Gizmodo: How To Use The Zune as a Hard Drive
Fantastic news for the handful of people who actually own a Zune. Someone’s found a way to enable a sort of hard drive support, which although doesn’t assign a drive letter to your Zune, does allow you to drag and drop files from it.
Turns out it’s just a registry value to enable visibility in the shell.
This sounds like way too much work, but here you go.
Gizmodo: How To Bypass The Zune’s WiFi Sharing DRM:
…rename whatever files—MP3s, movies, programs—to have the extension “.jpg” in order to fool the Zune into thinking it’s an image. This hack works because Zune doesn’t apply DRM to images!
Then what?
Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the “containing folder” where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.
ArsTechnica: Cell phone unlocking legal (for three years)
Every three years, the Copyright Office develops a list of approved exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention protections. This is the third time through the process, and the government has approved the largest number of exemptions to date—though they’re still incredibly narrow.
Exemptions are allowed for 1) the educational library of a university’s media studies department, in order to watch film clips in class; 2) using computer software that requires the original disks or hardware in order to run; 3) dongle-protected computer programs, if the the dongle no longer functions and a replacement cannot be found; 4) protected e-books, in order to use screen-reader software; 5) cell phone firmware that ties a phone to a specific wireless network; and 6) DRM software included on audio CDs, but only when such software creates security vulnerabilities on personal computers.