Idolator

Retail giant Wal-Mart have notified customers of their digital-music store that, come Oct. 9, they won't be able to play any files purchased before August 2007 and many of those purchased before February, thanks to those files being protected by the Microsoft-crafted digital-rights management software Playsforsure. In the wake of Microsoft stopping development and support of that nasty little bit of DRM, Wal-Mart switched its entire digital-music store to MP3s in February. So now, the higher-ups there have decided that the time is right to shut off the "license key" that allows those files to be played by people who purchased rented them. The Bentonville-issued missive to customers after the jump. More »

Hey, remember PlaysForSure? The Microsoft-branded DRM that the company abandoned when it developed the Zune and that even Wal-Mart won't use? Well, in a last-ditch effort, Microsoft has decided to rename PlaysForSure in a way that makes sense to no one except the marketing executives who probably thought "hey, this dying technology that we're saddled with does have a purpose: cross-promotional branding!" when they came up with this scheme: More »

According to ComputerWorld blogger David Haskin, Microsoft is in the process of letting its first-generation digital rights management service, PlaysForSure, slowly wither away, in favor of putting all of its energy behind the shiny brown turd it unleashed a couple of months ago. (Has it been that long already?) PlaysForSure is used by older Windows Media-based services like Napster and Urge; Haskin, who reviewed the Zune for the magazine, also noticed this bit of nefarious behavior: More »