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Weekly News Roundup (30 January 2011)

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

It looks like my pathetic begging last week paid off, sort of, as I managed to get a few likes on Digital Digest’s Facebook page, and a few more on Twitter. All those that participated will be noted, and when the competition launches next week or the week after, you shall all be rewarded handsomely (with better chances at winning)!

This Android game I made may look crudely drawn, it's gameplay is only slightly better

The current set up means every news article posted on the Digital Digest website, plus every blog and posts in the deals & freebies section, will all be added to the feeds, allowing for an easy way to get notified of updates on the websites. And occasionally, I will post a few things that aren’t really big enough to make the news, but are nonetheless interesting. One thing I did post about was my first attempt at an Android app, a game based on a paper based game based on video games based a movie. Paper (Star) Wars is my take on a paper based Star Wars game that I used to play with friends in middle school. It’s my first app, so please be kind and tolerant of the numerous bugs within the game. There’s a free “Not Very Special Edition” and a paid for version for around a buck, depending on exchange rates.

Self promotion finished, time for this week’s news, and there’s plenty to go through so let’s get started.

Let’s start the copyright news, the UK may have seen a change of government, the non violent kind, but its anti-piracy policies remains unchanged it seems. Their proposed three-strikes system, which will first start with a warning-but-no-action system, is set to be introduced, and UK ISPs will have to pay 25% of the cost of enforcing this law which will see private subscriber data being given to copyright holders.

In other words, the UK government thinks that ISPs are at least 25% responsible for anti-piracy policing on the net, even though they don’t receive any benefits from it at all if this thing works (and the UK government optimistically thinks that it will reduce online piracy by 50% – amazing!). So it seems ISPs have been cast as a guilty party. But ISPs will no doubt pass on the cost to subscribers. So it seems, we’re all being cast as the guilty party. And with higher ISP costs, and so less money to spend online, and when people start getting booted off the Internet, all of these actions which will no doubt affect the Internet economy, most likely the legitimate kind. Pirates will be pirates, and they will find (and have found) ways around being monitored, so I would really like to see how the UK government comes up with the figure of £200m as the amount of benefits that will result from this. They would be lucky to get away with less than £200m of damages to the economy. But this whole thing has become an ideological crusade, so common sense went out the window ages ago.

ACS:Law may have quit the mass lawsuit game

The new UK law should come into affect as anti-piracy law firms in the UK might be starting to wrap up their profit seeking mass lawsuit enterprises, when the head of one of the most notorious anti-piracy law firms, ACS:Law, said in court that his firm was no longer involved in anti-piracy stuff due to “death threats and bomb threats”, amongst other things (no longer profitable?). Not to condone threats of this kind, which is totally unacceptable despite the number of people ACS:Law has pissed off in recent times, but that’s the side effect of the kind of business ACS:Law is involved in, just as its predecessor Davenport Lyons realised when they also quit the game. And they were in court because the judge found their lawsuit somewhat dubious and wanted to examine it further, despite ACS:Law’s attempt to drop the lawsuits against the downloaders in question, in a last ditch attempt to avoid having any kind of court ruling on the matter (because it could go either way, and it looks like it’s going the wrong way for ACS:Law). The best way to go after these law firms is to take a leaf out of the entertainment lobby’s latest doctrine on online anti-piracy: go after their revenue source. If no profit can be made via mass lawsuits, because perhaps it’s difficult to ascertain jurisdiction or that people are fighting back by tying up these law firms in paper work, then these kinds of law suits will stop.

Google is the net's new piracy cop

But these lawsuits are still gaining popularity in the US, where this week, hundreds more were sued for download the Paris Hilton sex tapes. I wonder if Paris Hilton gets a percentage of the settlement fees, and if she does, then that’s one more reason to fight these lawsuits as tenaciously as possible. And people seeking to download this “movie” illegally be warned – the publishers, XPAYS, is still monitoring download networks for potential targets. But finding a torrent of this film may have just gotten about 1.5% harder, thanks to Google’s new filtering scheme which became active this week, something they warned us would happen back in December. It’s no doubt Google’s way to try and appease the entertainment industry, not that they would be pleased much by this, since only the suggested search phrases as part of auto-complete and instant search have been filtered – the results are still the same as before. And the way Google has did it was full of inconsistencies, like why a BitTorrent client software like uTorrent needs to be filtered at all (and yet, other popular clients like BitComet or Vuze are not filtered), or why RapidShare is filtered, but not MediaFire. In any case, this latest move by Google sets a very dangerous precedent, and goes completely against the Mountain View company’s principles on the open web. And as mentioned before, it will do little to appease the entertainment industry and instead, it will just make them ask the question “if you can filter recommended search phrases, why can’t you also filter out the results”. An appeasement of groups backed by a Fascist launched organization, yeah that doesn’t sound familiar at all. Maybe it’s just me, but has Google abandoned their “do no evil” policy, since they’re very much acting like just any other corporation these days. Even their recent withdrawal of support for H.264 in Chrome was very much an exercise in protecting self-interests (dropping H.264 so people will have to adopt their own WebM, for example), as opposed to their stated goal of supporting open software – this is the very same company that bundles Adobe Flash with the same browser in question, so it’s a bit rich for them to lecture other on support of open platforms.

For all of the entertainment industry’s pomp and bluster, they still haven’t even managed to close down The Pirate Bay. They talk big about closing down a lot of websites, another 50 this week apparently, but they don’t dare mention how many new websites spring up the second they close down one, fairly obscure, torrent indexer. And if The Pirate Bay people are to be believed, the RIAA are in for a rude awakening when TPB launches its music sharing service in a few months time. No details as yet, or even confirmation as to whether this thing is real or not, but a TPB insider has promised that this thing will scare the pants off the RIAA. It’s set to be launched around the 78th birthday of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and I thought it was interesting that this organization was launched by none other than Mussolini in 1933 (yes, that Mussolini). So when old Benito said that “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power,” he wasn’t that far off the mark it seems (ignoring the fact that he was talking about a totally different kind of “corporate” to today’s corporations).

And in potential silly DRM news of the week, how about DRM’d web images? Not quite, but it only takes a little bit of effort to turn this thing into the online newspaper’s favourite new toy, as expiring image links is quite effective at cutting down hot linking. Of course, those that really do want to steal your pics will just do so via a print-screen, while you make your legitimate visitors download and install plug-in after plug-in just to view the damn image. A totally ineffective DRM which only makes the life of legitimate users that much more painful. So definitely happening, then.

High Definition

Onto HD/3D news, price of Blu-ray players are tipped to drop below $40 in 2011. Not that surprising when you consider that it’s been available for around $50 already.

But this does mean one thing: if you don’t have a Blu-ray player now, you may just not want or need one. They’re so cheap now, when they’re not being given away freely with TV purchases, that there really aren’t any other excuses left for people not to have one. And with retailers often discounting Blu-ray/combo versions of movies below the price of DVD sets, it’s a no brainer. And so much for the higher premiums manufacturers had hoped that Blu-ray hardware (and movies) would bring on a more permanent basis.

Not everyone can enjoy 3D without wanting to throw up

So if plain old Blu-ray isn’t helping to bring in higher premiums, perhaps the 3D kind will. And when manufacturers and studios are not trying to kill the format by signing excruciatingly long exclusivity deals (I’m looking at you, Panasonic and Fox) on titles that will launch the format, there’s also the issue that many people just can’t stand watching 3D. I think I’m one of these people, since watching 3D for more than half an hour makes me uncomfortable, and watching something like Avatar all the way through would probably kill me (or at least make me very very sick). But I did still buy a 3D TV, and I’ve definitely paid more money for even less interesting gimmicks before. Expect all TVs to have 3D support by the end of the year though, and competition will ensure the higher premiums will be gone by then too.

And going back to the Chrome/H.264 decision I referred to above, there’s a new service that aims to end the problem of cross-browser compatibility for uploaded web videos. Vid.ly takes in your videos and then transcode them millions of times (or just a dozen times, I don’t know) so that it will work on any browser, regardless of whether it took the very corporate decision to back one of its own, albeit open, video standards, or whether it’s backing a video standard that it owns a lot of patent on. And the same for mobile videos, iOS, Android, Blackberry. I fed the service my recently uploaded Transformers: Dark of the Moon HD 1080p Trailer. Vid.ly ate it up, and spat out a link half an hour later, and I’ve put the sample embed video and mobile video links in this forum thread. For no other reason, it’s a great way to compare the various qualities of web video standards, H.264 vs WebM vs Theora, as the same embed code automatically detects what software you’re using and gives you the compatible stream (it looks by far the worst on Firefox at the moment, as it uses Ogg Theora). Anyway, an interesting service that may bypass the whole very confusing, and annoying, HTML5 format wars.

And last but not least, in gaming, Sony has reacted to the hacked 3.55 firmware by releasing the 3.65 firmware. And it was hacked within hours. Stable. Doors. Horse. Bolted.

Sony did have better success in the courts, with the judge granting a temporary injunction against, I don’t know what, geohot’s firmware or something. Because a temporary injunction on fail0verflow’s research into pointing out the security flaw on the PS3, doesn’t seem to make much sense, as it’s now common knowledge that Sony doesn’t know the difference between a constant and a randomly generated number.

Sony's Next Generation Portable is packed full of the latest tech, but at what price?

But Sony are at their best when they show off cool stuff, as opposed to trying all sorts of anti-piracy measures, and they did impress a lot of people and refocus people’s thoughts away from the PS3 security disaster, by revealing the NGP – the Next Generation Portable – the successor to the ailing (some would argue, dead and buried) PSP. It does seem pretty cool, all the best features from phones (Wi-Fi, GPS, multiple cameras, multi-touch), a kick-ass processor that can run PS3 games, albeit at the reduced resolution of the still kick-ass OLED screen (960×544). Still, it faces stiff competition from smartphones, the 3DS and tablets, all vying for a share of the portable gaming market these days (although Sony has promised a common development platform for its Android phones and the NGP, so we know at least Angry Birds will be on the NGP). Nobody knows what the price of the NGP will be, but with so much tech inside, it can’t be cheap, or can’t be cheaper than the 3DS, right?

Speaking of the 3DS, yes, it will have region-control, and downloaded games won’t be transferable to another console, at least not at first.

And so that’s it for another week. Have a good one and see you at the same time, same place, in 7 days.

Posted in 3D, Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (30 January 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (23 January 2011)

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

You may have noticed something different at the bottom of this blog (if you’re viewing this post on my blog, as opposed to through the newsletter that is) – that’s right, WNR (via Digital Digest) has joined the 21st century social media thingamajig. This means that if you like this post, you can use one of the dozens of social media tools to let others know, and help me increase my readership numbers into double (or even triple!) digits. In addition, I’ve also set up what the kids call a ‘book of faces’ page right here (where every single news, deals and blog post will be pinned up on the wall, or something like that), and even managed to employ the services of that blue twittering bird here. So please, friend, follow, tweet, twang, hurl, zomg me on Facebook and Twitter, since I’m a bit lonely and pathetic on there at the moment and will soon have to resort to making up fake accounts just so I have some “friends”. And many of the news stories that I link to in the WNR will now be to the Digital Digest news section (as opposed to the forum thread like before, although a link to the relevant forum threads will still be located at the end of the news articles), and there, you will also see FB like buttons, Twitter tweet buttons, and even a FB powered comments section where you can point out the numerous speling mistakes I’ve made in the news post.

And there might be something in it for those of you that goes through the laborious process of clicking on a button to indicate your “friendship” or “cult follower status” with me, and the earlier you do it (and the greater number of you who do it) will increase the likelihood of something like this happening. Did someone say prizes? Amazon gift certificates? Details (if any) to be released soon. Just to be clear, yes, I am trying to buy some friends, so fingers crossed it works and I get enough likes and followers to make launching a competition possible!

Lots of news this week, so let’s get started.

Let’s start the copyright news. The big wigs at the music arms of Sony and Universal did some brain storming the other day and came up with a new brilliant way to combat piracy: allow people to actually buy the music!

Apparently, not allowing people to legally buy something actually encourages people to seek illegal ways to obtain the same content, which must have come as a big shock to the Sony and Universal execs when their million dollar research revealed these findings, or something. Currently, when new music is released, it’s given airtime on the radio during an exclusive period before it was possible to buy the music legally, but research found that people searching for the new songs peaked weeks before the start of the sales period, and so, naturally, people just managed to get the song from “other” sources. So now, music will be made available for sale at the same time as when the radio airplay period starts, in a bid to curb online piracy. And it will only take a dozen more research reports before Sony, Universal and others realize that the same thing works for TV shows and movies, and that rental, release windows and delaying new TV show episodes by as long as 6 month in overseas markets, all contribute to the online piracy phenomenon.

Still staying in the music industry, the RIAA this week issued more threats to companies and organizations that it perceives as potential partners in the CRusade Against Piracy (CRAP™). The RIAA knows that the only way it can get others to do their dirty work in the futile war against online piracy (FWOP™) is to threaten them. This time, it’s ICANN, the people responsible for making the domain name standards, and the RIAA warns them that piracy syndicates might hijack planned music based TLDs like .music. Like as if music piracy websites would need to bother with .music, not if .riaasucks is available. It’s very likely though that the warning comes because the RIAA wants control of .music, but doesn’t have the cash to bid for it, and so they’re dreaming up an imaginary threat to force ICANN’s hands, a tactic that has worked well with governments around the world.

Malware is a more serious problem than online piracy, yet it receives almost no attention at all

A threat that is not so imaginary is malware. Hands up those that *haven’t* been affected by malware, or know someone that has. Malware costs the economy something like $50+ billion a year, that’s even more than the imaginary numbers that the RIAA likes to invent, and yet it seems there’s hardly any action against the spread of malware, apart from the odd arrest of hacker or two, and only when the malware story makes national news (and this happens only because it infected all the computers at said news network). And yet, the US government alone is throwing millions of dollars and resources of the FBI, Homeland Security at fighting the online piracy problem, which may or may not even be a problem. I mention all this because of the story this week that malware writers are now using that old RIAA favourite, DRM, to protect their toolkits to sell or rent to those seeking to make a profit infecting unsuspecting servers and computers. But we already know for a fact the resources at the FBI have already been diverted away from investigating online and identity fraud, towards online piracy investigations, but I guess that’s because there is no such things as the “online fraud victims” lobby, or at least it doesn’t have as much cash to splash around compared to the entertainment lobby (probably because all of their cash has already been stolen via malware and identify fraud).

High Definition

Onto HD/3D news, I posted a story about LG’s plans to make people buy more 3D TVs that use passive glasses, but mainly, it was just an excuse to post a link to this video.

But 3D TVs using passive glasses do have some advantages, after all, cinema 3D presentations are mostly based on the same technology. Sure, you won’t get a 1080p picture, but if it means less headaches and cheaper glasses, then it’s probably a good thing. Having had my 3D TV for about 6 month now, I’m still firmly convinced that 3D is still very much a gimmick, although one that’s very likely to be in every TV pretty soon (but only the active glasses kind, since it’s very inexpensive to add active glasses 3D support to HDTVs).

Smell-O-Vision may be coming to games and movies for a low price, but not all smells are pleasant!

Something that also smells very gimmicky, possibly literally at some stage, is smell-o-vision. But what caught my eye about Scent Science’s new ScentScape machine is the low price attached to it. I don’t think it makes a huge difference to me if I can smell burning petrol or not as I blow up yet another car with my RPG in GTA IV, but for $70, the price of the ScentScape machine, it might just be worth a try. I wonder though what the most popular smells would be. Gunpowder would be one, blood another. But I do have reservations about playing a game like Fallout: New Vegas. I can’t imagine the post apocalyptic world and its inhabitants (and mutants) smelling very nice at all! Nor would watching Generation Kill (brilliant mini-series by the way) be pleasant if “a MOPP suit that smells like four days of piss and ball sweat” was made a reality, smell wise.

And Star Wars on Blu-ray now has a solid release date. September 27th, 2011. It will be the best seller on Blu-ray to date when released, I suspect.

And finally in gaming, some new developments in the PS3 hack saga. Sony’s court case against fail0verflow and geohot has been delayed due to jurisdiction issues relating to the fact that geohot, aka Geroge Hotz, does not live in California where the lawsuit was filed. Sony reasoned with the judge that, due to various clauses in the PSN user agreement and whatnot, it could still sue someone who doesn’t live in California, in California, but the judge has reservations about allowing Sony to bypass jurisdiction so easily this way. The EFF has also come out attacking Sony’s lawsuit, saying it sends a ‘dangerous message’, suing security researchers for exposing security flaws, when really, Sony should had worked with people like Hotz to plug any security holes before the console was released. Both fail0verflow and geohot stressed that they did this for academic purposes and for enabling homebrew, and all have made sure that piracy would not be promoted or allowed directly by their hacks (although indirectly, the hack can be further modified to enable piracy). So instead of suing those that actually use this hack to allow piracy, Sony are suing the guys that actually exposed the hack. It’s like arresting the guy who pointed out to you that your car is unlocked, as opposed to the guy who actually stole your car.

Waninkoko has a custom PS3 3.55 firmware that played backed up games, but it's bricking some PS3s (screencap credit: PSGroove.com)

More custom firmware has been released, this time by infamous Wii hacker Waninkoko, and this ones does allow pirated games to work. But the firmware apparently bricks older PS3s, those with 256MB NAND chips, a list of affected models here. The warning forum user Budreaux posted in the forum thread should be listened to … playing around with hacked firmware is a quick way to brick your PS3, void you warranty, and get you banned on PSN probably, not to mention possibly breaking the law depending on where you are. So do it strictly at your own risk!

And games that relied on the PS3’s now hacked security framework are beginning to feel the effect, with Modern Warfare 2 servers hacked to erase gamer scores and all sorts of other things that make the experience unbearable to gamers. Not all games are affected because developers wisely decided that solely relying on Sony’s framework wasn’t a good idea.

And the worst is yet to come, since Sony’s official response will almost certainly be harsh. Remember that this is the same company that thought a rootkit was a good idea. And so it comes as no surprise that Sony may be planning to bring serial keys to PS3 games in a bid to curb piracy. Not only do you have to type in the 16 character serial code into your PS3, which is painful enough already, these keys may only be reused 5 times, which makes selling and buying second hand games that much more annoying. And it will also mean that you won’t be able to play offline games without going online for authentication. But at this stage, this is just a unsubstantiated rumour, so who knows.

Another unsubstantiated rumous is that the Nintendo 3DS, still weeks away from an official release, has already been hacked despite Nintendo’s assurance of better anti-piracy measures. This does not surprise me one bit, if it’s true.

And even though geohot is busy defending himself against Sony’s legal onslaught, he still has time to hack, this time, Windows Phone 7. But Microsoft, probably giddy from the disasters befalling the PS3 at the moment, isn’t so mad at geohot, and has even promised to work together to “let dev creativity flourish”. This after Microsoft actively not caring about people hacking the Kinect … has the corporate monster changed?

Speaking of Kinect, the PR machine rolled on, and just like how the Wii gained public exposure due to the thousands of broken TV screens and vases, “Wii tennis elbow” and other medical phenomenons, the Kinect is gaining similar public exposure via YouTube ‘Kinect Fail’ videos and reports of even more serious injuries, and even a potential arrest. These fluff pieces may all sound like bad publicity, but there is no such thing as bad publicity, because everyone thinks that these things only happens to stupid people, not themselves, so there is no way one would get ‘Kinect Sports volleyball shoulders’ that is so painful that it makes sleeping difficult. Ow.

And that’s all for this week.

… checks FB and Twitter for the 15th time today … still no likes or followers 🙁

Posted in 3D, Computing, Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 2 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (16 January 2011)

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. There’s quite a bit to cover this week, but I must of course do the customary promotion for the latest NPD analysis, which I posted yesterday for the US December video game sales results. The Wii did particularly well, despite being 38% down compared to last year (which was a kind of freak result, considering the sales pattern both before and after that particular month), so there’s still life left in the old dog yet. And even though the Xbox 360 had its best ever month for sales, it still couldn’t quite get over the Wii, although it did comfortable outperform the PS3, which might just have to settle for third place in this generation’s console wars. Anyway, back to the news roundup …

Starting with copyright news, the PS3 hack saga took a very non surprising turn this week as Sony finally got its lawyers involved, and filed lawsuits both the group that released the hack, fail0verflow, and geohot, the hacker that later released a custom firmware, based on the hack, that allows homebrew to be run on the PS3.

The legal documents linked make interesting reading, and Sony has approached the lawsuit from a lot of different angles, even suing for “trespass”. People who are more informed in regards to the law will have, surprisingly, a more informed opinion as to the merit of the case, as well as Sony’s chances of winning it. But at the heart of the issue is whether the DMCA was really violated, and the motivations of the hackers in question. Sony attempted to paint geohot as a someone trying to exploit this for financial gain (just because geohot once made some casual remarks about the need for Sony to hired someone like him if they wanted to keep their future consoles safe from hacking – Sony interpreted this as a form of financial blackmailing, or something). Both hacking groups were keen to point out that their hacks were not aimed at opening up the console for piracy, but there is no denying that the hack will do exactly this, although mostly without further assistance from either geohot or fail0verflow. But I think it’s a stretch for Sony to link any financial motives to the hacking – these were clearly hacks encouraged by the removal of Other OS, more than anything else, and it’s unlikely any of those sued is going to profit from the hacks, unless you count fame as a financial reward. Still, I think this has the makings of a epic court battle, with both sides committed to fighting for what they believe is right, and it could have seriously implications on copyright, the DMCA, DRM and hacking in general. Watch this space.

Buying individual tracks is now more popular than albums, which means less profit for record labels

The UK music industry has just released figures showing that music sales, by unit, reached an all times high or 281.7 million songs. You would think they’d happy with this result, but they’re not, and they’re blaming piracy. While unit sales was up dramatically, 27% compared to just a year before, actual revenue was down, mostly due to dropping CD sales. But if there ever was a figure showing that the music industry’s declining profits were nothing to do with piracy, then it was these sets of figures, despite what the BPI’s (the UK’s version of the RIAA) conclusions. The increase in individual unit sales shows people buying more than ever, but only in terms of single tracks. This is largely thanks to the digital revolution in music, iTunes stores and whatnot. Even without considering the ageing CD format (first demonstrated nearly 35 years ago!) and how out of place a physical medium is for music these days, the fact that most CDs are albums is also why CD sales are declining. With digital music purchases, you can buy only the music you want, as opposed to a whole album with only a couple of good songs, and you can even create your own albums, which makes those compilation CDs seems quite lame by comparison. And add to the fact that Apple, via iTunes, now get a huge chunk of the profit because the music industry was too slow to adapt to this digital revolution and set up their own online stores, this is what accounts for falling profits, not piracy. And you know what? I think record labels should just accept the fact that things aren’t as good as before, and move on. They’ve long exploited artists, who get very little of the money from song sales by the way, and their dying business model should not be protected. Piracy has been an easy scapegoat for the music industry, that’s all.

And it’s an easy to accept scapegoat too. Because people are downloading pirated songs, a lot of them, but of course, nobody has actually attempted to find out the real cost of piracy. Not the ridiculous figures of “$200 billion” a year, by multiplying the number of downloads by the full retail cost of each download, but actually examining just what percentage of people would have otherwise paid for the content had the content not been available for piracy? Nobody in the industry is conducting such a study because they know the results will not be in their favour, because they know that people are buying music and movies more than ever (remember that before DVDs, hardly anybody purchased movies), and they will then have to find another convenience scapegoat to blame for their woes. It seems the entertainment industry has shifted their cross-hairs over to online storage websites such as RapidShare and MegaUpload, the new scapegoats in their war against online piracy, as it’s much easier to sue companies like RapidShare/MegaUpload, than the thousands of BitTorrent indexes run by individuals without even a postal address. And again, incredible claims are being made, which basically is suggesting that sites RapidShare do nothing other than host and share illegal content, when I think (from my usage of these services anyway) most of the usages are perfectly legitimate (ie. sharing large, legal, files that otherwise would be difficult via email).

One convenient scapegoat was the so called “analog hole”, in which movie studios warned of the dire consequences of not closing the loophole which allowed people to record digital content, like Blu-ray’s, via analog output which have very little in terms of content protection (since it’s a lot harder to deploy content protection without using some kind of digital system). This is how they scared the FCC into adding selectable output control to analog outputs, and this is why we have the stupid rule in which it’s impossible for upscaled DVDs to be played over component legally. And this is also why, for the Blu-ray specifications, something called ICT was added. ICT stands for Image Constraint Token, which is simply something that the studios invented so they can block HD analog output. Due to public pressure, they put off the introduction of ICT until a later date, except that later date has just passed (January 1st, 2011), and ICT is now in effect. What this means is that for all Blu-ray players made after January 1st, they will no longer be allowed to output HD via component output – the resolution is now limited to only 540p, which is basically SD resolution. For those with older Blu-ray players, they too will be affected when new Blu-ray movies carrying ICT will also only be played at limited resolutions. So it’s HDMI, or no HD. And in 2013, it will be illegal for Blu-ray players to have analog outputs at all. This is fine for the vast majority, who is happily using the HDMI connection on their Blu-ray players. But there are still those with older TVs, or even those with home cinemas that employ expensive, but older, projectors that can display a perfectly great picture, but just doesn’t have the required HDMI input (projectors were much slower to adopt HDMI than TVs). The Blu-ray people will say that this is all to help the transition to digital, since analog can’t be supported forever. And that’s a valid argument. But is it really necessary to ban analog outputs to achieve this, when as I already mentioned, the vast majority have switched over to digital already without the need for any coercion. And if the argument is that analog makes piracy more a problem – I don’t know a single instance of piracy over component output, simply because it’s very very easy to pirated a Blu-ray movie via digital means, which also has the added bonus of 0% quality degradation. For me, this is the industry’s paranoia about piracy at its worst – imagining a problem that doesn’t exist, and implementing a “solution” that hurts legitimate consumers more than it actually helps to prevent the problem.

UltraViolet aims to provide consumers cross-format ownership of content, but at a price

For me, the industry is at its best when it is coming up with solutions to real, not imaginary, problems. DVDs were invented so people could buy movies without worrying that the quality would degrade after too many viewings, as it was the case with VHS tapes. Blu-ray was invented so people could have something to watch on their new HDTVs, and that they would get a cinematic experience at home as close as possible (in terms of visual/aural quality) to the original cinema presentation. Digital downloads and streaming, despite the industry’s reluctance, also helped to solve real problems. And the industry’s latest effort, which has somehow managed to earn the support of pretty much all the big names both in the movie industry and the computing industry, is something called UltraViolet. On the surface, it looks (and is) another layer of DRM, the last thing we need. But this DRM’s aim is different than what has come before. Instead of trying to prevent piracy, UV attempts to solve a problem that has bothered people since the introduction of DVDs – the fact that people are buying the movie that’s locked to a particular format, as opposed to simply buying the movie. Well, locked legally anyway, thanks to DRM, and if people wanted to transfer their DVD movie to another non DVD device, then they could only do it illegally. The introduction of Digital Copy helped to alleviate some of the concerns, but it’s a very flawed implementation. UV attempts to solve this problem by making you buy the movie, not the format, and once that movie is added to your ‘digital locker’, you can then have access to multiple formats of the same movie, and even access to new formats as they’re being introduced to the market). And you can even share your ‘digital locker’ with up to 6 people, and across up to 12 different devices. You can read up on just how UV might work here.

But while the idea behind it is good, the problem is that we, as consumers, are still handing a lot of power over to the studios. Instead of having a physical DVD in my hands, and (albeit illegally) convert that to work on my iPhone, UV means it’s the studios that now have the ultimate control. The current implementation might allow you to share with 6 friends and 12 devices, but what’s to say that it will always be this generous. Or that you won’t have to pay extra whenever a new format is released (say for your iPhone 6)? Or, if the studios get desperate enough one day, that they force everyone to re-pay or they will cancel access to your digital locker – that may be unlikely, since they’ll get sued seconds after sending out the emails demanding this “ransom”, but the user agreement that you entered with them might just allow this to happen. But these worries aside, the goal behind UV seems to be a good one, and I think if it’s implemented correctly, it will greatly help reduce casual piracy, and the need to purchase multiple formats of the same movie, although it’s hard to see what the studios get out of letting people buy less stuff. I mean these are the same studios that make you purchase 5 different “special, limited, platinum, ultimate, definitive” editions of the *same* movie on the *same* format, every couple of month!

Everyone’s favourite anti-piracy law firms, US Copyright Group, and the bunch that’s suing people for downloading Batman XXX and other pornos, are joining forces. It’s becoming harder for these law firms because of a little thing called jurisdiction, and so they have to form alliances with firms in other geographical areas and help sue for each other, to lower costs and ensure profit steams.

And everyone’s favourite anti-piracy agency, Aiplex, is in the news again, this time over their hilariously worded threat that was emailed to TorLock, a BitTorrent indexer that is actually paying users that spot fake torrents in their index. Creating fake torrents is one of the tools in their anti-piracy toolkit, although one that doesn’t really work. But Aiplex’s apparent anger is hard to understand, and also their claim that it’s not cool to pay people and remove torrent files for content that you don’t own. So this means I can’t pay people $1 every time they *don’t* watch a Michael Bay film, even though I’m sure I could save billions of brain cells by doing so, and it also means that TorLock can’t remove torrent files (that they don’t own) when requested to do so by firms like Aiplex, right? [insert confused smiley]

High Definition

In HD/3D news, the CES has been pretty much a non event for the Blu-ray format. This could be interpreted as bad news because it’s no longer the cool new thing that it once was, or it could just be because it’s mainstream status means, it no longer needs to be the cool new thing.

But there was one interesting new tech for Blu-ray, and one that makes the outlandish claim to improve upon the clarity of Blu-ray movies just by using a new, fancy type of HDMI cable (and Monster were not even involved!).

This before and after image shows DarbeeVision's HD enhancement at work

DarbeeVision claims to just do that, by using a special technique that creates a “drop shadow” for each frame of the Blu-ray image, which creates a kind of effect that our brains interpret as more detail. The HDMI cable part comes from the ability to embed the image processor directly into the cable, and so by connecting your Blu-ray player to your TV using the $150 cable, you can enjoy DarbeeVision’s added sharpness (the current system, which uses a set top box that sits between your player and TV, costs $1,500). I’ve even posted some before and after images here, for those that want to see if it really works or not. Interesting concept, but I’m not sure cinephiles will appreciate fake, digitally added, details (but the Average Joe would probably love it).

And as mentioned in this section a couple of months back, Apple has finally removed VLC for iOS from iTunes. The incompatibility between open source licensing, and Apple’s draconian licensing scheme (even for free software), claims another victim.

While not specifically HD news (more H.264 news), Google’s decision to no longer support H.264 for HTML5 in their Chrome browser is one that will have huge implications for online HD video streaming. This definitely shifts the momentum towards Google’s own WebM format or to a lesser extent, Ogg Theora, but WebM may suffer a similar fate to H.264, as disputes over patent claims could endanger the rollout of HTML5. Most video compression technologies are based on very similar principles that will almost certainly have been patented by someone at some stage, and experts feel WebM is not the open, patent/royalty worry free format that Google is promoting it as. While Microsoft has responded harshly to this decision, this move is really aimed right at Apple, which is going forward with HTML5 support for all their iDevices, but with H.264 support, since they’re huge fans of the format that they own lots of patents for (Microsoft owns a lot of patents on it too). Imagine if Google made the next version of YouTube HTML5/WebM only – then none of the iDevices will be able to browse the new version of YouTube, with Google’s Android phones being the main beneficiary of this scenario!

And finally in gaming, Kinect will be coming to the PC officially – just not any time soon. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer hinted at Windows support for Kinect, but did not want to release and specific timelines.

Some say that Kinect won’t work with PCs, because of the distance issue – people sit much closer to computers than TVs, and Kinect requires a lot of space. But that’s mainly because the current range of Kinect games all require leg tracking, while Microsoft has already hinted that there will be Kinect games where you can play just by sitting down, so these games might just work on Windows. And waving your hands to flick through pages and pages of a boring financial report using Kinect might just make the experience bearable!

And that’s enough words for this week (fastly approaching 3000!). Have a good one.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 January 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (9 January 2011)

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

How has the first full week of 2011 been treating you? Good I hope. Lots of news this week, but I’ve found an easy solution against having to write a lot of news articles this week: ignore the CES!! The plans is to cover some of the more interesting news out of the CES here, in a very brief fashion, but to be honest, I haven’t been keeping track of the developments as closely as I should because the dozen or so games I picked up during Steam’s Holiday Sale aren’t going to play themselves! Right?

Let’s star with copyright news. I attempted to destroy the optimism gained from the new year by writing about what could have been, had the powers that be not made the the financial aspect of copyright more important than the social aspect, in my piece titled A Sad New Year For Copyright.

Sadly, this is one aspect of copyright that’s not been discussed a lot recently, with the focus more on the details (DRM, court cases …). There’s a very important reason why copyrights expire, and a lot of people have forgotten about it. The US Library of Congress has already warned of the risks of copyright and copyright technology getting out of control and hurting cultural preservation, this was in reference to audio recordings, but the same warning applies to every other type of media. I mean can you imagine, due to the use of DRM and lawsuits, that in 95 year’s time, when the copyright for Transformers 2 or something expires, that nobody actually has a copy of the movie preserved without DRM that can be played at that time. On second thought, this may not be such a bad thing …

But seriously, it’s only the blatant disregard for copyright law, and the ever faster pace of technological progress and the increasing ease of information sharing (which has long since made current copyright laws outdated, even the recent changes), that is ensuring cultural preservation is not at severe risk. But how many early 20th century, but still copyrighted content, has been lost forever (something the Library of Congress says has already happened), and think of the copy protected games from the early 90’s that would not be playable today (even with legacy emulators) had pirates not cracked the DRM back then? Piracy making a contribution to cultural preservation? Why not!

Intel Insider is not DRM according to Intel, it is "content protection"

You may notice that I used the term ‘DRM’ to refer to copy protection from decade old games, when people weren’t using the term DRM at all. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and in my mind, it refers to any kind of technology in which our ability to manipulate digital media is restricted. Perhaps I’m wrong. I mention this because of the controversy surrounding Intel’s announcement of a new technology called Intel Insider, designed to secure online HD video streaming. It’s built into the hardware of Sandy Bridge processors, and so everyone has been referring to it as hardware DRM. Fearing the consumer backlash, Intel’s Nick Knupffer took the time to post an entire blog explaining why Intel Insider is not a DRM. Nick says DRM is about things like preventing people copying the movies and distributing it online, or setting a limit on how long someone can watch a rented piece of content. Intel Insider, Knupffer says, is “an extra layer of content protection” (direct quote from his blog entry), and that Intel Insider will be even more important when things like Intel’s wireless display technology, WiDi, takes off to “prevent pirates from stealing movies remotely just by snooping the airwaves”. So basically, in Nick’s own words, Intel Insider is designed to stop piracy, and offer hardware content protection. And that’s not DRM? And in Nick’s update of the blog, which came after “strong feelings in the comments” (haha), he refers to the fact that HDCP (which Intel also owns, and was cracked last year BTW) is everywhere already anyway. And that makes it better? HDCP, the DRM (sorry, “content protection”) for HDMI is one of the worst things ever, and if Intel Insider is a new take on HDCP (to protect Intel’s “content protection” related licensing revenue stream that must have taken a hit when HDCP was hacked), one that is built into every new CPU, then that’s even worse than I had first imagined. Bring on AMD’s Bulldozer then (unless it also sucks up to the entertainment industry with its own version of hardware DRM, sorry, “content protection”). But what pleased me most about this whole incident was that Intel and other companies now realises that DRM is a bad thing that they must use PR and spin to soften the negative impact it has on consumer sentiment. That’s progress, I suppose.

An update on the Ubisoft DRM, sorry “content .. wait, no, this one really is DRM, I think. Anyway, Ubisoft says they have not given up completely on UbiDRM, and they may still use it for future games on a case by cases basis, that it is still effective, and that it cannot be defeated, and that its enemies are committing suicide under the walls of Ubisoft HQ.

The USCG is now planning to sue those that download The Expendables

Everyone’s favourite copyright law firm is starting the new year with a bang, and now planning to sue people for downloading The Expendables. The recent setbacks suffered by the US Copyright Group, and the bad publicity they’ve received, seems to not have had a huge effect, as Nu Image Films, the production company behind The Expendables, sought out USCG’s services. Just like how the anti-piracy lobby is now going after the revenue sources of online piracy, going after the revenue source of firms like the USCG seems to me like the best way to stop these mass lawsuits. Tie them up in paperwork, make them actually do the lawyer-y stuff that costs a lot of time and money (like proving actual damages, or even actual infringement), seems to me the best way to stop mass lawsuit law firms.

But by far the biggest copy protection related news this week was the hacking of the PS3. The fascinating story (well for a computer geek anyway) behind the hack is well worth watching the video here (especially the slide where Sony’s random number generator algorithm is explained), but the implications of this hack are rather big. The leak of the master key basically destroys the PS3’s ability to tell what’s an authorised piece of code, and what is not, and so in other words, pirated games can now be made to appear as if it was a legally, store bought version. This is stuff Sony have nightmares about, and makes the PS3 the least protected console currently on the market, completely reversing the position in just a few months time. And not coincidentally, it all started when Sony announced they would remove the Other OS feature from old PS3 (new “Slim” PS3 never had this feature), and this is when hackers around the world decided that hacking the PS3’s copy protection system would be the right thing to do. And the funniest thing is that Sony removed Other OS because they feared it would *eventually* be used for piracy, and this pre-emptive actions seems to have been the cause of opening up the console to massive piracy. Whatever limited piracy that could have been achieved with Other OS (which was all theoretical), can now be achieved without Other OS, all thanks to hackers wanting to bring back Other OS to the PS3. Awesome. And since the leak of the master key, progress on opening up the PS3 has moved along at a brisk pace, with tools for creating custom firmware already available, and at least one video demo of homebrew running on the latest, now jailbroken, firmware for the PS3. Sony issued the expected overly-optimistic evaluation of the situation (“committing suicide under the walls of Sony HQ”, etc …), but they know they’re beat. Solving the problem would probably require Sony to release new version of the hardware with a new key system (not just a new key), and there’s always the risk they will make *all* existing games unplayable due to the need for a new key system (a risk, I’m sure, Sony wouldn’t mind taking, given their track record on creating DRM related problems). Detecting modified consoles and banning them from PSN could also be on the cards.

But I actually think this will be good for the PS3. It makes the console even more versatile, and let’s be honest, piracy is one of the key drivers behind hardware sales. But of course, a strong selling PS3, and mass game piracy, won’t make Sony’s financial situation any better (it will be worse, actually). But at least the PS3 will be popular!

High Definition

In HD/3D news, Blu-ray broke through the $100m weekly sales barrier according to stats released this week. Of course, this is more an estimate, than actual sales figures, but it is still a sort of milestone for the format.

Blu-ray’s growth this year has been significant, but a lot of it is really just making for DVD’s losses, and not always capable of replacing all the lost sales. In fact, DVD sales are down 16% for 2010 compared to 2009, and despite Blu-ray’s revenue growth of 53%, total home video revenue is down 3%. But 3% is better than the 7.6% decline in 2009 (compared to 2008), and following the trend in everything last year, “not as bad” is the new “good”. Growth in digital media continues, with digital movie sales up 17%, and vide0-on-demand up 21%. And with Blu-ray, digital, and rentals, all taking away sales from DVD, it’s not surprising then that DVD sales are down. The problem for the industry is whether it can create more revenue, not just make up for lost ones, but in the current economic climate, and with some many other rivals in the entertainment space (games and gadgets of all kinds), maybe a 3% decline really is good news.

Star Wars is coming to Blu-ray in September

And to the big news, from the CES I’ve been ignoring no less, is that Star Wars is coming to Blu-ray. Wait, hang on, didn’t we already know this? Yes, but we now have a release date, or rather, the month in which the release will happen: September 2011! Unfortunately, if you want all the new extra features and all that, you’ll have to buy the pack with the prequels in it too. They make you buy it, but you can’t force you to watch it (they haven’t invented the DRM to do this yet), so I guess it’s alright. At $90 at Amazon at the moment (purchase links, which will help out this poor blogger financially, plus videos of the launch/launch trailer are available here), it’s not the worst value in the world (not the best either).

Some of the other interesting things I’ve picked up from the CES news include the world’s first Wireless HDMI Blu-ray player, from Philips. Now all that’s needed are TVs that actually support Wireless HDMI. But if the wire-free future doesn’t interest you, how about a super wide future? 21:9 TVs, using the resolution 2560×1080, seems to be one of the highlights of the CES, with both Philips and Vizio announcing new models. Why is 21:9 good I hear you ask? Well, most movies are made using the aspect ratio 2.35/2.39/2.40 to 1, which roughly equals 21:9. You’ll then be able to watch these movies, like Star Wars, without those pesky black borders on the top and bottom of the screen. So what’s bad about 21:9? Well, you know how you have to watch old TV shows with the black border on the left and right? Well, with 21:9 TVs, you’ll have to watch all HDTV broadcasts this way as well, since these broadcasts, and many other movies, employ the 16:9 ratio, which wouldn’t fit into 21:9 TVs without black borders on the sides (unless you prefer seeing a very squashed picture). So these TVs are obviously aimed at home theatre fanatics, who probably have a automatic flip system installed so they can switch between 16:9 and 21:9 TVs depending on what they watch (and it’s only these people that can afford these TVs at the moment anyway).

And finally in gaming, while Sony is busy doing damage control over the PS3 hack, Microsoft have had a happier time at the CES, announcing a couple of Kinect related news of interest.

First up is Microsoft’s bold claim of 8 million Kinects “sold”, but it was “sold” in the same way Sony says that 4.1 million Move was “sold” – it was 8 million Kinects shipped, not sold, but probably more than 5 million sold for Microsoft in the first 60 days of sales, beating the previous target which was already revised up (from the original target of 3 million). It’s an impressive set of results. Microsoft also launched Avatar Kinect, which nothing to do with blue people tails, but rather, it’s a way to do video chat without video. Instead of having a video of my ugly face, I can use my much prettier avatar and do a virtual chat with groups of people at a selectable virtual environment. And the Kinect camera is able to pick up not only my body motions, it can also pick up some basic facial expressions too.

And so when gamers make that angry face because their new Xbox 360’s are scratching their Kinect Adventures disc, it will all be picked up by the camera. All that Kinect related jumping is probably what’s causing the disc scratching, which is why it’s a must to install games to the HDD, and those with 4GB Kinects … do yourself (and your console) a favour and buy the 250GB accessory (or if you’re braver than me, buy the cheaper unofficial variety).

And here are some leaked pics of the upcoming Nintendo 3DS, which looks exactly like the official pics release earlier in the year, except with a lot poorer photography.

That’s all for now. Must rest for epic gaming session. Haven’t been outside in 4 days. Oh noes, soft drink and junk food supplies almost running out. And other hardcore gamer stereotypes.

See you next week.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (9 January 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (2 January 2011)

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

Welcome to this side of 2011, and the first WNR of the new decade. It is a new decade right? Because there was no year zero and all that nonsense. As expected, not a whole lot of news this week, but still actually more than I expected. Which is good, as otherwise, I would have had to do one of those awful “2010 year in review” pieces, and I hate doing those (mainly because I can barely remember what I wrote last week, let alone the whole year). So let’s not waste any time (one of my new year resolutions).

Starting with a new year in copyright news, unfortunately it’s still the same old crap of government using *our* tax money to defend the business interests of an industry still relying on a old, decaying business model.

Piracy will cost New York a lot of money ... a lot in tax payer handouts to the MPAA

This time, it’s the city of New York, which is launching a new tax payer funded anti-piracy campaign. Not only is the campaign funny, in a stupid way, it is also severely misleading, and made worse by the fact that the city is struggling to balance its budget as it is, without spending a huge chunk of it helping out movie studios which has just had a record year in terms of profits. The MPAA used their usual scare campaign with made up figures such as “40% of camcorded pirated films come from New York”, a statement they made a couple of years ago (and then only days after claiming that “70%” of the same films come from Canada). This campaign uses the same scary figures, such as suggesting that if you pirate films, you’re putting 900,000 jobs in NYC in jeopardy. Not buying a movie that I wasn’t going to buy anyway, apparently, equals job losses. Nothing to do with austerity, cutting the city’s budget, and putting people out of a job just when the economy needs people to buy things (but that’s a debate for another blog, me thinks).

In any case, the fact that the MPAA can squeeze money out of a city that barely has the funds to even clean up the snowed in streets, shows just how powerful and successful their lobbying efforts, and that of their sister group, the RIAA, have been recently – both groups spent more than two millions dollars on lobbying combined in the last quarter alone. But lobbying can go both ways, and it appears that the under attack Rapidshare, which was recently listed by the RIAA/MPAA as a “notorious” website for piracy, is using some of its earnings to good effect, by lobbying the US government themselves so they can be treated fairly. The cyber locker company feels that they already have a takedown policy in place, a feature that the RIAA/MPAA could easily use to bring down pirated content, and so it makes them not so different to websites like YouTube, which relies on user uploaded content, and also suffers from users uploading copyrighted content. But we all know that while the RIAA/MPAA talks big about the consequences of piracy (twenty billion jobs lost every year!), but they aren’t really prepared to the hard work of actually stopping piracy online. Because going through the millions of uploads every day on RapidShare, most of them being legal, would take a lot of work indeed. Even suing is risky in that you could lose. And so it’s easier to just lobby the US government, which seems incapable of taking any other position other than the one the RIAA/MPAA wants them to take. And again, this all assumes that Internet downloads are seriously hurting both industries, and not their outdated business model (and it’s even debatable whether either industry are hurting at all, what with record profits and everything).

More news on mass litigation. Time Warner Cable has been accused of being a haven for pirates, after the company was sticking with an earlier agreement to only provide 10 IP to subscriber matches per month, making mass litigation against TWC customers almost impossible (if 5,000 people are sued, it would take 41.7 years to get all of their info from TWC). But why does TWC have to do the hard work for law firms whose only interest is to make money, and having others do most of the work for them? In the newspaper mass lawsuits, Righthaven has defended the fact that they were suing non-profits for copyright infringement. Moral objections aside (yes, taking money away from charities and non-profits to make lawyers rich), Righthaven argues that just because people or organisations are not making money off re-posting newspaper articles, it doesn’t mean they can’t be sued for it. And they’ve also attacked the “fair use” defence, which some defendants have used. The argument is that because the newspaper provides sharing links and email sharing features, it means the newspaper is actively encouraging sharing, and so this makes copying the articles alright. I’m actually in somewhat of an agreement with Righthaven on this issue (shock, horror), since there’s a big difference between linking to an article and copying its contents (even if you do link to the original article). But there is also a big difference between a partial copying of the article, with link back to the original, and a full copy, but this is one distinction that Righthaven is not making when it is choosing its targets. In any case, I think it would be a mistake to use this fair use defence, as I don’t think it will stand up in court. Instead, one should concentrate on the actual damages being caused to the newspapers in question, and perhaps even highlight the positives of copying (making the article well known, improving the authoritativeness of the source, and if a link to the original was provided, extra “foot traffic” to the newspaper’s website). The reality is that newspapers aren’t losing a lot of money from people copying their articles – they’re losing a lot of money because they can’t solely rely on online advertising revenue to pay for costs, not if they make their news free. Which is why iPad and tablet subscriptions seems to be the next big thing, and my advice to them is that to concentrate less on suing potential customers, and actually try to give them attractive products they’re willing to pay for. Don’t abuse your online reputation for a quick buck, a short term decision that could cost you big in the long run.

Unfortunately, copyright gone mad is not a phenomenon that’s only limited to the US – it’s happening in Europe as well. The latest has Germany declaring war on kindergartens for daring to teach children songs, without paying royalty to the music labels. They want kindergartens to pay up every time they copy the lyrics of songs or the songs themselves, in their effort to educate the next generation. So far, they’re not actually preventing children from singing songs without paying royalty, but you know it’s only a matter of time before they do it. Pretty soon, even humming a song in public will be considered a public performance with royalty attached. Although this sounds far fetched and ridiculously, it isn’t that far from the truth when even ringtones have already been claimed by copyright groups as a public performance.

The other big news of the week was that the Windows 7 Phone DRM has already been broken. But that’s the nature of DRM isn’t it? If it can be used/played, then being copied isn’t so different that it can’t be eventually performed, even with ridiculous DRM in place. The only real way to stop copying is to stop the content being used in *any* way at all via DRM, something Sony is obviously working towards (see last week’s news about the DRM on the Salt DVD).

High Definition

Not much in HD/3D news, so despite promising not to do a year in review type of thing, I might just have to do it. But I’ll keep it short in the interest of writer and reader.

Blu-ray movies are starting to be priced cheaper than their DVD counterparts

So Blu-ray ended the year on a high, with records broken, although not really a huge advance on last year, despite aggressive pricing (can’t remember the number of times I’ve come across where the more fully featured Blu-ray version is cheaper than the DVD version, and sometimes the Blu-ray+DVD combo version is cheaper too). In my mind, the aggressive pricing indicates that studios are now prepared to let Blu-ray become a mainstream format, as opposed to a premium format that sells side by side with cheaper DVDs. This is good for consumers I think, since we’ll be able to get more (resolution, content) for less, something that may not be true if Blu-ray remained a premium product. 3D Blu-ray, on the other hand, seems to be fizzling out due to greedy studios and 3D TV manufacturers. For me, having the Avatar 3D Blu-ray on general release will help the 3D Blu-ray format take off, and make Fox a lot of money in the process, but making it a Panasonic exclusive gives 3D critics something legitimate to complain about. When 3D is already a hyped up, content scarce and gimmicky feature, the last thing it needs is content exclusivity. The whole point of 3D Blu-ray was to have a common format that allows for cross-brand compatibility, but exclusivity kills this in the most artificial way possible.

In gaming, two pieces of DRM related news, and surprisingly, it’s all good (for the consumer, that is). It makes for a good end for 2010, and bodes well for 2011, I suppose.

The first piece of “good” news is that Ubisoft may have finally realised that making buyers of your games jump through hoops to play your games, may not be the best financial strategy, especially when it doesn’t stop piracy, and the pirated versions offer a better experience than the legitimate version. Through recent patches, Ubisoft has removed the requirement for an always-on Internet connection for the games Assassin’s Creed 2, and Splinter Cell: Conviction. Hopefully, it will be expanded to cover all their games. The DRM now only authenticates at every game start up, and does not come on during actual gaming.

In fact, while taking advantage of the Steam Holiday Sales (which is still going on as I type, with the big final day of sales coming tomorrow/in a few hours time depending on where you are), I noticed a lot of people avoiding UbiDRM games, even when they were offered for peanuts. Hopefully, Ubisoft has noticed this trend and that’s why they’ve reversed their previous stance.

Speaking of Steam’s sales, it’s confirmed to me the benefits of digital copies, particularly during sales. I’ve taken part in sales of physical goods, games in particular, in the last month, and there are so many more problems associated with that old model compared to the digital only model. First of all, stock is limited, meaning if you don’t rush in, you’ll miss out. And then, delivery is an issue, especially during the holidays, and especially during the adverse weather conditions experienced around the world right now. But with Steam, they can sell unlimited copies of a game at a low price without having to worry about stock levels, and delivery is instant. Although because Steam’s servers has been pounded by people downloading the dozens of games they’ve all purchased, downloads are not very quick at the moment, if it starts at all. That’s a problem, and hopefully Steam will bring more mirrors and CDNs online, to avoid the same congestion next year (they really need to work with ISPs to come up with some kind of local mirroring system).

A stupid error on Sony's part means that the PS3 is now hacked

The second piece of good news, at least for those that are cursing Sony for removing “Other OS” from the PS3, is that due to a serious security flaw in the PS3 authentication system, hackers were able to obtain the PS3’s private cryptography key, which for lay persons like myself, it means that the PS3 has been cracked, big time. The private key allows any application to be signed and accepted by the PS3 as a legitimate piece of code, meaning anything can now be run on the PS3, whether it’s pirated games, or a custom version of Linux used to turn the PS3 into a more fully featured media center. The irony is that Sony removed “Other OS” to pre-empt piracy, and if was this single act that spurred the hacking community’s best and brightest to completely destroy the PS3’s DRM system, and thus open the system up to unrestricted piracy. The PS3 – it really does do everything now.

While this will now open up the PS3 to pirated games, and turning it from one of the most secure game platforms to the least secure in a single stroke (or in this case, a single variable that should have been randomized, and not made a constant), it will also allow the continued development of custom HTPC solutions for the vastly powerful PS3 hardware, turning it into one of those must have pieces of kit, but only if you use custom software (like the original Xbox, and the subsequent XBMC development). And that, in the long run, probably helps the PS3 more than it hurts it. Maybe.

As for a roundup of 2010 for gaming? It’s quite simple really. Wii dying, PS3 hacked to pieces, Xbox 360 Slim FTW, and Kinect is actually pretty good.

And that’s that for the first ever issue of the WNR for 2011. The thought of having to bring out another 51 issues of WNR for this year alone makes me weep slightly inside, but a little ranting every week is good for the soul. Or something.

Posted in 3D, Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (2 January 2011)

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Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (30 January 2011)

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