Like Yahoo and MSN before them, Walmart is turning off its DRM servers on Oct. 9, effectively putting any DRM'd songs you bought from them into a cold stasis they'll never wake up from, since they'll become totally unmovable unless you circumvent the DRM. Walmart went through this earlier with their video store, though it didn't matter since no one bought anything from it. Walmart's music store is DRM-free now, though I doubt that's any consolation to people who actually paid for music that's now nigh useless.

Read More »

In case you were still worried about the LHC bringing on the biblical apocalypse, you can calm down, because it turns out the Collider is going to be out of commission for a lot longer than previously thought. The "electrical transformer" problem wasn't the cause of the shutdown at all, and the real problem means the LHC won't be back up and running for at least two months.

Read More »

A major cause of frustration in the Nvidia notebook GPU fiasco--where "significant quantities" of notebook graphics cards are packaged with "weak" materials leading them to overheat and fail at a "higher-than-normal rate"--is that Nvidia is declining to identify exactly which chips are bad, as the WSJ notes today. So you've gotta find out from your notebook maker if you're possibly stuck with a time bomb. Dell is extending its limited warranties by a year to deal with the issue in the following notebooks:

Read More »

CNBC reports that Netflix' shipping systems have been at least partially broken since Tuesday. They managed to ship nothing on Tuesday, half of what they were supposed to on Wednesday, and nothing today. What's the deal?

Read More »

Sorry for the tardiness of the overnight feed - Our CMS was borked by an automatic update. It's back at the moment, so we'll be bringing you all the stuff out of the US as soon as possible. Thanks for reading!

Oops! According to a law professor at George Washington University, all patent judges appointed after the year 2000 have been done so unconstitutionally, making thousands of patent rulings made by said judges null and void. This will have ramifications on patents worth billions and billions of dollars, and it's not clear exactly what's going to happen.

Read More »

Thanks to billing problems and the FCC's intervention, the Navajo Nation will be sans Internet on Monday. An FCC audit uncovered the fact that satellite service provider OnSat Networks had double-billed the tribe in 2007. Since the U.S. government pays for 85 to 90 percent of the cost of Internet service, it cut off funds to OnSat, pending an investigation into the matter. And, since OnSat can't pay its subcontractors, it is shutting down service. In the meantime, the Navajo will have to find other ways to peruse LOLcat pics and update their Myspaces. Will the struggles of the Native Americans never end? [DSL reports]

Read More »

Roughly 1,800 external drives manufactured by Seagate were infected with a Trojan horse virus that sent personal information back to China, according to the Taipei Times. The disk drives, sold at retail in Taiwan, were presumably messed with when they were in the possession of one of Seagate's Chinese subcontractors. The situation has been locked down, but it certainly puts a new spin on security fears, and Seagate itself has got to be pretty freaked out. All we have at the moment is a statement: "All products leaving the factory are now cleared of the virus." [Reuters]

At one of Toronto's locations of The Bay department store, four giant screens have suffered from the infamous Blue Screen of Death for days. You'd think that someone would, I dunno, turn off the freakin' screens. Or, at minimum, there's gotta be some 2.4gHz nanny cam feed they could leech for at least a few days before anyone complained. Because after the first 24 hours or so of BSOD, we begin to think that they like the aesthetic. [freshdaily]