Mass Disappointment
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on March 13th, 2012
Interactivity is the watchword for modern day gaming, and the ability to impact a storyline is central the success of any sort of narrative-based game play. After all, the whole point of video gaming is to imbue oneself with powers beyond anything available in real life, and then plunge into a fantastic world and make a difference (alternately, the point of some video games is to get certain numbers of cards or to click on a cow a certain number of times – but I digress).
That’s the reason Skyrim and other immersive RPGs have been successful, and it’s a big part of why Mass Effect 3 proved to be such a success at first, investing its players with the power to influence the course of galactic history.
At least, that was the story we were sold.
As it turns out, although one’s actions do have an impact on the final ending, the great sweep of history is largely unimpressed by the player’s decisions. While this may be more realistic, historical accuracy is rarely the reason people purchase video games. It’s particularly hurtful in the context of Mass Effect, which makes a point of demonstrating just how crucial and impactful every player decision might be, for hours and hours of game play and in repeated and forceful ways.
It’s hard to know what Bioware was thinking, although the standard (and most likely) explanation is that there will be downloadable content which will elaborate on the story. Or, as you might call it if you were being brutally honest, a “blatant cash grab.”
Understandably, fans are actively rebelling, organizing a campaign to get Bioware to change the ending as it stands without having to pay for additional DLC. The reaction is visceral, and no wonder – Mass Effect 3 is one of the most compelling games ever created, drawing the player in and fastening its story in his or her mind for hours and hours, right up until… a massive disappointment. One can only hope Bioware is paying attention.
Anonymous Takes a Hit
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on March 7th, 2012
Anonymous has been leading the authorities on a merry chase for years now, striking targets with impunity and taking down major corporations, even internet security firms who, you would expect, would have a little bit more security in place. Despite constant activity and plenty of exposure in the media, at times even openly talking to the police and journalists, it seemed that authorities were powerless to hit back against the group.
Well, no more. Today, international agencies arrested several of what they term the “leading members” of LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous that was responsible for some of the biggest hacks pulled off in recent months. Perhaps most notorious was the hack of Stratfor, in which millions of emails and god only knows how many credit card numbers were “liberated” by the LulzSec team and released in conjunction with WikiLeaks’ journalistic partners. It seemed nothing could stop them, and indeed, it wasn’t careful detective work or shoddy attempts to cover the trail that ultimately did in the hackers; it was betrayal from within.
The self-proclaimed “leader” of the group (I say self-proclaimed because leaders and Anonymous go together like oil and repulsive force made entirely of anti-oil particles that spontaneously explode at the mere suggestion there might be oil around) has apparently been working for the government for months, feeding authorities information about his collaborators and setting them up for an arrest to give the government the appearance of making progress on their various cases. I wouldn’t particularly want to be that guy once Anonymous decides to punish him, which is likely to be immediately.
Will this stop Anonymous? Unlikely. While it may scare off some people, most of the Anons were well aware of the risks and actively decided to pursue their actions anyway. The biggest risk to Anonymous is the implantation of a culture of distrust. Fortunately for them, the isolated, no-leaders mindset of the organization as a whole offers a form of moat to individual actors, ensuring a cellular structure almost by default. It’s likely that the strikes against major corporations will continue.
Show Off Your Skills
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on March 2nd, 2012
LinkedIn was one of the big hits when it went public, and for good cause. The site enables professionals and experts to network readily and communicate easily with others in their field, a useful service and an outstanding marketing demographic to capture. They key distinction between LinkedIn and sites like Monster.com is that it purports to be a social network for building credentials and a reputation, not just a resume host. And it works – people rely on LinkedIn for making and maintaining connections. There aren’t any appreciable competitors to the site.
Or at least there weren’t. Now, though, TastyLabs – the folks who built Jig, and including many of the people behind Delicious – are putting together something they call Skills.to, a skill based social network that enables users to cite their work experience as a constellation of skills which they can offer. Importantly, it also allows viewers to hunt for people with skills they may be looking for. Further, users can endorse one another as being accurate with their skill sets and competent in their chosen skills.
The TastyLabs team has big dreams for Skills.to, including the option to port the skill sets into other social media environments to make it easy to show what you’re offering the world (and, conversely, easy to find what other people are offering). With decent implementation – something we’re likely to see from TastyLabs – this could prove a major value for users who wish to establish credibility with the world at large and build a client base and a network, or even just communicate with like-minded fellows. It also represents a very decent market for advertising sales – people will be volunteering exactly what sort of work they routinely do and are good at, meaning it will become extremely easy to target advertising to suit their chosen industry and skill set. That’s a big win for advertisers as well as consumers – getting targeted ads may seem invasive, but a lot of the problem with advertising is the ubiquity of pointless crap. Filter that out so you’re only getting ads for things you use, and it really becomes just another form of search.
A Privacy Bill of Rights?
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on February 24th, 2012
Privacy is always a hot issue on the ever-morphing World Wide Web, but recent months have seen particularly fierce storms erupt. Whether it’s Facebook’s ongoing privacy concerns or Google’s new privacy policy, people have been up in arms over perceived privacy transgressions. The rapid adoption of mobile technology for consumer use has made the problem much more prevalent, as technological gains have outstripped defense measures and as smart phones increasingly intrudes on people’s day to day lives, producing a massive new market for advertisers and spambots.
Yeah, we saw that....
Now, the Obama administration is set to add some fuel to the fire with a proposed “privacy bill of rights” directly relating to internet vendors and services. The bill would be enforced by the FTC, and is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate new and emerging internet technologies as they come on-line. And even before the bill passes – which, given the way the Republican-controlled Congress has been working since 2010, it probably won’t even come to a vote – the FTC is aiming to enforce some of the provisions through self-regulatory means.
And the industry is listening – Google, Mozilla, Apple, and most of the other big players in the internet services industry have accepted a “Do Not Track” button proposal for their browsers. Similar proposals have either been resisted by the major players, or embraced in such a half-hearted manner that they simply couldn’t be effective. For example, Firefox allows for a “Do Not Track” button, but with no standardization across advertising platforms, it has been limited in its successes. By forming a coalition and agreeing to a standard method of approach, the industry faces a much larger chance of success – and, as I’m sure they’re hoping, they may also stave off especially stringent legislation by demonstrating their willingness to self-regulate.
Tesla Model X – It’s AWESOME
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on February 17th, 2012
Electric cars are shaping up to be big business, with substantial offerings from all the major auto manufacturers. That makes sense – as gas prices climb and awareness of the damage caused by global warming rises, consumers are becoming eager for vehicles that provide the same level of convenience without the associated costs (both financial and environmental). But there is only one company that is offering a purely electric lineup – and that lineup is expanding in all the right directions.
I’m speaking, of course, about Tesla, maker of the extremely well-regarded electric Roadster. Tesla is managed by Elon Musk, billionaire investor and inventor with an eye on big dreams, and it’s clear that he’s managing Tesla with the same panache. Tesla’s big offering this year is the Model S, a sedan designed for a much larger user base than the elite Roadster, and the car has enough pre-orders in place to generate some healthy revenue for the company.
But the real excitement is around the recently announced successor model, the Model X. This is truly a vehicle for the masses, designed for the typical American lifestyle with plenty of range, plenty of space, and plenty of sex appeal. It’s modeled after traditional SUVs or minivans, at least in the sense that it is designed with similar capacities in mind. But the design breaks plenty of new ground, and not just the electric motor. The Tesla drive train is an incredible advance over standard models, and the absence of all the pieces affiliated with internal combustion engines gave Tesla plenty of room to put in, well, room – as Musk amply demonstrated by standing up inside the car during early showings. Sleek gull-wing back doors add a charming and unique touch to the vehicle, but just as importantly, they give you plenty of room to open the loading doors, even in confined spaces.
The unveiling was a big hit with consumers, who swamped the Tesla Motors website to take a look at pictures and blog posts about the car – not to mention reservations for the vehicle, which rang up $40 million worth of reservations in the first few days.
You might even say the reaction has been… electric.
Internet = Saved!
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on February 11th, 2012
The internet has come a long way from the original World Wide Web of basic HTML, Geocities and 2400 bps modems. Today’s internet features vastly higher data transfer rates, full 3D graphics, and interactive features the likes of which early internet pioneers could only dream.
It was those interactive features that recently came under assault by that most miserable of internet enemies, a patent troll. In this case, the man’s name is Michael Doyle, and his company – Eola Technologies – has laid claim to the patents behind virtually every interactive technology you’ll find on websites, from mouse-overs to streaming video. You know, everything that makes up the modern web.
If found to be valid, the claim would mean essentially every major business involved in the internet would owe licensing fees to Eola, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. Needless to say, that would be fiscal catastrophe for smaller firms and startups, and would even impact the bottom line of big corporations like Google and Yahoo (two key defendants in the case).
So critical was the case that the defendants pulled in an all-star cast of witnesses to testify on their behalf against Eola’s claim, including Tim Berner’s Lee, who is widely acknowledged to be the inventor of the World Wide Web. That’s pretty impressive for a court case hosted in the little town of Tyler, Texas.
You can think this guy for the internet. Again.
Fortunately, Tyler’s jurors are a wise bunch. The case was decided today and it was an unequivocal rout for Eola and Michael Doyle. Oh, they’re certain to appeal – they have millions of dollars riding on the decision and they must think they have a case – but this is a critical blow in their quest, and although a ruling in Doyle’s favour would not have killed the internet, it would have crippled startups looking to use interactive features on their sites and put a major barrier in the way of innovation on the web. By contrast, Berners-Lee gave away the rights to his innovations – and as a result, we have the internet.
Path Gets It Right
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on February 9th, 2012
Path is a rapidly growing blogging service and ecosystem designed around the ideals of simplicity and ease of use. The company has an eye on families and users who may be less sophisticated than traditional bloggers. Everything is designed to be as easy and as automated as possible, so the service makes as much sense to Grandma as it does to you.
Unfortunately, that quest for automation and ease of use got taken a little too far. Path was recently busted for automatically uploading the stored contact information in your iPhone to its own servers. Understandably, people were right pissed about this, particularly when it came to light that the equivalent Path Android app utilized that feature only as an opt-in.
Path responded by stating (probably accurately) that the information was used only to improve the friend finding tools within the Path ecosystem and that all data was transmitted using encryption and stored on secure servers (whatever that’s worth these days), but nonetheless immediately launched an opt-in variant for the iPhone. Still, users demanded to know what would become of their already uploaded data.
Path reacted exactly right by meeting these concerns head on. It deleted the data entirely from its servers and apologized strongly and profusely for its actions, without trying to weasel out or pass the blame. This is a tough thing for any company to do, but also a very necessary response to such a breach of trust. Path management also made clear that if you do decide to opt-in, they have made it very easy to opt back out in the future if you change your mind and also indicated that this would once again mean a complete deletion of ALL contact data stored on their servers.
While it’s possible that some privacy hawks may not be satisfied by Path’s response, it’s hard to imagine any way the company could have handled the situation better. Nobody is perfect, and a rapid apology followed immediately by complete corrective action is more than most complaints ever garner. Path deserves respect for its response.
Wolfram Alpha Goes Pro
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on February 8th, 2012
When you think of search, you think of Google, Bing, and Yahoo – probably in that order. But there are many alternative search engines – Dogpile, for example – that offer various ways of standing out from the crowd, whether it be enhanced privacy controls, meta-searches through other browsers, or just Nyancats floating over top of the screen (no, really).
One of the most distinctive alternatives to the big three search engines is Wolfram Alpha – so distinctive that its advocates would bristle at even letting it be called a search engine (they prefer the term knowledge engine). The basics behind Wolfram Alpha – founded and maintained by Steve Wolfram – which distinguish it from traditional search engine are the array of calculations which it can, and will, perform for you based on your input, and the report style output it provides no matter what the search. The reasoning is that most of the time, when people look up something in a search engine, they’re not looking specifically for that thing, they’re looking for information about that thing. Consequently, Wolfram Alpha doesn’t return a string of links based on your inputs, it returns a panel full of relevant information. This works better with some things (firmly established scientific domains like geology or physics) and not so good with other topics (politics, technology), but the ultimate goal is a re-envisioning of how data is stored and presented.
In that vein, Wolfram Alpha is offering a new service called Wolfram Alpha Pro, which offers all the functionality of the basic free variant but with additional options for manipulating the data. For example, the reports that are generated by the user inputs are now exportable, and utilize a file format called CDF (for Computable Document Format). This makes the reports fully utilizable by other data harvesting and manipulating services, something that you would have expected to be long since implemented across the web but which is, in fact, a relatively new development (and very heavily pushed by Steve Wolfram, who considers it an obvious step, which it is).
Wolfram Alpha Pro is very inexpensive at just 4.99 a month – it’s clear that Dr. Wolfram is more eager to make a difference than to make a buck.
Pinterest – Social Curation for the Next Generation
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on February 3rd, 2012
Social media has been the big buzzword in tech circles for the last several years, and for good reason – that big buzzword is also big business. The way social media has evolved over the years since early forays to today’s juggernauts has been a steady progression towards simpler and more easily interacted formats – call it the “Applefication” of social networking. Where initially online social interaction was conducted in online forums and blog comments, it’s now progressed to full social profiles with messaging and comments and “walls” and “boards” and “like” or “+1” buttons and everything else you’re used to. Which sounds more complicated – but each revision has been easier to access, more streamlined, more integrated, and easier to understand than the last. Google+ has bucked this trend a little bit – it’s definitely a social network designed and built by proud nerds – but the trend lines remain the same.
Twitter is the penultimate expression of this – 140 characters or less, and just a couple of buttons of interface to broadcast your thoughts to the world. One of the hallmarks of Twitter is how you can simply repost other people’s content that you enjoy, called “re-tweeting.” That idea has rapidly spread to other sites, and now one site – Pinterest – is surfing that wave by implementing a similar format for the web at large.
The way it works is to give each user a set of “boards” to which that user can “pin” comments, links, stories, whatever catches their fancy. That content is then automatically shared with anyone viewing the boards, making for social networking output without actually having to create the content yourself – indeed, without having to do any more work than clicking a couple of buttons. This is simple enough that some consider it an entirely new phenomenon – rather than social networking, Pinterest heralds the culmination of the birth of social curation. Check it out at Pinterest.com
Wikileaks Takes Part In Real Life Neal Stephenson Novel
Posted by tevans in Winrar Free Download on February 1st, 2012
Wikileaks has been under attack from the US and allied governments for quite some time. Its founder, Julian Assange, is currently being pursued for allegations of sexual assault which arose – quite coincidentally – just as international pressure came to be borne against Wikileaks . Its primary source, Bradley Manning, has been held without trial and in the most extreme conditions as the government attempts to build a case for espionage against the man (missing the irony pointed out by one web comic, in that Bradley Manning exposed non-confidential documents about the world’s largest governments and corporations for free, and is jailed, whereas Mark Zuckerburg sells off your own information to corporations and governments and is rewarded with untold wealth and praise).
It’s no wonder, then, that Wikileaks – which has not slowed in its efforts to expose misdeeds perpetrated by global leaders and corporate executives – is looking for some additional safety measures to prevent its servers being seized and its organization being shut down. With Assange currently facing extradition, it’s clear to the Wikileaks team that even friendly governments are not necessarily going to be sufficient to stop a determined opponent. That’s likely why rumors abound that Wikileaks is nosing around to find an area outside the rule of law entirely – and they may have found it in Sealand.
Sealand is a curious little entity. It calls itself a “micro-nation” and floats just off the coast of the United Kingdom. Founded in the sixties by a British national and still maintaining itself as its own “constitutional monarchy,” the little island isn’t even properly an island – it’s just a dolled up and abandoned oil platform. Nonetheless, it’s far enough out to sea that national laws do not apply, and it is hooked up to a global darknet via a powerful radio transmitter.
Of course, it’s not clear that this will be enough to protect Wikileaks from a determined attack by national governments; but it is yet another move in the ongoing battle over who controls the flow of information.
Hackers set up an offshore data haven to stick it to the man? Where have I heard this before...
