This morning my daughter was having a look around for some pictures of medieval castle’s on Google Images. She’s six and a half.
My Wife was sitting with her while she browsed the index, and as the results looked quite reasonable, she left the room to let her browse around the search results.
Next thing, our daughter was calling out that she didn’t like what was on the screen – and seeing what was there, no wonder. It was a porn site.
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We’ve all seen the video of Microsoft showing off the surface table that lets you interact in what is now a novel way.
We’ve found a video that brilliantly mocks it.
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A nifty mashup reaches us via Perry Aulie, co-founder of VideoIPO.
It’s a service that is hoping to make a success out of the enormous and growing interest in watching videos online, specifically YouTube – but not by following the same now-overdone model of serving videos.
VideoIPO lets you trade on the popularity of YouTube Videos by mashing up YouTube video and the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) trading engine.
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Quick catchup news. China has modified their content blocking – or Great Firewall of China as it’s sometimes called – to allow through the English language version of Wikipedia to be seen in China.
This change only took place at the beginning of this week. My experience the week before (while in Beijing), was that results were show in Google, but when clicking on the Wikipedia links, they would timeout with nothing displayed – classic firewall blocking behaviour.
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From the beginning of July, Vodafone UK is dropping the price of their Mobile Broadband service to £25 a month or a ‘designed to get you to take the monthly offer,’ £8.50 for 24 hours.
There’s also a new feature that gives the ability to continue data connections, while you’re in select European countries for £8.50 for 24 hours.
All of these prices exclude VAT.
They are pitching it as a real alternative to fixed-line broadband and Wi-Fi.
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With just over a week until the whole of humanity is saved and we shall never have to worry about disease again launch of the iPhone in the US, Apple have let it be known that they have been getting even closer to YouTube.
YouTube have been busily re-encoding lots of their videos to H.264 and the Apple iPhone (aka Mankind’s Saviour) will be the first phone to make use of them. The advantages to Apple is PR (You’re reading this) and the playback of H.264 should be more battery efficient, as it doesn’t need the whole of a Flash player to render the videos on the handset.
Over 10,000 video will be available on the 29 June (iPhone day) with all of the other videos following suit, it’s expected, by Autumn (Fall) this year.
By way of a lovely tie-up, it’s also the day that sees the YouTube on Apple TV go live – after they do the download update to their little boxes.
BeeBird, another FM transmitter reaches us, this time with a pretty decent look about it.
The Chinese manufacturer, netSharp, got in touch with us give us the heads up.
There’s a not-insubstantial 199 channels available for transmitting your fave sounds. The frequency range that can be chosen between, is 88.1 – 107.9MHz.
The chosen frequency is displayed on the LCD display, while the simple up/down shuffle changes the frequency.
It’s got FCC approval, and as long as its output is under 50 nanoWatts, it will be legal in the UK under OfCom rules too.
It looks at light as it is at 30g excluding the one AAA battery it runs on (there’s also a car power adaptor available). As you’d expect, it has a 3.5mm headphone jack, so will play from any sensible music source.
Price? Not clear yet. We hadn’t heard back before going to press.
Plazes, a service that enables its users to create geo-indexed information, has finally come out of beta to a release version.
We’ve been using Plazes for over two years now, so its beta phase has been pretty extensive. In that time it has grown not only in number of users, or locations ‘discovered’ – it’s topped 20,000 places in over 120 countries now – but in terms of functions.
Since we last looked at it, about six months ago, it’s gained a Twitter-like function – the ability to add short messages telling people what you are up to at any time of the day. This can also be done by mobile phones these days.
Further new additions bring the ability to add comments to any of the Plazes – anywhere with a WiFi connection – providing a review function as well.
If you haven’t see it before it’s well worth having a look at – Plazes
Powerline chipset supplier, DS2, has been conducting some speed tests with their 200Mbps product in an attempt to prove how much quicker distributions within households can be using their Powerline Communications (PLC) than rival technologies and products.
As we all know, there’s a (sometimes major) difference between the claimed performance of network products and what it delivers in the real world. Some of this is down to legitimate things like error correction overheads, but lots of it is down to other factors.
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The British Board of Film Classification (BCCF) have ruled that Manhunt 2, the second version of the game from Rockstar Games, has been banned in its current form from sale or rental in the UK.
Originally scheduled for release during July 2007, the BCCF today made it pretty clear that they really didn’t like it – at all. David Cooke, Director of the BBFC said, “Rejecting a work is a very serious action and one which we do not take lightly. Where possible we try to consider cuts or, in the case of games, modifications which remove the material which contravenes the Board’s published Guidelines. In the case of Manhunt 2 this has not been possible. Manhunt 2 is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing. There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game.”
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