For the Love of Geeks

It’s a Big Lebowski reference, for those already lost, but the Telegraph is reporting that Britain’s Home Office is working on database designed to store the details of every phone call, email, and web page accessed by British citizens in the previous year.  Can someone say Big brother.  Apparently the Brits are even less concerned about privacy then [ Google India ].

The general plan is that all telecoms will turn over personal data consumed over the course of a year to the “we watch everything” department of the UK government where it will sit and wait for the local authorities to need access to it.  The interesting thing about this, is that this database will be cleared out after a year, which is the same amount of time that Telecom companies are required to retain this information anyway, and local authorities can already gain access with proper permission.  So basically, the government is just building a massive, scary database of personal information with endless potential for abuse by low-level, underpaid, overworked, bitter bureaucrats.

It hasn’t made it to law .. yet.  Hopefully, someone will come to their senses before this becomes a precedent that other “democratic” countries can follow…

Game creator Peter Molyneux is well-known for grandiose promises and his liberal use of hyperbole when talking about his upcoming games, but he tried to show restraint when he recently demoed his new incarnation Fable 2.

He said :

“I’m being really careful, I will only talk about real tangible features of the game that I can show.”

But then said :

“I think it’s such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired.”

Maybe he will too, it wouldn’t be unprecedented for Wired to grace their cover with a video game that was pushing the current limits.

The game certainly does look interesting and as a fan of the original Fable I am, at least, looking forward to seeing how this game will be.

After reading the interview in [ Wired ], I will admit that it sounds like they are really pushing the limits with the AI, especially in the morality judgment in the game play.

“The tests were too obvious in the last game. Save lives good, kill people bad. This time, we know what we’re doing with the morality system. If you want to be truly good, you have to sacrifice. If I can make you stop and have to really think about what you’re about to do next, I’ve succeeded,” he says.

Part of graying out the black-and-white morality system includes altering the spectrum itself. It’s no longer just a measurement of good and evil. “We’re measuring purity versus corruption, and cruelty versus kindness,” Molyneux says. “That’s different from good versus evil. I tell my son to go to bed and he thinks I’m cruel, but I’m really being kind.”

I ask about the scars that your character will gain over time, a feature he discussed at last year’s E3. Molyneux says he wanted to do something where a character can lose a fight and not die, but still suffer consequences: All the bad guys gang up and beat the shit out of you after you’re bested, and your avatar gets scarred.

Being the one who had horns and flies by the end of Fable, I can only imagine what I will turn into at the end of this game.

Microhoo story of the day. Now Yahoo will bust itself up for the benefit of Microsoft. Yeah, um, OK! Is the OLPC dead. One columnist besides myself thinks so, maybe. Asterdata shows up on the scene. I go over their odd bios on the website. Napster rolls out 6 million unprotected MP3’s. Netflix reveals set top box for download and play. YouTube told by Senator to take down terrorist videos.

Click to listen:

If you’re trolling eBay and craigslist trying to find out what you can get for your old iPhone, you might want to take a moment to consider your file privacy.

There have been a series of discussions about file security on the iPhone since it was released.  Apple’s restore (even the “Erase all content and settings”) feature on the iPhone does not actually delete the data, which means that is completely accessible to anyone with the proper software tools.

So what is an eager wannabe 3G iPhone owner to do?

1. Keep your old iPhone as a backup, and don’t sell it all.

2. Use the Erase all content and settings, and then completely fill the phone with mp3 files (legal ones of course.. ) and rinse and repeat x 3…

Once you have put a collection of useless data on the phone ( filling the memory completely is a vital step here) it will make retrieving any of the actual data that was on the phone originally a heck of a lot harder.  However, it is still possible for the more zealous voyeur of your data.

The iPhone has been targeted more then other devices for this particular issue, but it should be noted that data recovery is almost always possible on any type of media.  Remember the Columbia space shuttle the crashed,  the drive was found in a dry lake bed and handed to a team at Kroll Ontrack about six months after the tragedy,, and yet… [  99% data recovery ]

So, the lesson here is that unless you REALLY REALLY need the money, selling old hard drives, and other memory storage devices is not a good idea.  As far as the iPhone goes, most of your buyers will not be doing the Columbia style data recovery, so step 2 should be sufficient to feel comfortable dumping it for the 3G.

How many of us out there miss the original NES system… You can put your hands down, it was a rhetorical question. For many of us the original game systems (NES, Atari, Intellivision) take us back to a more innocent time when the world seemed a less scary place.

Of course, new technology reminds us of where we can go, and the potential for innovation that we have.. Even, the most minor of devices, can be sleek and cool …

So what happens when old meets new? Awesomeness is created … for instance, when you combine an NES controller and an Apple remote, you get something like this video :

It is a unique, and cool way to bring a bit of retro to your styling MacBook.  Want to make one of your own?

Here are the directions.. [ Apple NES Remote ]

Filming for the next Transformers movie begins in a few weeks, and already there are leaks as to the plot, and direction that the movie will be taking ..

Remember this guy?

Yep.. that was Soundwave, and he will be one of the new Decepticons that will be featured in the movie, along with his cassette sidekick “Ravage”.

When asked if Ravage would be as closely tied to Soundwave as he was in the animated series  Orci answered:

Perhaps! You know, we had Ravage in an early draft of the first movie and Soundwave, and we couldn’t do it right and I think this time hopefully we’ll have the ability to do it.

The movie will begin 2 years after the conclusion of the last movie, and we will catch up with Sam, and his girlfriend, but Orci says something that makes the geek in me tingle like a little boy again :

However, some of the die hard fans, which we were a member of that group, felt, well, maybe it’s a little light. Maybe it wasn’t science fictiony enough. And I think the second one will deliver on a true Transformers story. You know, the first one, we had a limited budget for what it was. Every second of Transformer time is a million dollars or whatever the heck it is, so this time, because we were able to prove through the whole thing that it’s a viable live-action movie, we have a little more freedom this time to actually learn about the Transformers, see them, hear them. It’s a better balance between the humans and the Transformers.

Oh yeah … more Transformers, means more awesome!

I guess the real question is will they be able to sell Ravage as a cassette, without the younger generation asking their parents [ what a cassette is ] …

After months and months of rumor, speculation, and rampant guessing, we finally have a launch date for the 3g iPhone.

Gizmodo, and others, are reporting that a June 9th launch date has been confirmed.  The new device will be announced at the keynote address at WWDC 2008 in San Francisco.  It will also be made available worldwide immediately following the launch, rather then at the end of the year, as was previously assumed.

There is speculation now, that the 3G iPhone will no longer have a fixed price point, at least in some countries, and that there will be new policies surrounding the sale of the iPhone.  Some countries will get variable pricing on new iPhones based on enticements to switch carriers. There’s no word on which countries will be subject to this pricing structure.

Korean display manufacturer Samsung SDI and German security printer [ Bundesdruckerei ] have demonstrated a passport that features a slim and flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) color display within a polycarbonate data page. The display can be used to provide a mass of information including a video of the document holder.

The integration of a display makes electronic ID documents even more difficult to forge and opens up the way for new security applications, they claim.

Samsung SDI developed the display to be just 300µm (µm = a micrometer or a micron, which is a millionth of a meter ) thick. However, even with the integrated color display, the data page of the ePassport is still only 700µm thick.

The passport display page is comprised of an active matrix display with organic light emitting diodes (AMOLED). This means that an active electronic circuit with low power consumption is located behind every pixel of the display. AMOLED displays provide excellent color images and can obviously be produced in much thinner formats that conventional LCDs.

The display is activated via the power provided by a contact-free reader, so that the document itself does not require any batteries. The suppliers say that it will be possible to retrieve all kinds of information via the display, for instance, a moving passport image of the document holder, as well as text-based information, such as the passport holder’s address.

Ulrich Hamann, CEO of Bundesdruckerei says :

“With our innovative, trailblazing technology, such as ‘video identification on card’, we are speeding up border control procedures and, at the same time, setting a new milestone in protection against forgery.”

The integrated display technology could display, for example, documented border crossings, which are usually represented by physical stamps within the passport booklet. Complex security applications are supposedly in place to prevent unauthorized people from accessing, or adding information. The passport card can be laminated since the materials used for the display are heat-resistant, and this will help prevent any form of manipulation.

Future incarnations would be the “ultimate” ID providing all necessary information. This would mean that the personal data would no longer have to be transmitted to special reading devices, but would remain exclusively in the document and hence in the document holder’s control.