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Microsoft and the entertainment industry’s holy grail of controlling copyright through the motherboard has moved a step closer with Intel Corp. now embedding digital rights management within in its latest dual-core processor Pentium D and accompanying 945 chipset.

Officially launched worldwide on the May 26, the new offerings come DRM-enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case.

DRM for those who aren’t familiar is a scheme to control the use of legitimately downloaded media. It is what prevents you from putting music you bought onto your CD player; what prevents you from listening the music on MP3 players; or putting it on any hardware other than that specified by the manufacturer. Its implementation kills legitimate online music sales. However its also insisted as a requirement by the Music Industry (who later cry foul… go figure).

But this isn’t all:

Conversely, Intel is heavily promoting what it calls “active management technology” (AMT) in the new chips as a major plus for system administrators and enterprise IT. Understood to be a sub-operating system residing in the chip’s firmware, AMT will allow administrators to both monitor or control individual machines independent of an operating system.

Additionally, AMT also features what Intel calls “IDE redirection” which will allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems. Both AMT and IDE control are enabled by a new network interface controller.

In other words, anyone from the outside will also be able to utterly destroy your computer. Without your assistance. Personally, I’ll just continue to stick with the arguably better and cheaper AMD Chips.

Update: Intel has dismissed the original article from Computerworld Today Australia. Full story here.

From BMGs [Record Label] own mouth:

“The casual piracy, the school yard piracy, is a huge issue for us,” says Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business for Sony BMG. “Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs, which is why making the CD a secure format is of the utmost importance.”

That means that the biggest piracy of them all by far isn’t filesharing according to this particular Record Label; its the ripping/burning CDs. The same kind of “piracy” that has been executed ever since the release of the tape deck.

Suddenly, my fears that filesharing could of actually damaged legitimate sales in any significant manner completely dissipated.

There are a bunch of illegitimate pay-downloading sites on the Internet. The premise is simple: the website promises oodles of movies, games, music to download if you pay a certain fee.

I was able to get into the member’s area of two of these sites without paying, to do a bit of recon [thanks MattZab]. Inside these sites you will find a bunch of links to resources that were already free to begin with, such as open-source software, free online radio sites, etc. No mention of the “Thousands of movies”, “Millions of MP3s”, “Applications” or any such downloads. At most some of these sites will have links to other torrent tracker sites.

There was also a phone number for customer service. So I decided to call it up!

Download Phone Conversation

Its funny how time flies. I just got an email informing me that my Freewebs account was about to expire. Because its always handy to maintain 100MB of external storage, I decided to login and void the potential of losing my account.

I found pictures/screenshots that I had stored there from 2 years ago. There was one of my first sigs ever on NX. An Agenda cover I had made for my high school in my last year there. Screenshots of my desktop w/ a samurize config. The config wasn’t half bad; pretty decent custom desktop w/ theme. It feels like I was on that depiction of my computer a few months ago… but its been 2 years.

Time flies.