The Buzz

The popularity of Pac-Man leads to the game continuing to pop up everywhere, like on Google's homepage. However, more obscure games could be lost without greater efforts at preservation.

What happens when a video game platform is replaced by something newer? People buy new machines, throw the old machines into a closet after awhile, and it and the games collect dust.

But as these outdated platforms continues to age, are we properly preserving the games? This Technology Review article is a fascinating look at the challenges of preserving video games, why it’s not working right now and what needs to be done.

Surely, classics like Super Mario Bros. and Pac-Man will survive, but the lesser known games, many of which would still have its fans (I enjoyed the game Burger Time, but until a new downloadable title was released recently I hadn’t played it in 20 years), may not survive as the remaining working hardware fails and games aren’t preserved. It’s a sad thought that years of ingenuity could just be gone forever.

SOURCE: Technology Review via Houston Chronicle TechBlog

If Yvette’s bridal wasn’t enough, ChicagoNow has compiled another 50 examples from around the world of bad website designs. Drudge Report seems a little out of place on this list, but it certainly is from a different era at this point.

SOURCE: ChicagoNow via Digg

Awhile back I weighed in on the data changes AT&T was making to reduce the hit to their data network (or at least get paid more for the data they were carrying). But while the U.S. market is generally used to unlimited access, going back to the days when AOL flipped the switch from an hourly rate to unlimited access, it’s not like that everywhere else. So, with that in mind, how does AT&T’s iPad data rates stack up against the rest of the world?

Not good. With a 2 GB plan costing $25, that works out to $12.50 a gigabyte, and that’s among the highest costs of countries using the iPad, and over 50 percent higher than the average of $7 a gigabyte worldwide. Tableau Software has done a nice job of creating an interactive map (which doubles as a demo of what their software can do – nice move) that helps visualize it. See the interactive goodness by clicking here. And of course, while our rates aren’t exceptionally good, they’re not the worst either. That honor belongs to France, who pay twice as much per gigabyte as we do: about $25.

SOURCE: Tableau Software via Gizmodo

The Dell Streak features a generous 5" screen, but challenges could result from a phone that size.

I worked in the wireless industry for 10 years. During that time, I had a lot of phones. I personally always leaned towards a larger phone. I’m over six feet tall; I’m not a small guy, and as cell phones got smaller it irked me that the keys and screen shrunk too, making dialing a bit troublesome. Still though, for most, that relentless microsizing of phones was almost a fetish for years; the Motorola StarTAC started it off (the analog version had an incredible 60 minutes of talk time!), and over time we got thinks like the RAZR, loved for its thinness, and a series of Samsung phones like the M610 which pushed the limits, but took up very little pocket real estate.  Of course, my favorite issue that would happen in the stores would be the complaints that “the phone doesn’t stay charged all day;” given how small the phones got, it’s amazing they stayed on at all.

Lucky for me, phones are getting bigger again. First, it was thicker phones with full keyboards attached to them, like the LG Voyager. Then the iPhone started off the big screen trend with its 3.5″ screen; the HTC Incredible and Evo phones, on Verizon and Sprint respectively, along with Verizon’s Droid X, have upped the ante with a 4.3″ screen; now the Dell Streak is the new hot thing, and it’s coming out with a 5″ screen.

Now, by the time you get to 5″, you’re getting very close to the iPad in size, and I think you start losing phone dimensions. A CNN article noted the challenges of the giant-screened phones, especially trying to get them to fit a standard pocket and the challenge of holding them during long calls.  And battery life remains constrained because of the screen size and the horsepower packed into these new, super-sized phones.

My longer fingers are up to the challenge, yet I hold out. I’m out of contract, due for an upgrade, and I wait, largely because these phones come out so quickly now it’s hard to decide. However, it’s hard to believe phones will get much bigger than they have; they’re already rivaling some of the big ones from my earliest cell phone selling days, like the Qualcomm PDQ.

SOURCE: CNN via Digg

An article on Slate talks about the evolution of auto-correction software, how it’s getting better and how most implementations now learn over time that, for instance, my name is Josh. It also discusses the challenges that autocorrection software makers face in terms of learning and implementing the evolving lingo that has resulted from limitations of 140 character text messages. You want the phone to not autocorrect LOL or OMG anymore than you’d want it to correct proper names of importance.

Despite the best efforts, it can end up being troublesome at times, as this follow-up post on the topic discusses with Twitter users. Some of the autocorrections are pretty funny… when a phone changes “Yankees” to “wankers,” you have to wonder if there’s a Boston fan working on the software.

SOURCES: Slate, John Dickerson’s Notions

Photo by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images

The Black Hat conference is the place where hackers can demonstrate how to make good things do bad things. Fortunately, these exploits are demonstrated in front of security researchers, who can then take the appropriate action to close loopholes.

This year’s brought an interesting one, even if the odds of it being able to be done in the wild are unlikely: a hacker managed to, with just a few ATMs off the internet to work with as a starting point, get many types of ATM machines running Windows CE to spit out free cash.

The hacker would need access to the machine’s innards to plug in a USB key with the exploit, which isn’t reliably possible in the real world, so don’t expect to see this happening when you’re walking down the street. Helping matters for him, however, was the discovery that ATM keys are shared within models, meaning the chances of having a good key if you have an ATM key in your possession increases. The fact that he ordered ATMs off the Internet to do his research only underscores the potential insecurities, which can go beyond ATM skimming. It shows we still have a long way to go when it comes to developing not just secure software, but hardware too.

SOURCE: SF Gate via Gizmodo

Redbox has announced that they are rolling out the $1.50 per day Blu-Ray option mentioned earlier here at its kiosks nationwide, more than 23,000 in all. This will take time, but they should be widely available by fall.

SOURCE: Deadline Hollywood

Much ado has been made about Facebook and privacy, which I’ve covered here in depth, but what’s the larger implication of all this data being available? To one security researcher, it’s a close to 3 gigabyte file containing the public data of 100 million Facebook users.

Facebook says it’s no big deal, given that all the data is public, but putting that many peoples’ data into a file so readily searchable and indexable is still likely to raise concern, since it’s far removed from looking at data one person at a time. The BBC reports that hundreds are sharing the file on The Pirate Bay, a popular file sharing site that links people who have files available to people who want them.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo reports that tracing the IP addresses of people downloading the file, you can learn things about them, like what company they work for (if they’re downloading it at work). While you’ll never know if it’s a random employee or a company wanting to gleam data from it, the fact that the companies like AC Neilsen (a research company with an office in Connecticut), Halliburton, Sprint and Viacom, it’s unlikely it’s all just random employees with curiosity on their side.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Advocacy groups raise additional Facebook privacy issues
• Facebook’s new privacy controls are here!
• Facebook roundup 2
• Facebook roundup 1
• Facebook briefs: Zynga pact, broken privacy settings?
• Understanding Facebook’s privacy options
• Facebook’s privacy evolution at a glance
• Facebook’s slippery slope of privacy changes
• Facebook’s private to public transformation

SOURCE: BBC via Consumerist, Gizmodo