One day we’ll all be taking home automation for granted when every new house on the market includes built-in support for controlling our fireplaces via our watch phones, but until that glorious future arrives the home automation noob has a dizzying array of choices to contend with. We checked out what Control4 has to offer in the way of centralized command over your media, home theater, lights, security system and temperature and found fairly clean, easy to use interfaces coupled with an array of choices for central control and storage depending on the scope of your needs, all compliant with the lovably-named ZigBee wireless standard. Hit the gallery for an overview of Control4 devices and configurations including their Home Controller HC-300 we heard about earlier this year.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise that execs from AT&T, Microsoft, and NBC and several content filtering companies spent part of a CES panel about piracy talking about filtering at the network level — it’s definitely a tempting solution for Big Content, and one we’ve already seen Comcast kinda-sorta implement to general hue and cry — but it’s still somewhat disheartening. According to AT&T SVP James Cicconi, current anti-piracy efforts “haven’t been working,” and “a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this.” Of course, having your ISP monitor every bit that goes down the tubes is pretty damn creepy, but come on — you know that’s not stopping fools like NBC’s Rick Cotton from saying that the volume of P2P traffic itself is unacceptable because it’s “dominated by copyrighted materials.” That’s a little ridiculous, but AT&T’s Cicconi tried to spin it positively regardless: “Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” he said. Damn straight — it’s called “all of your customers switching to an unfiltered provider.”

Counterfeit batteries and chargers are a legitimate problem for electronics manufacturers — faulty components tend to go up in (literal) smoke, and have even caused deaths — so we can totally see why Kodak has decided to join Nokia and NEC in decided to employing an anti-counterfeiting system in its digital camera batteries. The system, called TRACELESS, uses invisible markers that can be mixed directly into thermally-printed barcode labels, and can only be detected by handheld Kodak readers. Apparently Kodak’s already deployed the system in the pharmaceutical, wine, and cosmetics industries, and the results seems to have inspired a little cockiness — Philip Faraci, Kodak’s president, says counterfeiters should simply stop tying to replicate Kodak’s batteries, “because [they] simply won’t be able to do it.” That kind of confidence has apparently convinced Sanyo to license out the tech for its cams as well, but Kodak hasn’t said anything about legitimate third party accessory manufacturers — which has us a little worried, to be sure.