detailed marketing data on buyers, on things like geographic usage (people who drove to the south of spain 3 times this year, etc). They can also track the consumption of petrol quite accurately over a large sampling of their vehicles, which probably gives their engineers more data on fuel efficiency as motors wear over the first two years.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The European Union is making guidelines which will force manufacturers like HP and Epson to make their cartridges refillable and adjustable by 3rd parties, for anti-monopoly reasons.
I don't know anything about European copyright acts, but it would seem, this doesn't go well with a, above mentioned, DMCA like law. Anybody got any insights on this?
You might want to read this article
Phoenix renders pages twice as fast as IE. And Mozilla is NOT an end-user browser. It's a technology preview which shows off XUL and bunch of other shit, which makes fast applications possible (such as Phoenix).
So there.