Saw this over at the Inquirer. Thought it was amusing since my own Maxtor drive just gave up the ghost today. Looks like no warranty for me....-Ed
The Inquirer writes...
"LAST YEAR we reported that the major hard drive manufacturers were, almost to a man/woman, slashing their warranties on disks from three years to one.[/i]
That caused various bats to fly in the European belfries, because of a European Union directive which obliges a two year warranty on products sold in the community.
Different countries take different attitudes to this directive. For example, in Italia, it has already become law, as you can read for yourself here.
But Maxtor is telling its customers that it will be the retailer or dealer which is obliged to fulfil this requirement, according to correspondence from the firm we've seen.
Why? Well Maxtor says it does not sell direct in Europe, but only through distributors. That, however, still seems like a sale to us, so it's hard to understand why Maxtor thinks it escapes liability.
Non-retail drives, says Maxtor in a letter to a customer, only have a one year manufacturer's warranty, but it claims that consumers will have a two year warranty with the retailer or dealer they buy drives from."
News source: Inquirer
The Inquirer writes...
"LAST YEAR we reported that the major hard drive manufacturers were, almost to a man/woman, slashing their warranties on disks from three years to one.[/i]
That caused various bats to fly in the European belfries, because of a European Union directive which obliges a two year warranty on products sold in the community.
Different countries take different attitudes to this directive. For example, in Italia, it has already become law, as you can read for yourself here.
But Maxtor is telling its customers that it will be the retailer or dealer which is obliged to fulfil this requirement, according to correspondence from the firm we've seen.
Why? Well Maxtor says it does not sell direct in Europe, but only through distributors. That, however, still seems like a sale to us, so it's hard to understand why Maxtor thinks it escapes liability.
Non-retail drives, says Maxtor in a letter to a customer, only have a one year manufacturer's warranty, but it claims that consumers will have a two year warranty with the retailer or dealer they buy drives from."
News source: Inquirer
The true vulnerability is not found in the major music players--Windows Media Player, WinAMP and Xmms are among the players Gobbles names--but in the MPG123 music player, a relatively unknown piece of open-source software.
Mailing list BugTraq also decided to post the advisory. "In this case, it contained valid vulnerability details, so we decided to publish it," said Oliver Friedrichs, senior manager at computer security firm Symantec, which owns the mailing list.
This is not the first time that the RIAA has been a potential target of hacker humor. Over the weekend, unknown hackers hit the organization's site and replaced some content with false releases. In July, the music industry's Web site was hit by vandals in an attack that caused the pages to be available sporadically for four days.
The music industry isn't hacking back, but someday it might. A bill sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., would allow copyright owners and such groups as the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America to disable, block or otherwise impair a "publicly accessible peer-to-peer file-trading network." Nowadays, that's called hacking.
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