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Friday, February 13, 2009 - Posts
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Every three years, the Copyright Office hosts a rulemaking in which it considers specific exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) rules against circumventing DRM, and the comments are now in for the current round. This year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pushed hard for an exemption on jailbreaking the Apple iPhone, allowing people to install and run applications of their choice that don't come from the official App Store. Now, Apple has responded with a ringing defense of DRM and its business practices, siding with groups like the MPAA and RIAA against exemptions. Click here to read the rest of this article Read More...
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Sheepish is one of those puzzle games where you create a funneled pipe system to deliver cargo to some destination. In the case of Sheepish, the cargo is sheep (baaah!) and the pipe system is exactly that: a series of tubes that your sheep move through to get to the paddock door. The digital sheep are Newtonian. A ewe in motion remains in linear motion along that path unless acted upon by an outside force.
You, as the path designer, provide those outside forces. Along the way, your sheep can bounce over trampolines, accelerants, and other special-purpose equipment to ensure the ungulates arrive at their grassy destination. This is, in a nutshell, the kind of puzzle game that I adore and have played in endless variation over the years. So why did I find Sheepish to be more work and less fun than it was worth? Here are five eight 10 lessons that the Sheepish designers really need to take to heart.
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The "state secrets privilege" has been around for over half a century, but has never enjoyed the level of public prominence it enjoyed in recent years, thanks to the Bush administration's record-shattering reliance on it to block litigation targeting controverisal programs of warrantless surveillance and "enhanced" interrogation. The Obama administration has committed itself to a narrower view of the privilege, but—to the consternation of progressives—has thus far declined to walk back from the previous administration's broad assertions of privilege in any pending court cases. Now, Congress is proposing to take matters into its own hands with the reintroduction of the State Secrets Read More...
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It appears the venture funding market isn't closed for everyone, not even Web 2.0 startups with no apparent revenue plan. Twitter, the white-hot microblogging service, just raised more than $35 million, most of it from new investors Benchmark Capital and... 
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At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, the morning started off with a panel discussion that was intended to provide some insights into where we should be focusing our research efforts when it comes to the production and use in energy. To set the stage for that, many of the speakers described the challenges we face in coming to grips with the energy needs we'll be facing in the next several decades. As was the case with several other recent analyses, the raw figures can provide a lot of reasons for pessimism, as we'll reach some pretty severe limits if we simply try to extend current technology. Referring to current tech, Los Alamos' John Sarrao said, "very exciting Read More...
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Your activities on the Internet are akin to your activities out in public—they're not private and are possibly open for police scrutiny, according to an Ontario Superior Court. The ruling was made by Justice Lynne Leitch on—surprise!—a child pornography case. The judge said that there's "no reasonable expectation of privacy" when it comes to logs kept by ISPs. Canadians, watch out, because everything you do online could soon be turned into legal fodder, even without a warrant. The case in question came about when, in 2007, police asked Bell Canada to hand over subscriber information for a particular IP address that they suspected of accessing and "making available" child porn Read More...
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Today is a big day for makers of software for Android, an operating system developed by a consortium of companies lead by Google and used in cell phones and other devices. Android Market -- the portal where users of Android-based devices can download applications -- announced that it's now accepting paid applications from U.S. and U.K. developers. First paid apps will become available in the U.S. starting mid next week and will use Google Checkout for payment. 
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Google has expanded on its January experiment with downloadable videos by adding more testing partners, licensing terms, and a payment system. It's the latest move in a string of recent changes designed to both monetize YouTube and make it a more appealing platform for ambitious videographers and organizations that want to get their message heard. The most significant part of Google's latest announcement is that it's testing the download feature with a broader selection of users. Available as an option to new partners like Stanford and UC Berkeley , downloadable videos will display a "Download this video" link on the lower left side, just below the toolbar's play button. As we saw before , these Read More...
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The Federal Trade Commission wants to know about DRM, and it's hosting a March conference on the topic. The agency looks set to get an earful—today is the final day to file public comments, and more than 700 individuals have already done so . Surprisingly, the main concerns in the comments don't appear to be about DVDs or protected music files but about video games. If FTC staff didn't know much about SecuRom, Spore, install limits, and activation codes before the conference, they will soon be experts on the topics. The big players in these sorts of public hearings follow a predictable plan: they hold their filings until the final day for submissions, apparently out of a desire not to tip Read More...
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Novell developer Aaron Bockover has created a clever Firefox plugin that uses Moonlight to play conventional Windows media streaming video content at websites like C-SPAN. The plugin takes advantage of the video codecs that Microsoft provides for Moonlight, Novell's open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application framework. Moonlight 1.0, which was officially released Wednesday , automatically downloads a proprietary codec pack from Microsoft in order to provide Linux users with legally licensed support for Microsoft's video formats. Bockover's plugin uses the NPAPI to register itself as the default consumer of Windows Media content and then, when it is invoked Read More...
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Yesterday, the United State's Vaccine Court Omnibus Autism Proceeding delivered its ruling to three families who claimed that vaccines were the cause of their children's autism. The courts ruled that "the evidence does not support the general proposition that thimerosal-containing vaccines can damage infants' immune systems," thereby ending the case the parents brought before the special court. The ruling came down not from a single jurist on the bench, but a panel of three "special masters" who were appointed to determine if Michelle Cedillo, Colten Snyder, and William Yates Hazlehurst's autism was caused by either the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine or the vaccine preservative, thiomersal. Read More...
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On the Nintendo Wii, you seem to either have the standard family-friendly fare the system is known for, or titles that are over the top with violence and language. There's no real in-between on the system yet, even though that's where truly "mature" games lie. Luckily, when you play House of the Dead Overkill, you'll be laughing way too hard to care.
Take a regular on-rails light gun game, such as the past House of the Dead titles, and add a love for profanity, sick jokes, violence, and Grindhouse cinema. Each level is introduced and ended by gravelly-voiced announcers explaining the non-sensical story—"Varla Guns is the older sister of a crippled man, SLAIN BY YOUR HAND! Now she's out for revenge... in cutoff shorts!"—and the main characters deal with each other in terms of profanity-laden terms of endearment. Such as "diaper-s*&$."
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Mozilla Labs has launched a new project called Bespin that provides a browser-based framework for interactive code editing. The prototype includes a simple IDE with a built-in command system, a basic project management interface, and an editor that supports syntax highlighting and other features. The Bespin framework is distributed under an open source license and can be deployed by users on any server. It uses standards-based Web technologies and doesn't rely on features that are specific to the Mozilla ecosystem, so you will eventually be able to use it in any standards-compliant Web browser. It does use some cutting-edge standards, however, so you will need Firefox 3 or a WebKit nightly build Read More...
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Researchers from Australia, Denmark, and China have combined efforts to show the feasibility of terabit-per-second Ethernet over fiber-optic cables. The solution involves a photonic chip that uses laser light for switching signals, and a form of the exotic material type, chalcogenide. Click here to read the rest of this article Read More...
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The Harvard Law students defending accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum are doing their best to turn his upcoming trial into a media event, but when it comes to pure spectacle, they have nothing on The Pirate Bay. The Swedish trial against the notorious BitTorrent tracker opens next Monday, and it will come complete with live streamed audio from the courtroom, a Twitter feed, a translation service, and a city bus currently being driven from Belgrade to Stockholm. The folks on trial are referring to the event as a "spectrial," a combination of "spectacle" and "trial," and there's little doubt it will be. The Pirate Bay backers are on trial for secondary copyright infringement in a case that has Read More...
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Moving the country towards renewable power when coal remains a cheap fuel source has been a challenge, one that a number of states are addressing by setting hard targets for their utilities. Two of the states that will require their utilities to provide a fixed percentage of renewable power in the next decade or so, California and New Jersey, will be the site of some major solar power efforts, both announced this week. The projects are interesting because they demonstrate how renewable power can adapt to the geographic realities of each state. California's deserts will be the site of large-scale solar-thermal facilities, while the densely populated garden state will see a distributed network Read More...
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