Attack of the Gaming Grannies
Barbara St. Hilaire spends about 50 hours a week wielding a machete, dismembering demons and battling a slew of thugs, zombies, and other nasties of the video-gaming world. Having recently nailed a 100% score in Outlaw Golf 2, she’s now focused on mastering the top levels in God of War. It’s a passion that has [...]
Politico wants to move up DTV deadline
That requirement could appear as an amendment to a draft digital-television bill currently scheduled for a committee vote on Thursday, said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican. The existing bill calls for a "hard deadline" of April 7, 2009, by which all analog broadcasters must give up their piece of the spectrum and switch to [...]
Senator: Keep U.N. away from the Internet
Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said his nonbinding resolution would protect the Internet from a takeover by the United Nations that’s scheduled to be discussed at a summit in Tunisia next month.
"The Internet is likely to face a grave threat" at the summit, Coleman said in a statement on Monday. "If we [...]
DVD Jon Lands Dream Job Stateside
Jon Lech Johansen, the 21-year-old Norwegian media hacker nicknamed DVD Jon, is moving to San Diego to work for maverick tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in what can only be described as the most portentous team-up since Butch met Sundance.
A world-famous reverse engineer by the time he was 16, the soft-spoken tinkerer outraged the motion picture [...]
Groups sue California over minors video game ban
Two industry trade groups sued the state of California on Monday after the state passed a law barring the sale of violent video games to minors.
The trade group Entertainment Software Association announced its intentions to fight in court immediately after Schwarzenegger signed the ban 10 days ago. Video Software Dealers Association joined in the [...]
Codes Make Printers Stool Pigeons
While the codes may aid the Secret Service’s fight against counterfeiting, the practice raises some larger issues for society, according to EFF Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "People who want to protect their anonymity — whether they’re whistleblowers or dissidents or journalists or whatever — when they print something out, should know that there’s an issue [...]
Wooing Hollywood to be a tough act for Apple
In the week since Jobs unveiled the handheld iPod, which plays video clips on a 2.5-inch diagonal screen, media and technology executives have been trying to figure out whether people will watch shows on a small screen, what types of programs will work and whether money can be made at the $1.99 price Apple set.
In [...]
Trojan masquerades as Skype update
The Trojan horse, a variant of IRCbot, arrives in an e-mail purporting to be an update to Skype, the popular Internet telephony application. Once opened the malicious software displays a phony installation error message. It then blocks access to security updates and installs a back door on computers, MessageLabs said in a statement.
The e-mail can [...]
Google widens book search effort in Europe
The Google Print sites–for France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain–enable users to search books provided by publishers in each country as well as English-language books in the Google library for which the company has secured local rights.
Susan Wojcicki, a vice president for product management at Google, said in an interview Monday [...]
Apple steps up iPod ‘tax’ push
For some months, the company has been seeking royalties from accessory makers that want to display a "Made for iPod" logo on their products. The program, which one analyst has likened to an "iPod tax," applies to devices that connect electrically to the player and not to cosmetic things like cases.
Now Apple has made the [...]
