The Great Geek Manual News

Not every video game creator was musing about how to sell more hardware or craft more realistic virtual weaponry at the Game Developers Conference, the annual convention of game designers, programmers and executives.

Several impresarios were more interested in pushing the limits of the interactive medium with their ideas.

The industry’s most innovative creations were showcased this week at the eighth annual experimental gameplay sessions. Developers demonstrated several prototypes, such as Ian Dallas’s The Unfinished Swan. In the black-and-white game, players track down a swan within a blank white environment by splattering black paint to reveal pathways, walls, lakes and more.

“This is, I think, the most consistent collection of designs that are doing what I describe as pushing the boundaries of game design in the most interesting and consistently thoughtful ways,” said Jonathan Blow, the panel’s organizer and the independent designer behind the time-bending puzzle platformer Braid (which is available for Xbox Live Arcade and PC).

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Seagate claims to have discovered a new way of greatly increasing the capacity of magnetic drives.

Magnetic drives are swiftly hitting the ceiling of their storage capacity, with solid-state drives widely expected to become the standard over the next five years. However, Seagate may have found a way to halt the coronation, according to a report in Technology Review

The company’s touting a new technology called “heat-assisted magnetic recording” which it claims will increase the density of magnetic drives by up to 50 times.

Hard drives are made up of spinning platters coated in magnetic grains, on to which information is recorded by flipping the magnetisation of the grain so that it either faces up or down, representing a 1 or a 0.

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Source: PC Pro

At a strip mall clinic in suburban Maryland, Kevin is at the unlikely intersection of new efforts to treat symptoms of autism, cerebral palsy and other developmental disorders with robotics and computer work. Here, he scrambles onto a swivel chair to examine a half-meter- (1.6-feet-) tall robot on the table in front of him.

Prodding four brightly-colored buttons near the robot’s feet, he directs a cartoon version of the machine around a computer monitor, furtively glancing up at the real thing for encouragement.

At just 18-months-old, Kevin showed the first signs of learning difficulties, which were later diagnosed as developmental dyspraxia.

“It is like having a stroke,” his mother Patty Fitzgerald explained. “His brain is intact, but his body doesn’t do what he wants it to do.”

Some specific skills — like pronouncing consonants, matching cause and effect or grasping relative concepts like better and faster — can be depressingly difficult for him to master. But for the last year, a small blue-and-yellow android called Cosmo has offered some hope.

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Source: Phys Org

It could be argued that security vendors are losing the battle with online scammers whose programs sneak onto computers and drop malicious programs, opening the computers up to remote attacks and turning them into zombies in botnet armies.

The problem is that most computers today rely on antivirus software that blocks malware by checking the code in a file against a database of signatures of known viruses. With thousands of new viruses arriving each day, many of them encrypted in part or otherwise disguised with modification, the signature lists require frequent updates and many new viruses slip through undetected.

As a result, security providers are turning their attention to behavior-based approaches for identifying new viruses, with software that focuses on watching for suspicious behavior, such as a program trying to write data to an executable program. Two security companies are set to make announcements on Monday that follow this trend.

Antivirus provider AVG is introducing AVG Identity Protection, software that analyzes the behavior and characteristics of programs running on a computer and shuts down activity that looks suspicious. The software is based on technology the firm acquired when it bought identity theft specialist Sana Security in January.

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Source: CNet

You can imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, if that’s your thing. But despite a spate of overheated headlines flowing out of the United Kingdom this weekend, you probably don’t need to imagine it just yet. The impression created by the flurry of press reports is that police there have suddenly acquired new powers to hack private computers without a warrant. In point of fact, precisely nothing in British law has changed.

You could be forgiven for missing that detail with stories boasting such titles as “Police set to step up hacking of home PCs,” “British police can now hack citizens’ PCs,” “Government plans to extend powers to spy on personal computers: Police could routinely hack into personal computers without the need for a warrant under new plans from the European Union,” and “New powers for police to hack your PC.” In fact, British authorities have not been granted any new powers, and at this point the predictions of “routine” warrantless hacking are, as a Home Office spokesperson put it, “pure speculation.”

Here’s the actual story. A little over a month ago, the European Union’s Council of Ministers put out a release—reported in the British press at the time—announcing the adoption of a common strategy to fight cybercrime and online child pornography. The strategy itself does not appear to be available online, and none of this weekend’s reports site the full document. According to the summary, however, law enforcement agencies are “encouraged” to share information about border-crossing crime and “resort to remote searches,” meaning surveillance involving (among other things) monitoring at a distance of suspects’ computers by such means as keystroke loggers. Some €300,000 will be earmarked for Europol to implement the strategy.

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Source: Ars Technica

Delta Air Lines is taking Internet access to the skies this week with the launch of Gogo Inflight Internet service on board six of its planes. Delta is introducing the service with a free trial that lets consumers experience the technology.

Monday’s announcement highlights the first of more than 300 Delta domestic planes that will soon feature in-flight Internet, according to the company.

East Coast travelers will be among the first to experience Delta’s newest amenity. The in-flight Internet services are debuting on five MD-88 aircraft flying Delta shuttle routes between New York’s LaGuardia Airport and Boston’s Logan and Washington’s Reagan airports, plus one Boeing 757 flying throughout Delta’s domestic system. The service will spread to other Delta routes as additional aircraft are introduced.

Tim Mapes, Delta’s senior vice president of marketing, said in-flight Internet access is one of the most popular requests the company receives from its customers.

“Next year when Gogo is available on our entire domestic mainline fleet, our customers will have access to the most extensive Wi-Fi network in the sky, making the time they spend with us on board even more productive and entertaining,” Mapes said.

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Source: News Factor

Yahoo unveiled a new toolbar on Monday that will give Web users access to their e-mail as they surf the Web, the latest step in its strategy to make its products more open to users and third parties.

Firefox, Yahoo, Microsoft and others make toolbars - small strips that sit atop Web browsers - to give users quicker and easier access to Internet functions.

The Yahoo toolbar available later this week will allow users access to a selected group of programs from the toolbar without leaving the page they are on.

For example, users get notifications of new e-mails on the toolbar and can open them. The Internet company also showed off a newly styled in-box, which combines social networking functions and also allows users access to third party programs.

Yahoo has about 275 million users of its e-mail. Its portal relies on advertising and the company says it has an audience of more than 500 million consumers.

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Source: iT News

Could Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s sick sue ‘em all campaign get any worse?

It could. And it has. Their RIAA is suing a young transplant patient in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Nineteen-year-old Ciara Sauro has pancreatitis and because she needs an islet cell transplant, she’s hospitalized every week, a situation resulting in a huge accumulation of medical bills. Now, “Because she didn’t defend herself against a copyright lawsuit, a federal judge in Pittsburgh ruled she’s a music pirate, and that could cost the Sauros almost $8,000 in fines,” says Pittsburg news channel WTAE.com.

“I already have severe depression,” the story has her saying. “I mean, it’s so hard to sit there and think that I have to get in trouble for something that I didn’t do. It’s not fair.”

It isn’t. But then, fairness isn’t a word the Big 4 or Mitch Bainwol and Cary Sherman, the two spinsters who run their RIAA, understand.

Sauro is accused of of illegally sharing 10 songs online and, “You want to know the truth?” - the story has her mother, Lisa, saying.

“I make $8.25 an hour. She can’t work. This child is very sick. I mean, what am I supposed to do?

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Source: P2P Net

For years, Web retailers have touted their convenience and efficiency over conventional retailers, and enjoyed surging double-digit sales growth, especially in the crucial year-end holiday shopping season.

But the steady draining of consumer confidence reflected in recent government data and the latest market research reports suggest the online retail industry is bracing for a humbling first-ever year of flat or even contracting holiday sales.

Ecommerce, for reasons tied to both the global economic crash and Web-specific factors, is poised to fall harder than the much maligned retail store industry, itself struggling with recent high-profile bankruptcies and widespread signs that consumers are looking to sharply curtail their spending.

“Retail spending has not really dropped,” says Gian Fulgoni, chairman of consumer audience measurement firm comScore Inc. “It’s ecommerce growth rates that have fallen off a cliff.”

This week, comScore once again cut its forecast for U.S. holiday shopping, reporting that sales in the first 23 days of November had fallen to $8.2 billion, down 4 percent from a year earlier.

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Source: Reuters

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is to step down from his post following the company’s failure to strike a deal with either Microsoft or Google.

Yang, who will return to his former, strategic role of “Chief Yahoo”, has paid the price for his stubborn refusal to entertain a deal with Microsoft until the last minute. “From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensable to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” Yang claims in a statement.

The Yahoo boss’s position was untenable after he persistently refused to engage in takeover talks with Microsoft, and instead sought a search deal with rival Google.

However, Google pulled the plug on the deal after the US Department of Justice revealed it planned to file a lawsuit to block the agreement on competition grounds.

Yang made one final, desperate plea to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to buy the company, having long argued that falling into Microsoft’s arms wouldn’t be in Yahoo’s best interests. “To this day, I have to say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo,” Yang said. “I don’t think that is a bad idea at all…at the right price, whatever the price is, we are willing to sell the company.”

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Source: PC Pro

“There are a number of different proposals for quantum computing,” Andrew Daley tells PhysOrg.com. “These include solid state or semiconductor as well as atomic and molecular systems. We are considering atomic systems, and more specifically alkaline earth metals.”

Daley is a physicist in the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Austria. He, along with Martin Boyd and Jun Ye at the University of Colorado, and Peter Zoller at Innsbruck, are proposing a quantum computing scheme that would make use of overlaying optical lattices to store information as well as perform computations. Much of this work was performed when the authors were guests at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and their ideas are shared in Physical Review Letters: “Quantum Computing with Alkaline-Earth-Metal Atoms.”

Electrons play a vital role in quantum computing with atoms, and when atoms are controlled with light, the electrons are also controlled. “That’s what makes alkali atoms nice to deal with,” says Daley. “They only have one valence electron, which makes the system really simple.” He then points out that alkaline earth metals offer an advantage over alkali atoms: “There are two electrons weakly bound. Even though the system is a little more complicated, there are some very nice properties.”

Daley explains that it is possible to excite an electron to higher energy states in which they remain for a relatively long time. “The idea is to create two different traps using two different colors of light, one for atoms where the electron is excited and the other for atoms where it is not. This is possible because the atoms react to light, and go where the light is. Basically, we can make an array of bright spots of laser light – an optical lattice – where there is an atom in every bright spot.”

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Source: Phys Org

The problem of illegal file-sharing has become a global one but the way governments go about tackling it changes from country to country.

In the UK, internet service providers (ISPs) have recently voluntarily agreed to engage and educate their customers about file-sharing.

Virgin Media is one of the most recent ISPs to write to customers whose net connection may have been used to download unlicensed content.

However, coming up with a logical and viable solution is proving difficult because of the fast pace of technological change.

“Who would have ever predicted five years ago that there would have been such a thing as iTunes, which now has an 80% global share of all downloads,” said Feargal Sharkey, chief executive of UK Music, which is an umbrella organisation representing the collective interests of the UK’s commercial music industry.

“The music industry is often having to wait and see what works,” he told the BBC World Service’s technology programme, Digital Planet.

“For several years now, the music industry has been the ‘canary down the coalmine’,” said Mr Sharkey.

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Source: The BBC

Google’s first foray into the world of mobile phones, the Android G1, has been hacked just days after being released into the wild.

Using an app called PTerminal, which is freely available through the Android Marketplace, users can gain access to the route level of the operating system and tinker about with its innards to their heart’s content.

It’s expected that the handset’s inabilty to install applications to the SD card will be the first restriction to fall, followed by carrier unlocking which will allow owners to free themselves from expensive T-Mobile contracts.

Needless to say, fiddling about at system root level of any device is guaranteed to cause pain and misery if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. So best not fiddle.

Source: iT News

Rapidshare has just published a press release to clarify its position with regards to a recent German court decision decision that essentially mandated to “proactively check content before publishing it.” Rapidshare’s response: “This is currently technically and legally impossible.” Rapidshare COO Bobby Chang continued: “There’s not going to be any control of uploads.”

This statement came a little bit as a surprise to me, because I had asked the company last week to explain how it is going to respond to the court decision and got a much more measured response. It read:

“The Rapidshare AG is currently analyzing the decision and working on a solution that will on the one hand do justice to the instructions of the court and on the other hand protect the privacy of its users.” (emphasis added)

These instructions of the court were pretty clear: Rapidshare has to become active against the infringement of a copyrighted work once it becomes aware / gets notified of such infringement. This does not just include erasing the work from its servers, but taking reasonable steps to make sure that it doesn’t get uploaded again.

Now how could such reasonable steps look like? Simply installing keyword- or hash-based filters - something Rapidshare already has in place - wasn’t enough for the Hamburg-based court. Instead, it mandated to identify users that have uploaded the work in question in the past and monitor their uploads before publishing them.

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Source: P2P Blog