Slashdot Mirror

First time accepted submitter null action writes "Want to have your code run on a satellite in space? Take a look at this. MIT Space Systems Laboratory and TopCoder are hosting a DARPA competition to create the best algorithm for capturing a randomly tumbling space object. Contestants in the Zero Robotics Autonomous Space Capture Challenge will compete in online simulations, and four finalists will have their algorithms tested aboard the International Space Station on small satellites called SPHERES. 'In this challenge, you have no advance knowledge of how it will be rotating. We're pushing the limits of what we can do with SPHERES and we hope to break new ground with this challenge,' said Jake Katz of MIT."

Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that Ting, a new reseller of Sprint's voice, 3G and WiMax services, has a new approach to mobile pricing that lets customers buy minutes, messages, and data separately, and allows households to pool them to an unlimited number of phones and data devices on one account. 'Household data plans are the next step for consumers, mainly because people are adding more connected screens and devices to their lifestyle,' writes Kevin Tofel. 'And different household members have different data needs; some use a little while others consume gobs of gigabytes. Why not average out the usage across multiple devices?' Both AT&T and Verizon have hinted at offering shared data plans in the future, but the devil's in the details, says Tofel. 'My hope is that family data plans come soon, to all carriers, just like we have for family voice and messaging plans.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that Ting, a new reseller of Sprint's voice, 3G and WiMax services, has a new approach to mobile pricing that lets customers buy minutes, messages, and data separately, and allows households to pool them to an unlimited number of phones and data devices on one account. 'Household data plans are the next step for consumers, mainly because people are adding more connected screens and devices to their lifestyle,' writes Kevin Tofel. 'And different household members have different data needs; some use a little while others consume gobs of gigabytes. Why not average out the usage across multiple devices?' Both AT&T and Verizon have hinted at offering shared data plans in the future, but the devil's in the details, says Tofel. 'My hope is that family data plans come soon, to all carriers, just like we have for family voice and messaging plans.'"

A few weeks back, you asked gaming-world academic and game designer Ian Bogost questions from the business, philosophical, and aesthetic sides of gaming; below, find his responses. Thanks, Ian! Is it all just absurd?
by Anonymous Coward

You satirize the meaninglessness of compulsive-click based games, but what would you say is your larger point in doing so? Do you think that "big" video games (for instance, ones with complex plots and characters, cooperation among players, etc) are all that much better, or would much of the same critique apply?

(Sure, they're not quite as mindless, but they still mean that people are spending time and money to withdraw from reality to some extent, and substituting made-up, arbitrary goals for interacting with other people. Is it purely happenstance and convenience that means you've made a certain point with social games, rather than, say, remade Catch-22 as a FPS?)

Ian Bogost: In my original essay about Cow Clicker, written when the game launched in the summer of 2010, I made a similar observation about "big" videogames: they seem to destroy time. (My exact words were, "Many of today's console games exert a time crush. They demand tens or even hundreds of hours of attention to complete, some or most of which often feels empty"). As I see it, one difference between "traditional" games and social games is that the former don't try to infect the time we spend away from them as well as the time we spend with them. Surely there is something compulsive about console games too, but at least the end. The service-oriented component of social games, along with the fact that companies like Zynga require regularly renewed attention to make money, these are important differences that may not seem fundamental at first.

Still, some cultural trends are more like cracks in a wall than like monuments. It's likely that Cow Clicker is more akin to picking away the plaster to find the veins of a complex structural issue than it is like uncovering a simple fact about its foundation. I don't think that structural issue is limited to games. Whether we noticed or not, we've created a media environment driven by compulsion. Email and instant messaging are examples unbound to specific companies, but Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram — all of these services and many more build value by monetizing our repeated and regular attention, and now we have so many different ways to ask, "Is something new? Am I missing something?" that it's possible never to stop asking those questions, all day long.



Procedural Rhetoric in morally-gray big name games?
by siphonophore

What do you think of AAA studios exploring more moral grey areas (e.g. hostage shooting airport level in COD:MW2 ) as a form of procedural rhetoric? Do you think players' natural tendencies of (in this case) non-violence toward innocents is solidified or shaken by simulating such acts?

IB: For those who don't know the reference, "procedural rhetoric" is a concept I developed in my 2007 book Persuasive Games . We have verbal and written rhetoric, which uses speech and writing to make arguments or express ideas, and we have visual rhetoric, which deals with the way images do so. I suggest procedural rhetoric as a way to describe the use of systems and models to make arguments. Videogames (and software in general) are media that are built largely out of processes, and so we can use this framework to design or evaluate how games make arguments.

Of course, the commercial games industry hasn't been very interested in making arguments with games, in taking strong positions on topics of any sort, let alone controversial ones like politics. We have begun to see some efforts to push harder at this boundary COD:MW2 is one example, but so are Deus Ex, Homefront, Farcry 2, Bioshock. I'm glad to see this progress, but of course I'd like to see more. In particular, we only seem to get the very faintest sense of an argument or position in these games. It's almost like it's just there for the publicity, but not too much publicity, because that might turn some players off.

In fact, that's the usual explanation for why we don't have AAA games with strong positions. They're expensive to make and the publishers are said to be conservative. It's true, of course. I was recently talking to some of the team responsible for securing the publishing deal for Bioshock, and they told me that even they had trouble, and that's for a game that's really just another sci-fi shooter with a very thin layer of contra-Ayn Rand dystopianism wrapped in gorgeous art deco environments.

But to believe that "the market" is the reason we don't see more of these games doesn't tell the full story. The truth is, the AAA game industry doesn't really have much to say about politics or social issues. Not only is traditional sci-fi and fantasy entertainment in books and movies far more political than the average game, even children's animated films are more political than the average game. I mean, there's more political commentary in Wall-E than in the last decade of AAA games. I'm generalizing, but game developers and executives are technolibertarians rather than artists. For them, what's good for the world is what people vote for with their wallets. And once we get enough of that position fed to us over and over again, it's no wonder that AAA shooters risk becoming just the empty power fantasies they are sometimes accused of being.



Skinner Boxes
by Catiline

I have long described both MMO gaming and Facebook social games as being a "well-padded Skinner box" for their staggered/random reward system. Do you see any possibility for anything else to eventually replace this model?

IB: I don't know. Certainly the gold rush associated with a very bare version of these mechanics isn't helping. If anything, the Skinner boxes seem to be finding their way into other genres. I haven't played Diablo III yet, but someone who tried the beta opined that it's "Farmville for hardcore gamers." Then again, I suppose we might have said the same thing about World of Warcraft half a decade ago. These features have always been in games, but there's no question that we've begun refining them in the way one refines oil, making them more pure and useful to drive the engines of commerce rather than experience.

We can't just will ourselves out of this situation. It's not simply a matter of developing a new design philosophy that will replace the old one through pure unfettered rationalism. Since the games industry responds only to economic incentives, perhaps what we need is an implosion. Just as the housing bubble was burst by the revelation of inviable lending and the related artifice of constantly-inflating property values, so perhaps something similar needs to happen to the behaviorist bubble. It may already be starting, thanks to the apparently disappointing performance of Zynga's IPO. Still, it's worth remembering that the founders and executives of today's big tech companies have been enjoying the privilege of making liquid parts of their equity on secondary markets, so the tech investment community may not have the same deterrent to bubblethink that the market in general does.

In any case, this trend should remind us that the whole media ecosystem has been built on this promise of high-leverage value derived from the aggregated behaviors of a very large base of patrons who are actually the product of these services rather than their customers. Google and Facebook are the obvious examples, but Zynga derives all of its revenue from 2.2% of its players. The remainder are there as viral marketing infrastructure. Is it even possible to opt out of this situation? Not if you also want to live productively in contemporary society.



Interesting Mechanics?
by spektre1

Hi Ian! Can you comment about game mechanics that you wish designers explored in more depth?

IB: Certainly I have my own tastes. I've said a bit about them here, such as my interest in games that offer political opinion or commentary. And I tend to prefer "systemy" games to narrative games. But at some point, all of that is just a matter of taste. And as the aphorism goes, there's no accounting for taste.

So instead of specific mechanics or styles or genres, what I'd most like to see is more earnestness and more personality in games. I'd like to see more of the creators expressed in the works, not because I want to "receive" the "messages" they are sending, but so that I can feel like the work is not being stamped out by a machine in a factory. Part of that process would have to include more conversation about and framing of games. If you compare games to other forms of creativity, there's just far less deliberate, public discussion of games than there is of painting or novels or films or even sports. Filmmakers go on talk shows, novelists give interviews in magazines. What do game makers do? They send their lowest-common-denominator PR agencies out to put words in the mouths of the enthusiast press.

I'm often more engaged by games with styles I don't particularly like, for example the games of That Game Company or Tale of Tales, because those creators make an effort to frame and personalize the work, to give players a sense of how they might approach them, an invitation to care about the logic of their weird, tiny world. There was a time when Activision shipped their videogames with photos and notes from their creators. True, that was a time when the equivalent of "AAA" games were created by individuals, but the point stands. Indie games have a greater capacity for this sort of thing, thanks to their smaller and more compact teams, but that doesn't make independent games automatically more inviting than AAA games, either (a lot of indie games are starting get that stamped out in the factory feel, too). In the AAA scene, I think Naughty Dog, Valve, PopCap, and Blizzard offer examples of culturing a style and a design sensibility.



Persuasive game elements
by Anonymous Coward

My question revolves around trends in the "gamification" of tasks as used by government, corporations and others. I am curious what you feel about the persuasive elements that may or may not be used in these endeavors. I've noticed this holiday season to some sites seem to have attempted to use some gaming elements in very persuasive ways. I haven't really looked to closely into government sites lately, but I'm sure governments around the world are already starting to adopt them. Understanding the power of this is kind of disturbing, particularly when you see how governments, etc. can abuse this. So my question is what, if any recommendations would you give to social activists looking to develop counter-gaming or ways to identify and inform others about these elements? Given the subtle nature of some of these elements, how difficult a task is it to identify these elements in games?

IB: I've been a pretty vocal critic of gamification, which I think is bullshit, and which I've suggested we reframe as exploitationware. In both of those articles about the trend, I point out that the thing governments and corporations and other organizations like best about gamification is its facility, how rapidly and undisruptively it can be integrated into their current practices. Whereas, when I write about persuasive games and procedural rhetoric and the like, I'm interested in the idea that games might be particularly useful frames for complex issues, precisely because good games make complexity and ambiguity and trade-offs central, embracing them rather than rejecting them. Systems rather than soundbites.

The problem is, most governments and even most social activists don't really want to concede that point—that hard problems are hard, that simple answers are usually wrong, and that solutions are less likely than messy, stochastic progress. Instead, they are more concerned with reproducing the conditions of their own existence. For example, I've written before about the White House's "Apps for Healthy Kids" contest. On first blush, this effort looks like an earnest attempt to create games and software about an issue of great concern and great complexity—health and nutrition. But the results are trite and meaningless, just more bad kids software about choosing the carrot instead of the candy bar. They contain no admission of the entrenched, intractable issues at the heart of healthy eating, like food subsidies, industrial farming, population growth and density, socioeconomics, and so forth. And that's because the White House didn't really launch the contest to solve anything. They launched it to make themselves appear contemporary, engaged with the current "app economy," able to make websites with big form fields.

So, the most important lesson for governments or activists or anyone else is that the subtlety is very rarely there, in fact. So either we have to show the reasons why explanations are insufficient and not just "earnest attempts" at a reasonable solution, or we have to create the subtlety in our own media, be they games or books or blog posts. We have to do that in the games themselves, but also in relation to the medium of games, which we ought to position as a medium against simplicity in the first place.



Places where 'gamification' is good?
by oneiros27

At the closing plenary for the 2011 IA Summit, Cennydd Bowles called out the whole 'UX' (User Experience) community as a whole, in that the role that most of them play is in trying to get people to spend more time on websites and buy more stuff, rather than doing stuff that really improves the world. You've taken a similar stance on 'gamification', but there's at least two groups (Zooniverse [zooniverse.org] and FoldIt [fold.it]) using it for good as they're helping to advance science. Can you think of any other situations where we could use video games to improve the world at a grand scale, and not just simple 'edutainment'?

IB: Sometimes general explanations are helpful, and other times more specific ones are required. So despite everything I just said about the games as windows into complex systems, there are other ways to think about the usefulness of games. In my most recent book, How to Do Things with Videogames , I try to make this case, showing a couple dozen or so different applications of games, from art to tools.

Zooniverse and FoldIt are what you might call "games for work." They are games deployed in the pursuit of specific outcomes in the case of both of those titles, the outcomes are identification and analysis in very large scientific data sets, for which automated (computational) analysis is unlikely to be successful. Some people have used the name "human computation" to describe this process, and Louis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon is probably the best known proponent of it. Others use the term "playbor," and they usually mean it derogatorily.

That mind, here's a question: does human computation in games really improve the world? I know what you're thinking: how could scientific progress not be good? Well, projects like FoldIt and Zooniverse are also massive distributed outsourcing efforts, offering free labor to the research establishment. Sure, you could make a utilitarian argument for why such work is progressive and not exploitative. And it may seem reactionary and dystopian even to intimate that collaborative work might lead to a nightmarish prison state in which tiny doses of satisfaction replace both gainful employment and crafted distraction. Or it may not.

This leads me to my answer, which may disappoint: the world gets improved in fits and starts, in small ways more than in large ones, and thanks to the unseen, unthought infrastructures that undergird it more than the civic or scientific or artistic victories we celebrate in the streets or in the theaters.



Start with a 'Facebook' game or a regular website?
by Anonymous Coward

I lead an enthusiastic clan of RuneScape players, and they tend to have a pretty broad interest in gaming and game development. As the lead programmer/IT guy for the clan, I'm frequently asked about programming and how to go about doing it.

I'm considering setting up a fairly basic Mafia wars type of game for them to expand and update, coded in python/html5 and running on google app engine for simplicity's sake. Python has a huge amount of self learning resources out there, and putting a python project on GAE is my go-to method for getting a project up and running quickly.

Should I encourage them to move into building a Facebook app, or should I encourage them to keep it a standalone website?

On the one hand Facebook gives better potential for expanding their user base, but on the other there's the 30% fee for using Facebook credits and their horrible API documentation. While I want to keep things as straightforward as possible for them, I would like to see their game accumulate a decent number of players so they can show it off.

IB: A pragmatic question! For those of you who haven't developed on the Facebook platform, let me tell you: it is a fucking train wreck. Badly documented (really, the worst documentation I can imagine), works in fits and starts, infrastructure changes constantly, updates roll out weekly, features constantly deprecated and removed, support non-existent, opaque bug and issue reporting. It's a nightmare. It's the Great War of software development, with tangled barbed wire and constant cross fire.

But, in exchange for tolerating that terror, you get access to some 800 million people and the promise that the small fraction of those you can reach will bring their friends. The 30% take for Facebook Credits is a lot compared to a credit card transaction fee, but the entire system is automated and works without any need for special merchant accounts or fears of PayPal retribution. Facebook is a piece of infrastructure, and the benefits it offers as infrastructure are undeniable even if the platform's viral free-for-all days are over.

Which to choose? It sounds to me like you can get your project working without Facebook, and then consider strapping in the social and payment features as you need them. That makes you less reliant on the platform, but also allows you to explore its benefits for your situation, if indeed there are any. In any case, I think being reliant on Facebook is a terrible situation for anybody to be in, whether they are a large company or independent creator.



Tabletop Gaming?
by Anonymous Coward

Is there a bridge between tabletop gaming and video gaming?

I design tabletop games and RPGs, and sometimes when I'm designing something I realize it would all work better as a video game. Do you feel the same way sometimes when you're designing real time games to want to make them turn based or tabletop games? Is there a link between the two industries in a professional way? Can workers from either industry cross over?

IB: There are a few different ways to think about videogames. One situates them in the long history of games, from folk games through wargames through tabletop games on to videogames, and to find similarities in design, use, and application. Another places them in the history of computing, asking how videogames relate to other kinds of software and hardware media for productivity and expression. Another compares them to creative media like literature, film, art, theater, opera, puppetry, and so forth, finding opportunities for adaptation across material form, or obstacles to such adaptation. Another asks how videogames participate in cultural traditions of play, like festival, conflict, sport, and ritual. These are just some of the possible vantage points from which one could seek to understand or design games. And of course, they are not mutually exclusive.

There is a fairly strong tradition of inspiration between tabletop games and computer games. The relationship between Dungeons & Dragons and certain genres of videogames, especially adventure, RPG, and MMOs is well-known. But tabletop wargames (like those published by SPI and Avalon Hill) also inspired many computer game designers, as did the type of strategy games sometimes called German-style board games. Games like Carcassonne and Puerto Rico used to be unheard of among the general public, but thanks to the success of Settlers of Catan, thoughtful tabletop games are becoming increasingly popular, even in this age of computerization.

All of which is just to say that there are a number of successful game designers who take the tabletop-to-computer spectrum as their primary creative axis. Rainer Knizia has created many successful tabletop games as well as videogames (many of which were adaptations of his board game designs). Designers like Greg Costikyan, Brenda Brathwaite, Eric Zimmerman, Nick Fortugno, and Frank Lantz are also frequent players and designers of other types of games — not just tabletop but in some cases large-scale "big games" played in urban spaces, and installation games played in museums or galleries. And many other developers in the videogame industry also play and make non-digital games in their spare time.

There's also a technique called paper prototyping advocated by designers like Raph Koster and Stone Librande, which draws a strong material connection between tabletop and computer game design. Designer and USC professor Tracy Fullerton's book Game Design Workshop is based on this method, and a game design workshop is held every year at the Game Developers Conference that uses non-digital materials exclusively. So, in short, there is a lot of cross-over, even if that crossover isn't always expressed through published tabletop games.



What do you think of James Franco?
Anonymous Coward

I understand you may be working on some sort of joint project with him in the academic world. Is he the rockstar that he appears to be?

IB: Perhaps one day I will be fortunate enough to have James Franco nap in my classes. Until then, I'll have to be satisfied to click on his likeness in the post-cowpocalypse version of Cow Clicker.



Re:Yo, Ian!
by Hatta

I actually read your book Racing the Beam. Fantastic book. The only thing I really want to know is when we can expect the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis to get the same treatment.

IB: Thanks for reading! For those who haven't yet, Racing the Beam is a book I wrote with Nick Montfort about the ways the hardware design of the Atari Video Computer System (VCS, aka the Atari 2600) influenced game design. The book was the first in a series Nick and I edit called Platform Studies [http://platformstudies.com]. Books in the series discuss the relationship between the hardware and software design of computer platforms and the creative works produced on those systems. These books are meant to be technically detailed but in an explanatory and accessible way, one that doesn't require any particular background to read.

We have a number of new books lined up in the series. Two books will be published this spring: Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform by Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal, and The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, by Jimmy Maher. Other books at various stages of progress do include the NES, SNES, Flash, and a number of other more esoteric platforms. We're actively looking for more books and authors, so if any readers here have projects that match our vision for the series, please get in touch. Keep in mind that we're interested in computer platforms of all kinds, not just videogame systems.

Nemesisghost writes "Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), a major opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act has announced he plans to call a hearing where Tech industry representatives will get to speak out about how legislation like SOPA will negatively affect the internet. From the article 'Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has called a hearing that will bring more voices from the technology industry to Washington, D.C. to discuss how legislation such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would affect the Internet. On Jan. 18, industry representatives that include Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures; Lanham Napier, the CEO of Rackspace Hosting; and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com, will testify before Congress.'"

Frankie70 writes "SlideShare has ditched Adobe Flash technology entirely, and rebuilt its website using the HTML5 markup language. This means that SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device, from iPads to iPhones to Android devices and beyond."

AmyVernon writes "Most computers today can't support gigabit connections and current Wi-Fi networks can't offer those speeds either. The first trial of Sonic.Net's gigabit network was a speed test on a generic laptop that showed off 420 Mbps down; the laptop couldn't handle a full gig. Plus, few applications need those speeds. It's hard to justify such a huge investment in a network that will have few subscribers and few applications that need it. Of course, that can change, and then these networks will be vital. This story has a good analysis of where things stand and what has to change."

bonch writes "Pundits have been analyzing Google's Motorola acquisition since its announcement. Dan Lyons, formerly known as Fake Steve Jobs, says Google never cared for the Nortel patents, and that they drove the bidding price up intentionally while negotiating to buy Motorola. This idea is questioned by MG Siegler, who believes buying Motorola for $12.5 billion — almost two years' worth of Google's annual profits — is an act of desperation. John Gruber notes that Motorola was threatening to wage a patent war against other Android partners during the time they would have been negotiating with Google, and that Motorola likely forced them into an expensive buyout rather than a patent license agreement. Google may have also been motivated by the fact that Microsoft was reportedly pursuing a Motorola buyout." S&P researchers apparently weren't a fan of the deal.

An anonymous reader writes "One version of new spectrum legislation poses a threat to unlicensed wireless, which is where technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth operate. Your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies are safe, but the future of the proposed White Spaces broadband also known as Super Wi-Fi, and new unlicensed spectrum is in doubt under the draft bill. And hiding in those unlicensed airwaves could be the next Wi-Fi. 'The draft bill says that in order for unlicensed spectrum to win out over a licensed bidder, an entity or a group of people would have to collectively bid more than a licensed bidder would. This would be akin to having a group of people who want more unlicensed airwaves going up against Verizon or AT&T. As a reminder Verizon spent $9.63 billion on spectrum licenses in the last auction while AT&T spent $6.64 billion. The legislators may have envisioned Google playing a heroic role here and thus enabling the government to make some extra money in a spectrum auction as opposed to just letting such potentially lucrative spectrum become a public radio panacea regulated by the FCC.'"

Oooskar writes "SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), a technique invented by NASA, defines the concept of building a 3D-map of the environment and simultaneously computing the position within it. Based on SLAM, Swedish startup 13th Lab has implemented real-time sub-centimeter local 3D-positioning by using only the sensors, most importantly the camera, already present in most mobile devices (demo video). The technology will be made available as a software platform for developers (sign up for beta). A first application demonstrating the technology has just been released for the iPad2. The technology should be available on other devices with similar computational power soon."

wasimkadak writes with this excerpt from GigaOM: "According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to 'a fate worse than death,' and the only way out is 'bite the bullet and rewrite everything.' Not that it's necessarily Facebook's fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network's predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions."

macwhizkid writes "I'm traveling to Canada for a week in July with youth group, and need a way to post blog updates on the trip and send back photos. I'll be staying on an island accessible only by boat, so a hard-wired connection is out of the question. I have a Verizon voice + data plan, and I've heard all the horror stories of multi-thousand dollar international data roaming charges. What I'd like to do is get 1-2 GB of data (5 GB would be great) to use on a Canadian provider's network for a reasonable fee (say, less than $100 total) as a wireless hotspot set-up. I have both a CDMA iPhone and a GSM iPad, so I really just need a micro-SIM or a way to register the IMIE. It appears that both Rogers and Bell offer 'pay as you go' data plans (Rogers has a particularly attractive iPad option), but there are conflicting reports as to whether a U.S. credit card can be used to buy service. I can't believe I'm the first U.S. citizen to want mobile data in Canada. So, has anyone done this successfully? Is there another option I'm not considering?"

itwbennett writes "The LA Times reports that Hulu, which is jointly owned by Comcast, News Corp., Disney, and Providence Equity, has retained investment banks Guggenheim Partners and Morgan Stanley to help them find a buyer. Yahoo is said to have expressed an interest, but not made a firm offer. But what might this sale mean for users? GigaOm says we can expect to see more ads. But there are also 'indications that free Hulu users will have to be a cable subscriber in order to watch shows the day after they air,' says blogger Peter Smith."

bizwriter writes "Facebook has done well with the Friendster patents and patent applications that it acquired. Just last week, a patent application for passing personal info between users based on degrees of separation became public. Now, thanks to the Friendster IP purchase, Facebook pretty much owns the technology for publicly identity-tagging digital media of any sort in a database."

Approximately one trillion readers wrote in to tell us that there is a big rumor that Microsoft is buying Skype. This follows an earlier rumor that the suitor was Facebook. Unsurprisingly many people are already wondering what it would mean for Linux users of the popular VoIP platform. Many major publications are running versions of the story.

h3rr d0kt0r writes "A recent decision of an Italian court could spark considerable discussion over the liability of a search engines. The court actually ordered Yahoo! to remove any link to any site containing unlawful copies of a movie. Under EU Directives 2003/31, liability of search engines is not regulated (save for caching activities). In the case brought to court regarding the film About Elly, it was not the caching activities of Yahoo! that were questioned (or any content hosted on Yahoo!'s servers), but the mere fact that searching for the film made it possible to reach websites allowing the streaming or downloading of the movie (actually, illegal sites got a better ranking then the official one)."

ColoradoAuthor writes "The horrific earthquake and the ensuing tsunami in Japan have caused widespread damage to undersea communications, according to data collected by telecom industry sources. Initially, it was thought that the damage to the cables that connect Japan and Asia to each other and other parts of the world was limited, but new data shows the extent of the problems."

adeelarshad82 writes "This year's Mobile World Congress was the stage for dozens of new tablets. Unfortunately, Android Honeycomb tablets lacked presence; amongst the top Android tablets demonstrated at the show, only the Motorola Xoom was running Honeycomb, whereas others were running either Android 2.3 or older versions. Moreover, most of the top apps announced for the OS were not new, just reworked. Gigaom may believe that Honeycomb tablets will be iPad's true competition, but progress has been slow, in my opinion. Honeycomb was born too early, primarily out pressure from the iPad getting a one year headstart in the tablet market."

itwbennett writes "Last week Google took a page from Apple's book and pulled the Arcade by Kongregate app from the Android Market for violating its terms of service. In particular, the part that forbids distributing 'any Product whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution of Products outside of the Market.' As Kongregate's Jim Greer explained to Joystiq, the app is essentially a custom web browser that loads in a Flash game from the mobile version of Kongregate. Plus, it will cache the game so you can play offline. And this may be the feature that got it yanked, speculates Ryan Kim at GigaOm."

miller60 writes "Amazon Web Services has rolled out Elastic Beanstalk, a free feature which automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. AWS execs tell GigaOm that Beanstalk represents a move up to Platform-as-a-Service and is designed 'to address the idea of vendor lock-in and inflexibility that commonly afflicts other platforms for application development.' Meanwhile, Amazon rival Rackspace Hosting has extended its cloud platform to its European data centers, opening the service to customers bound by data protection regulations, and says it now has more than 100,000 cloud customers."

Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that millions of Skype phone users worldwide couldn't make calls or were dropped in mid-conversation because of a network connection failure that began about 9 AM Wednesday PST. 'For a communications system this large to go down, it's almost unheard of,' says Charles S. Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst. 'Usually when phone lines are disrupted, the blackout is confined to a specific geographical area. This is worldwide.' In theory, Skype, which is based on peer-to-peer networking technology, shouldn't see an outage, but that is not really the case — the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication and linking to the traditional phone networks. 'The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business,' writes Om Malik. 'If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage.'"

Bruce Perens writes "When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a bang: Acacia's patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat's next tangle with Acacia being kept secret, and how is a Texas court helping to keep it that way? Could the outcome have placed Red Hat in violation of the open-source licenses on its own product?"

itwbennett writes "Today, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said in an interview with Om Malik that the iPad has been good to his company because many people are opting for the Wi-Fi only iPad and pairing it with Sprint's 3G/4G Overdrive MiFi device (which the company sells with a special Overdrive case for the iPad) rather than choosing an iPad 3G that is limited to AT&T's network."

destinyland writes "Reports are surfacing of a Facebook-backed smartphone running Google's Android system, built by INQ (who also manufactures a phone for Skype). GigaOm's Om Malik says he's been aware of the project 'for quite some time,' and Bloomberg News (linked above) reported that Facebook will release two AT&T smartphones in 2011, first in Europe and then in America. (Adding that 25% of Facebook users access the social networking site with their wireless devices.) " Whether it's pure semantics or pure misdirection, as of yesterday, Facebook acknowledges work with INQ, but describes the collaboration as customization, rather than a phone of their own.

dwightk writes "According to a lawsuit brought by Skyhook Wireless, Google allegedly forced Motorola, among other Android handset makers, to use Google's own location services instead of alternatives like Skyhook's. Quoting the lawsuit: 'In complete disregard of its common-law and statutory obligations, and in direct opposition to its public messaging encouraging open innovation, Google wielded its control over the Android operating system ... to force device manufacturers to use its technology rather than that of Skyhook, to terminate contractual obligations with Skyhook, and to otherwise force device manufacturers to sacrifice superior end user experience with Skyhook by threatening directly or indirectly to deny timely and equal access to evolving versions of the Android operating system and other Google mobile applications.'" John Gruber points out another interesting excerpt from the complaint regarding Google's procedure for determining Android compliance, which includes what Skyhook calls an "amorphous outline of additional, non-standardized requirements" that "effectively gives Google the ability to arbitrarily deem any software, feature or function 'non-compatible.'"

Julie188 writes "Target will begin selling Facebook's virtual currency as gift cards on September 5, becoming the first brick-and-mortar retailer to do so. Facebook Credit gift cards will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations at the retailer's 1,750 stores. That's right, you can now spend real dollars to get fake ones so you can buy imaginary items for games like FarmVille, Bejeweled and 150 other FB games or apps. If that interests you, please contact me. I have some swamp land in Florida I'd like to show you."

jamie writes "A new site called Digg In The Future - created by 17-year-old high-school student Raj Vir as a research project - says that its algorithm can predict with 63-percent accuracy what shared links are going to make it to the front page of the Digg website. (Does it allow for brigades?)"

An anonymous reader writes "Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr." For visual learners: this earlier story at GigaOM explains the system with a diagram.

1sockchuck writes "Facebook's 400 million users spend more than 16 billion minutes on the site every day, and view 1 million photos every second. That's prompted massive growth in the social network's infrastructure, which now encompasses more than 60,000 servers. Facebook's Tom Cook discussed how the company's operations team manages that growth in a presentation last week at the O"Reilly Velocity conference (video). The next day at Structure 2010, Facebook Vice President of Operations Jonathan Heiliger said server and chip makers have 'come a long way' in supporting cloud platforms since he bashed them last year."

1sockchuck writes "Stealthy startup SeaMicro has unveiled its new low-power server, which incorporates 512 Intel Atom CPUs, a load balancer and interconnection fabric into a 10u server. SeaMicro, which received a $9.3 million government grant from DOE to develop its technology, says its server uses less than 2 kilowatts of energy — suggesting that a single rack with four SeaMicro units and 2,048 CPUs could draw just 8 kilowatts of power. Check out the technical overview, plus additional coverage from Wired, GigaOm and VentureBeat."

techclicker sends word on the ambitious plans of Allied Fiber to disrupt the long-haul business in the US. The company is embarking on the first phase of a planned six-phase build-out of dark fiber, towers, and co-lo facilities ringing the US. The first three phases are budgeted at $670M; the last three are not yet laid out in detail (announcement, PDF). Phase 1 is scheduled for completion in 2010. Allied's business model of selling wholesale bandwidth to all comers is in sharp contrast to that of incumbents such as AT&T, who won't sell backhaul to potential competitors. "Allied is deploying a 432-count, long-haul cable coupled with the 216-count, short-haul cable that will be a composite of Single-Mode and Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted fibers. Allied Fiber has implemented a new, multi-duct design for intermediate access to the long-haul fiber duct through a parallel short-haul fiber duct all along the route. This enables all points between the major cities, including wireless towers and rural networks, to gain access to the dark fiber. In addition, the Allied Fiber neutral colocation facilities, located approximately every 60 miles along the route, accommodate and encourage a multi-tenant interconnection environment integrated with fiber that does not yet exist in the United States on this scale."

ZWilder writes "Remember 'Clippy', the annoying anthropomorphic paper clip foisted upon unsuspecting users of Office? Well Microsoft has taken the concept behind Clippy and 'turned the dial up to 11' with its new, even more intrusive animated life-coach, known as 'Guardian Angel.' Patented in 2006, Guardian Angel is 'an intelligent personalized agent' that 'monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user.' Like a manlier Fairy Godmother. Or a similarly omniscient HAL from '2001: A Space Oddysey.'"

CWmike writes "Verizon Wireless announced on Monday that customers will soon be able to charge up to $25 a month in online purchases to their accounts. The service, based on technology created by Danal, will require text messaging-enabled phones, and that purchases be made from Verizon-approved online stores, which include game sites and social networks. It will require that customers click a BilltoMobile button during checkout from a participating online Web site. Users will be asked to input their mobile numbers and mobile billing zip codes for authentication. Once the user is authenticated, a one-time passcode will sent to his or her phone. The number is then input into the online checkout window. At that point, the transaction is complete and the charge will appear on the customer's monthly phone bill. GigaOm writes, 'If Verizon can get people accustomed to putting in their phone numbers instead of credit cards while shopping online, then it could own a critical element in building an application and services platform that spans the wired and wireless world ... Much like Apple has such a large stake in the mobile application and commerce space today because it has millions of credit cards in iTunes, Verizon could be expanding its own payments information for a similar goal.'"

CWmike writes "Verizon Wireless announced on Monday that customers will soon be able to charge up to $25 a month in online purchases to their accounts. The service, based on technology created by Danal, will require text messaging-enabled phones, and that purchases be made from Verizon-approved online stores, which include game sites and social networks. It will require that customers click a BilltoMobile button during checkout from a participating online Web site. Users will be asked to input their mobile numbers and mobile billing zip codes for authentication. Once the user is authenticated, a one-time passcode will sent to his or her phone. The number is then input into the online checkout window. At that point, the transaction is complete and the charge will appear on the customer's monthly phone bill. GigaOm writes, 'If Verizon can get people accustomed to putting in their phone numbers instead of credit cards while shopping online, then it could own a critical element in building an application and services platform that spans the wired and wireless world ... Much like Apple has such a large stake in the mobile application and commerce space today because it has millions of credit cards in iTunes, Verizon could be expanding its own payments information for a similar goal.'"

andylim writes "Separate teams at Oxford university and Zentium, a South Korean company, are working on next-gen augmented reality solutions, which make it possible to fuse real and 3D computer-generated visuals on the fly using mobile phones. The team at Oxford university has named its solution Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM) and it has licensed its technology to QderoPateo LLC, which has ambitious plans to grow the mobile augmented reality market and create an augmented reality search and gaming engine running for its 'Ouidoo' smart phone. Zentium's solution is called D-Track and is being used to develop the first markerless mobile augmented reality pet, called iKat. D-Track's mapping technology is very similar to PTAM and allows your phone to recognise the space in front of the camera and create an appropriate space for an augmented reality object or pet."

Google has launched a competitor or counterpart to Microsoft's Photosynth, which employs user-contributed photos of much-photographed sites to supplement the street-level view in an immersive way. Google's offering is called simply Navigate through User Photos, and unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash. This YouTube video (also embedded at the link above) offers a quick tour of the new feature, which can use photos uploaded to Panoramico, Flickr, and Picasa.

ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"

ruphus13 writes "While open source companies are legion, their acquisitions by proprietary source companies may cause concern for the viability of projects. Can a FOSS project 'survive' an acquisition? According to the article posing that question: 'One has to ask, though, how healthy it is for increasingly important open-source platforms and applications to come under the wing of huge, proprietary software companies. Probably the best example to cite on that topic is the ongoing car crash that is Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems...Sun Micrososytems is one of only three big, US public companies focused almost entirely on open source. If it gets swallowed up, that will leave just Red Hat and Novell. Open-source pundits are predicting that small, promising open-source players will be snapped up by bigger fish this year. And Google's relationship to Android gets ever murkier as it sinks its commercial hooks deeper into the platform, billing its own offerings as superphones relative to other Android phones.'"

Many readers are submitting stories related to Google Chrome OS. ruphus13 points out a GigaOm opinion piece about how, if users end up rejecting its current cloud-only focus, the nascent OS may succeed as a netbook secondary operating system alongside Windows (in company with secondaries based on other Linux flavors, including Android). Engadget reviews a Chrome OS on a USB key setup that is claimed to offer eye-opening performance compared to running under virtualization. And an anonymous reader notes the 0.1 beta release of ChromeShell, which installs a "Chrome OS-like" environment that boots to the Chrome browser in ~3 seconds; users can switch to Windows later as desired.

ruphus13 writes "In a sign that ebooks are rising in popularity, a recent survey by mobile analytics company Flurry revealed that users may be using the iPhone for more intellectual pursuits, and not just the visual sizzle. The 'book-related' apps on the iPhone overtook games in terms of new apps released. According to the post, 'Book-related apps saw an upsurge in launches in September ... So much so that book-related applications overtook games in the App Store as a percentage of all released apps. The trend isn't an aberration. In October, one out of every five new applications launching on the iPhone was a book ... from August 2008 to the same month in 2009, more apps were released in the 'games' category than any other and, as a result, the iPhone (and iPod touch) became a new handheld gaming platform, one that impacted the Nintendo DS. '"

An anonymous reader writes "The MiFi Mobile Router has been getting a lot of positive reviews these days, for combining a cellular modem, WiFi radio and battery pack in a portable device. But playing with a beta release of a software based wireless router for Windows 7 has me wondering if there's any future to these dedicated, multi-radio routers. Is the future that every PC should be a router? Or is that a job best left to a cell phone?" I just drove across the country and back with a MiFi (using Verizon's service, which was not zippy but very reliable); it strikes me that being nicely cross-platform and not requiring a laptop with its own cell-network connection is a serious advantage for the MiFi or any similar device.

ruphus13 writes "In a recent talk at the Churchill Club, Michael Dell addressed several topics, including the fact that Windows 7 is poised to take advantage of the upgrade cycle. Dell has always been a strong MS OEM ally and it is now hoping to cash in again from the impending upgrades. From the post: 'Dell made plain several times that he sees the installed base of technology as very old, and sees a coming "refresh cycle" for which he has high hopes. "The latest generation of chips from Intel is strong, particularly Nehalem," he said, adding, "and Windows 7 is on its way." (The operating system arrives Oct. 22nd, although Microsoft's large-volume licensees are already getting it.) He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old. "I've been using Windows 7 for a long time now," he said, "and if you get the latest processor technology and Office 2010 with it, you will love your PC again. It's a dramatic improvement."'"

lostinbrave notes laboratory work that could lead to long-haul network cables capable of exceeding 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. "Alcatel-Lucent said that scientists at Bell Labs have set an optical transmission record that could deliver data about 10 times faster than current undersea cables, resulting in speeds of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. This translates to the equivalent of about 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer, or sending about 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. ... The transmissions were not just faster, they were accomplished over a network whose repeaters are 20 percent farther apart than commonly maintained in such networks, which could decrease the costs of deploying such a network."

Mirell writes "Time Warner Cable has recently changed their Terms of Service, so that they are allowed to charge you at their discretion via consumption-based billing. They were shot down a few months ago after raising the wrath of many subscribers and several politicians. Now they're trying again, but since they make exclusions for their own voice and video not to count against the cap, this could draw the attention of the FCC."

Pablo Martinez-Almeida writes "Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner confirms that new entrants in the browser market are raising awareness on the mainstream Internet community about the availability of alternatives to the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. 'How has the emergence of WebKit and Chrome changed the market for you? JvT: The effect of Chrome so far has been 20 percent more downloads every day. It's fairly logical when you think about it, because the biggest hurdle we have is all those people that don't realize there's an alternative in the market. Now, with the launch of Chrome there's focus on the choice of browsers in the market.'

wjamesau writes "What's the deal with broadband caps, like Comcast's 250GB/month data transfer limit, which goes into effect tomorrow? Om Malik at GigaOM has a whitepaper laying out the facts and fiction about Comcast's short-sightedness (which other carriers are mimicking), and how it will impact the future Internet: 'Given the growth trend due to consumers' changes in content consumption, today's power users are tomorrow's average users. By 2012, the bill for data access is projected to be around $215 per month.' Ouch." The white paper is embedded at the link using Scribd; for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.

Gamasutra has a feature discussing some of the extremely common trends in current game design. Many publishers are looking at multi-player content and downloadable additions as necessities, rather than luxuries, for modern titles. Also on the rise is a focus on micro-payments; offering small-scale games, updates, and add-ons for a smaller fee than a full game. Similar to these is the subscription-based model, which Scott Jennings of NCSoft recently called "an arms race that few can even hope to compete in, much less win." From Gamasutra: "Games relying on micropayments are founded on a somewhat different logic. Like fast gaming, these games are conceived to be immediate hands-on experiences, but are also designed to entice the players to deepen their experience of the game by purchasing affordable additional components. This economic model is fast-growing in Asia, and we can expect to witness an important impact on the west — perhaps even a major one. The design for such games will have to be thoroughly adapted, even for established genres such as racing games or shooters."

Raindeer writes "While the Broadband Bandits of the US are contemplating bandwidth caps between 5 gigabyte and 40 gigabyte per month, the largest telco in Japan has gone ahead and laid down some heavy caps for Japan's broadband addicts. From now on, if you upload more than 30 gigabyte per day, your network connection may be disconnected. Just think of it ... if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterday's wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems."

astwon sends us to a blog post by parallel computing pioneer Bill McColl speculating that, with the cooling of Web 2.0, parallelism may be a hot new area for entrepreneurs and investors. (Take with requisite salt grains as he is the founder of a Silicon Valley company in this area.) McColl suggests a few other upcoming "new things," such as Saas as an appliance and massive memory systems. Worth a read.

Chris Albrecht writes "The bippedy-bippedy-bippedy sound you hear when using 1-800-GOOG-411 is actually a senior voice designer at Google. (Here's the sound.) The technical term for that noise is the 'fetch audio,' and it's more complicated to design than you'd think. For the first time, the voice of GOOG-411 talks about how he came up with it, how important that sound is, and how people now ask him to 'perform' it."