Horizons
Computers: An extension of ourselves?
A quick followup to Tuesday’s post: While the courts have made it clear that US Customs agents have the right to browse your computer any time you bring it across the border, there is one very interesting dissenting opinion.
During a 2006 child pornography case, where the evidence relied on an airport search of the defendant’s computer as he returned from the Philippines, Federal District Judge Dean Pregerson argued that the evidence should be suppressed. What’s interesting is his reasoning.
“Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory,” he wrote. “They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.”
He says that authorities should not be able to search computers, BlackBerries, or PDAs without probable cause, because, as The New York Times reports, they can store “diaries, letters, medical information, financial records, trade secrets, attorney-client materials and — the clincher, of course — information about reporters’ ‘confidential sources and story leads.’ ”
Judge Pregerson’s idea, however, is not the law. Most rulings agree that computers are simply lifeless gadgets and that anyone crossing the US border is liable to a full review of their belongs, digital or otherwise. Still, it’s a cool idea.
[Via NYTimes]
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Border security – for your laptop
Video games invade the mainstream
As gamers of the arcade generation grow up and have kids of their own, the market for video games is exploding. This week brought three new signs that the young medium has grabbed more and more of the pop-culture spotlight – and that some unexpected names are racing to join in.
1) "Grand Theft Auto IV" snatched $500 million in its first week of sales. Compare that to movie box-office smash Iron Man, which made $100 million in its debut last weekend. This newest installment in the popular, mature-rated game series made more money in its first day and first week than almost any other game, movie, book, or album in history. GTA beat out last year's "Halo 3", which swiped $300 million in its opening week, and rivals the last "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, which scored $500 million globally in its debut weekend.
2) Looking to grab his own slice of this expanding market, Steven Spielberg released his own video game Tuesday. Boom Blox, for the Nintendo Wii, is a cartoonish puzzle game that came out of a brainstorming session between the famed movie director and reps from EA Games. Despite initial skepticism from gamers, reviews have been very positive.
3) One of PC games’ biggest franchises, The Sims, is getting an Ikea makeover. This week, EA hinted at an upcoming expansion pack for the popular life simulator that will allow players to furnish their digital homes with items from the Swedish big-box store. The series already offers pixelated apparel from real-world clothing giant H&M.
What surprises me the most is how these stories have been covered by the media. Video game articles usually revolve around some outrage over graphic content – and GTA IV is certainly steeped in explicit game play. But the tone of many GTA stories from the past few weeks was “this is big,” not “this is ruining your kids.” These recent pieces often noted the portrayals of violence but then focused on the huge open world that can take more than 60 hours to explore.
For example, last week NPR’s Talk of the Nation ran a 16-minute segment on GTA IV that gave much more airtime to a reviewer who loved the game than to the requisite video-game detractor. If that piece had run a few years ago, the balance would likely have skewed the other way.
I can’t tell if this is because games have won over the media – perhaps sheer sales figures have convinced them – or if those early gamers have grown up to become today’s journalists.
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Border safety – for your laptop
Few people know this, but in the same way that US Customs guards can search your luggage, they may turn on your laptop and browse, copy, or delete any file that they want to without probable cause. In some cases, officials have seized computers for weeks at a time, while they copy hard drives for later review.
Before a flight to London, federal agents told Maria Udy, a UK citizen working in Maryland, that her company laptop would be seized for a “security concern.”
"I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight," she told the Washington Post. Federal officials took Udy’s username and password and “assured that my laptop would be given back to me in 10 or 15 days.”
Several court cases have revolved around whether your hard drive can testify against you. And questions still linger about what files may be seized – all of them or just the illegal stuff? For now, the answers are “yes” and “all of them.”
While some companies draft recommendations to protect for their globetrotting employees, a CNET blogger has posted some tips for individuals. These can save you from the embarrassment and hassle of having your laptop scanned during your next international trip.
The gist: Before you leave the country, back up everything on your computer. Cleanse your hard drive of questionable material – “this includes any copyrighted content which you may not be able to prove you own.” And if you’re worried, encrypt your files and upload them to a secure Internet host (he explains how to do that).
For the full picture, here’s the link.
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Search engines with more sparkle
Google is the antiglitz. The search giant has plenty of features, but the main site is still rather drab. No clutter. No fuss. Just results.
Since competitors can’t outbland Google, a bunch of startups are attempting to swing the other way. Here’s a run down of several visual search engines that add some razzle-dazzle to your Web results.
Exalead
By far the least snazzy of the group, Exalead displays links much like Google, but tacks on a thumbnail image of the site. This helps people avoid webpages that sound authoritative from the description, but on first glance were obviously just thrown together by amateurs.
ManagedQ
This site is all about cross-referencing. ManagedQ throws down several results and then lets you refine the search by picking secondary terms. It blacks out the sites that don’t fit your new, narrow search – by “rock,” did you mean the wrester, the music, or the mineral?
Redzee
Brace yourself for cuteness. This search engine offers an animated lazy Susan of website options – each with a snapshot of the page. You can spin through the visual buffet, but the site doesn’t explain why that pretty picture in front of you is a good match for your search terms. Redzee’s adorable mascot reflects the site well: fun, fresh, and ultimately frivolous.
Viewzi
The strongest competitor to Google, Viewzi collates 12 different kinds of searches: from websites to MP3s to two varieties of photos (professional and amateur). Each mode takes on its own style and interface. The most useful is their “4 sources” view, which layouts out a polished grid of links from Google, Ask, Yahoo, and MSN. While the site is still invite-only, go now and sign up to get on the list. It’s worth it.
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Superheroes and science history
A new exhibit at the London Science Museum shows how pop culture can drive innovation. The show links the exploits of spacefaring comic book hero Dan Dare to the real-world inventions that came out of England in the 1950s and ‘60s.
The cartoon “pilot of the future” had no superpowers. Instead, Dare relied on ingenuity and engineering to battle evil aliens. This grounding in science inspired a generation of English children growing up after World War II, says curator Ben Russell, and can be seen in the military and civilian artifacts of the cold war.
New Scientist has a great article on this British Buck Rogers and the BBC has posted videos on the plucky pilot and the exhibit in his honor.
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No more Micro-hoo
Yesterday, Microsoft withdrew its bid to buy Yahoo. Now that the deal has fallen through, the past three months kinda seem like a silly game of Ping-Pong – with the press watching anxiously as the ball zipped back and further.
First, Microsoft surprises everyone with a $44.6-billion unsolicited offer to buy the rival Internet firm. Ping! Yahoo rejects the bid and starts shopping around for other offers. Pong! The software giant threatens a hostile takeover. Ping! Yahoo pleads with stockholders to stand strong. Pong! Microsoft ups the offer to $47.5 billion, about a 70 percent premium on the original stock price. Ping! Yahoo demands $53 billion. Pong!
Now that the game’s over, who won? Some analysts are suggesting the winner is Google.
After all, everything online revolves around how many people cruise through your site – and therefore look at the ads. Google still grabs about 65 percent of search engine hits. Yahoo attracts 21 percent. Microsoft only gets 9 percent.
But Yahoo has something that Microsoft has had a hard time capturing: Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Music, and all of the other branches of the Yahoo family tree that are ripe for advertisements. Similarly, Google has Gmail, Blogger, YouTube, Google Maps, etc.
Rather than develop its own services, Microsoft wanted to just buy some that were already successful.
“However, that assumes that the combination of Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s DNA would have created a top athlete, not a corporate Frankenstein,” writes the BBC in its news analysis.
As the BBC points out, Mr. Ballmer has hinted that he no longer thinks a Micro-hoo hybrid would help either company in their fight against Google. In fact, Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo mentions that one of his reasons for walking away was Yahoo's plan to team up with Google by paying the company to use its ad platform.
“In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons,” Ballmer wrote in the letter.
Regardless, Yahoo must be happy that it survived the potential takeover. But it has better get its act together, lest another hungry tech giant tries to take a swipe at it – or worse, Google gobbles up so much market share that Yahoo starves.
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Debunking the dorm-room entrepreneur
The image of the 20something Silicon Valley millionaire has been one of the major industry stereotypes of the past few decades.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard to launch their tech giants. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still in their 20s when they started Google – as were the founders of Apple, YouTube, and Digg.
But a new study of the industry has some good news for this year’s crop of college graduates: Take your time – you’ve not missed your chance to change the world! The median age at which American tech entrepreneurs launch their companies: 39.
The research, funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, looked at US engineering and technology companies that were founded between 1995 and 2005 and earn in at least $1 million.
Not only is the median age higher than expected, but entrepreneurs who were older than 50 outnumbered those younger than 25 by more than 2-to-1.
The analysis also looked at how long it took for graduates to launch their tech firms. On average, entrepreneurs with an MBA take 13 years after graduation to start their company. There’s a 17-year lag for those with only a bachelor’s degree and 21 years for people with a PhD.
[Via Chronicle of Higher Education]
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Victorious Blu-ray still stumbles in the sales charts
At first, the analysts blamed the format war. Consumers didn’t want to pick a side in the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD, they said, until the movie industry could decide on a single successor to the DVD.
Well, after a year and a half of slugging it out, Blu-ray emerged victorious – but the hi-def movie discs have yet to win over many households.
The NPD Group reported some very gloomy sales figures last week: In the US, Blu-ray retail sales sank 40 percent from January to February – the month that Toshiba, backer of HD-DVD, said it would abandon its format. Sales then rose the next month, but only by 2 percent, according to NPD.
These numbers exclude computers with Blu-ray drives (of which there are very few) and sales of PlayStation 3 (which is finally gaining some momentum).
So why are Blu-ray sales still floundering? NPD suspects that most people are content with good ol’ DVDs. Why bother upgrading if the difference isn’t that noticeable?
More important, the next-gen players are expensive. Budget DVD players can cost less than $50, but Blu-ray drives hover around $400. The price will probably stay lofty for a while. Sony, obviously one of the biggest names in Blu-ray, told Gizmodo that a $200 drive is still at least a year away.
Another factor could be the new crop of “up-converting” DVD players, which play normal DVDs but scale the picture in a way that looks better on HDTVs. “Sales of significantly less expensive upconverting DVD players have actually increased 5 percent over the first quarter of 2008, compared with the same quarter a year ago,” reports CNET. “Standard DVD players sales dropped 39 percent over the same period.”
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Why Blu-Ray's victory might not matter for long
Tech Roundup: Blu-Ray to best HD-DVD in format wars?
Why HDTV is getting a fuzzy reception
Tower of 'techno' babel
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