Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio

Hot on the heels of EMI / Apple’s iTunes Plus offerings, and Amazon’s DRM-free music store, comes news that the industry media-providing MusicNet service will be making a 1-million-song outlay of EMI and indie tracks to its waiting corporate partners, sans DRM. So what does this mean for us? Well, clearly the DRM-bucking trends that have been put into play are causing some serious ripple effects throughout the industry, and since MusicNet provides content to places like Yahoo! Music Unlimited, HMV Digital, and URGE — not exactly small potatoes — it’s likely we’ll start seeing free-er music popping up all over the place. Don’t get too comfortable though, the RIAA will still find ways to make your life hell.

[Via TG Daily]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

OPPO, a PMP maker we’ve come to expect some interesting designs from (see the guitar-shaped DAP and the pendant player), is bringing something a little more tame to market. The 6.9mm thick Blast sports a 2.4-inch TFT screen, takes microSD cards, and can play back all the standards, like MP3, WMA, MP4, AVI, XVID, and FLAC, which is all well and good, though we’ve seen a million of these and counting. What’s different in this case — at least a little — is that the Blast can supposedly play back FLV files, which gives it a certain modern flavor, and suggests that even mass-produced China-ware is getting caught up in the YouTube game. Not available anywhere even close to the US, price unknown.

[Via PMP Today]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

New device specific chargers aimed at stopping your stolen ‘Pod being used.

Filed under: Cellphones

While this would be all the more sweet on a 3G iPhone, a new series of hacks will now give you untethered EDGE networking from your laptop. Starting with jailbreak as any proper iPhone hack must, the latest hack installs a new SOCKS server on your iPhone. Join your iPhone and laptop to the same ad-hoc WiFi network and you’re pretty much good to go. The procedure is a bit cumbersome if this is your first hack attempt so be sure to check the YouTube video-how-to before you get going. Check it after the break.

[Via MacRumors]

Continue reading iPhone hacked for untethered EDGE data on laptop

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Networking

Have you ever dreamt of having your own, self-contained network in your house or office? Have you ever wanted to take full control of every aspect of a network — banning, blocking, adding, limiting and deleting whomever you choose? Well listen pal, your egomaniacal dreams are about to come true, thanks to the ioBox-1000, a “network appliance” from Hong Kong-based Dragontech. Designed to eliminate servers and “centralize” networks, the company’s odd looking purple box does a little of everything. The system, which acts as a wireless router, firewall, and VPN, as well as a mail, FTP and printer server, can also house your own, quasi-unique domain names (blank.ioboxusers.com), and includes a p2p blocker for when you really want to put the kibosh on your worker’s / children’s fun. The mysterious Dragontech claims all this power can be yours for less than $5 a day, which, assuming they mean $4.99, is $1821.35 per year. Enjoy, root.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!