Lenovo has done a pretty good job with its recent notebook line. I love the way how the second screen is ‘inserted’ into the first screen. That is simply slick and smart in terms of the design. It is very likely that other laptop manufacturers will follow suit given the popular need for a secondary screen.
Lenovo Dual-Screen Laptop
This video was recently posted on Kotaku.
That little kid with his A.D.D.-styled screaming reminds me of this video back in time when Nintendo 64 was still hot.
BTW, this is the remix version if you’re interested.
Ars Technica posted this interesting article about how Australia’s government try to censor the flow of information into the country. The attempt is simply flawed, costly, inefficient, technically not feasible, and undemocratic. The complaint list can go on and on and on, yet, the government has planned to put this filtering system on trial in early January 2009.
Australia’s hugely controversial ISP filtering plan received a lump of Christmas coal in its stocking with the release this week of a new report that points out the many difficulties with such a scheme. The current government’s response is to make clear that the report was commissioned by the previous government—which apparently makes it a bit suspect. A live trial of the filtering system has been delayed into January, but it is still going ahead.
“The Government is aware of technical concerns raised in the report, and that is why we are conducting a pilot to put these claims to the test,” said Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
The lengthy report was commissioned by the Howard Government back in 2007 and was conducted by the Internet Industry Association. Not that the current government wants you to take the report’s points too seriously; Conroy points out that “the report methodology was a literature review of existing studies as well as interviews and surveys. It involved no empirical testing of filtering technology.”
The group did, however, conduct interviews with ISPs, content producers, filter vendors, telecommunications lawyers, and technical experts from Sydney University. The project team also “visited and interviewed organizations in countries that have implemented content filtering schemes.” What emerges from the report is a sense of the difficulties that Australia would have to face if it moves forward with implementation.
Not least among them are the legal questions. The report identifies a huge list of potential problems, including:
- Over-blocking and under-blocking content
- Service degradation and the potential impact on existing service level agreements
- Interception and hacking
- Impairing freedom of expression
- Privacy breaches
- Contractual claims
- Negligence
- Misleading conduct
- Breaching sale of goods legislation
Incorrect blocks, though they might prove uncommon, could prove costly. The report notes that a single blocked site could result in multiple legal claims, including “defamation, due to the grave implication that the owner has been involved in the distribution of illegal content” and “loss of revenue during the time site was blocked, possibly as a result of degradation of product or brand awareness, or direct loss of potential earnings.”
The ISPs consulted for the report pointed out that the filtering scheme could be bypassed quite easily; VPN and HTTPS traffic would be harder to filter, for instance, and the proposed scheme doesn’t appear to include e-mail, instant messaging, or P2P content. If it’s not on the web, it won’t be filtered.
The likely result? An arms race. “There is an evident risk therefore that web filtering will suffer from the [same] high ongoing costs that e-mail filtering does, as web content providers seek to get their content in front of as many users as possible,” said one ISP. “For instance, some sites use dynamically generated URLs for each page of content which would make filtering of exact URLs effective only. Such a technique could be employed by such web content providers in order to stymie blacklist filtering.”
There’s also the question of the increased cost. In the UK, BT recently spent around £500,000 to implement its “CleanFeed” system. Australian ISPs said that increasing their service fees “even $1/month will be too much.” These ISPs expect the government to cover any costs they incur implementing the program.
And then there’s the question of performance, a key point of pride for ISPs. Most ISPs believe that any scheme would slow speeds, since pulling the destination IP addresses from every packet that passes through the network is a terrifically intensive job; matching those in realtime against a blacklist, then looking up whether the user in question has opted out of the second (optional) level of filtering, could take too much time.
The report quotes an unnamed analyst saying, “Broadband speeds in Australia are low and [ISPs] are concerned about any scheme which degrades existing performance, particularly as it relates to video streaming which has grown dramatically over the past 18 months. Speed degradation would seriously impact that growth.”
Finally, the report takes a look at filtering schemes in European countries, many of which take steps to restrict access to child pornography. Nearly all such schemes are voluntary, though, and ISPs can implement them any way they wish. One odd approach was Sweden’s, which uses a voluntary industry scheme but only addresses “commercial child pornography sites: i.e., sites that offer child abuse images for sale.”
All such schemes were far more limited than Australia’s plan, but they do show that filtering is possible. (If the government cared less about free speech and performance concerns, it could obviously adopt a system more like China’s, though this isn’t the sort of reputation Australia is looking to acquire.)
In any event, the government is going ahead with the scheme. A trial was supposed to begin this week; for reasons not made clear, the trial has now been pushed into January. The government is also signing up mobile operators for a future trial of their own.
I found these two interesting articles on why PS3 still stands out to be a hack proof console.
The first one was posted by a guy named nikkelitous on his site http://www.ps3news.com
Why the PS3 still isn’t hacked?
Source: http://www.ps3news.com/story/title/Why-the-PS3-still-isnt-hacked-2
“Why isn’t the PS3 broken already?” We hear this every day. Someone somewhere thinks they can write a better media player with HD support. A guy wants to release his game but needs the RSX for the amazing graphics it can generate. Why can’t we just tear open the PS3 solder a few wires and be done with it? The answer is both simpler and more complicated than you might expect.
The PSP, the Wii, even the Xbox 360 have all been hacked and can run homebrew applications so everybody thinks “the PS3 should be just as easy.” The PS3 in some ways is as easy, in fact easier. No other console let you install Linux and run anything you want to. Sure Linux on the PS3 is great. You can write your own code and use it. You have the largest collection of applications anywhere (thats right, WAY more than Windows). It’s all free (or at a very low cost).
But it’s limited. You can’t touch the RSX (The very powerful graphics chip in the PS3), you can’t use the full hard drive, and nothing is really optimized for the PS3’s fantastic Cell processor, this means that what should be fast and easy tends to be slow and cumbersome. In fact, DVD playing which can be done on any modern computer is a monumental task in PS3 Linux.
The major problem is that the PS3 isn’t any other console. The PS3 is different in many huge and terrifying ways. First, lets compare the PS3. I know you may think “Why compare the PS3 to the PSP? Why not the 360 or the Wii? The answer is simple, the PSP is another Sony product and if we can break one Sony product why not another? The PSP is hacked, it’s true. In fact, it was hacked almost as soon as it was released!
Why? Because the PSP didn’t have any security protections in the first version: Thats right! It essentially ran anything that you put on it. You could install any program from day 1 (Mind you, no programs existed at the outset, but in time they became common.)
Now you may say “But they added security in the next version and that was hacked very quickly”. I agree with you here, the PSP now has a very powerful security system, but like the Greeks, we had people inside. Once a system is hacked and understood, very little can be used to continue to protect it. In other words, the moment the PSP was uncovered and investigated any future security measures would be trivial to remove and disarm. This proved true and to this day we have each version of the PSP firmware hacked and able to run homebrew within a few weeks.
Now, the Wii, homebrew for the Wii has been slower than expected, not because it’s incredibly difficult to do, but because most developers don’t see a reason. The Wii has been hacked, but it’s almost exclusively used to play copied games.
Most homebrew, in fact, runs in the gamecube emulator built into the Wii. The only reason that developers were interested ing the Wii at all is the controller. Once the controller was found to be connectible to any computer (and even to the PS3) developers lost interest.
“But the Wii has still been hacked, lack of interest isn’t an excuse for the PS3 being difficult”. That’s true, it isn’t, but there is a valid excuse. The Wii isn’t a full upgrade of all the technologies in the GameCube, in fact, it’s almost identical except for a few upgrades. The GameCube has been hacked for a long time and with the Wii being so similar it was a trivial matter to map out the exact differences.
“The 360” some may cry out “it’s on par with the PS3 and has been hacked as well.” It’s true, several hacks for the 360 exist, and some of them are actually monumentally difficult and fascinating. The first hack is rather simple actually. The 360 uses standard DVD disks for it’s games. This means that duplicators exist widely for the 360s media, it also meant that people understand it very well. Sadly, the 360 was broken first by simply fooling the DVD drive to bypass all checks to ensure that a game wasn’t copied.
Again it came from lack of security on the original version of the console. The DVD drive was easily put into “debug” mode and forced to reveal all it’s secrets. Later versions of the console have rectified this with a newer drive. This hack is simply not possible for the PS3 because it’s not using a DVD drive it’s using a custom Blu-ray drive, we can’t simply copy the disks, and we don’t know enough about the firmware on the drive to accomplish a “debug mode” even if it’s on there.
This wasn’t the only hack to hit the 360. Momentarily vulnerable kernels have happened twice, where a bug in the firmware enabled homebrew to be run, each time, though, Microsoft closed the hole in the next version (which was usually released before the hack was really publicized). This is possible for the PS3, but we haven’t yet found one of those bugs.
Remember: Only 2 of all the updates the 360 has had have been broken, all the others are still secure.
Only recently has the “timing” or “ultimate” attack on the 360 come to fruition. By counting the time it takes for the 360 to crash when confronted with code which is not valid the “hash” of a particular set of data can be found. This enables you to move back to one of the older firmwares and hack your 360. However, you are still unable to access the xbox live service until you return to a higher version.
Mind you, this hack is INCREDIBLY difficult to do and requires a specially designed mod-chip and several hours for your 360 to reset repeatedly until you can downgrade putting this hack well above the average user. (To the 360 hackers, I am sorry for simplifying your brilliant hack so much, but this article isn’t just to sceners, it’s to everyone.)
“It’s still a hack.” Well thats true, the 360 IS hacked. And it will probably only get further hacked as time goes on. But you must remember, the 360 was out for a full year longer than the PS3 and it has less security than the PS3 (which actually has a special “police” program running constantly to ensure that the PS3 remains secure). More time and less security mean that it’s easier to break open.
“Well, fine then, when can we expect a PS3 hack?” Thats a good question but it’s very hard to answer. You see, we have many expert hackers trying to break open the PS3 and eventually they will, the problem is that there are many groups of hackers who aren’t communicating or sharing information. This means that many hackers are repeating work that another hacker has already done, or that may be useless due to information that another group may have discovered.
While many groups have claimed hacks, none have actually provided any proof, instead we get videos like the recent ICE video and we get excuses. They may very well have incredibly valuable information, but none of it is shared so it’s hard to get anything out of it. Paradox may have a loader but no way of running it on the latest PS3 firmware, while another group may have a hack enabling code to be run on the latest firmware, but nothing to run on it.
“Why aren’t they sharing?” Typically, the reason they don’t want to share is glory. They want to be “first” they want to be “best” they want to be the Dark Alex or DVD Jon or Arnezami of the PS3. They want first dibs and for that, we all suffer. While each group has different skills, I don’t think that any scene group is really better than any other.
I think that any group stands an equal chance of finding that hole, because like stumbling around blindly after a treasure, someone is bound to stub their toe on it eventually. But if all groups were to work together, we could pinpoint the treasure, and the beauty of this treasure, is that every PS3 owner wins.
Another great article by PS3Center.net explains further:
Why Hasn’t The PS3 Been Hacked?
Source: http://www.ps3center.net/article/202/1/why-hasnt-the-ps3-been-hacked/
When we create a new generation of video games, we also create a new generation of technology, security, and sadly … hackers. Finding holes in new hardware and exploiting them to do anything from copying free games to changing the technology itself, these hackers have many ways of doing things and leave many industries looking for solutions to stop it. With the PSP being hacked just days after each update, we are left to wonder why the PS3 hasn’t been hacked yet and what has Sony done to stop the madness. Well, we created a feature to help explain how things are done and exactly why the PS3 is safe from these attacks.
If you have ever hacked, or watched someone hack a PSP, then you’d know how things work. You mess with the file system and trick it into reformatting itself to fit your needs. All the DRM and privilege rights are overwritten and nothing is stopping you from doing things you’re not supposed to. This can be done on almost any technological piece of hardware. You can insert a UMD and copy it to a memory stick, you can take the iPhone and change the version to bypass AT&T security, or you take your PC game and upload it to a torrent site for someone else to play. Since these hacks seem to be common practice nowadays, Sony has obviously studied these exploits and went to great lengths to prevent it from happening on the PS3.
The minute your PS3 boots up, it runs through 4 stages of security at all times. All 4 stages have secrets that will need to be decoded in order to reach the next stage. So think of hacking the PS3 to be similar to a treasure hunt. You discover the clues and figure out a way to piece them all together to find the treasure. Except in this hunt for the booty, if you mess up one tiny thing, the whole mission collapses and your PS3 could possibly explode into vast reaches of outer space.
For starters, the PS3 is not easily fooled like its sibling PSP. Sony has encrypted each hard drive to only work with a specific PS3, which eliminates the possibility of switching them out like memory sticks. The hard drive is then read by the PS3 where it makes sure the drive is registered to the specific console. After verifying the hard drive, the PS3 continues to search for needed files to boot up the OS. This is merely the logo that appears or random files hidden in the system that will trigger the “OK” to boot up. The hard drive is built in layers with the “bootflag.dat” being the first file read on each start up, which then leads into the DRM file and finally … the game files. Several files found in between each of these makes things even more complicated to bypass. We must also note that messing with any of these files will cause the PS3 to read them as missing and not boot up correctly.
If you finally get past the hard drive, you must then face the problems hidden within the actual system itself. We all know the PS3 is a beast with a hearty 7 cells running under the hood as we brag about this on a daily basis. The problem for hackers is how only 6 of these cells are actually accessible, with the 7th cell access being denied to everyone. Not even game developers have access to this 7th cell. Now why is this cell even there if we can’t use it? In a simple sentence, the 7th cell runs the PS3 completely on its own. The cell boots the system up, cracks the codes encrypted in all security branches, and finally keeps the OS running while you play a game or do whatever you normally do. Remember how I talked about the PS3 verifying the HDD in relation to the system? This is where that comes into place. The 7th cell is what verifies everything that needs to be unlocked or encrypted. The 7th cell basically double checks that everything in the PS3 actually belongs to the PS3, so users cannot trade hard drives or share illegal games without the cell noticing and denying access. With the exception of communicating with other cells, this cell cannot be written to or acknowledged by an outside source, making it completely secure from attacks.
If hackers somehow find a way to hack the hard drive and bypass the 7th cell, there is still one more major problem awaiting for them at the next step. If you haven’t heard about Blu-ray, then you are probably thinking PS2 is the shiznit right now and randomly came across this article of the future somehow. Joking aside, Blu-ray is an amazing feature for HD users and a tremendous advancement for all game makers with a massive storage space and fast loading times. However, it is also the biggest problem to every hacker out there. Each Blu-ray disc comes equipped with a special “disc-based” encryption that is stronger than the security we find on DVD. The 128-bit key is hidden within each disc marked as BD-ROM and requires the “special” Blu-ray technology to decrypt it. Does Eboot.bin sound familiar? No? Well for the new guys, this is the file that hides all the required data to run a game or movie, which is very important. Now you can guess what is hidden under the encryption layer of BD. A Blu-ray lens can read the encryption, unlock it, and break it down from a .SELF file and .ELF file for games, where the Eboot file can be shared with the system. Even if this code is bypassed, hackers would have trouble finding ways to boot up a particular file without having the disc inserted. Unlike hacks on the PSP, simply inserting a different disc will not work. So next time you insert a BD and realize the small load time, just remember your PS3 is just doing all these things in a matter of seconds.
While the PS3 is closed down like the gates at Fort Knox, hackers do occasionally find ways to breach the security of the system. Some hackers have tried to steal passwords, some have tried to destroy the PS3 due to their frustrations of failing, and others randomly do something stupid to make us all laugh. Sony finds out about these hacks, or “attempts” as it were, and immediately issue software updates to protect users like you and I. These updates help protect the PS3 from attacks and are required to access the PlayStation Network. When a PS3 logs into the PSN, it registers on the network with its firmware version. Having faulty firmware will get you banned from the PSN permanently and possibly trigger something to go wrong internally. Hacking the PS3 will also void your warranty and you will no longer be allowed to receive repairs. This final precaution is the 4th and final step Sony has taken to prevent the pirates from hacking your PS3.
Remember, these are just the 4 major security walls Sony has implemented within the PS3. Depending on how hackers attempt to hack the PS3, several smaller problems can occur preventing them from going any further. Installing the OS Linux may open up some loop holes, but compared to what hackers have done with the PSP, nothing has ever been quite as successful.
Will we see the PS3 hacked one day? Possibly, depending on if Sony ever releases that 7th cell and how much hackers learn about all the new technology. Right now the PS3 is the safest beast on the market and people don’t really have to worry a whole lot about attacks. While you may be thinking free games on the PSP are nice, we all must realize how much it hurts the industry as a whole and would devastate the PS3 market.
Thankfully, Sony has found a way to make the safety features unnoticeable to the average gamer and keep the lid on the PS3 closed tightly. So no need to worry, your PS3 is safe at home waiting for you to play the latest games and will one day rule the world. That is until PS4 comes out and we start worrying about something new … but that’s quite a ways away, so let’s just relax while we can.
Found an interesting post from Wired.com today: Why iPhone Games will Rule
- The iPhone’s processor thinks almost twice as fast as the Sony PSP’s brain.
- Its touchscreen is more responsive than the Nintendo DS’s, recognizing subtle finger taps, pinches, and spreads.
- The three-axis accelerometer, like the one in the Wiimote, could replace the thumbstick — Sega has already exploited this ability for an iPhone port of Super Monkey Ball.
- Wi-Fi could make for mean multiplayer mayhem.
- Cell-tower triangulation could be used for location-aware games.
- Attention developers: Get to work!
I haven’t got this gadget so i can’t comment too much about those points.
However, the writer raise two strong claims against the current handheld console: 1/ that iPhone has a faster processor than that of PSP; and 2/ it has a more responsive touch screen. Only time will tell if this proves to be true. It’s still too early to judge if Apple will decide to ‘taste’ the gaming industry thru iPhone.
To further heat up our discussion about CT DS, I found some screenshots of this anticipated game:
Graphically speaking, I can’t notice any much difference from the original version. Will Square Enix add some more extra contents into this ported game?
Is this the time we should walk away from our beloved WinXP?
I am a huge fan of XP myself and find no interest at all in Vista. Apparently, Microsoft’s decision to discontinue XP has made me to rethink about the new OS that I may need to use in case I have to change it. Linux? Or MacOS?
Setting the debate aside, let’s think where our computer MS OS is heading to. The writer in this article describes a process where MS has been working on a new OS system, a microkernel-based system written as a managed code, under a project called Singularity. Midori Project, a derivative of Singularity, is a supposedly Microsoft new puppy to replace Windows in the future. However, we still dunno when or how this project is gonna turn out to be.
Imagine where your computer is window-less, how’s that gonna look like?
Hello World…
This is our first post. Welcome to our blog where you will encounter our various random bits, tips, ideas, and news about video games and tech stuff.
Dunno who we are? You can read our short intro here.
Feel free to comment on our discussions.
Enjoy…