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Archive for September, 2014

Weekly News Roundup (28 September 2014)

Sunday, September 28th, 2014

A lot of Linux “bashing” this week, as a Bash bug (one old enough to be able to vote) is causing mayhem for admins all around the world. There’s been a lot of misinformation floating around, mostly being distributed by the mass media, so I thought I would spend a bit of time trying to clear a few things up.

The Bash “Shellshock” bug in action

So what is Bash? It’s a shell for Unix/Linux based systems (including OS X). What is a shell? A shell is a command processor, basically something that lets you do everything from listing files and directories, to running programs and piping outputs from them to other programs, to running scripts. When you see hackers in unrealistic Hollywood movies, they’re usually typing a bunch of commands on a black screen with white/green text – then they’re typing on an (most likely made up) shell (with an extremely large font). So just to make it clear, the bug is not called Bash. Bash is the software that has the bug. The bug itself has been called the Bash bug (which I think is where the confusion comes from), although many are calling it by the rather catchy name of Shellshock.

So what is the Shellshock bug? It’s basically a rather silly bug that allows instructions to execute commands to be added to environment variables. It turns a fairly innocuous function that doesn’t really do much into one that can basically do everything.

So instead of running a command which simply set the variable “MyName = Sean”, hackers can instead set the value of the variable “MyName” to be “Sean” plus some command to execute. So instead “MyName = Sean”, they can do “”MyName = Sean; Plus run commands that sends all the password and credit card data on this server to the hacker’s server and then delete all the files on this server”, and this stupid bug will actually allow all of the latter instructions to be executed.

On the surface, a shell bug might not be all that damaging – one would have to already have gained access to the system before you can access the shell. The problem is that many internet-facing parts of a server that runs Bash, including the parts that render web pages and scripts, call upon shells like Bash to perform certain actions, including setting environment variables. This means that, with only a little bit of knowledge, one can potentially execute almost any program on a vulnerable server, programs that could allow the hacker to delete files, steal information, or just about anything really.

So why is this bug so serious? For starters, 60% of all web servers have the bug – a much higher rate than the Heartbleed bug because Bash is more integral to these servers – it’s such a basic part of the system, and such an old part of it, that nobody though it could possibly be buggy … until now. It also appears that OS X is vulnerable, although most OS X installs are not configured to allow attacks from outside. Most worryingly, it’s not just web servers that can be affected – any device running some version of Linux and has Internet access *could be* affected, including smartphones, routers, even things like Blu-ray players and in-car entertainment systems. Many of these Internet-of-things devices are also difficult/impossible to update in order to fix the vulnerability, and as there are so many of these devices and so many versions of them, even the manufacturers (if they still exist) probably won’t know which devices/versions are/aren’t vulnerable. To make matters worse, the first set of patches that went out to various server versions were incomplete, giving admins a false sense of security if they didn’t notice that there were subsequent updates.

So basically, it’s a bug that’s very commonly found, easy to exploit, can potentially do a huge amount of damage and hard to fix for some devices – so yep, very serious.

So why is this bug not as serious as some in the media are reporting it to be? While there are probably billions of devices that run some variant of Unix/Linux, not all of them include Bash. Embedded devices such as routers prefer the lightweight BusyBox, which uses ash and not Bash, for example. So luckily iOS*, Android* and a lot of devices aren’t vulnerable to the bug, but that still leaves maybe a few hundred millions devices that are still vulnerable. But even if these devices are vulnerable, it takes a combination of different things (web accessible script that uses Bash to change environment variables) for something malicious to be done, and so while a few hundred million devices may have this bug, a much smaller number can actually be exploited successfully.

* Rooted devices that may have had Bash installed, may be vulnerable.

Hope that clears up a few things. Sorry for spending so much time on this, but it’s not as if I have a lot of other things to write about this week, as you’ll find out below.

A follow-up to a story from a few weeks ago (edit: it was actually last week … jeez, I have no sense of time these days), Google has hit back in the war (of open letters) between itself and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. News Corp labeled the search engine a “platform for piracy”, and Google has now hit back with its own open letter titled Dear Rupert and cites all of the company’s herculean efforts in fighting the piracy problem (222 million web pages removed from Google’s indexes, for example). It’s almost a line-by-line debunking of all the claims made in the now infamous News Corp letter, well worth a read if you want Google’s take on the whole “is Google taking over the world a good thing or not” debate.

I probably watch more Netflix than the average person, mainly because I like having certain shows on in the background while I’m working on the computer at home (yes it’s distracting, but in a good way!). I’ve already streamed through The Office twice this way, and I’m currently doing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air via Mexican Netflix (as they have all the seasons). So the news that the average Netflix subscriber now watches 1.5 hours of content every day didn’t really strike me as surprising – I watch that much between lunch and afternoon tea.

You too can influence how Netflix decides what movies to add to their library (Not Intended to Be a Factual Statement)

But if you actually analyse what people are actually watching, I think you’ll find it’s more The Nanny, than The Wolf of Wall Street or any other high profile movie releases. This is because most top movies are simply not available on Netflix. New research shows that only 16% of popular and acclaimed films are actually on Netflix at the moment, compared to 94% on sell-through platforms like iTunes.

The latter, 94%, has been used by the MPAA to suggest that availability is not a huge issue when it comes to causes for piracy, but in reality, it’s the former 16% that may still be fueling the desire to download. It would be interesting to see what the piracy rate is for movies that do make it to Netflix, compared to movies that have never been on the platform – surely this should provide us with more valuable insight than simply saying “94%”.

Speaking of Netflix, I may have found a way to influence how Netflix decides which flicks to add to their library. For the past few months, whenever I have the time, I’ve been doing a search on Netflix for the delightful Martin Short, Nick Nolte comedy Three Fugitives. I know it isn’t there, but I’m searching for it anyway in the hope that the data boffins at Netflix spots the numerous searches being made for the movie and something gets done. And it’s worked! The movie will be available to stream in early October, thanks to my efforts and my efforts only I can only assume (as I must be the only one to be searching for this movie on Netflix, or the Internet in general). A similar thing happened with Harry and the Hendersons, which I had been furious searching for in the preceding months, and finally watched again on Mexican (or was that Canadian) Netflix this month. So get busy and start searching (obviously a trick that works better for titles that has little commercial value, then say searching for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’).

Please note that the above advice contains zero scientific or logical merit, and is solely based on the flimsiest of empirical evidence, if you can even call it that.

And finally in gaming (and semi-copyright) news, Steam’s re-design of its web store now more prominently shows the DRM employed by the game (if any). A move that will surely be welcomed by gamers, tired of spending a sizable amount of money on a game, only to find it infected with DRM nonsense. A new notification is now shown on the right hand side of the game’s page, with a clear “warning: this is something that you probably won’t like” yellow background to make the DRM warning stand-out. Perhaps this will further discourage publishers from putting in bad DRM, because if we all start treating DRM just as something detrimental, such as a bad review or incompatibility problems, then maybe publishers will have less incentive to include them in the future.

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Alright, that’s it for this week. See you in seven!

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Movies, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (28 September 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (21 September 2014)

Sunday, September 21st, 2014

If you’re sick of the iPhone 6 overload this week, then you’ve come to the right place. There’s only one paragraph in this WNR about Apple’s new phone, and it has to do with perhaps the most boring aspect of the phone. There’s also a rant in there about print media. Fun times!

Time to bring out this classic poster again …

Piracy losses are translating to higher prices for consumers and is having a negative effect on the economy. This has been one of the major argument for a crackdown on piracy, but according to leading economists in Australia, the reverse might be true. This week we again turn our focus to Australia and the heated debate there over what to do about the piracy problem. A submission this week to the government from leading economist Henry Ergas and the former head of Australia’s peak consumer body Allan Fels argues that the government’s plan to make ISPs monitor user downloads is actually bad for the economy, and bad for consumers.

Their argument is that the high cost of running such a program, nearly $150 million a year, will not translate to anything close to this in terms of increased revenue and benefits to the economy, based on current evidence. And any increased revenue to rights holders are unlikely to be passed on to consumers. In the most optimistic scenario under the government’s proposals, where piracy is substantially reduced, the removal of the need for rights holders to “compete” with pirated downloads may actually bring about higher prices for consumers, and actually end up “incentivizing” piracy, the submission also warns.

If this “incentivizing” happens, then piracy rates will back up again and the only options left for rights holders would be to improve the value of their offerings, greatly improve the availability of legal content on services that consumers want to use, and also ensure things like release window delays are as short as possible. Basically all of the things that they should be doing right now to fight piracy instead of asking the government to intervene, argues the economists.

The most worrying thing about the Australian debate right now is that all of these same arguments have been heard before, and the practical actions suggested have already been tried, tested and shown to be largely ineffective. And yet, we still have rights holders asking for legislative action. It’s interesting that rights holders in the US have stopped asking for the same, at least not publicly, all because they fear the same kind of consumer backlash that occurred when SOPA/PIPA was being debated. Which is why the MPAA this week again re-iterated their lack of desire for legislative action. The MPAA’s Chris Dodd was saying all the right things too, about not “finger pointing at everyone” and “arresting 14 year-olds”, but instead to focus on “accessibility” and releasing content at “price points [consumers] can afford”. At the very least, it seems rights holders there have lost their appetite for new laws (publicly at least), just like how rights holders here in Australia have lost their appetite for legal action (having lost a major case a couple of years back). Well, at least they’re learning (in terms of what they say publicly, at least).

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I was going to write a full length news article on this story based on the attention grabbing headline of “NewsCorp: Google is a ‘platform for piracy'”. Ohh, I though, Murdoch is on one of his piracy rants against Google again, oh goodie. But then I read the article and it wasn’t really focusing on the piracy problem, or the kind of piracy that I usually talk about here. Rather, it was mainly about the dispute between NewsCorp and Google, and goes much deeper than who is downloading what via the search engine. In case you don’t know, newspapers have a love/hate relationship with search engines like Google. Mostly hate these days. They don’t like the fact that Google “aggressively aggregates” content (some of us webmasters don’t like it either), in which Google takes content from sites and sticks it in the search results (with credit and links, but done in a way that makes visiting the site unnecessary – do a search for “aggregation definition” on Google, and you’ll know what I mean). Which is why drastic measures such as blocking Google crawling have been employed in the past to try and stop Google’s content “stealing”, which unfortunately has the side effect of greatly reducing your visibility to users. Pay walls were then introduced to try and make news profitable again, but in my opinion, it only made aggregated content more valuable (as sometimes a headline and summary is enough, especially compared to the cost of paying for the full thing). Google’s argument is that it’s good for the end users, which it is, but it’s also easy to see why some content creators are not happy with what Google (and to be fair, the other search engine too) is doing.

Google’s news aggregation – good for users, bad for content creators?

While there are legitimate arguments to be made about the content aggregation issue; the lack of genuine competition in the search sector; and issues of anti-competitive behaviour with Google’s perceived favourable treatment of its own products over those from other companies (Google is both a partner, and a competitor, to content creators, in my opinion); on the flip side of the coin you could argue this is just another case of old media not being able to adapt quickly enough. In NewsCorp’s accusations against Google, this interesting passage caught my eye: “For example access to 75% of the Wall Street Journal demographic at 25% of the price, thus undermining the business model of the content creator”. Undermining, or just doing business in a more efficient way? Google could label the same accusation against more successful social media platform, which are offering even better targeting at even lower prices (with Google+ having failed to be as successful in doing the same). But isn’t this just progress and innovation?

As for the woes of the newspaper industry, I don’t know if it’s fair to blame Google, or even the Internet in general for their troubles. To me, if a product is worth paying for, people will pay for it. If people’s expectations of what something is worth has changed, and you can’t re-engage with people again to convince them that paying for news is worthwhile, then perhaps it’s time to re-think the whole business of news. Maybe it shouldn’t be a business at all, but a publicly funded, truly independent institution who’s goal is not profit, but the actual betterment of society and democracy. Then maybe we’ll get back true journalism that protects, not undermines, democracy (via the dumbification of news and the serving of vile populist garbage in the name of profit – the click-baiters of their time – tactics that NewsCorp should be very familar with).

Obligatory iPhone 6 pic

I suppose I should mention the iPhone 6. Not that it has much to do with what I cover in the WNR, except for this slightly related story about the choice of codec being used for FaceTime over cellular 3G/4G. The use of HEVC/H.265 makes a lot of sense when combined with the iPhone 6’s more powerful processor (which is needed for realtime HEVC encoding/decoding) and the need to reduce bandwidth requirements, while increasing the quality of video calls. Would this be the first mass consumer product to feature built-in HEVC/H.265 support? Possibly, and it won’t hurt the format’s chances to become the next de facto standard for web video.

Which is why things are not looking great for Google’s VPx, their open source, royalty free alternative to HEVC/H.265. I’m sure Google’s Android will be pushing VP10 if/when it is released sometime next year, but apart from the lack of industry support for the format, technically, it just doesn’t seem to be quite there compared to the more polished and efficient HEVC. As one industry analyst said recently, “The industry has already selected HEVC,” and that, I’m afraid, is that for Google’s VPx.

Tests have shown that VP9, while perhaps better than H.264, cannot really compete at the moment with HEVC. Surprisingly, VP9 is in practical use to a much larger degree than HEVC at the moment, thanks to Google pushing the use of the codec for YouTube, and also superior native browser support due to the codec’s open-sourcedness. But with Netflix 4K choosing HEVC, Blu-ray 4K also choosing HEVC, and now Apple also going down the HEVC route, there’s not much room for VP9/VP10 to grow into. Nobody wants another format war, especially one as tame as this one, so the industry will choose one format and just go ahead with it – and right now, the choice is definitely HEVC.

As promised last week, more on August’s NPD results right here. The PS4 was again the most popular console, 8 month in a row, but it appears that its lead has shrunk somewhat. Unconfirmed information suggests that the PS4’s 175,000 units sold was just ahead of Xbox One’s 150,000. Nothing official from either Microsoft or Nintendo though, so the difference could actually be much greater than that (especially for the Wii, as Mario Kart fell out of the top 10 games chart in August).

Xbox One needs to be cheaper than the PS4

More worrying for Microsoft is that traditional Xbox 360 favourites like the Madden series are being won by Sony, with the PS4 version of Madden NFL 15 outselling the Xbox One and Xbox 360 version. In fact, the same trend is true for all of the top selling multiplatform games right now except for Call of Duty: Ghosts. The next Call of Duty game will be interesting, not only is it one of the biggest franchises around, this time, we may actually see the PlayStation become the top performing platform for the series’ next chapter. If this were to happen, it could have serious implications, in that developers will most likely make the PS4 their lead platform (if they haven’t done so already) and the Xbox One version of the same game will suffer, thus causing the sales/quality/value gap to grow even larger.

I bet Microsoft wishes now more than ever that they can have a do-over, so that they would have never bothered with all that DRM crap, and released the Xbox One without Kinect for cheaper than the PS4. It would have made the Xbox One a sure winner, but I guess they grew overconfident and felt they had room to experiment. The same kind of “arrogance” maybe that was responsible for the PS3’s relative failure. The good news for Microsoft is that their backflips have been fast and decisive, and so there’s still time to pull one out of the hat. But the Xbox One needs to be cheaper than the PS4 to have a real chance, and I’m not sure if Microsoft can afford to do it at the moment.

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A longer than expected WNR this week, and sorry for the incoherent ranting. See you in a week (for more incoherent ranting, no doubt)!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (21 September 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (14 September 2014)

Sunday, September 14th, 2014

It’s going to be a short one this week, as I’ve got somewhere I need to be at shortly after pressing the “submit” button on this WNR. You might then question why, considering I’ve had an entire week to prepare and write this WNR, didn’t I just do it earlier? Because news waits for no man. Or rather, man has to wait for news to happen, and it again happened pretty late during this very quiet week. So quiet that, again, we only have to Australian oriented stories for you this week, although stories that do have global implications. Enjoy!

Spotify has released research showing piracy rates dropping rapidly in Australia since Spotify’s introduction

After being challenged by those in Australian that believe tougher laws and technological solutions like DRM and censorship are the way forwards for the fight against piracy, Spotify has released data from its own research showing that introducing more affordable legal options is the way to go. According to Spotify’s data, music piracy download rates in Australia (based on calculating BitTorrent downloads) dropped by more than 20% only a year after Spotify’s introduction here in Australia.

The piracy rate has continued to steadily decline since then, proving that if you provide a service people are willing to pay for, they will. Of course, some people will simply never pay for music and will continue to download – but you can’t lose money from people that were never willing to spend it in the first place (the argument is that if the only options were legal options, then some of these people might eventually pay up – but this argument is not valid because it would require piracy to be completely prevented, which even the most optimistic industry person will agree is impossible).

There is this huge amount of resistance to change in the industry, and for them, it’s so much easier to simply blame everyone else for their problems. Piracy has become a convenient excuse, but it’s only just a symptom of a much larger problem the creative industries seems unwilling, or unable to address. It’s all good news for the IT industry though, since (without a sense of entitlement that people in the creative industries, particularly the movie and music industries, seem to have) they’re the ones that are coming up with the solutions at the moment, and bit by bit, they’re the ones inserting themselves into critical junctures of the creative industries.

Despite not wanting to admit the obvious, piracy is also providing competitive pressure for companies that have had it too easy for too long. This is particularly evident in Australia, where many of the major global players, like Netflix, have not been been able to, or willing to influence the market conditions here – very likely because our market is so small that it’s mostly an afterthought for many companies. This lack of competition, the “taking it for granted” nature of the companies that operate here, and our relatively high average salary has meant prices are exorbitant (up to 431% more for TV shows online) compared to almost any other place in the world. But with Netflix predicted to make its debut locally in 2015, and with 200,000 already signing up via various geo-unblocking methods (which is legal here in Australia, thanks to a court case in the 90’s that basically said region control is not acceptable), the pressure is finally on, and some companies have started to respond.

Australian companies sh*t scared about Netflix and actual competition

As mentioned last week, one such company, our only cable operator Foxtel, has decided to drop prices to prepare for the Netflix onslaught next year. This is despite the company raising prices annually for the past decade, including at the start of this year (just before rumours started circulating that Netflix was coming). The current debate over the poor value Australians get in terms of what they pay for, and Foxtel’s virtual monopolistic position, has also added to the price cut pressure.

In fact, the general trend recently has seen various companies scramble in full panic mode to try and deal with the arrival of Netflix. We’ve seen indirect competitors, like Foxtel, finally starting to be more competitive price wise, even if at the same time, they’re locking up content so Netflix can’t get their hands on it. It’s very likely that our local Netflix offering will be very much limited compared to overseas equivalents, which may mean that VPNs and geo-unblockers will still have their use. This is why there is still pressure from local companies, and also direct competitors to Netflix, on the government to ban the use of geo-unblockers (again, despite legal precedent ruling that busting geo-restrictions is perfectly legal here in Australia).

While all of this “discussion” is happening under the guise of a “debate” on solving the piracy issue, you can’t help but feel it’s more about local companies trying to protecting their privileged positions in our noncompetitive market – basically to get the government to bail them out now that some real competition is about the arrive. And that, perhaps, is what the piracy debate is all about, not just in Australia – industries that have grown too comfortable with the way they do business and will do everything in their lobbying power to keep the status quo, and prevent new forms of competition from succeeding, whether it’s piracy or Netflix.

The early NPD stats for August 2014 are out, and no big surprise here. The PS4 outsold the Xbox One to claim the throne as the best selling console eight month in a row. It’s a still a bit early, and so I’m still waiting for other stuff to filter through. I’ll cover the NPD results in more detail next month.

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That’s it for this edition of the WNR. Not the most interesting, I know, but hopefully stuff will happen (and happen sooner than Friday afternoon, thank-you very much) next week. Until then, have a great one!

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, News Roundup, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (14 September 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (7 September 2014)

Sunday, September 7th, 2014

Happy father’s day for those that do not live in the UK or US. In fact, I’m not quite sure if it’s father’s day anywhere else but here in Australia (although a quick search suggests Belgium, out of all places, also celebrate it on the same day). I watched Alexander Payne’s Nebraska over the last few days, and I have to say it was definitely an appropriate movie for father’s day, even if when I started watching it I had no idea.

Lots to go through this week, most of the stories unfortunately only came about in the last couple of days which meant weekdays of mostly thumb twiddling, and then rushing to get everything done on Saturday. Please excuse teh lower than norml quality.

Downloading movies is just as bad as promoting terrorism online, or sharing child pornography, according to an Australian media company

Hyperbolic much? So movie piracy is basically the same thing as terrorism and pedophilia, according to Australian movie studio Village Roadshow. Statements like this do not help to elevate the so called dangers of piracy (because most people realise that, at its heart, it’s all just a question of money), but I worry that it trivialises the much more insidious, dangerous and very much real threat of online terrorism and pedophilia. This is also the same company, in its submission to an Australian government call for input on ways to solve the piracy problem by giving Hollywood everything they want, that says 900,000 jobs are at stake if piracy isn’t stopped. 900,000 is 8% of Australia’s workforce, and a number that’s higher than the total number of unemployed in the country at this time – sounds like quite a lot considering we don’t really have a movie industry.

The same week also saw Australia’s Media, Entertainment, and Arts Alliance back the government’s Internet censorship plans, only for the same union to backtrack and withdraw their support soon after. Turns out this union that represents journalists (whom are almost always against censorship) also represents people working in film and TV (which do support censorship), hence the schizophrenic positions the union seems to be taking.

Silicon Valley has also stepped into the debate here, and you can’t but help feel that Australia has become a pivotal arena for those that have different views on how to battle piracy (simply because our government is stupid and clueless enough to be persuaded to do just about anything). The Computer and Communications Association (CCIA), an industry group that represents pretty much every tech company that exists including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, has waded into the debate on the side of consumers by saying that things like domain blocking and three-strikes simply do not work. Instead, content owners should focus on availability, ease of use and more equitable pricing, in order to fight piracy. A common sense position that will no doubt be ignored by our center-right government.

Fun times in Australia, that’s for sure.

All this focus on piracy has had a positive effect though. One of the focal points of criticism here has been the high cost of legal options, or rather, just the single option, singular. This is because we only have one pay TV operator here in Australia, and their strategy has been to lock up content on an exclusive basis in order to justify their high pricing. A strategy that obviously gives pirates the moral justification they need to do what they do. This week, the pay TV operator, Foxtel, finally announced a price cut (after years and yearly price increases), with $25 being taken off almost all of the packages and with more pocket friendly packages available for those that only want to watch shows like Game of Thrones and The Newsroom without having to subscribe to a bunch of other crap. The cynical part of me thinks this is the company’s way of trying to nullify a particular argument against the introduction of harsher laws, and that once these monopoly friendly laws are passed, prices will simply go back up again. But assuming this is a genuine attempt to find a market based solution to piracy, as well as counter any moves by Netflix into the Australian market next year, then this is definitely a step in the right direction. And it goes to show that there are solutions to the piracy problem that do not require going down the tricky path of censorship and domain blocking.

If domain blocking does gets approved here in Australia, one might have to look at the UK to see just how slippery the slippery slope of “guilty by association” can become. A story this week sees UK police now threatening domain hosts for selling domains to suspected owners of piracy websites. Apparently, if you’re an individual that has once upon a time possibly been linked with owning a domain name that might have been used to provide pirated content, none of it proven in a court or anything, then domain registrars must police these people and not sell them domains names that might possibly have some relation to piracy, even though the domain at the time of purchase would not be connected to a live website at all and so there’s no way to know how the domain name will be used, or even if it will be used at all in the future. Easy!

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An update to a story from earlier this year, when DRM came to coffee. Apparently, the DRM in Keurig coffee machines that prevents third party pods from being used has been cracked by, surprise surprise, a third party pod maker. It’s hard to say if the DMCA could apply in this case and whether Keurig can take Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee to court over the “hacking” or not. Sometimes company put in DRM they know will be cracked simply because it gives them the legal option to sue later on.

4K Blu-ray will have four times the pixels, but won’t need more space thanks to HEVC – 4K Blu-ray players coming to a store near you in 2015

Excited about 4K? Then 2015 is the year for you, as that’s when 4K Blu-ray players and discs will be available (towards the end of 2015, it has to be said). The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) revealed the current status of 4K on Blu-ray at the IFA electronics show, and they say that the specs are almost done, and licensing will start “Spring or Summer 2015”.

The BDA also revealed some technical specs for 4K on Blu-ray. The physical disc won’t actually change, and 50GB will be enough with the more efficient HEVC/H.265 codec being used. The increased resolution of 4K isn’t the only improvement to the picture quality, as other additions such as an improved color gamut (which ups the visible color spectrum from the current 30-35% to 70-80%) as well as increasing video bit depth from 8-bit to 10-bit will also bring about picture quality improvements.

Even though the currently agreed upon specs do not call for higher capacity discs, the BDA also revealed that larger discs are in consideration, with 66GB and 100GB discs being considered for 4K (or even 1080p) use. 4K Blu-ray players are expected to hit the market for the 2015 holiday sales period, and 4K TVs will hopefully be affordable enough then as well.

For those that want to make the argument that discs have had its time, and I’m definitely leaning towards this camp, here’s an interesting argument against digital downloads: carbon footprint. Despite logic suggesting otherwise, large downloads are actually more costly to the environment in terms their carbon footprint than discs. This is due to the electricity used by devices that download large content, such as PS4s. Of course, the numbers can be played around to suggest the opposite conclusion, if for example you use your car to get to the shops to buy the Blu-ray, or if you use the background downloading feature of the PS4 while you’re using it for some other function which means the download doesn’t use much excess power. And there’s also the issue of millions of plastic discs that will one day be useless and what to do about these. Something to think about, perhaps.

Catastrophic Bug or annoying DRM? It’s so hard to tell these days …

While this story probably fits better in the Copyright section above, it might just be that it’s a gaming story after all. You see the confusion comes from the fact that the new Sims game might contain a major glitch, that may also be an intentional way to annoy pirates. For those not familiar with The Sims, the characters you control in the game, sims, can performs acts such as going to the toilet and taking a shower. With EA keen to keep the game family friendly, pixelation is used to keep the naughty parts hidden. However with this “bug”, the area of pixelation increases every time the sim does something that requires it, until it covers virtually the entire screen.

Gamers are already reporting that the bug seems to occur only in pirated versions of the game, which suggests that this is more likely an anti-piracy measure, than careless programming on the part of the developers. Like other games that have employed this type of DRM, some gamers are apparently posting about this bug on forums and to tech support, not aware that they are inadvertently outing themselves as pirates in the process.

Of course, patches and fixes will remove this “bug” from the pirated version if it indeed turns out to be an anti-protection thing, but as long as this glitch does not affect paying customers, then this is one DRM that I don’t mind!

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Well that went longer than expected.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (7 September 2014)

DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for September, 2014

Weekly News Roundup (28 September 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (21 September 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (14 September 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (7 September 2014)

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