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Weekly News Roundup (13 March 2011)

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. For those that are new to this, this is where I usually write my introduction, or in the rare cases, I get to mention the one piece of work that I actually managed to do the whole week. This is one of those rare cases. The work in question is the monthly NPD US video game sales analysis for February 2011, which I posted yesterday. No big surprises, and the five week reporting period for this February made the figures look better than what it was a year ago, when it was only a four week reporting period, but once again, the Xbox 360 was the real winner with year-on-year growth even when you take into account the reporting differences. Kinect is a big part of why the Xbox 360 is doing well, but you do wonder how long people are willing to wait for some new games, because people I think are already bored with the launch titles.

Also, just a reminder that the draw for the Digital Digest Facebook/Twitter competition took place this week, and you can see if you’ve won here. I’ve tried contacting the winners via Facebook/Twitter, but not everyone has gotten back to me, so hopefully you’ll read this message and collect your $20 Amazon gift card.

Lots to go through, so let’s get started.

In copyright news, LimeWire is in the news again, this time for settling one of the two lawsuits it is facing. No details have emerged regarding the settlement agreement, other than both sides will pay for their own legal costs.

But the way music copyright works, LimeWire is still facing about a billion dollar worth of damages from the other lawsuit. With music copyright, copyright is split between copyright owners of the song in question, and the publisher, which owns particular recordings of songs. The settlement this week is with the publishers, but some of the very same companies as part of the settlement are still suing LimeWire as copyright owners. LimeWire is still fighting that other lawsuit though, and they’ve even gone as far as subpoenaing mega-corps such as Apple and Google to see how distribution deals are normally set up. And the conclusion they’ve drawn from the internal emails they’ve looked at is that piracy possibly even helps sales, and that the closure of LimeWire actually had a huge negative effect on legal music sales. And this will all have an effect on the possible amount of damages that LimeWire needs to pay.

Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton once said that he's the type of guy that "doesn't see anything good having come from the internet. Period."

Other than this piece of news, it was actually pretty quiet on the copyright front this week. Just before I started writing this edition of the WNR, I came across this editorial in The Observer, on the websites of the British newspaper. The premise of the article is very simple – that movie studios have only themselves to blame for not embracing the Internet, and allowing online piracy to fill the gap left between the traditional, outdated business model, and the consumer’s demand for something new. The entertainment industry spent the last decade basically trying to use the courts and lobby governments to intervene on their behalf, instead of actually working with the technology. And when they did work with technology, it was to invent DRM whose only function was to annoy legitimate consumers, and actually create a legitimate excuse, at least for some, to obtain content illegally. When people can obtain the same or higher quality content for free, and more easily than legal purchases, this creates the illusion that what they’re doing is perfectly justified, even when they know that it’s illegal. What the industry needs to do is to not give people any excuses, at least not good ones, to not buy legal content. And this starts with making content easier to access, to grant users access to more content, faster, and all at a price point that is reasonable. The Observer article hints at the fact that it may already be too late to act, that a whole generation has grown up disrespecting any type of legal purchase, making fun of those that do the right thing. However, I’m more optimistic, because the success of iTunes and Apps suggest that, people in this new under-25 generation do still spend money, even if their expectations are very much raised in terms of value and ease of use. It’s now up to the industry to rise up and meet those expectations, or the doomed scenario that The Observer article predicts, one where a perfect storm of “excessive budgets, dwindling finance and diminishing returns” will catch up to the industry.

You still can't re-download your past purchases on iTunes, thanks to the music industry's imposed limitations

If you want an example of the industry not embracing the Internet, then Apple’s iTunes is a good example. While the music industry was pre-occupied on cramming as much DRM into music as possible, even putting root-kits on CDs, Apple was quietly building a new business model to suit the Internet age. Sure, Apple also did experiment with DRM, with no success as predicted, but they also made sure that even if you had to deal with Apple’s draconian DRM scheme, you would at least get something back, which would be cheaper music (cheaper than buying a whole album just for a song anyway), ease of use, and hardware devices that made it all work. And Apple, a computer company, now profits from a music, where the music industry could have perfectly easily retained this revenue for themselves, if they just had the foresight to embrace the Internet, instead of fearing it. And this week, another example of the industry’s fear was on show, as news broke of Apple trying to re-negotiate re-download rights for iTunes music with the major labels. That’s right, once you buy a song on iTunes, you cannot re-download the song without paying for it again. This is not Apple’s doing, this is a roadblock put up by the industry, who greedily wants to be paid on a per download basis, as opposed to a per purchase basis. While this is a simple inconvenience to iTunes users, it just goes to show the mentality of the industry who sees the Internet as the worst thing ever (as one Sony executive put it), trying to make it harder for Apple to sell music *legally*.

I can sort of see why the entertainment industry is reluctant to offer re-download rights, and to also put out reasonable prices. They way they see it, if someone is spending $50 on 30 music tracks at $1 each and one DVD movie at $20 every month, then by lowering the price of tracks to 10 cents, and movies to $5, then they will see their income drop from $50 to $8. But the way I see it, if you do truly build a great and easy to use system, people will still spend $50, they’ll just buy more things. In fact, I can see people even spending more than $50, if every buying decision becomes a non-decision and the perceived greater value in their purchases will probably mean more purchases over time. And there will also be more people paying for content than before, because nobody but the really hardcore downloaders will find it necessary to go through the trouble of pirating a 10 cent track. Then there’s the indirect result of “teaching” a generation about copyright, not by trying to punish those that don’t do the right thing, but by creating reasons for them to do the right thing.

High Definition

In HD and 3D news, nothing much again this week. The only thing remotely related to HD was the news that you will soon be able to rent movies on Facebook, using Facebook credits.

I guess after my rant above about the entertainment industry not embracing the Internet, this is one example of the opposite. I still don’t know if this will be a success, but at least they’re trying. The problem is that it costs 30 Facebook credits, or around $3, to rent a movie that you can only really watch online, via a Flash based movie player not too dissimilar to YouTube. That sounds a bit steep for $3 to me. And the same argument I made above rings true here as well, as instead of trying to sell/rent a few overpriced movies to a small minority of Facebook users, wouldn’t it be better to sell/rent a lot of reasonably priced movies to more Facebook users – the long tail approach, where the money is made on a huge number of small transactions, as opposed to a few large ones.

And in gaming news, some better news for Sony this week as their European PS3 import ban has been lifted, and LG, which initiated the ban in court, might even be fined for perhaps taking things a bit too far.

It’s all just as I suspected, a petty patent dispute (one which, to be fair, was started by Sony), with no real consequences once both sides settle down and settle the matter, in or outside of court. But even Sony admit this one could have been costly, since supply was definitely starting to get constrained had the ban not been lifted in time.

And a new firmware is available for the PS3 as well, with 3.60 released this week to give PlayStation Plus subscribers access to 150MB of online storage to store their save games in the cloud. The firmware also addressed security issues, as I suspect every firmware release from this point will, and hackers have reported that it is somewhat effective, for now at least.

Sony encourages people to upgrade their PS3's HDDs, but refuses to fix the firmware bug that renders some PS3s with upgraded HDDs useless

While the update is good for PlayStation Plus subscribers, it’s not so good for those that had their consoles bricked due to the botched 3.56 firmware. What happened was that 3.56’s security fix to fight hackers, fought against those that had legally upgraded their PS3’s HDDs (something Sony encourages people to do, even providing instructions in the manual on how to do it). The update rendered the system unusable, and even the later 3.56 Hotfix didn’t fix the problem, although it did allow those that still had the original unmodified HDD to get the system up and running again (and once that happened, users could then upgrade their HDD again without problems – in other words, users needed install the 3.56 Hotfix by using their original unmodified PS3 HDD, and then afterwards upgrade their HDD). Everybody thought that 3.60 would then fix this major bug, and allow borked systems to work again, but unfortunately, this was not the case. Apart from paying for an expensive repair by Sony tech support, there’s no other way to restore functionality, but some have had success begging Sony to fix their PS3s for free, if they were only out of the warranty period by a few months. I urge people to talk to their local consumer rights group, to inform themselves of their statutory warranty rights, and demand Sony repair their PS3s for free, for a problem that Sony and Sony alone were responsible for in the first place.

Microsoft, on the other hand, are basking in the rays of good news, with Kinect officially entering the Guinness Book of Records as the “fastest-selling consumer electronics device”, with 8 million units sold/shipped in the first 60 days according to Guinness’ own independent research. So far, 10 million units have been shipped to retailers as of the end of February, that’s almost one for every five Xbox 360’s. Still, as I mentioned earlier, Kinect will succeed or fail based on the software offerings, and so far, what’s on offer has been pretty average.

And so that’s another WNR done and dusted. Before I go, I would just like to say that my condolences goes out to the people of Japan. Google has set up a page with resources on the crisis in Japan, for those seeking information or ways to help.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Movies, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (13 March 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (6 March 2011)

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

Welcome to my favourite month of the year. Not just because it’s the month where I celebrate my birthday, but there are many reasons why March is the bestest month ever. Spring is happening (or Autumn here in the southern hemisphere, and autumn is my favourite season), the sun is shining (but it’s not too hot), the Easter break is just around the corner, and it’s just a brilliant month. Not even Sony can ruin it, no matter how many lawsuits they launch! Speaking of lawsuits, let’s get to this week’s WNR, filled with goodness that you can only expect from March.

Let’s start with copyright news, and I’m going to do things a bit differently this week by talking about some of the gaming related copyright news in this section, and some in the gaming section, mainly because most of the copyright related news items have to do with gaming.

Anti-piracy promotions have had almost no effect on the public's perception of piracy, which most consider socially acceptable

But we’ll start with a non gaming related copyright news, about a new Danish study which says that online piracy, despite being illegal, is socially accepted. In other words, most people know that online piracy is not legal, but most people don’t care. In fact, 70% of all respondents surveyed said that piracy was socially acceptable, whereas 20% even said that it was “totally acceptable”. So why do people, knowing full well that something is illegal, still goes out and does it? Is it because they feel they won’t get caught? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the numbers, that so many are doing it, the law has become as respected as say the jaywalking law. And maybe people think that there’s no real harm in it. In any case, the entertainment industry would not have been happy upon hearing the results of the study, because it shows that the millions and millions they’ve spent on anti-piracy advertising has been totally ineffective, since the study’s results haven’t changed much since a similar study in 1997. And most interestingly, the study showed that people were aware of the difference between piracy for personal use, and piracy for profit, with three quarters of those surveyed saying piracy for profit was unacceptable. So this does point to the fact that people just don’t think personal piracy is harmful, and they’re right if a) piracy leads to sales, and b) if the “pirate” never intended to buy.

I think online piracy has reached a state of total ubiquitousness, that I don’t think you can find many Internet users that aren’t aware of the fact that pirated stuff can be found online. Now, some of these people may not know how to download it, that’s true, but I’m sure they will know someone who can help them download it, and most can figure out how to watch streamed TV shows and movies online because I assume that most people can figure out how to play a YouTube style video. What’s my point? It is that despite this, a lot of people are still buying a lot of movies, TV shows, games and everything else, and probably more so than compared to when the Internet didn’t exist. And I suspect a lot of the people that buy also pirate at the same time. If the entertainment industry wants to find out how to stop piracy, they have to first find out why these people, given the temptation of online piracy, still go out to buy stuff, and why some of them will buy some things, and pirate others. If a pattern can be found, then perhaps it can lead to a solution. And at the same time, question those that only pirate and ask why they don’t buy. If the answer is that buying costs money, then you know these were never the type to buy anything in the first place, but if it is another answer, then perhaps it too can be used to craft a real anti-piracy solution. To me, if the industry is serious about tackling the problem, this is what they should be doing. Not go crying to the government about how come their old business model isn’t working as well now as before the Internet, and about how people are stealing all their stuff.

Minecraft creator says piracy does not equal theft

And whether piracy of digital content should be considered stealing, that’s another contentious issues. I actually see valid points on both side of the argument, so it’s a hard one for me. This issue’s been in the news this week when, at GDC 11, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson said that piracy does not equal theft. His argument is that, in the real world, when you steal something physical, the owner of that something has a physical loss that has to be replaced at cost. With digital content, you can steal something and the original owners won’t even know about it, because what you’re doing is copying, not actually stealing. This makes sense, but it depends on who you see as the subject of the theft. If you’re copying your friend’s music, then you’re not stealing from your friend. But if the subject of the theft is the original copyright owners, who would otherwise have received royalty of some kind from a legal purchase, then perhaps that is considered theft. What copyright holders have got wrong, is that they believe every digital “theft” equates to a lost sale, when it only really at best represents a “potential” lost sale, and may only be a temporary one at that (if the “thief” then decides this game or movie is pretty good and I should buy a copy). There are lots of things that causes “potential lost sales”, such as a bad review (as “Notch” noted), and “temporary lost sales” (such as a missed shipping date, as “Notch” also noted). And what about lost sales because the item is priced too high? Copyright holders don’t have a right to claim a lost sale just because people didn’t want to buy their products. The only thing that’s changed is that people are now able to use said product that they didn’t want to buy by obtaining it illegally online, and that’s not a lost sale, that’s a gained user if said user didn’t like your product enough to ever want to pay for it.

High Definition

In HD and 3D news, I actually managed to find one this week, although it’s not good news really. Panasonic seems intent to milk their Avatar 3D Blu-ray exclusivity deal to the full, and it’s now unlikely we’ll see this 3D movie available for general sale until after February 2012.

But before you go bad mouth Panasonic, it seems they’re aware of the possibly bad publicity this move has (you don’t want to get Avatar fans angry! Some of those people are nutty. And blue), and so they’ve shifted all the blame to Fox, even accusing them of trying to start a bidding war between Panasonic and Samsung, as to who gets Avatar exclusivity. None of this surprises me, because Fox has always seemed like a company forever searching for short term gains at the (usually huge) expense of the long term (Star Wars merchandising anyone? Or their insistence on region-locking every damn thing). Avatards, do what the Na’vi did in the movie (you know it’s just a movie, right?), and fight the oppression dished out to you by this mega-corporation, who wants to destroy your way of life (if your way of life consists of buying Avatar 3D Blu-ray on general release and watching it on your non Panasonic equipment). But seriously, if you don’t want studios like Fox treating film fans as some kind of collateral to negotiate big money exclusive deals, then do the only thing that will hurt them – don’t buy Avatar on 3D Blu-ray when it comes out! It’s the only way that Fox will learn their lesson.

The MPEG LA is being investigated by the US DoJ

And continuing the H.264 vs Flash vs HTML5 vs … oh I don’t know, it’s already so confusing … war coverage in this section, this week marked the first shot fired in the H.264 vs WebM wars, or rather, the MPEG LA versus Google war. And interestingly the shot was fired by the US DoJ. The DoJ is investigating the MPEG LA for anti-competitive behaviour, accusing it of trying to stifle Google’s VP8/WebM. The MPEG LA says they’ve done nothing wrong, since it’s their business model to license patents, and if Google uses patents held by MPEG LA members, then Google needs to pay up (instead of go crying to the DoJ about it). I think Google’s wish to take over the web codec standard with their royalty free WebM isn’t going to work, because from what I’ve read, it will be almost impossible for WebM to escape without having to depend on at least some patents. I suspect all will be settled in court one way or another, but I don’t think the DoJ really needs to interfere, considering the MPEG LA is only doing what it has always done and it’s up to Google to ensure WebM doesn’t use any patents held by MPEG LA members.

And I suppose it is sort of HD related, so if you want to find out what’s new with the iPad 2, go here to read all about it.

Ahh, gaming news. It used to be all about fun things like Fallout 3, Kinect and Fallout New Vegas, but now, it’s all PS3 jailbreak this, PS3 jailbreak that.

Sony’s legal setback a month ago seems to have been just a temporary one, since they have now managed to get all the subpoenas they wanted, and more. The overreaching and extremely broad subpoenas, as the EFF puts it, means Sony can now request the details of anyone who simply viewed the geohot hacking video on YouTube, followed geohot’s twitter account, or even just visited his website, and then sue, sue, sue! I’ll save Sony some time now – I’m guilty on all three counts, and I even dared to embed one of the PS3 jailbreak videos in the forum, as a companion to the news article about the massive Sony security FAIL. But I suspect journalists, or “web journalists” like myself (ie. opinionated hacks) aren’t immune from the mother of all mass lawsuits Sony wants to initiate – let’s just hope that someone talks them out of this and the total PR disaster that would ensue.

Ridiculous requests by Sony, and just when you think they couldn’t over-react more to their own PS3 security failings, they go and do something like this. Sigh.

And it seems Sony’s over litigious nature do get them into trouble, and not just in the PR front either. They tried to sue LG for patent breaches back in December, in relation to mobile phones. They didn’t expect LG to fire back, let alone actually win a counter dispute, in relation to Blu-ray patents, which has now seen tens of thousands of PS3 shipped to Europe seized by customs. The PS3 shipment will be seized for 10 days, unless LG uses the option to extend to temporary sales injunction, and if this thing drags on, you could actually see PS3s being taken off store shelves all across Europe. Karma?

And speaking of security breaches, the Nintendo 3DS has already been cracked to allow pirated DS games to work. DS games were always easy to crack, but let’s see if Nintendo can stay strong against efforts to crack 3DS games.

That’s it for the week. Don’t forget, you still have two and a half days to enter our Facebook/Twitter competition, details here. Good luck!

Posted in 3D, Copyright, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (6 March 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (27 February 2011)

Sunday, February 27th, 2011

The last week of the “high maintenance” month of February is upon us, and it’s a relatively quiet one in terms of news stories (quantity wise, anyway). I did finally write that US video game sales 2010 year-in-review blog that I promised over a month ago. And it was pretty short as promised as well, mainly thanks to NPD no longer releasing publicly all the figures needed to do a proper analysis. But really, the story of 2010 was the Xbox 360 revival (not that it was ever close to dying or anything), with the last of the three graphs I posted in the review blog being the most telling, showing the trend of the three major home-based consoles. Anyway, onto the news roundup.

In copyright news, let’s start with more bad news for isoHunt. Not only did they get sued again last week, now, even a potential ally in Google has come out blasting the BitTorrent search engine.

Now, on first glance, you might expect Google to back isoHunt, considering both are search engines. And since Google is fighting its own copyright battle against Viacom, surely this puts them on the same side as isoHunt. But that’s not really the case. Viacom’s strategy in their appeal of the YouTube verdict is to say that it’s no longer enough for websites to be DMCA compliant, that is to remove infringing content when requested. Instead, Viacom says that there is something called “red flag” infringement, which means that if it’s somewhat obvious that infringement is occurring, then Google/YouTube should take action even without any specific DMCA complaints. The problem for Google in regards to the isoHunt appeal is that the MPAA might just win the case against isoHunt on the basis of “red flag” infringement, and it would set a precedent that would disadvantage Google. So what’s Google’s legal strategy? It’s to paint isoHunt not as a search engine, but just a really really bad copyright infringer. It’s arguing that there’s no need for the MPAA to even use “red flag” infringement, because isoHunt is plainly guilty of actively and deliberately supporting piracy, something that Google/YouTube cannot be accused of. Yes, it really hurts isoHunt’s defence that they’re just a search engine, like Google, but this is Google in self-protection mode.

The so called "red flag" infringement ruling could spell an end to online innovation

Regardless, “red flag” infringement is actually quite a dangerous precedent to set, so I do support Google’s efforts in trying to fight against it, even if it means that isoHunt will be sacrificed as a result. The problem with “red flag” infringement is that it potentially could kill innovation on the Internet, because let’s admit it, a lot of even today’s most popular and mainstream web services had to tolerate or even support “red flag” infringement, to get their business up and running. Would YouTube exist today if people weren’t allowed to upload copyrighted content back when it first started out? Would Google, the search engine, have become the most popular search engine if it blocked all piracy related search results when it was first launched? Would any of the free file hosting websites even exist, allowing us to share large (legal) files that otherwise would be too big for email? “Red flag” infringement is basically the content owner’s way of stopping all innovation, even if there is a remote chance that infringement could occur at some unspecified time in the present or future, and that’s dangerous. And it also puts the onus on identifying infringing activity on the side of the website publishers, as opposed to the content owners, which doesn’t even make sense, since how would I know what content belonged to whom and whether it’s really authorized or not (case in point, Viacom’s own employees uploading copyrighted clips under fake accounts, to create fake hype and promote their shows)?

And so we move on to the next set of news, which is also about appeals. This time, it’s the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft’s (AFACT) appeal of a verdict from a year ago which found Internet Service Provider, iiNet, not guilty of authorizing copyright infringement committed by its subscribers, even though iiNet failed to act on infringement notices sent by the AFACT. The result of the appeal was announced this week, and it’s victory again for iiNet, even if it’s mostly symbolic at this point. While iiNet won the appeal, several decision has been overturned in favour of the AFACT, and it probably paves the way for AFACT stepping up its campaign to make ISPs the copyright police. iiNet’s victory apparently was more due to technical reasons, the precise design of the copyright infringement notices which the court found inadequate, and really, the decision probably gives the AFACT a very clear set of guidelines on just how to send infringement notices to ISPs. Basically, a symbolic victory for iiNet, but probably a more substantial win for the AFACT in the long run.

What frustrates me most about these types of trials, and about ISP warnings and/or three-strikes system, is that, in the end, it will be so so easy for users to bypass monitoring and escape being caught, or even cautioned. This is because anti-piracy monitoring today is basically just based on monitoring BitTorrent networks, which is only one way to obtain pirated content. Encryption, VPNs, or even just direct Internet downloads via digital lockers, can all escape the watching eyes of the piracy police, and so with millions of dollars being spent on lawsuits, and even more millions per year for monitoring and policing, the result will, as always, just push people towards using new piracy tools that will make online piracy harder and harder to track and stop. Remember in the good old days when websites simply hosted the pirated files, and how easy that was to stop compared to stopping torrents? Civil liberties are being sacrificed to give corporations a *false* sense of security, and that’s a really really bad reason to force us to give up our rights (is there even such a thing as a “good reason”?)

High Definition

Again, not much happening for HD/3D news, and I’m not even going to mention the stupid “Inception to be converted to 3D” news, because if there’s one thing worse than the 3D hype, then it’s “taking a 2D movie and converting it to fake 3D so we can squeeze more money out of the fans” phenomenon. Note to studios: not everything has to be in 3D!

XviD 1.3.0 has been released this week

While not exactly HD news, exactly, but a new version of Xvid has been released, version 1.3.0, and it’s the first new version in quite a while. MPEG-4 ASP based codecs may no longer be as sexy or “cool” as the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 ones, but there’s still a place for the good old Xvid codec for medium quality video files.

And the absence of real news means that I will have to plug my weekly US Blu-ray (and DVD) sales analysis feature, the latest analysis found here. It’s a place where Blu-ray fans can go to bask in the glory of “their” format’s sales successes, and where die hard HD DVD fans like myself can go and find any signs that show Blu-ray’s weakening stance, no matter how statistically insignificant (“OMG, Blu-ray sales fell 20% compared to last week – it’s doooomed!!”).

And as part of compiling the stats, I also regularly update a series of related graphs, that are never actually posted anywhere (other than on our on-and-off “Blu-ray: The State of Play” feature). So instead, I’ll post some of the graphs here right now, for your enjoyment.

Every week, there are stats to show how Blu-ray revenue as a percentage of combined disc (Blu-ray + DVD) revenue, and here’s the stats plotted that compare the most recent weeks (in red) to the same week a year ago (blue):

Blu-ray Sales Percentage: Currents vs a Year Ago (as of 2011-02-12)

The graph below shows the same stat as above, except plotted in a linear time fashion, with a trend line showing Blu-ray’s growth.

Blu-ray Market Share Trend: As of 2011-02-12

And finally, this graph shows the Blu-ray growth rate (so if Blu-ray’s market share was 5% a year ago, and now it’s 10%, the the growth rate is 100%, or doubled), again with a trend line.

Blu-ray growth rate trend: As of 2011-02-12

And finally in gaming, which these days, should probably be renamed to the “PS3 Jailbreak” section instead. Last week ended with Sony banning a bunch of users from PSN for using hacked firmware, and now the hackers have fought back by hacking PSN to un-ban themselves, as well as make it possible to ban anyone they want.

Note to Sony: don’t try to out-hack hackers.

geohot's takes the battle with Sony to rap form

Then we had the news of Sony attempting to bring out a new PS3 SKU that would be hack proof (famous last words). geohot and others have already said that the only way for Sony to really combat the PS3 hack is to release a new hardware, and it seems Sony has taken their advice. At the same time, Sony is beefing up their own legal team as they seek to sue their way out of this mess (what could possibly go wrong?). Sony have also got the German police to raid the home of PS3 Linux hacker graf_chokolo, which will please the Linux/hacking community. You can read more on these stories here.

For those that think I’ve been too hard on Sony, perhaps you’re right. Personal history with the company aside, the main reason I and a lot of people detest Sony is solely based on their recent actions, best described in this Make article/rant. I started Digital Digest talking about how to play DVDs in Windows, back when commercial solutions were few and far in between, and with Pentium 4’s still an expensive early-adopter thing, you just needed to hack your way to play DVDs on PCs smoothly, from tweaking drivers to using custom decoders and more. And from then on, it’s always been about using products and software beyond the purposes intended by manufacturers and publishers. Sony’s hatred towards anyone that wants to do things outside of Sony’s own limited imagination, and their arrogance of forcing people to use Sony products in Sony’s own prescribed manner (and it’s not just end users, it’s also developers too, having to adapt themselves to Sony’s way of doing things, as opposed to the other way around – a philosophy that Microsoft, for example, do not share, which is why the Xbox 360 is a much more developer friendly platform). And it’s also the arrogance in their response, which is almost always an overreaction (eg. CD root-kit fiasco), because it’s as if they believe that using, developing for or even selling a Sony product is a privilege, and so if you make Sony angry, expect retribution. Point out a flaw in their security design? Sony will get you. Make their products do more than advertised? Sony will get you. Sell products to help Sony users in a way Sony doesn’t like? Sony will double get you (as geohot wisely raps in his video, “I shed a tear everytime I think of Lik Sang”).

Speaking of Microsoft as a “good guy” when it comes to consumer right seems quite wrong to me, but compared to Sony, there are a lot of “good guys”. But Microsoft’s response to the Kinect hacks (not the first response, which was similar to Sony’s, but the subsequent responses by openly welcoming the hacks) is to be commended, and really, it’s the best business decision as well (Sony’s actions have often hurt themselves more than anyone else, to be fair). And now Microsoft is following up by releasing an official PC developer kit for Kinect, available for free to non commercial users and researchers. Of course, opening up the development of an console accessory is different to the reaction of seeing your product hacked into oblivion, but still, it’s hard to imagine Sony reacting to the hack in the same manner (as the Make article mentioned, the Aibo hacking incident kind of shows what a typical Sony response might have been).

Also, Kinect will work with Windows Phone sometime in the future (not this year though), which given the recent Nokia announcement regarding moving to the Windows Phone platform, can only be a good thing for Kinect. Still, Kinect needs some better, more varied games, because frankly, I’m a bit tired (in both sense of the word) from playing Kinect Sports soccer and winning 4-3 all the time (I’m not that good at goalkeeping, which for me, consists of flapping my arms wildly).

Alright, enough ranting for this week. Have a good one.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (27 February 2011)

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 »

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Weekly News Roundup (13 March 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (6 March 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (27 February 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (30 January 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (23 January 2011)

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