My Writings. My Thoughts.

iPad mania: hot presales, iBooks info, 3G model semipopular

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

iPad mania has hit since Apple’s answer to the tablet became available for pre-order on Friday morning. We already mentioned with glee that the mute switch has been transformed into an orientation lock . Now, sales estimates suggest that virtual iPads are flying off virtual shelves as fast as Apple fans can click “Buy Now,” and a number of details are surfacing about iBooks, 3G data services, and more. Of course, Apple hasn’t made any official announcements about sales numbers, but that hasn’t stopped clever buyers with a Google spreadsheet from estimating how many iPads Apple is selling. Using order numbers matched up to the time of order, estimates range from about 20,000 to 25,000 iPads sold per hour �in the hours after Apple raised the curtain. Assuming the majority of sales are the $499 entry-level model, Apple could be grossing about $10 million per hour. If this rate keeps up, it’s possible Apple will sell through its first batch of iPads (set to ship April 3) this weekend. Read the comments on this post

Get Yer Jugs out for the lads

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Games

Well, as you bolt another round into your Intervention hoping to stop those Juggernaunts in “Snatch and Grab”… how the hell do those juggernaut suits work? We’ve seen from the ads for ‘hurt locker’ (not seen it yet… still not available in España) … the JUGS are real, not just a figment of InfinityWard’s imagination… Well here are some answers for ya… (I can’t post the entire article as that woudl be rude to the author. But it is wel interesting. Quote: Say you’re a professional bomb defuser, like the soldiers in the Oscar-nominated film The Hurt Locker — and the bomb you’re working on suddenly goes off. Do you just kiss your adrenaline-addicted ass goodbye? No — odds are you’re wearing an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) suit, which means you actually have a fighting chance of walking away alive. I had to know how these blast-resistant suits worked in real life — so I called up Pravit Borkar, a ballistics engineer at HighCom Security , a firm that manufactures EOD suits for military applications, and asked him to explain. How a Bomb Kills You The “EOD ensemble,” as Borkar calls it, is not simply a body-condom version of a Kevlar vest: “It’s a complex composite product consisting of both rigid and soft armor systems.” These two fundamental layers are designed to defeat the two main threats in an explosion: the overpressure pulse, or shockwave; and the fragmentation, commonly known as shrapnel. The overpressure wave is actually the more dangerous of the two. A microsecond after a bomb goes off, the explosion compresses the surrounding air and blows it outward in a lightning-fast shockwave that ripples through clothing and literally flattens internal organs. Guy Pearce’s character experiences it firsthand at the end of The Hurt Locker’ s tense opening sequence: read more here, it is interesting.. spoiler warning BTW Attached Images iraq-eod-660×440..jpg (55.3 KB)

Week in Apple: iPad day looms, Mac gamers rejoice, and more

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

As St. Patrick’s Day draws near, Apple fans are counting themselves among the lucky. After all, Steam is finally coming to the Mac, the iPad finally has a ship date, and the iPad developer program now has a much lower barrier to entry. Read on for the top Apple news from the last week: HTC lawsuit came after warning by Apple to handset makers : Apple supposedly contacted executives at “tier-1″ handset makers in January saying it was ready to go to the mat over its iPhone-related IP. Those warnings, coupled with Apple’s complaints against HTC, may have a chilling effect on smartphone makers for the indefinite future. Valve: full “Steam” ahead on Mac OS X with free syncing : Valve is bringing its online service to the Mac in April and plans to make its Source engine cross-platform. Along with the new cross-platform strategy, Portal 2 will be the first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. Read the comments on this post

Scary….

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Games

I was checking out my Stats on Assassin’s Creed 2, and the “Distance covered” was 66622… Attached Images wow.jpg (66.2 KB)

p2pnet World Headlines: March 13, 2010

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // p2p

Hi all: Owing to a long-standing family commitment, p2pnet won’t be published again until Tuesday, March 16. Cheers! Jon ________________________ Take your royalty checks, SoundExchange begs Los Angeles Times When John Boydston got an e-mail from SoundExchange saying he had several thousand dollars in unclaimed royalties, he did what most sensible people would do. He ignored it. To the rock musician from Atlanta, “money for nothing” meant a song by Dire Straits, not a stranger contacting him out of the blue promising to cut him big checks. But then he got the message again six months later. Curious, he called SoundExchange. “Sure enough, they had a sizable amount of money for me,” said Boydston, 51, whose band Daddy a Go Go includes his two teenage sons. “It was several thousand dollars. That’s not a ton of money. But for a guy who makes CDs in his basement, it was enough to finance my next album.” Boydston’s money came from royalties that SoundExchange has squirreled away on his behalf since 2001, when Congress created the nonprofit to collect royalties from digital music streams on Internet, satellite radio and cable television. So far, the group has distributed about $360 million to more than 45,000 artists and copyright holders. But at any given time, about 25% of the money SoundExchange gets from online music services such as Pandora, XM Radio and Last.fm can’t be distributed because the artists can’t be tracked down. Currently, that amounts to about $50 million. And with the rising popularity of Internet radio, the cash pile has been growing, said John Simson, SoundExchange’s executive director. The problem stems from what Simson calls “bad data.” [More like Bad SoundExchange. [For more on this farce, see SoundExchange: $256 MILLION undistributed dollars , and stay tuned  ... ] China warns Google to comply with censorship laws BBC China’s top internet official has warned that Google will “pay the consequences” if it continues to go against Chinese law. Google announced in January that it would no longer comply with China’s internet censorship laws. It warned that it may shut down google.cn because of censorship and a hacking attack on the portal. Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong was speaking at China’s annual legislation session. “We need to preserve our nation’s interest, our people’s interest, we cannot be relaxed with any information that will cause harm to the stability of our society, to our system, and to the health of our under-age young people,” he said. “So, of course, what needs to be shut down will be shut down, what needs to be blocked will be blocked.” Google “99.9 pct” sure to shut China search engine-FT Reuters Talks with China over censorship have reached an apparent impasse and Google, the world’s largest search engine, is now “99.9 percent” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, the Financial Times said on Saturday. It said in a report on its website Google had drawn up detailed plans for closing its Chinese search engine. The newspaper cited a person familiar with the company’s thinking as saying that, while a decision could be made very soon, Google was likely to take some time to follow through with its plans. That would be in order to bring about an orderly closure as the company takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by authorities, it said. China warned Google on Friday against flouting the country’s laws, as expectations grow for a resolution to a public battle over censorship and cyber-security. Three inspectors sign off on net filter blacklist Computerworld New Zealand’s opt-in internet content filter, which went live in February, runs the Swedish Netclean Whitebox content filter on a set of servers. Banned websites must be justified and signed-off by three “warranted inspectors of publications”. The blacklist has more than 7000 URLs of child sexual abuse material, according to 2009 government statistics. It has been in construction by the censorship unit since 2005 and is affiliated with Europe’s Cospol Internet Related Child Abusive Material Project. Website requests are filtered by Border Gateway Protocol against a blacklist held on a central server in the government Censorship Compliance Unit. The list is maintained by the Independent Reference Group which reviews banned URLs each month for false positive listings. The managing director of internet service provider Watchdog, Peter Mancer, said the filter model could be used in Australia and would cost ISPs, excluding Telstra and Optus, less than $1 per customer, per year. Watchdog and ISP, MaxNet, have officially signed-up to the filtering deployment. Mancer said Telstra and Optus would likely need to run the filters on their own dedicated servers due to the huge number of subscribers. Three Strikes Rule: Sleeping for Seven Months Heesob’s IP Blog Last month I requested the South Korean government to disclose information on the three strikes rule that came into effect on July 23, 2009. Surprisingly there was no single case in which the rule has been actually applied or considered to be applied. This is surprising because the government, backed by copyright industries, claimed, when it strongly supported the introduction of the rule, that wilful repeat infringers (called ‘heavy uploaders’) were about 1,000 and most of the illegal file sharing took place in around 150 ISPs (largely in web storage service providers). Due to the heavy uploaders and ISPs having a symbiotic relationship with them, the loss to the copyright industry was said to amount to approximately 2 trillion KRW (in 2007). Relying upon the overestimated number, the government proclaimed that the three strikes rule was of urgent necessity for saving the copyright industries that were going to wither away. According to Article 133bis of the Korean Copyright Act, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) may order ISPs to take a measure: (i) to suspend for a period shorter than 6 months a user account of a repeat infringer [1] (Para 2); or (ii) to shut down for a period shorter than 6 months a web site [2] that allows a file uploading and has been ordered by MCST at least three times to stop an illegal filing sharing (Para 4). These are key provisions of the Korean three strikes rule. Buckinghamshire village in Street View fight against Google Telegraph Residents of London Road – a cul-de-sac of 30 detached and semi-detached houses in Broughton, on the outskirts of Milton Keynes – decided to take a stand after the Google Street View service was launched last year. They prevented one of the company’s cars from driving down the street, claiming that the images from a camera mounted on its roof would effectively allow burglars to peer over their garden walls. And for much of yesterday it appeared that the small band of householders had won a famous victory. When the service – which stitches together photographs of public roads to provide a “virtual tour” of towns and villages – went live in the Broughton area, London Road was missing. Internet users who attempted to look at the street yesterday morning were greeted with a blank screen and a message that read: “This image is no longer available.” However, villagers’ joy soon turned to anger when 360-degree images of the cul-de-sac eventually appeared later in the evening, with Google blaming a “technical glitch” earlier in the day. It left residents bemoaning a perceived lack of accountability and public control in the mapping service, which now covers 95 per cent of the UK. Haven’t found that software glitch, Toyota? Keep trying Los Angeles Times There has been a lot of speculation recently that Toyota’s problems with sudden acceleration may be caused by a problem in the vehicles’ electronics systems. The “electronics” includes millions of lines of software running on the automobiles’ computers. As The Times reported on March 3, Toyota’s chief engineer testified to Congress that the company has done extensive testing on its cars’ electronics and believes they are not the cause of the sudden acceleration. Having owned a Toyota myself, I have always been a fan of what I perceived to be the automaker’s high standards for quality. I also happen to have more than three decades of experience designing, building and researching reliable computer systems, many of which are embedded inside other devices. Based on this experience, I find it very difficult to accept the statements from Toyota’s chief engineer. And the implications extend beyond Toyota, to all other companies that rely on software for their product safety. As anyone with experience in embedded systems will tell you, there are nasty software bugs that can be extremely difficult to reproduce in a laboratory test environment. Effort to Widen U.S. Internet Access Sets Up Battle New York Times The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network. The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service. The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access. Hollywood supergraphic battle may be over KABC A sign battle that landed a local businessman behind bars may soon be over. He has less than 24 hours to remove the giant ad wrapped around a building in the heart of Hollywood. The city of Los Angeles crackdown on the giant billboards known as supergraphics turned into a legal fight that ended in the arrest of Kayvan Setareh, a 49-year-old man from Pacific Palisades. Setareh agreed to take the ad down in a deal worked out on Monday, and to have it down by Wednesday morning. In exchange, his bail was reduced from $1 million to $100,000. “It doesn’t justify $1 million. It doesn’t even justify $100,000, but my client wanted to get out,” said Andrew Stein, Setareh’s attorney. - … .. … and identi.ca More First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi March, 2010 Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to - | | rss feed: http://-/feed -? - Click here to learn what technologies might help you bypass censorshiop in your area.

Week in tech: ad blocking, whitelisting, and privacy

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The biggest story this past week on Ars was ad-blocking. You may not have realized it, but blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit. We discussed why that is (diminished resources to continue doing what we do) and showed you how to whitelist Ars and other sites you care about. Cisco had us all holding our collective breath on Monday night, promising an announcement that would change the Internet forever . When it went down on Tuesday morning, we were a bit disappointed to discover it was just a new (admittedly impressive) router. Read the comments on this post

Hollywood: targetting ‘tweens’ in school

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // p2p

p2pnet view Kids & Kartels:- “The concept of intellectual property and its value needs to be embedded inextricably into the school curriculum.” Is that a statement from Hollywood’s MPAA which, years ago, force-fed intellectual property law to Los Angeles scouts and scouts in Hong Kong ? “Trying to mess with the minds of children around the world is standard entertainment cartel operating procedure”, said p2pnet late last year, continuing: “A Kiddie Spy program was launched in Hong Kong in 2006. Under it, 200,000 members of local youth groups would spy on internet activity and, report illegal file transfers”. But No. This time it’s not Hollywood itself. But it is Hollywood child mind-rape, this time coming from David Puttnam. In the Guardian , he points to a “recent FDA (Film Distributors’ Association) project aimed at the vital ‘tween’ generation of 8 to 11-year-olds, a teaching resource designed to stimulate classroom debate about why copyright existed.” Teaching resource? It’s a pure, unadultrated corporate crap — another Hollywood indoctrination program aimed at implanting spurious Hollywoood ’standards’ into the minds of our children. “Today, it’s encouraging to report that this resource has been supplied, free upon request, to almost one in five primary schools in the UK – that’s 4,000 out of a little over 20,000 schools,” he says in the story. Thankfully, we home school our daughter . Jon Newton - p2pnet - … .. … and identi.ca More First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi Los Angeles scouts – MPAA corrupts US Scouts, October 21, 2006 scouts in Hong Kong – Scouting with the MPAA, May 4, 2005 Guardian – Film piracy: Lord Puttnam targets tween curriculum, March 11, 2010 p2pnet – Hollywood goes after New Zealand kids, October 13, 2009 mess with the minds – They`re brainwashing YOUR child, July 4, 2005 Kiddie Spy program – Hong Kong’s kiddie Net spies, May 31, 2006 home school our daughter – Open letter to parents, July 2, 2006 Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to - | | rss feed: http://-/feed -? - Click here to learn what technologies might help you bypass censorshiop in your area.

Intriguing new BPI Three Strikes leak

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // p2p

p2pnet view P2P | Politics:- With the confirmation that hacks at Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s BPI (British Phonographic Industry) wrote some of the text openly used by the British government in its Digital Ecomy bill comes another leak. In it BPI director of public affairs Richard Mollet “sets out the BPI’s strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill” says Boing Boing . Mollet’s Digital Economy Bill weekly update 11 March 2010 memo, addressed to an interesting number of recipients,  “appears to be a weekly status report on the DEB’s progress”, says the story. He identifies Britain’s MI5, the UK’s “top spies”, as being a stumbling block to the bill’s passage — worried, apparently, that creating a Great Firewall of Britain will make it harder for spies to spy on naughty sites”, says Boing Boing. “Mollet also implies that Britain’s spy agencies might have paid for a Talk Talk survey in which 71% of 18-34 year olds said that they would simply evade the DEB and go on infringing”, it says. “Mollet claims that Britain’s ISPs have already caved into their duties to spy on and censor network connections, claiming that there is a sense of ’settled will’ in the ‘ISP community’.” Says the memo > > > There has been a meeting between No 10 officials and BIS  special advisers today to discuss the way forward on Clause 18. I am told that “discussions continue” but that the “security services concerns are not being met”. Twisting and turning The interest shown not only MI5 but also MI6 won’t come as a suprise to those who’ve been following events. The UK government is “twisting and turning in its efforts to please the entertainment industry by finding a way to impose the same Three Strikes anti-P2P plan that’s giving Hollywood and Big music lobbyist Nicolas Sarkozy so much trouble in France”, said p2pnet recently, quoting Times Online as reporting police and intelligence services were, “calling on the Government to drop plans to disconnect persistent internet pirates because they fear that this would make it harder to track criminals online”. But “The Times understands that both the security services and police are concerned about the plans, believing that threatening to cut off pirates will increase the likelihood that they will escape detection by turning to encryption”, said the story, continuing > > > Law enforcement groups, which include the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Metropolitan Police’s e-crime unit, believe that more encryption will increase the costs and workload for those attempting to monitor internet traffic. One official said: ‘It will make prosecution harder because it increases the workload significantly’. A source involved in drafting the Bill said that the intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, had also voiced concerns about disconnection. “The spooks hate it,” the source said. “They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult.” Enforcement groups are also unhappy that the Government’s change of plans has left them little time to draw up a response. Lord Mandelson’s intervention came two months after the Government’s Digital Britain report, published in June, failed to back disconnection. Instead, it proposed giving Ofcom, the media watchdog, powers to direct internet service providers to block pirate websites or “throttle” connection speeds. Observes Mollet’s memo > > > It is sadly ironic that the campaign for the bill which has drawn support from Steven Garrett, the creative force behind the BBC series “Spooks”, should find itself partially thwarted by a real-life equivalents. Ironic too, that the champions of freedom of information, the Open Rights Group, are  lined up alongside those champions of non-free information, the security services. The document also suggests MPs are “resigned” to not being allowed to “debate the bill or give it “detailed scrutiny”, and has an expert on legislation saying it’ll probably die “if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it”, says Boing Boing . Stay tuned. - … .. … and identi.ca More First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi confirmation – Record labels wrote UK 3 Strikes amendment, March 12, 2010 Boing Boing – Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking UK copyright, March 12, 2010 p2pnet – UK cops, spy agencies, say No to 3 strikes plan, October 26, 2009 Times Online – MI5 comes out against cutting off internet pirates, October 26, 2009 Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to - | | rss feed: http://-/feed -? - Click here to learn what technologies might help you bypass censorshiop in your area.

Week in gaming: Ubisoft DRM, PlayStation Move, and God of War III

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Those playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on the PC got a rude reminder of DRM’s pitfall s when the servers that authenticate the game went down. Many complained on the company’s official forum, and tempers ran hot. At GDC, Sony showed off its new PlayStation Move controller, along with a number of games. The audience response was positive, but the demos shown seemed both inspired and informed by what the Wii has done before. We got a quick hands-on with the controller followed by a bit more time playing SOCOM 4 with it. Read the comments on this post

Gamato.info protest goes off peacefully

// March 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // p2p

p2pnet view P2P | Politics:- Yesterday’s demonstration in Athens, Greece, against the arrest of six admins on Gamato.info, the country’s largest BitTorrent tracker, was peaceful, says Demotix , from whence came the clip on the right. With angry Greek citizens rioting over unpopular government “austerity” measures, “the IFPI has suborned hard-pressed police resources, funded by local taxpayers, to close down gamato.info , the country’s largest BitTorrent tracker, and arrest six admins”, said p2pnet . The protest centered on the police action, said a Reader’s Write , observing, “Gamato was a free-access sharing service at no cost”. The authorities are looking for another five people, says Agency France-Presse , going on, “Interpol has been notified as two of the suspects live abroad.” Meanwhile, the world largest and most-used indexing site continues to operate openly, freely and with impunity, and at a huge profit , p2pnet noted. It’s called Google. - … .. … and identi.ca More First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi Demotix – Greek Torrent tracker’s supporters protest for administrator’s arrest, March 12, 2010 p2pnet – Gamato shut-down protest: Athens, 17.00, March 12, 2010 Agency France-Presse – Largest Greek download site shut down by police, March 11, 2010 Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to - | | rss feed: http://-/feed -? - Click here to learn what technologies might help you bypass censorshiop in your area.

« Older Entries


eXTReMe Tracker