IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 27/03/2010

Saturday, March 27, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 27/03/2010

Google reportedly shares mobile ad revenue with key partners

Google's Android mobile operating system is gaining considerable traction in the smartphone market. According to a report from mocoNews, the secret behind Android's success is a series of revenue-sharing agreements that Google has signed with carriers and even some handset manufacturers.

The specific details are somewhat hazy, but the report cites unnamed sources who say that Google is giving its partners a cut of the advertising revenue generated by its mobile users. These deals are said to be isolated to the companies that are shipping Google Experience devices—handsets that come preinstalled with Google's branded mobile applications.

Mobile advertising is still at a relatively nascent stage of its evolution. A New York Times article that was published earlier says that mobile ads in 2009 generated less than one-third of one percent of all total ad revenue. Despite the current lack of compelling demand for mobile advertising, there appears to be a whole lot of potential for growth, which is why Google and Apple are both making big investments. Google's $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising firm AdMob is pending and Apple reportedly paid $275 million for Quattro, one of AdMob's competitors.

The availability of Android's source code and the absence of licensing fees helps to make Android adoption an easy choice for carriers and handset makers, but the revenue sharing is possibly how Google seals the deal and attracts loyalty.

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GameStop sued over one-time use codes, deceptive advertising

Used game sales are not popular with publishers who only see profits when new copies of games are sold. Increasingly, games are now sold with one-time use codes that give customers extra content or features; those buying the game used will have to pay that same fee to access this content. GameStop is facing legal action due to this practice for one simple reason: the game box advertises the content, but the stores don't disclose the fact that the content costs extra for those who buy used.

A class-action lawsuit against the retailer has been filed in California, claiming that the game boxes claim the content is included, when the code has most likely been used or is missing completely from the second-hand packaging. GameStop's return policy allows returns within seven days, which the suit claims is not enough time to protect consumers.

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280,000 pro-China astroturfers are running amok online

If you thought corporate "astroturfing" (fake grassroots activity) was a problem at sites like Yelp and Amazon that feature user reviews of products, imagine how much worse it would be if the US government employed a couple hundred thousand people to "shape the debate" among online political forums. Crazy, right? What government would ever attempt it?

According to noted China researcher Rebecca MacKinnon, the answer is China, which allegedly employs 280,000 people to troll the Internet and make the government look good.

MacKinnon's discussion of Chinese astroturfing measures turns up in testimony that she prepared from a Congressional hearing this month. When that hearing was eventually rescheduled, MacKinnon was no longer on the witness list, so she released her prepared remarks (PDF) anyway.

The government increasingly combines censorship and surveillance measures with pro-active efforts to steer online conversations in the direction it prefers. In 2008 the Hong Kong-based researcher David Bandurski determined that at least 280,000 people had been hired at various levels of government to work as “online commentators.” Known derisively as the “fifty cent party,” these people are paid to write postings that show their employers in a favorable light in online chat rooms, social networking services, blogs, and comments sections of news websites. Many more people do similar work as volunteers—recruited from among the ranks of retired officials as well as college students in the Communist Youth League who aspire to become Party members.

This approach is similar to a tactic known as “astro-turfing” in American parlance, now commonly used by commercial advertising firms, public relations companies, and election campaigns around the world. In many provinces it is now also standard practice for government officials - particularly at the city and county level - to work to co-opt and influence independent online writers by throwing special conferences for local bloggers, or inviting them to special press events or news conferences about issues of local concern.

That last sentence about co-opting bloggers certainly isn't limited to China; US companies have perfected the practice, and government PR people dole out interviews and access to journalists in ways often designed to shape opinions or coverage. But still—280,000 people paid to permeate message boards and e-mail lists, all backing the government's line? The mind boggles.

MacKinnon's testimony, well worth reading in full, notes that Chinese citizens aren't helpless creatures of astroturf, filtering, censorship, and intimidation. People have developed countermeasures, including (these are direct quotes):

Informal anti-censorship support networks: I have attended gatherings of bloggers and journalists in China—with varying degrees of organization or spontaneousness—where participants devoted significant amounts of time to teaching one another how to use circumvention tools to access blocked websites
Distributed web-hosting assistance networks: I am aware of people who have strong English language and technical skills, as well as overseas credit cards, who are helping friends and acquaintances in China to purchase inexpensive space on overseas web hosting services, then set up independent blogs using free open-source software
Crowdsourced "opposition research": With the Chinese government’s Green Dam censorware edict last year, we have seen the emergence of loosely organized "opposition research" networks. Last June a group of Chinese computer programmers and bloggers collectively wrote a report exposing Green Dam’s political and religious censorship, along with many of its security flaws
Preservation and relay of censored content: I have noticed a number of people around the Chinese blogosphere and in chatrooms who make a regular habit of immediately downloading interesting articles, pictures, and videos which they think have a chance of being blocked or removed. They then repost these materials in a variety of places, and relay them to friends through social networks and e-mail lists.

Then comes our favorite: dirty jokes as a form of protest.

In 2009, Internet censorship tightened considerably. Many lively blogging platforms and social networks where heated political discussions were known to take place were shut down under the guise of an anti-porn crackdown. In response, an anonymous Shanghai-based jokester created an online music video called “Ode to the Grass Mud Horse”—whose technically innocent lyrics, sung by a children’s chorus over video of alpaca sheep, contained a string of highly obscene homonyms. The video spawned an entire genre of anti-censorship jokes and videos involving mythical animals whose names sound similar to official slogans and obscenities of various kinds. This viral pranksterism created an outlet for people to vent about censorship, poke fun at the government, and raise awareness among many people who are not comfortable discussing such matters in a direct way.

Now, in true capitalist style, one can buy shirts, hats and stickers that feature the Grass Mud Horse.

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Cloudy with a chance of Linux: Canonical aims to cash in

Although Ubuntu is generally regarded as a desktop Linux distribution, the sever variant is becoming increasingly popular in the cloud. It is silently infiltrating server rooms and gaining traction in enterprise environments. A recent survey published by Canonical provides some insight into adoption trends of Ubuntu on production servers.

As Ubuntu's presence in the server space grows, it is showing up in some unexpected places. Weta Digital, the New Zealand company that did the special effects for Lord of the Rings and some of the 3D rendering for Avatar, reportedly runs Ubuntu on its 35,000-core render farm and virtually all of its desktop computers. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the popular Wikipedia website, rolled out Ubuntu on 400 of its servers in 2008. We even use Ubuntu ourselves on several of the key servers that power the Ars Orbiting HQ.

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WarioWare D.I.Y.: making games an inch wide, a mile deep

If you want to try your hand at designing a game, you live in a very good time. You can always download the Unreal Engine 3 to play with for free if you want to take a crack at PC gaming. but if your goals are slightly less ambitions, Nintendo has your back. The company is giving you the reins with Wario Ware D.I.Y., the latest game in the now venerable series of microgames. Each release in the series features short games that can be completed in a matter of seconds by the player, and this newest release allows you to make those games yourself.

Don't expect to just jump in and start creating, however. The game begins with a lengthy and somewhat tiresome tutorial, but there is nothing simple about creating a simple game. Stick with it, and the game will hold your hand through the basic concepts of game creation, including artwork and music. You can import assets from any of the existing games on the cart, or make your own. The game will teach you basic scripting language in order to give your creations the ability to interact and respond to the player.

When you're finished, games can be shared with other players either using direct connections or online using Friend Codes. The games can be played on the Wii with the optional WarioWare D.I.Y. Showcase for that system. Nintendo will also be releasing games designed by some of the industry's top talent, including the minds behind Metroid: the Other M and Scribblenauts. The games on the cart, and the games released by the pros later, have all been made with the tools you have been given. It's empowering to be able to look at what others are able to do with what you have ready at your fingertips.

There are limits to how many objects you can put into your game, and you can only control the game by tapping the screen, but those limits will stretch your creativity. Take a look at what others have created with those parameters in order to see just how far creativity can take you. The game also includes a four-panel comic designer, and the ability to upload and download new games means the experience can be fresh for pretty much... well, forever.

If you've ever had the itch to create your own Nintendo title, this could be as close as many of us get. WarioWare D.I.Y. comes to the Nintendo DS this Sunday.

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Moving beyond silicon to break the MegaHertz barrier

We're rapidly closing in on a decade since the first desktop processors cleared the 3GHz mark, but in a stunning break from earlier progress, the clock speed of the top processors has stayed roughly in the same neighborhood since. Meanwhile, the feature shrinks that have at least added additional processing cores to the hardware are edging up to the limits of photolithography technology. With that as a backdrop, today's issue of Science contains a series of perspectives that consider the question of whether it's time to move beyond semiconductors and, if so, what we might move to.

The basic problem, as presented by IBM research's Thomas Theis and Paul Solomon, is that scaling the frequency up has required scaling the switching voltage down as transistors shrink. Once that voltage gets sufficiently small, the difference between on and off states causes problems from some combination of two factors: the off state leaks (leading to heat and power use problems), or the device switches slowly, meaning lower clock speed. Faced with a "choose any two" among speed, size, and power, we've been doing pretty well via chipmakers' focus on the latter two, but that's now gotten physicists and materials scientists thinking it might be time to look elsewhere.

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Big Content: stopping P2P should be "principal focus" of IP czar

Thanks to the recent PRO-IP Act, the US has for the first time has an "Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator" responsible for pulling together all the resources of the federal government. What should the IPEC be doing with her time and resources? The "core content industries" have an answer: she should turn the online world from a "thieves' bazaar to a safe and well-lit marketplace" by encouraging network admins to deploy bandwidth shaping, site blocking, traffic filters, watermark detectors, and deep packet inspection.

According to the RIAA, MPAA, Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, and others, new IPEC Victoria Espinel should embark on nothing less than a quest to "push back the tide of copyright theft." But as anyone who has tried to hold back the tide can tell you, it's a tough job. Just ask Venice.

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feature: Microsoft Research TechFest 2010: NUI and the cloud dominate

Microsoft Research's TechFest is essentially a glimpse into a Microsoft future. It's an annual showcase of the various technologies that the company's researchers have been working on. The 2010 event that took place earlier this month featured a few prototypes that we've already seen before, but there were also many that have only just started to emerge out of Microsoft's research labs around the world, including labs in China, India, the UK, and the US.

The gathering of hundreds of researchers, as well as the broader group of Microsoft employees and product managers, happens at the company's headquarters in Redmond and creates a sort of forum for these colleagues to exchange ideas, show off their latest innovations, and form partnerships that lead to the creation of shipping products (even though most don't make the cut). Here's this year's keynote:

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Verizon: FCC is a haunted house and can't regulate the 'Net

The war over the Federal Communications Commission's authority to regulate the 'Net got a little hotter on Wednesday, with Verizon Vice President Thomas Tauke telling a Washington, D.C. audience that the Communications Act reminds him of the Winchester Mystery House of San Jose, California. "It started out in the late 1880s as a small farmhouse," Tauke told the New Democrat Network, "and by the 1920s was transformed into a 160-room, seven-story Victorian mansion with doors and stairways that lead no where, dead-end hallways, and mazes that can leave you lost for hours."

Ah, we wish the public found the FCC as interesting as Winchester, with its fascinating legends and alleged hauntings. But Taukes' argument is that key provisions of the Comm Act give the FCC little authority over cyberspace. Even worse, he says, like that elaborate Silicon Valley tourist site, the FCC has become an unwieldy palimpsest—new rules to regulate the 'Net hastily scribbled over old ones to supervise radio, telephony, television, and cable.

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Our digital exodus: we're moving forums!

In less than three months, Ars Technica will be 12 years old. It’s hard to believe that when we slapped WWWThreads on our site and started directly facilitating conversation amongst our readers, we'd still be using derivatives of its successor, "Ultimate Bulletin Board" (produced by a company now known as Social Strata) in 2010.

Bringing our community platform in-house has been something we've wanted to do for a long time, but have not had the resources to tackle a project so expansive, entrenched, and intimidating. Fortunately, with the relaunch of the subscriber program, technical and economic evolution over the past few years, and the technical know-how of Clint Ecker and Kurt Mackey, we are finally in a position to be able to guide our platform 100 percent in the direction that serves us best.

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Nintendo DSi XL: Nintendo throws a great system under bus

Our Nintendo DSi XL showed up at the office the same day news of the Nintendo 3DS began trickling out of Japan. That system will be out before March of next year, at least in Japan, and Nintendo wants us to buy a system this weekend without knowing what's going to replace it in a little under a year? There is confidence, and then there is hubris.

The DSi XL is not for everyone. This is a DSi, with no added features or improvements outside of the larger screen and price point. That screen has to be held somewhere, and the overall size and weight of the system have also been increased. I had no trouble fitting the thing in my pocket to take with me when I left the house, but the weight was something of an issue; I was glad for my belt. Let's take a look at what you're getting into with this $190 bruiser.

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Almost half of poor Americans go to the library for Internet

There's more data coming in on the extent to which low income Americans depend on public institutions for broadband. A new report released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says that 44 percent of those living below the poverty level access e-mail and the Web via their local public library. And nearly a third of Americans over 14 used library Internet services in 2009. That's about 77 million people.

The study was based on almost 50,000 telephone and Web form surveys. It also found that:

Forty percent of those 2009 users accessed library Internet resources to find employment. Seventy-five percent of these looked for a job online. Half posted their resume or filled out an online job application.
Another 37 percent researched some illness or medical problem, or searched for or made an appointment with a doctor.
Forty-two percent used their local library's Internet for education; over a third of these did their homework online. A big portion of these users were teenagers.
Sixty percent accessed a library computer to contact someone else.

The study is further confirmation (if more is needed) that low income Americans know that broadband is now an absolute necessity in this economy. It's also more evidence of the huge pressure on libraries to meet this demand. About a third of libraries say they lack both the 'Net connections and staff power to provide the services for which low income patrons ask.

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Advertisers hot for iPad, even though details are murky

Major companies are rushing to secure advertising space from print and Web publishers that will have iPad-specific apps or websites ready for the product's launch on April 3. This is despite the fact that there are plenty of unknowns when it comes to how advertising on the iPad will work.

A report from The New York Times notes that a number of large corporations, including Coca-Cola, FedEx, Unilever, Toyota, Capital One, Oracle, and GM have already bought up advertising from the likes of Newsweek, Reuters, Time, Wall Street Journal, and NYT itself. In fact, Chase has bought out all of the NYT advertising units for two full months following the iPad's introduction to advertise its high-end Chase Sapphire credit card.

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Idiot users still intentionally opening, clicking on spam

Internet users are still opening their spam e-mail with abandon and clicking the links and/or opening the attachments within. These are the latest findings from the Ipsos Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), which found once again that people continue to practice poor e-mail habits despite awareness of the consequences. A healthy dose of denial and ignorance about who should protect them is apparently enough to keep users clicking away.

According to the MAAWG report, a full half of all North American and Western European users admitted to having opened spam, with nearly half of those people (46 percent) doing so intentionally. Sure, a quarter of those users claimed they did so in order to unsubscribe or complain to the sender—bad idea, people!—but a full 15 percent said they opened spam because they were interested in the products or services being offered. Another 18 percent simply wanted to "see what would happen," and four percent actually forwarded an e-mail they identified as spam to someone else.

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FTC claws back robocaller's Porsche, Lexus, and Florida home

If you lived in the US two or three years ago, you probably got the call: "The factory warranty on your car expires soon! We can help!" In fact, you probably got more than one. (I received a dozen or more.) The callers suggested that they were affiliated with car companies or local dealers and that they were offering legitimate extended warranty products; both of these were misrepresentations.

The robocalling was so blatant that it ignored most existing Do Not Call rules and dialed just about everyone in the country—over and over—including 911 operators. Some dialers didn't even bother to use phone number databases, instead just doing brute force dials that began with 111-111-1111 and incrementing by one, then doing it all again after hitting 999-999-9999.

This was not an approach notable for its subtlety, and the massive call volume was basically certain to bring down the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission. That happened back in 2009, when the agency filed court complaints against all the major players it could find. A year later, those cases are finally playing out.

One of the biggest just reached a settlement yesterday. James Dunne, head of a company called Voice Touch, Inc, worked as a broker who hooked up telemarketing companies with the actual dialing companies who did the dirty work of marketing these "warranties" to people. This worked out quite well in the short term; Dunne picked up a second home in Florida, a Lexus sedan, and a Porsche 911. Unfortunately for him, it's time for the toys to go back in the bin.

Dunne settled with the FTC and agreed to pay back $655,000 and all the proceeds from the sale of his second home and his cars. He's also barred from working in telemarketing, and has to assist the FTC in its ongoing case against other companies and individuals.

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Survey: consumers want iPads for getting work done on the go

A recent survey on mobile device use revealed a surprising result: over half of respondents reported that they would use tablet devices such as the Apple iPad for "conducting work." Carried out by enterprise software vendor Sybase, the survey also confirmed that most mobile devices are being used for both personal and business applications, and that mobile device users consider themselves "more productive."

Apple has openly said that the iPad was not designed with any particular use or type of user in mind. However, the device's media and Web browsing capabilities certainly lend it to casual computing around the house or on-the-go. Apple also created iPad versions of its iWork suite of applications—a clear indication that it believes the device will be useful for general productivity. Some third-party developers agree, and are already scrambling to make iPad versions of their productivity applications.

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