Author: Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?

Yahoo’s Personalised Search

Yahoo have been fine-tuning their portal and search offering of late, as part of an effort to fend off new rivals and reduce the gap with Google. Their new wheeze is personalised searching – allowing users to save results that they find most useful, attach notes to saved searches and share results with other users via email. Yahoo promise not to harvest submitted email addresses for marketing purposes.

Saving search results is quite handy, but then if I’m impressed by a page I generally bookmark it anyway, making the save feature less useful. Being able to attach notes to results makes the feature more relevant, but then again being able to export the notes and results to a word processor would make it even better.

Saved pages go to a MyWeb section in Yahoo, with details on how pages were found in the first place. Users can categorise results to make navigation easier, but as it stands this is just like a slightly more useful version of bookmarking pages. Pages and results that you don’t want can be blocked from future searches, making whittling down answers much easier.

Links and notes can be shared from MyWeb, though I feel that Yahoo have missed a trick – I would like to see what searches and pages other Yahoo users have stored, and would like to share my information with them – almost like Apple’s iMix feature in their music store. As it stands, I can only email links to people I know and can’t publish my search for other people to use. How much time would you save if you could consult someone else’s tailored search, complete with notes?

Yahoo’s MySearch

BT Bars Scam Diallers… For Now

BT has responded to the growing problem of rogue telephone diallers by blocking 1,000 premium rate numbers used by the downloaded applets.

Diallers are generally installed without a computer users knowledge, often through a website or as part of an application or virus. The dialler then replaces the users’ ISP details and instead access the internet using an expensive premium rate number. BT admit that they have dealt with 45,000 complaints from subscribers who have fallen victim to this scam, with another 9,000 cases pending.

With the offending numbers blocked, diallers will not be able to get through – for the time being. This is only a temporary fix – new diallers are released almost daily and I’m sure it might take somewhere in the region of about a week for someone to come up with a dialler that can check a regularly updated table of numbers that haven’t been blocked yet. Putting BT and its subscribers back where they started.

Realistically, the only way round this is for concerned subscribers to block access to all premium-rate numbers – which can be inconvenient. BT report that some 1.5 million customers currently use this approach, and the company provides premium-rate number blocking as a free service.

Gavin Patterson, BT’s group managing director for consumer and venture business said in a statement: “We have taken the decision to block numbers suspected of being associated with diallers as soon as we are alerted to a problem. We have offered free premium rate barring to all customers, and a removable bar for premium rate and international calls for UK£1.75 (€2.54)a month. We have made it clear that we are not the ones profiteering from people’s misfortune. In fact, we will continue to forego our share of the call revenue generated by these disputed calls.

“We will be emailing all of our dial-up customers again to give them advice on how to avoid falling victim to a dialler, because customers need to take action as well to protect themselves, as we believe many cases aren’t fraud but are due to a lack of awareness from customers. In fact, we are seeing that many cases are cleared up when we explain where these charges have come from, which underlines our view that there needs to be greater awareness of how these services operate.”

BT comment on diallers

Sony’s Vaio Type X Media Centre

Sony have launched their latest convergent device onto the Japanese market – a digital media centre for the home with huge storage and potential. The Vaio Type X is essentially a PC with four 250Gb hard drives and seven television tuners in it, though “only” 500Gb is available for PVR functions. This means that lucky Japanese owners can record everything that’s broadcast on the country’s seven network stations all week, and then just delete the shows they’re not interested in. This brings timeshifting television into an entirely different phase with consumers selecting what they don’t want to watch, rather than what they do want.

Recorded programmes are presented in a thumbnail view, so that users can visually select what they want to watch – Sony call this the Time Machine View, and content can be sorted in a number for ways, chronologically or by genre for example.

The Vaio Type X has two tuner cards with three analogue tuners each – plus an integrated tuner on the main board itself. A digital tuner is an optional extra.

The other 500Gb is for the PC part of the Vaio X, based around a 3.6Ghz P4 with 1 gig of RAM and an ATI Radeon X600XT video card.

Sadly, Sony have no plans to market the Vaio X outside Japan, so we will have to wait to see what they have planned for the international market.

The Vaio Type X

BPI to Sue UK Filesharers

The British Phonographic Industry is about to begin action against illegal filesharers in the UK. The BPI has observed that similar programmes, notably the RIAA’s own action in the US, have worked in other countries and intends to crack down on Britain’s music pirates as early as this month. The rapid rise in broadband adoption in the UK has also spurred them into action before the problem gets out of control.

The BPI will be following a 15/75 rule in which individuals they sue – they believe that 75% of all infringing files on the internet are being shared by just 15% of the file sharing population.

A BPI spokesman, told NME.com: “There are a small percentage of hardcore internet users who are uploading material regardless of its illegality. It would appear that litigation is the only way to deter them. It’s becoming pretty obvious that litigation needs to be there as a deterrent.”

We have a call in with the BPI and will bring you more information from them as soon as we have it.

The BPI

NME

FCC Begins Digital Television Push

The USA’s Federal Bureau of Communications has started their big consumer campaign to switch the country over to digital television by December 2006, or January 2009 depending on who you ask. Starting with an interview with chairman Michael Powell at half time during Monday Night Football, the campaign is based around a website designed to help consumers learn about digital television and assist them in their decisions when moving from analogue.

I’m trying to imagine Tessa Jowell appearing at half time during ITV News Football Extra and it’s not really working for me.

Powell said during a press conference to mark the campaign: “Although for the vast majority of American households, digital television may be uncharted territory, we will not let them go it alone. If you have questions about digital television, the FCC is ready to serve as a primary resource for quick answers. Then we hope they will get DTV — get the set, get the connection, get the content.”

The FCC certainly have a huge task in front of them if they are to be stuck with the initial 2006 date: there are only 11 million digital TV sets in the US – that’s just 10% of households, with only two years to go. The deadline may well be put back to January 2009, a date that Powell intends have the commission vote on later this year.

The FCC’s DTV site

GameTrak: Dark Wind Bundle Due for Release

Beat-em-ups have always been a bit of an odd genre for me: the highly kinetic action on the screen – punching, kicking, disembowelment – has always been strangely at odds with the frantic button mashing dictated by the controls. Well, those first two techniques anyway.

Now being beaten by your opponent simply because he saw a button sequence on the internet that you didn’t know about, or thrashed by your girlfriend because she can press the triangle button faster than you can is a thing of the past – now you can throw real punches at your on-screen opponents.

GameTrak have developed a new PS2 beat-em-up, Dark Wind, that will be bundled with their eponymous controller. The game makes full use of the GameTrak hardware to allow players to punch and block with great accuracy.

The GameTrak controller itself consists of two sensors which can be attached to limbs or a prop (like that Samurai sword you’ve always wanted) and can measure with an accuracy of up to 1mm in a 3m cube. The controller can be used with many different genres of games – GameTrak themselves suggest golfing and lightgun games. I just can’t wait to see if it’s compatible with Freak Out. A USB peripheral, the controller may end up being used on XBox and PC games, as well as the PS2. The Dark Wind bundle will cost UK£69.99 or €99.

The controller won the Most Innovative Product award at the Leipzig Games Convention and has certainly stirred a lot of interest in a market that is starting to take notice of different types of games controllers, particularly in the wake of the success Sony has enjoyed with EyeToy.

Exotic controllers have become popular in arcades of late – indeed, when consoles can reproduce arcade cabinets exactly, cabinets are turning to controllers to make them stand out. Modern arcade cabinets now have swords, revolving seats, footballs and denim-clad buttocks as controllers to give an experience that console games don’t provide. Since the first light gun came in to the home, consoles are always quick to adopt what’s going on in the arcade – and the GameTrak will be able to emulate many current controller and game styles. Though I don’t expect to be wandering home with that buttock thing under my arm any time soon.

But I will soon have some bongos, and that’s even better.

GameTrak

Coral Cross-Industry Group to Address DRM Interoperability

Well, I must say I’m pleased at the announcement – let’s hope it comes to something: seven major technology and media companies have come together to form the Coral Consortium, with the objective of promoting interoperability amongst the competing digital rights management systems in the market. Coral has been founded by HP, Intertrust Technologies Corporation, Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, Sony Corporation and Twentieth Century Film Corp.

Fragmented DRM systems are threatening to dull the public’s enthusiasm for digital media as they discover that they can’t play files that they’ve bought the rights to on all of their devices or can’t transfer music and video to their new PC because of license incompatibilities.

The group aims to ensure interoperability between standards and systems so that consumers will be able to access their digital media easily – however, they won’t be doing this by making DRM systems compatible. They plan to do this by introducing a new technology layer that will allow DRM systems to co-exist, and by publishing a set of specifications based around interoperability. Their ambition is to make the whole process transparent to the end user, so that they don’t realise what’s going on under the hood.

“The classic approach to solving the interoperability problem is to either use a single proprietary platform for media distribution, or to standardize a common content protection and management technology,” said Jack Lacy, Coral Consortium’s president and Intertrust’s SVP of Standards and Community Initiatives. “Consumers typically just want to buy, play, and use content in an intuitive manner and do not want to dwell on differences between esoteric technology features. Coral aims to provide them with such functionality and ease of use.”

Coral

Sony Japan Rethinks Copy-Protected CDs

Sony has dropped copy protection from their CD range, as they believe they’ve educated the public not to make illegal copies – and that only a small proportion of people made the copies in the first place. So, if this is the case they won’t be introducing another form of copy protection later on, then? Sony had previously been amongst the most enthusiastic proponents of copy protection in the market and indeed only recently decided to support the protection-free MP3 format in their range of digital players.

My guess is of course that Sony are giving in to market pressure – piracy is still robbing artists of millions of euros every year but restrictive copy-protection turns the public off and harms revenues too. Sony has looked at the popularity of the iPod and other MP3 players, seen that it wasn’t the end of the world for recorded music and decided to jump on the bandwagon. Neatly avoiding potential legal action at the same time. Now, in order to avoid legal threats and criticism from its customers, Sony will supply all CDs after 17th November without copy protection.

Sony’s copy protection system was unpopular with the public as it sometimes prevented CDs from playing in a range of devices, such as car stereos, and also infringed some citizens’ legal rights to make copies of purchased media for personal use. The copy-protected CDs are not strictly CDs, and incorporate a technology for preventing computers from ripping the music on the disk, but contain a compressed and DRM’d version of the music for use on music players and PCs.

A guide to CD copy-protection schemes

Vivisimo’s Clusty Takes on Google

Search engine company Vivisimo have launched the beta of their new Clusty search engine, and it’s open to the public to try out.

Clusty’s main selling point is that it clusters results into separate categories, hopefully making it easier for users to sift through searches that return hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of results. For example, a search run today for Kubrick returned 182 initial results – but Clusty split those for me into ten categories, including Film-maker, Space Odyssey and DVD. More categories were available if I wanted them, and could be applied to the entire 200,000+ results returned.

Vivisimo have gone for the current fashion of a simple, uncluttered search page, though there is something about it that says “Ask Jeeves” to me. The search box itself has a a row of tabs across the top, allowing users to search for different formats of information, including News, Images, Shopping and, a new one, Gossip.

As search engine catalogues get bigger and, inevitably, more the same, the big brand search engines need to provide a unique benefit or reason for people to stay loyal. Hence the recent introduction of new features such thumbnail views of web pages, multimedia searching and new ways of navigating the millions of results returned. Whilst Clusty acquires its search results themselves from a number of other engines, Vivisimo’s clustering technology is proprietary and is fully automated – no maintenance is required and the company claims that it can cluster any type of textual information with little or no customisation.

The clustering feature is interesting – but is it really enough to distinguish it from Google? And without patenting the concept, what’s to stop Google from developing its own clustering technology and staying out in front? Or just licensing it? However, Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo is sure it’s enough to win them new fans.

“The success of today’s search technology has left users awash in information,” he said, “The net result is that users cannot or will not wade through all of the options a search engine offers up. The fast and friendly Clusty.com puts users back in control and ensures that they truly know the full extent of resources that are available to them in the vast online world. Clusty also helps them zero in on what they were looking for and, often, leads them to discover new things along the way.”

Try Clusty for yourself

Palm’s T5

Palm have announced the latest in their popular line of PDAs – the T5. There have been months and months of speculation over what features the T5, may or may not have, but the most interesting thing about the new handheld is its memory configuration.

The T5 is built around 256mb of Flash memory – 215mb is available to the user: 55mb is system memory, leaving 160mb for storage. As it’s Flash memory, data is much safer from sudden hard resets or the occasional month away from a power socket. Palm are clearly capitalising on the success of USB key drives and their ability to carry large amounts of documents between the home and the office. No doubt security managers everywhere will be shaking their heads in woe again.

The PDA runs PalmOS5.4, and whilst it features the T3 320 x 480 screen, there is no slider on the new model. Cunningly, there is a little groove where the screen might have slid apart, though this might just baffle some people.

No WiFi (that caught a few people out), but Bluetooth is still in – expect a WiFi SDIO card in due course. Street price is about US$399 (€322).

Palm T5