Geographic – Page 61 – Digital-Lifestyles

The Risks Of e-voting: ORG London Event

Clearly we love technology – it would be a bit of rum do calling ourselves Digital-Lifestyles if we didn’t.

The Risks Of e-voting: ORG London Event Firm believers in technology being used to add something, not being used for the sake of it, we also think there are some areas that technology should stay out of.

One being the counting of votes for elections. Democracy is just too valuable to be fiddled with.

We’ve all heard about the introduction of electronic voting machines in America and the huge number of concerns that has thrown up. Hell, there was even a film made about it – Hacking Democracy.

As we in the tech world know, anything that is on a computer can be manipulated. Removing people, who bring the appropriate check and balances to the process, is a very bad idea.

What does it matter if it takes a little bit longer to count the votes? Who’s hurrying? Let’s not forget that the party elected in the UK is going to be in power for four years, so a couple of extra days to count the vote matters not.

There are just too many risks to let this go ahead.

Well, some bright spark appears to think that introducing computerised voting in the UK and further afield is a good idea.

Luckily the Open Rights Group (ORG) is holding some discussions on the 8th Feb to discuss this very subject.

If you’re near to London, we urge you to attend. This is important stuff.

Sky Anytime on PC: One Million Films In A Year

Sky Anytime on PC downloaded its one millionth film on the 14 January neatly marking its first year of operation.

The Sky Anytime on TV service is the renamed Sky By Broadband service, which delivers select Sky’s TV content over a broadband connection to a PC.

Sky Anytime: One Million Films In A Year

Figures for the film downloads could have been larger if Sky hadn’t had to pull the service back in September after their chosen DRM-restriction system, by Microsoft, was cracked.

We’re assuming that the million films that have been downloaded have been paid for, making it a pretty big bonanza, given the films are a wallet-emptying £3.95 each. Once subscribers have paid up, they’re given access to it for seven days, but are restricting to 48 hours viewing window after the first viewing.

Dawn Airey, BSkyB’s managing director of channels and services, was keen to say her piece about it … “We’re delighted that customers have taken to Anytime with such enthusiasm. Sky Movies is the UK’s most popular movie service and we’re able to use broadband to give customers more flexibility in how they watch. The fact that in this first year we’ve already seen 1m movie downloads is testament to customers’ willingness to embrace new technologies and get more from Sky.”

Sky report that the service has gained a quarter of a million registered users in its first year of operation.

Big Brother’s DRM Nightmare

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare Backstory
Forgive me. I forked over money to Channel 4 to become a paying Season Pass sucker for the Celebrity Big Brother live stream.

My dearest, a less-than closet BB fan, persuaded me to watch CBB on the launch night – something made all the more peculilar by the fact that I don’t watch TV anymore (apart from The Simpsons at 6pm on Channel 4, of course).

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare To be frank, by the end of the program I was grateful to her. The sight of the fantastic disdain of Ken Russell made it worthwhile in itself.

What got me reaching for my credit card was the sheer hilarity of seeing Jade Goody enter the house – post her journey through crowds of frantic screaming BB fans, proceeded by her 50-yard car drive and obligatory press photo pose – to a house with three grumpy, quiet people who didn’t jump up and down when they saw her enter. It couldn’t have been further from her expected truth.

Her face was priceless – well, I thought it was at least worth £5 to see it for a while longer, showing a mixture of confusion and pain.

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare It appeared that finally Endemol had got a quality production team behind this one, lead by an intelligent director.

Hence my giving money, enabling this rubbish to make huge profits for those concerned.

__Using DRM … it _does_ suck
Once I’d registered and paid for it, the first surprise was not to be sent a direct URL to access the stream. Instead the process is long and painful as you have to drag yourself through the Channel4 site to find the stream.

Here’s a run down of the hoops they get you to jump through …

*Deep breath now* –

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare Navigating through their home page to the CBB page; click on the “Watch 24/7” link; then the “Already own the pass” link. This pops up a new window with a form requesting sign up detail (despite the link being specific about already owning a pass).

After some searching you’ll notice, at the top of the window, a single word link for Login; which, once clicked, you’ll be asked for your email and password.

Finally the video player appears – hurrah!

Don’t be fooled, the agony isn’t over yet, this is where the DRM pain begins.

Despite having logged in a number of times already, you’re told that you do not have rights to play the content.

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare Clicking Yes takes you to yet another Web page, grandly entitled License Acquisition. Here you’re requested to login _again_.

Once you’ve bashed the keys in the right order, you’re requested to “wait a moment,” as the licence is “obtained”. Eventually you’re offered to click the Play button.

Finally, finally you get to the steam.

That’s bad enough to do once, but adding insult to injury, the worst of it is that each and everytime you want to watch a stream, you’ve got to go through this bullshit.

Summary – DRM Don’t Work
From the experience above you can see that the current version of DRM – Microsoft’s naturally – just doesn’t work for the consumer.

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare It’s not from lack of trying on their part either, Microsoft have been plugging away at their DRM solution for many years and, we have to assume, this is their latest as to get to view the streams, there’s a requirement to ‘upgrade’ your Windows Media Player to the latest version.

We also have to assume that Channel4/Endemol and Microsoft worked together to get the Big Brother streaming working. Say what you want about Big Brother, but it’s a high profile TV ‘event’, so important for them to have it working correctly.

Even after all of this effort, the end user experience is truly atrocious, so bad, that you feel anger every time to access the stream, and let’s not forget, people are paying for the privilege of being insulted like this.

With the difficulty of this process, it’s no wonder that people still try to get their content from file sharing networks to avoid DRM.

Laptops Outsell Desktop PCs For First Time

Laptops Outsell Desktop PCs For First Time Notebooks outsold desktop PCs in Western Europe for the first time, as Acer leapt ahead of Dell to grab second place in PC sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (an area known in da biz as ‘EMEA’).

The figures from research firm IDC show Acer sneaking into second place for the fourth-quarter 2006 sales, with Dell box-shifting activities hit by slow commercial demand and competition from top dog HP.

Michael Larner, IDC senior research analyst, commented that Acer’s growth was fuelled by competitive desktop offerings and surging laptop sales which saw the company retaining its position as the Lord of laptop floggers.

Top overall PC vendor HP enjoyed a successful autumn, with sales expanding by a hefty 62 percent over the quarter.

Laptop sales up
The total PC market in EMEA grew by 10.4 percent during the quarter, although increased laptop sales were countered by desktop sales declining by 5.7 per cent in Western Europe.

Laptops Outsell Desktop PCs For First Time Laptop sales totalled 8.4 million during the quarter, against 8 million desktops, but corporate refresh cycles are expected to elbow desktop sales skyward in the second half of 2007 with Windows Vista expected to drive consumer – but not business – sales, as IDC’s Andy Brown explains:

“In general, enterprises are not moving to new operating systems, at least not until the first service pack, so we don’t expect to see a massive impact in the corporate space in 2007. Once issues of application compatibility are sorted, companies will start to consider it.”

Conversely, business desktop sales went up by 10 per cent here in Blighty-land, but IDC reckoned that this was down to the fact that us go-getting Brits tend to go through commercial desktop refresh cycles earlier than our European chums.

IDC

Scottish School Kids Get Free PDAs

Scottish School kids Get Free PDAs Back in our day we lived in an old water tank on a rubbish tip and considered ourselves lucky if we ate two bits of cold gravel for lunch and had a broken pen for our school work.

But kids today are spoilt rotten, with nearly 60,000 pupils across the Lothians being dished out PDAs, all for nowt.

So far, four Lothian councils are involved in the project, and are currently considering pooling their assets to form a charitable trust and thus become eligible for Lottery funding.

Scottish School kids Get Free PDAs The Scottish initiative – costing £25 million – will see all pupils over the age of 10 in selected schools being handed shiny new PDAs, with 6,000 teachers also enjoying the freebie onslaught.

And if all that wasn’t enough, the kids will also be given access to free wireless Internet under the £25m scheme, designed to boost learning in Scotland.

The bumper PDA giveaway follows a successful pilot scheme in Wolverhampton which reported improved results in boffin topics like mathematics and science once the kids were armed with PDAs.

Scottish School kids Get Free PDAs The scheme will also provide free wireless Internet in a move to keep children interested in schoolwork by giving them online access to course material and homework.

While we’re all for new technology being used in education, we still think the first thing that will cross the kids’ minds when they’re handed their PDA will be, “can I get any games for this?”

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Video On Demand Could Grind The Internet To A Crawl

Video On Demand Could Grind The Internet To A Crawl Although the home entertainment industry is more loved up than the Happy Mondays on a bagful of E about Video-on-Demand, a new report suggests there might be a bumpy ride ahead.

The media research bods at Deloitte reckon that video downloads are likely to “encounter some challenges in 2007” with customers expecting to suffer slow broadband downloading times, especially for customers downloading to their computers.

Igal Brightman, global managing partner at Deloitte commented that, “the unrelenting growth in Internet traffic during 2007 may overwhelm some of the Internet’s backbones: the terabit-capable pipes connecting continents.”

“The impact may be most noticeable in the form of falling quality of service,’ he added, warning the industry that it would only take an unexpected upsurge in video usage to turn the inconvenience caused by dropping access speeds into “full-scale consumer dissatisfaction.”

UK market still small
At the moment, the UK film download market in Britain is still relatively small, with media market and research analysis group Screen Digest, anticipating that the big moolah will eventually start rolling in, but not for a few years’ time,

Video On Demand Could Grind The Internet To A Crawl The company estimates that the UK market is set to be worth £2.6 million in 2007 (£400,000 up from last year), soaring up to £8.4 million in 2008, and hitting a badger’s nadger under £30 million by 2009.

The big payola, however, is unlikely to start being raked in until equipment and networks improve.

Slower than a sleepy sloth
Deloitte calculated that on a typical two Mbit/s DSL network, film downloads will crawl down the wire at a yawn-inducing one minute per minute for a film, so a three hour film would take 180 minutes or more to arrive.

When it comes to downloading high-definition video, punters can definitely put the popcorn on hold too, with an average film taking the best part of a day to slide down a one Mbit/s DSL connection.

Matters aren’t helped by the rise of other bandwidth-hogging applications like VoIP, e-mail and online gaming, and in high demand areas it may prove quicker to pop down to Blockbuster than wait for the film to download.

MySpace Face Four Child Lawsuits

MySpace is being hit with compensation claims by the families of four children who allege sexual assault by adult MySpace members after finding out personal information about them on their MySpace pages.

The families from New York, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas have filed seperate cases in Los Angeles. They’re being represented by Arnold & Itkin LLP of Houston, Texas and Barry & Loewy LLP of Austin, Texas.

They allege “negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation” by News Corp. and MySpace.

These cases don’t appear to fall into the ‘oh this might have happened’ category. Three of the cases have lead to the incarceration of the attackers, one whom is serving ten years in Texas. In the other case the two men have been arrested and are awaiting criminal prosecution.

Not the first claim
This isn’t a first for Barry & Loewy LLP. Back in June 2006 they filed the first lawsuit of its kind against MySpace, for a 14 year old girl who was also allegedly assaulted after contact through MySpace.

They claimed MySpace was “negligent in protecting teenage users despite numerous warnings of the dangers” and “had full knowledge that sexual predators were contacting young children on the website but did nothing to stop it.” The financial claim was $30 million in damages.

Concerns like these aren’t new to MySpace. Back in Feb 2006, parents were voicing their concerns.

MySpace have taken action. In December last year MySpace took action to kick off known sexual predators.

Be careful
Cases like these will bring into focus the potential dangers to those who reveal details about themselves online, although with a few simple rules, horrible incidents such as these should be avoidable. Most of them being the same rules you would apply in normal, non-online life.

Skype: Calls To Landlines Go Flat Rate & Skype Pro Announced

Skype are on the move again, this time changing the way that they bill for calls to landlines.

Skype: Calls To Landlines Go Flat Rate & Skype Pro Announced As is their want, it will be brought to in Europe, then rest of world during 2007.

The new charging scheme does away with per-minute charges for SkypeOut calls to domestic landlines, replacing it with a connection fee. This fee changes depending on the currency, with Europe paying 3.9 Euro Cents and the UK being spanked 2.9 pence per call, against the current exchange rate equivalent of 2.56 pence. All of these prices exclude VAT.

Skype: Calls To Landlines Go Flat Rate & Skype Pro Announced After the first five seconds of a SkypeOut call, the connection fee will apply.

Some countries will be cheaper, running at 1.7 Euro Cents, these currently include … Czech Republic (including Prague), Guam, Hungary (including Budapest), Israel (including Jerusalem), Luxembourg, Malaysia (including Kuala Lumpur), Puerto Rico and both Alaska and Hawaii in the United States.

This shift around isn’t a bolt out of the blue. Back in December a Skype Executive talked about these connection rates that became effective from 13:00 CET today.

The Skype Unlimited Calling plan in the US and Canada and the Talk for Britain campaign in the UK do not include a connection fee for national calls. Skype to Skype calls continue to be free and calls to mobiles will continue to be charged on a per minute basis.

Setup fees are usually bad news for people who make short calls, as the cost is front loaded, with the nattering classes gaining the biggest benefit from the flat rate.

Skype Pro
To have the privilege of a Skype Pro account punters will have to pay €2 per month. The new Skype Pro accounts also come with free Skype Voicemail and €30 off a SkypeIn number.

Skype Pro

The iDontWantOne: Private Eye Mocks The iPhone

The brilliant Private Eye, satirical magazine of the UK, has a fake advert for the Apple iPhone.

The headline? At last, from Apple – The iDontWantOne with a photo of the iPhone underneath it.

The gist of the jest is that it’s over-complicated for normal mortals and is highly likely to malfunction. After you’ve used the phone to call Apple customer support and tried to text them and failed, you can use it as an iBrick with a paper note attached to it saying “Why doesn’t your stuff work properly?”

Full copy is

The ultimate in hand-held technology! Now using the all-in-one device you can take a photo, download songs, play videos, access the internet and then with the iPhone you can ring up Apple to complain that none of the above facilities work. And if the phone doesn’t work you can text the customer services department – unless that doesn’t work either, in which case you can use it as a brick (the iBrick facility) to throw through the window of the Apple store, attached to a lo-tech hand-written note saying, “Why doesn’t your stuff work properly?”

Referring to the oft-used phrase of bad support departments, they have an insert with “Try turning it off and then on again,” underneath a photo of The Steve.

Given Apple’s legal-happy status currently, they may be contacting The Eye – not something that will phase them, they’ve had far bigger legal battles and won before.

Besides the great jests that Private Eye have against the irrelevant, they also carry out real journalism – actually investigating wrongs and exposing them – something of a rarity in most publications.

Private Eye
Private Eye subscriptions

The iDontWantOne: Private Eye Mocks The iPhone

Nintendo Rake In Record Sales

Nintendo Rake In Record Sales The Nintendo DS has emerged as the top selling gaming device in both the US and the UK during 2006.

According to figures from the NPD Group, the DS outsold the Wii and PlayStation 3 (PS3) over the bumper Christmas holiday period in the US, with 1.6 million Nintendo DS’s flying off the shelves during December, adding to a total sales figure of 9.2 million units.

By comparison, Sony’s much hyped PS3 only managed to sell 490,700 units in December, hindered by supply and production problems.

Nintendo Rake In Record Sales Americans certainly went waheey for the Wii, with 604,200 consoles shifted in December, backed up by brisk business for extra games.

NPD found that Wii owners bought three extra titles on average, with a huge 86 percent forking out for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Nintendo Owns Europe
Across the pond in Europe, Nintendo managed to shift 500,000 Wiis during December, while in the UK a hefty 200,000 of the next-gen consoles found themselves in the clammy excited hands of game-crazy Brits.

Nintendo Rake In Record Sales Despite the bumper sales, Wii’s still remain as rare as a Cardiff City away win, with Nintendo Europe MD Laurent Fischer admitting that the company is still “facing stock shortages.”

Record sales
According to UK market monitor Chart Track, UK consumers also bought more than 500,000 Nintendo DS handheld consoles, making it the UK’s biggest games machine last year.

With the Wii whipping up a sales storm and the DS registering record sales on both sides of the Atlantic, Nintendo look set to notch up their most successful financial year ever.

[From PC Advisor and Reg Hardware]