HomeWeekly News Roundup (5 June 2011)
If this picture of a motherboard turns you on, then my computer buying guide is for you
Are you planning to buy a new PC soon? And are you willing to spend more money on a PC than what’s considered sane today? Then read the latest edition of my If I Were To Buy A New Computer Today feature, dubbed the Sandy Bridge edition, as this is the CPU that’s all the rage these days. You may laugh and point at any guide that recommends paying more than $1800 for a new PC, in these days of tablets and netbooks and whatnot, but hey, some of us still play PC games. And do CPU intensive things such as video conversion. I have to say, the most exciting thing about Sandy Bridge for me, apart from the lower starting price points for such a new part, is the SSD caching feature introduced by the new Z68 chipset. Regular reader(s) will be aware that I’ve been bigging up SSDs since 2009, but the stupid things refuse to drop down in price enough to prove that I was right. But with SSD caching, where you use a much smaller (and hence, cheaper) SSD drive as a cache for your TB sized cheap HDDs, can give you some of the benefits of SSDs without most of the negatives (low capacity, high price, etc…). For this alone, Sandy Bridge is worth upgrading too, even with the added hardware DRM (or not).
News wise, it’s not been a huge week, hence why I felt the need to pad the week with the computer buying feature. So let’s get started.
Let’s start with the copyright news, which surprisingly, isn’t too forthcoming this week. In fact, there is only one story in the “copyright gone insane” category this week, which, you have to say, is an improvement.
Unfortunately, this one is right up there in the insane rankings, as the US senate debate plans to jail people up to 5 years for sharing YouTube videos. This isn’t as far fetched as you might think, because this is one of those “road to hell is paved with …” things, and if you break down the issues, all of them seem to make sense. First of all, you have the disharmony between civil and criminal copyright laws, in which there are civil penalties for performances, but no criminal penalties. So let’s “harmonize” the two sections of the copyright act. Fine. How about classifying video streaming as a kind of performance? Well, it appears the courts have been doing this for a while now, so I guess it’s fine too. And what about the differences between hosting a video, linking to it and embedding it on your website? Well, ICE has seized several domain names recently for websites that only linked or embedded content, uploaded to websites such as Megavideo, and ICE got the seizure orders by going through the court (albeit in a very one sided argument), so I guess that’s not a huge problem either. So to sum up, video streaming is a performance, and hosting, linking and embedding is really the same thing, when the court is concerned these days. And an unauthorized performance should carry criminal sanctions of up to 5 years in jail, much like like every other kind of copyright abuse. Add them all up: new senate bill that could lead to 5 years in jail for embedding YouTube clips. Now, if Senators are more educated when it comes to technology, particularly the issue of Internet content distribution, and/or if they’re not being “pressured” by lobbyist, then maybe, you would have a bill that doesn’t threaten to send half of the entire US population to jail (who hasn’t embedded a video, and who hasn’t done it with a video that used copyrighted clips, even if only for a small part of the video or soundtrack). For example, you could ensure that criminal sanctions would only apply in the case of massive infringement, such as linking/embedding thousands of videos, and for profit. Instead, we have a bill that describes a digital “performance” as 10 viewings in any 180 day period. Maybe in the real world, if I had a show and 10 people turned up, that may count as a performance. In the digital world, 10 views is hardly viral stuff, especially if it took 180 days to get this many views. But what can you do? Well, you can go after the people that upload the infringing content and only those people, but that would be too hard, so let’s just arrest everybody.
The removal of yongzh's emulator apps from the official Android Market by Google may not be what it looks like
There are two more copyright related stories, but they’re not as crazy, and so as a rule, are not as interesting. First up, we have Google possibly going after emulator apps on the Android Market, with apps from two developers being removed in the past month alone. Emulators have been proven time and time again to be legal in courts all over the world, so Google going after them, especially proclaiming Android as the “open” platform, seems to be a bit hypocritical. On the other hand, we don’t know why the removed apps were removed, while others are still happily being offered, so perhaps there are other reasons for the removal. Certainly, with some of the removed apps by developer Yong Zhang, there are licensing issues at play (open source related stuff), so who knows. If by this time next month, more emulators have been removed, then perhaps it signifies a trend. Right now, it just means you’ll have to get these apps from one of the billions of other Android markets.
The other Android related story has a bit more substance to it. This involves the newly released YouTube video rental service on the mobile platform, and how you can’t use it on rooted phones. It’s definitely a DRM related thing, and I’m sure the content holders providing content for the service will have asked for these draconian restrictions. But it’s the typical backwards thinking that plagues the digital entertainment industry, where they’re so afraid of their precious streams being stolen, that they end up barring people from being able to pay for content, legally. Wouldn’t it be better to ensure more people had access to your legal service, as opposed to less? And it’s not as if ripping movies from DRM protected YouTube video streams is the most popular or easiest way to illegally obtain or share movies online, so they could have no DRM, and nobody would probably even bother, when they can just rip a DVD or Blu-ray. It’s like HDCP protection in HDMI, which was initially such a big deal and caused untold compatibility problems and silliness, because content owners were afraid people would record/rip digital content straight from the cable, if it went unprotected. Then HDCP got cracked, as expected, and do we see a huge surge in HDMI-rips? No. Do you know why I know? Because I just made up the term “HDMI-rips”. In fact, if you search for “HDMI rips” on Google or Bing, all you end up with are articles about HDMI cable rip offs, which is a discussion for another day.
Also, if I somehow manage to get the YouTube rental app running on my rooted phone, does that stream them become unauthorized, and jail time?
In HD and 3D news, following last week’s story about the 3D cinema craze coming to an end, box office results for the US Memorial Day Weekend seems to suggest that it really is happening.
The long weekend capped off a set of very disappointing results, but only for 3D showings. In fact, the best performing movie wasn’t even available in 3D, and perhaps it was only successful because of the lack of the 3D distraction. Certainly the theory mooted last week was that for every extra dollar that 3D presentations earn, there’s more money being lost through increased 3D production costs, marketing costs, and lost sales at the popcorn stand. But it’s the usual Hollywood thing, 3D for 3D’s sake, whereas they’d better off having movies like Avatar that’s been written, directed and shot for 3D, even if it means only a couple of such movies every once in a while. But no, everything has to be in 3D, and the hype dies out because of all the lame 3D movies.
And finally in gaming, after a nausea inducing session of Wipeout HD on my 3DTV yesterday, I can confirm the PSN is back and the “Welcome Back” goodies are now available to download as well (I still haven’t made my decision on which other free game I will download).
PSN is back online, and the welcome back pack is available to download
Those that want to download the free games need to be patient though, because the claim and download process for me was riddled with error messages, that retrying time and time again seem so to fix. Some will and are still complaining about the free games being offered, and how old most of them are, but as someone who didn’t really used the PSN that much in the past before, I’m not complaining too much.
So just as things seems to be getting back to normal for Sony, guess what? They get hacked again. It’s not the PSN again, so no need to ring your nearest game store and ask what kind of console exchange offer they have on at the moment, but it’s certainly not what Sony wanted so close to the PSN hack. SonyPictures.com was hacked by the same group that recently hacked PBS, with account details accessed and taken, as well as other stuff. According to the hacking group, LulzSec, they had access up to one million Sony Pictures account passwords, all of which were stored as plain text in the database. Read any “noob guide to user databases” on the Interweb, and the first lesson is always about not storing passwords as plain text, so how Sony could have got it so wrong, I have no idea. I guess because no financial information was being stored, Sony thought nobody would bother to hack the database, and the rest is history. It really paints a picture of a company that doesn’t seem to have any security policy at all, or at least it’s not enforced, and really, would you trust such a company with your financial details? And this is not a rhetorical question either, because you can answer this very question in a new poll I just put up.
Also, the hackers detailed how they got into the Sony system, and it wasn’t some kind of super hack that can only be pulled off by a hacker that would make Neo from the Matrix look like a script kiddie, or a sophisticated social engineering “my voice is my password” style operation involving a blind guy that has great hearing. No, it was just your plain old SQL injection, which for the uninitiated, means injecting SQL commands via poorly written web scripts that don’t check for inputs. To be fair, it is the most common type of web programming security SNAFU, but you would have thought that after the PSN hack, Sony would have performed an extensive security audit on all their web assets, knowing now that they’re a major target for hackers (but they always were, even if they didn’t want to believe it). Sony has since confirmed the attack, and have contacted the FBI.
Alright, that’s it for the week. Thanks for reading, linking, tweeting, facebooking or whatever it is that you young folk do these days. Have a good one.