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Can digital rights management technology stop the unauthorized spread of copyrighted content? Ten years ago this month, four engineers argued that it can’t, forever changing how the world thinks about piracy. Their paper, “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution” (available as a .doc here) was presented at a security conference in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2002.

By itself, the paper’s clever and provocative argument likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really remarkable thing about the paper is who wrote it: four engineers at Microsoft whose work many expected to be at the foundation of Microsoft’s future DRM schemes. The paper’s lead author told Ars that the paper’s pessimistic view of Hollywood’s beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later, its predictions have proved impressively accurate.

BizSpark, via MSDN, comes with a generous supply of Windows operating system licenses, including the recently released Windows 8 OS.  Upgrading from Windows 7 is easy and will allow you to keep your files and settings.  If you or your teammates have MacBooks you may use the preinstalled ???bootcamp??? software to run Windows 8 on a partition.  Here???s are the steps I used to get Windows 8 up and running on my MacBook:

Most startup companies will want to run at least one, and often several websites.  A wiki for technical documentation, a blog for the team to keep customers informed, and a marketing site can be had free for three years using the benefits provided by BizSpark.  How so?  All BizSparks are eligible for up to $3700 in free Azure utilization each year they are in the program.  Under that program your startup could run 3 custom websites, with ample storage and bandwidth included.  Azure???s web site product makes it easy to run custom asp.net, php, or node.js sites.  Code and content can be updated using TFS, FTP, or GIT publishing.  You may also quickly create sites from a gallery of blog, wiki, and CMS engines.

There are many individuals and companies that use the cloud to help improve their business activities. We were curious how writers use cloud services in their line of work so we contacted a few of our customers that are freelance writers and asked them how they use the cloud.

Based on these interviews, we found that the majority of writers use multiple cloud services- Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox and cloudHQ. Google Drive, Evernote and Dropbox are not instantly compatible with each other so the writers use cloudHQ to sync them all together for the ultimate writing package.

Listening to playlists on YouTube is a great way to check out new music for free, but you have to keep your browser open and you have to watch a bunch of ads. If you’d like a cleaner experience, tech blog Digital Inspiration shows how to play playlists in the VLC media player.

Despite the name, Google Type isn’t a real Google product. The site generates fonts based on Google image search, hence the name. You type in words, the site digs through image search and regenerates your text using image versions of each letter.

This is all based on an interesting quirk of Google’s image search. If you type in a single letter and search images, Google gives you a lovely collection of image representations for that letter. For example, plug in “Y,” and you may see the “Y” from “Yahoo,” an illustration of a guy with his arms up in a “Y” shape, and a hand making the hang-loose sign. Any of these could pop up in Google Type.