- Thursday, 12 November 2009
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I have opinions of my own - strong opinions - but I don't always agree with them - George Bush
Wal-Mart shuts DRM infested movie service
MUCH TO THE chagrin of no one, Wal-Mart shut its monumentally awful video download site. Well, it sort of did, HP, the makers of the back end, gave up on its end, forcing Wal-Mart to do the same.
If you go to its main page, you will see that it is closed down for good, a loss only to those who actually bought from here. Those people are, in the vernacular, what is known as screwed. Why? Read the FAQ.
Yeah, they have no recourse, have no one to go to with a problem, can not transfer their videos to a new machine, can no longer re-download them, and in general, are screwed. Another victim of DRM. If you have a problem, as they put in so many words, "Ha ha, we got your money, get stuffed", also known as the last item on the list.
But we're sad to see this site go. It was a shining beacon of awfulness and an easy target to point people to when you wanted to show off the evils of DRM, they spelled it out in terms even a Wal-Mart customer could understand.
Now that is gone, and like every other DRM scheme out there from MS to Major League Baseball, all that the customers have left is a hole in their wallet, the warm feeling that they enriched a company that doesn't care, and a burning sensation in their.... hey, nice weather out there, eh? ยต
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They could've summed up the FAQ with a few simple words...

You're screwed!
Hi guys

I have 2 concerns:
1.Using Wireshark on my computer I 've discovered communication from port 2600 on my computer to a host in Norway, utilising the protocol Zebra
I don't think that is ok,especially worriyng is that Comodo firewall did not block it
2.On my computer i have installed Visual Studio 2005
When I run some .mov files with QuickTime, I get a message from Visual C++ Runtime telling that a buffer overrun has been detected that corrupted the stack so the program needs to close(and it closes)

Is my super-protected computer infected ? Any ideeas?

Thanks
then again, I suppose their needs to be some karmic justice for those punters that shop at Wally World.

Here's Wally World's Slogan:
"Lowest Prices, Guaranteed!"

Why anyone runs to a store like that, for anything, is beyond me... as is how this comment relates to DRM.
Anyway, good piece.

you would have to be foolish to believe that digital movie downloads wouldn't have DRM infections
On the FAQ linked above, I saw this sentence:

"Portable format videos purchased from Wal-Mart Video Downloads are compatible with most PlaysforSure compliant portable video players"

SO... What's 'sure' about 'playsforsure' then?! Not a lot!
I think the best place in which they could add the line said in the article would be in the site closing down page:

"The Wal-Mart Video Downloads Service closed on 12/21/07.
Thank you for shopping with us. We got your money, get stuffed."

By the way that's another reason why I despise DRM so completely...apart from the total rip-off of paying a company to have a "nothing" that's completely dependant upon the survival not just of your hard disk, but just of your current Windows installation...you also end up depending from companies which don't give a ... of your satisfation or your decent enjoyment of the things you buy...

I remember when I was younger and my mother bought me Temple of Elelmental Evil (Italian version) as birthday gift...I "loved" that game, but it was bugged like a ..., Atari stopped supporting the international patches almost immediately and the developer, Troika Games (who did many games I loved), shut down so one couldn't hope to have his international patch from them...

Well...that's one of the things that made me pissed off with Atari, but think how could have been if I had not a nice (physical) cd and its pack!

My hard disks died almost three times in a row...I've re-installed Windows XP at least three times (I hate to do it, that's why so little times)...were it a DRM not-physical copy, I'd be ripped ten times as much!!

TC and DRM are the things that made me despise Windows Vista even before it came out...a lot before it was found out to be a total lemon...
Thanks good, there are some "evil doers" out there.

These criminal persons write tools/patches to un'DRM DRM'd stuff. Aka hackers.

What would be the world without people, risking a lot, reverse engineering, harming the law, to help screwed people?

Could they be called "new age robin hoods"?
Taking from the rich, sharing to the poor, hunted from the government?

- Selfless and Brave