wires

It's 2011, and I can't believe that I'm still untangling headphone wires like I did in 1983. It's one of those things, along with gasoline engines and coins, I wish would become genuinely obsolete.

The Sinch is designed to eliminate cord chaos. It's marvelously simple--it attaches to your mobile device at the headphone jack and folds over itself to keep your wires from messing with your keys, ninja tools, and other stuff in your pockets.

Magnets in the elastic strip secure it to the device, around which users can naturally wrap their headphone cords. Then, all it takes is folding the band over to secure the cords in place. To release them, simply tug on the cord.

Produced by Dune Road Design and designed by Frog Design, the Sinch is billed as the only cord management gadget that allows headphones to remain connected to a device while allowing users to store them too.

The Sinch is now available in black or white for $15.99 through Facebook and Thesinch.com, with other colors to follow. … Read more

BlueAnt branches out from its Bluetooth wireless roots with a wired stereo "headset" it calls Embrace. The stylish over-ear headphones include an integrated mic and controls for iOS devices that allow you to make hands-free calls and play, pause, and track-forward audio selections. Although their $200 retail price tag sways toward the higher end of the consumer market, we recommend these over-ear headphones for their robust, well-defined sound and padded comfort.

As far as their design, the Embrace headphones seem to have drawn inspiration from Bowers and Wilkins' P5 headphones. They have rectangular earcups that are aptly padded … Read more

LimeWire is far from finished with compensating the music industry for years of inducing copyright infringement, according to legal claims made last week by a group of independent record companies.

Merlin, a trade group that represents more than 12,000 indie labels and such artists as Arcade Fire, Neko Case, and Carla Bruni, has claimed in a lawsuit that Lime Wire, the company that created the now defunct LimeWire peer-to-peer network, broke a promise made in 2008 to compensate them for the millions of music tracks that LimeWire users pirated via the site.

According to legal documents filed last week with a New York federal court, Lime Wire and founder Mark Gorton agreed to pay Merlin members an amount that was in line with whatever Lime Wire ended up paying to settle with the four major music labels. In 2007, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music accused the company of cashing in on a service designed to help people pirate music.

Last year, a federal judge agreed with the labels. She ruled that Lime Wire and Gorton were liable for copyright infringement and ordered the LimeWire network shut down. Two months ago, Gorton agreed to pay the majors $105 million to settle. Previously, Gorton paid the trade group representing music publishers a sum that topped $12 million, according to music industry sources. And there are other music-industry entities that could possibly press claims against Lime Wire that are still unheard from, such as the American Association of Independent Music. … Read more

External hard drives are exceptionally popular peripheral devices, and it is exceptionally likely that you have one attached to your system given the recommendation to use Time Machine or some similar form of full-system backup. If you have a laptop, then it is additionally likely that these external drives you use will be the smaller 2.5-inch laptop drives that can be powered off the computer's USB or FireWire bus. While convenient, sometimes these drives can end up getting exceptionally hot with use, to the point where it may hurt or even burn if you hold the drive for … Read more

Album sales edge up 1 percent for just the first half of the year and suddenly it seems everybody in the music industry is giddy.

That's likely due to the fact that since 2004, all the news about sales has been bad, bad, bad. Consider that the music industry hasn't seen growth since George W. Bush was preparing for a second term as president, the Boston Red Sox were breaking the curse of the Bambino, and Mark Zuckerberg was founding Facebook.

Last Wednesday, research firm Nielsen SoundScan announced that the industry recorded a 1 percent increase in overall … Read more

Wired's Chris Kohler posted a very telling gallery of reader-submitted dusty and neglected Wii consoles, games, and controllers on his Game|Life blog.

The photos look more like some sort of modern archaeological exhibit, displaying motion controllers seemingly frozen in time from the last moment they were used.

It's no secret that the Wii has lost plenty of steam since its enormous 2006 launch, with most gamers complaining of gimmicky software and lack of compelling blockbuster third-party titles. It seems Nintendo has even given up on the console, too. At the company's 2011 E3 press conference only … Read more

Some of the country's largest Internet service providers are poised to leap into the antipiracy fight in a significant way.

After years of negotiations, a group of bandwidth providers that includes AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are closer than ever to striking a deal with media and entertainment companies that would call for them to establish new and tougher punishments for customers who refuse to stop using their networks to pirate films, music and other intellectual property, multiple sources told CNET.

The sources cautioned that a final agreement has yet to be signed and that the partnership could … Read more

Happy day! Just a few weeks after Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time Magazine offered free iPad access to print subscribers, technology mag Wired has made the same move: if you subscribe to the print edition, you get current and back issues in the iPad app, no extra charge.

(Full disclosure: I'm an occasional contributor to Wired.)

That is, of course, the way magazine subscriptions should work. As publishers have discovered, subscribers feel insulted when you ask them to pay twice for content. I know I did.

With Wired, all I had to do was enter my subscriber number (which … Read more

Defense contractor L-3 Communications told employees that attackers used SecurID information stolen from RSA in March to target L-3, according to a report.

"L-3 Communications has been actively targeted with penetration attacks leveraging the compromised information," said an April 6 e-mail from an executive at L-3's Stratus Group to the group's 5,000 workers, which Wired published yesterday after receiving it from an unidentified source. The source reportedly said SecurID is used for access to an unclassified corporate network, but not classified networks.

It is unclear if the attack was successful. "Protecting our network is … Read more