UK govt: IP address is "Intellectual Property address"
The UK has just passed a far-reaching "Digital Economy" bill that gets the judiciary into the website-blocking business and orders ISPs to pass on copyright notices from media companies. It also makes it easy to expand into throttling and Internet disconnections a year from now.
The moves are explicitly done to help the UK's music and movie industries. This "help the rightsholders!" thinking has taken such hold in the government that an "IP address" can now be defined as an "Intellectual Property (IP) address" rather than an "Internet Protocol address" in official government correspondence—and no one bats an eye.
A reader from the UK wrote us with the unintentionally hilarious details. After the reader sent a letter of concern to his own MP, the letter was forwarded to the Department for Business, Innovation, & Skills, which backed the Digital Economy bill. The Department replied with a letter of its own, describing how rightsholders can find suspected infringers.
Rightsholders can "seek to download a copy of that material and in doing so capture information about the source," said the government letter, "including the Intellectual Property (IP) address along with a date and time stamp."
Sure, it's just a funny mistake on a single letter. But given the context of the entire debate, it looks like an unintentionally revealing peek into the government's collective mind on this issue. What's the main use for the basic plumbing of the Internet? Why, hunting down copyright infringers, of course!
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Google turns up the heat on Office with collaboration tweaks
Google is making a number of changes to its Google Docs offerings to make them even more attractive for those looking to make the switch from Microsoft's Office. Google's editors for documents, spreadsheets, and drawings are getting even more realtime collaboration attributes—including character-by-character editing by multiple users. Unfortunately, Google Docs is also losing a couple features, but Google believes these changes will help take it to the next level when it comes to challenging Microsoft.
Google Docs has always had easier-to-use collaboration features than much of what Microsoft has to offer. Docs has been particularly useful for individuals and small businesses who need to throw together a document quickly with geographically scattered users, but the newest additions allow users to see each others' edits on a per-character basis. This means you can watch what your coworker is typing into a document in almost realtime, and up to 50 users can be connected to a document at a time.
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Liveblog: Mobile Microsoft Event at 10am Pacific time
Microsoft is holding a mobile event this morning in downtown San Francisco at Mighty. The invitation includes the cryptic phrases "All In The..." and "It's time to share." Ars will be on the scene liveblogging the event, which is scheduled to begin at 10am Pacific time (click here to see it in your timezone).
It's widely believed that Microsoft will announce some sort of mobile device or platform, including the long-rumored Pink project—which is supposed to deliver the successor to the Sidekick platform after Microsoft purchased Danger Hiptop in 2008.
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Painkiller meets Gears? Bulletstorm brings guns, cannibals
With the inevitable official announcement of Gears of War 3 on the way, Epic has announced that it's working on another new game as well. Dubbed Bulletstorm and developed by People Can Fly—the team behind Painkiller and the PC version of Gears of War—it looks to be an action-heavy, multi-platform first-person shooter.
"Bulletstorm is the kind of game we love to make because it's pure, unadulterated entertainment," said Dr. Michael Capps, head of Epic Games. “People Can Fly has created a wildly fun first-person shooter that looks gorgeous running on the latest Unreal Engine 3 technology, and the skillshot system is a welcome addition to the genre. We can’t wait to see how everyone reacts to seeing Bulletstorm."
The story looks to be pretty standard fare, with players taking on the role of an elite mercenary protecting a futuristic confederation. And, it turns out (shocking, we know), you've been working for the wrong side!
Generic-sounding story aside, the main draw of Bulletstorm appears to be its straight-up action. The game will feature "outrageously large guns" and a "skillshot system," which rewards players for creating as much mayhem as possible. Throw in hordes of mutants and flesh-eating gangs, and you have what could potentially be some fun, over-the-top FPS action.
Though it doesn't have an official release date, Epic is calling Bulletstorm "one of next year’s most anticipated original games," so, barring any delays, we should be seeing it in 2011 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.
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Masterpiece: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Ars Technica is happy to debut a new series of articles celebrating games that are nearly perfect, or that mark a major turning point in the industry. We'll be updating irregularly, and our choices are bound to get people talking. Our first pick? Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
If you have not played the single-player portions of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or Modern Warfare 2, this post contains spoilers.
Leaving its mark
It's been said that few people saw the Velvet Undergound play live, but everyone who did started their own band. In the same way, Call of Duty 4 left its mark on every war game developer since. The difference is that everyone played Call of Duty 4, and its stamp on gaming has been both obvious and wide.
The things we saw in Call of Duty 4 were shocking at the time. The game opened with the player looking out through the eyes Yasir Al-Fulan, the president of a nebulously defined Middle Eastern country, and the scene ended with his execution. The game wanted to make a point: no one was safe. The ultimate survival of the characters was called into question with this opening scene, and while American audiences see death in the Middle East on a nightly basis on the news, this scene showed us how cheap life is in first-person perspective.
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The speed of Pink: Tegra 2 powering new Windows phones?
This morning at 10am PT, Microsoft will launch its Project Pink phones on Verizon, and there's a rumor out that these phones will use NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC. If this rumor is true, then these phones will have a ridiculous amount of horsepower. So much power, in fact, that I'm disinclined to believe the rumor. What does a low-end Sidekick successor need with way more horsepower than the iPad?
The NVIDIA Tegra chips that power the Zune HD are based on a very simple, fairly old (from at least 2002) ARM core design, the ARM11. ARM11 is a single-issue, in-order design with a short, 8-stage pipeline. This simplicity makes it extremely low-power at modern sizes, but it's also so limited as not to be appropriate for much more than a basic phone or media player. Tegra 2, however, is another story.
NVIDIA's next-generation Tegra is based on the ARM Cortex A9, a fully modern, out-of-order microarchitecture that's capable of running a full-blown desktop OS. This is a netbook-class product, and in a quad-core design it could be a potential Atom competitor. It's also vaporware right now—not in the sense that it won't really see the light of day, but in the sense that it has gotten a ton of hype for something that's not actually shipping in a product yet. Right now, we don't really know what the A9 can do.
I personally think that a dual-core A9 SoC is beyond overkill for even a higher-end smartphone, but it will make a fantastic tablet chip that could beat up Apple's A4 and steal its lunch money (but at the cost of some battery life, because you can't break the laws of physics). Just in terms of what the hardware is capable of on paper, the software guys will have to work to deliver a stuttery UI and slow framerates on Tegra 2.
We'll see what happens later today, but if the rumor is true and the Tegra 2 era is upon us, then the mobile 3D gaming party can finally get started. If it isn't (and I have to confess to some skepticism, because phones based on this part were expected later in the year), then Tegra 1 will make a solid basis for some Windows phones... but it's no Tegra 2.
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Should the US govt force all cell phones to carry TV tuners?
So it is The Year of Our iPad 2010, and we've all got mobile phones, netbooks, laptops, desktop computers, and hybrid devices like PS3s and Xboxes. Given all our gadgets, does this mean that in the event of a tornado or terrorist attack, we've got a better emergency information communications system?
A former NBC News vice president says no, but he's got a fix for the problem:
"This homeland security communications problem can be remedied by a simple requirement from the [Federal Communications Commission] that all mobile devices include a tiny digital television receiver that would work alongside the current broadband connections," writes Tom Wolzien. "Since most mobile phones get traded in every two to three years, on average, almost every one of the 280 million mobile subscribers would have the emergency capability in a half decade or less."
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Palm CEO tries to make the case for Palm
When Jon Rubenstein agreed to join a fading Palm with the goal of outdoing his previous work on the iPhone at Apple, I'm sure he knew that he had a shot at the CEO role if his project succeeded. But I seriously doubt that he ever expected to give an interview like the one he just gave to CNN Money:
The conventional wisdom is that Palm has blown it and either is going to run out of money or get sold or both.
Clearly we've hit a speed bump. No question about it. It’s really disappointing, and it's frustrating. But, the company has tremendous assets.
The rest of the interview is pretty much on this pattern, where the interviewer asks a question that amounts to, "Aren't you guys kind of screwed?" Rubenstein responds with something to the effect that "things have been tough, mistakes have been made, but look at what we've still got going for us... and if that's not enough, then hey, look at what Palm had going for it before webOS."
Throughout the course of the interview, Rubenstein acknowledges the Pre's initial hardware problems, but he claims that's in the past now and that quality is up. He also acknowledges that the recent Verizon launch was a flop, but he blames it on the Verizon in-store sales staff's lack of experience with Palm. And when he has to make the case, yet again and at this late date, for webOS's existence in a market that's already dominated by a few established players, he turns to multitasking.
Yes, people want easy multitasking, but maybe they don't actually need as much of it as Palm gives them; maybe they just need the little bit that Android gives them, and that Apple will soon give them.
At one point in the interview, the subject of Palm's anemic software library comes up, and Rubenstein both acknowledges the "long tail" effect and then completely misses its significance.
"I mean, if you look at the long tail of the 150,000 or 180,000, or whatever number Apple has got these days, it's an amazing number," Rubenstein says. "The reality is that it's the first thousand or so that matter and the rest of it is long tail."
Yes, the rest of it is indeed long tail, and that long tail of apps is precisely what gives the iPhone such a massive advantage over its rivals. The whole point of the long tail is that's where the bulk of your business comes from... but if Rubenstein doesn't understand this, then what hope does Palm have? The answer increasingly appears to be: not much.
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4 rules for creating mainstream media gaming controversies
Several times a year, the media picks up on an event that portrays games as terrible, terrible things that will destroy the very souls of our nation's children. One game chosen from the flood released every year is held up for all to see and be properly enraged by. But many times, these stories are manufactured to create controversy, not to educate viewers about the realities of gaming.
Which is why we've decided to help. For people who don't follow the gaming industry or may not be educated on its many wiles, we offer these rules for deciding if a gaming-related story is really worth the anger, outrage, or disbelief.
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Making surgery scalpels from sound waves
Sound waves are used in many imaging applications, but they're often underpowered and hard to focus. But focus them into "sound bullets" and all sorts of interesting things happen.
A paper published in PNAS this week describes how scientists might transition from creating sound-based images with linear acoustic dynamics to using nonlinear approaches. Researchers created a system with an acoustic lens that can focus highly tunable and accurate signals into "sound bullets." Once researchers have slightly better control over them, the bullets could be used for everything from detecting objects underwater to acting as nonintrusive scalpels in certain kinds of surgery.
We use sound waves a lot to get an idea of what things look like without actually being able to see them, such as an unborn baby (ultrasound) or the underwater ruins that the History Channel leads you to believe might be Atlantis before they end an hour-long program on an ambiguous note (sonar). However, the images that these hard-to-focus signals produce are notoriously murky, and often show little more than nebulous blobs pulsating against a black background.
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From iPhone to iPad: the art of porting games to a big screen
The iPad offers developers a large touchscreen and enough power to do something interesting with it. With the tight time constraints to launch a game before launch, it's no surprise that so many of the best games are upgraded versions of titles that have already found success on the iPhone.
Bringing a game from the iPhone to the iPad isn't just about updating the graphics a bit; the ergonomics of the new device and how you use it also must be considered. We caught up with Firemint CEO Rob Murray, whose company developed Real Racing HD and Flight Control HD on the iPad, to talk about bringing hit games over to the new platform.
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Google boosts open video by funding ARM Theora codec
In a move that will boost support for open video on the mobile Web, Google has provided funding to TheorARM—a project that produces an ARM-optimized implementation of the Ogg Theora video codec. Google's support for the project could be a signal that the search giant is significantly warming up to open video.
Although HTML5 delivers open standards for Web video playback, browser vendors have not been able to reach a consensus on the codec. Some parties favor Ogg Theora, a royalty-free codec that can be freely redistributed because it is thought to be unencumbered by patents. Others favor H.264, a codec that offers technically superior compression but is burdened with costly licensing fees.
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