All Things News

Straight from Ars Technica: “YouTube and MySpace may be next on the music industry’s hit list, according to Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris. Labelling them “copyright infringers,” Morris said that the label has plans to deal with the popular web sites and their hosting of infringing videos.MySpace is the trendiest social networking site around, while YouTube has come from nowhere to become one of the most popular destinations on the Internet. While copyrighted material is peripheral to the success of MySpace, the plethora of snippets from popular TV shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show along with countless music videos on YouTube has made it a very high-traffic site.

YouTube “respects the rights of copyright holders,” according to the Copyright and Inappropriate Content section of its Help Center. However, it puts the onus on its users to ensure that the material they post is not infringing. Given the type of content available on the site, it’s clear that users aren’t too concerned about who owns the rights to the material they are uploading. That said, YouTube readily takes down copyrighted material once it is notified of the infringement, as fans of a Saturday Night Live sketch found out earlier this year.”

Straight from Slashdot: “A safer and more practical way of storing and releasing hydrogen, discovered by two Arizona State University researchers, could lead to a new type of fuel cell capable of packing 10 times more energy. The key is apparently using the alkaline compound borohydride — ‘a 30% solution of borohydride in water actually contains one-third more hydrogen than the same volume of liquid hydrogen.’”

Wii VIDEO Tailer – Shows Wii Sports Boxing and more!

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Straight from Ars Technica: “Nintendo has announced release dates and launch prices for the Wii console, and it looks like the Americas will get it before the Japanese home market does. In Japan, the Wii will be available on December 2 for the princely sum of ¥25,000 (about $215), while North and South America will see a November 19 launch and a $250 initial price point.It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison between the two continents, as the Japanese version will lack the bundle of sports games that ship in the American package. The five titles included are Wii Tennis, Boxing, Golf, Baseball, and Bowling, all fairly obvious candidates for swinging the wand around your living room. Other than that, the two launches will feature the same assortment of hardware, including one newfangled wand controller and one nunchuck attachment.”

Straight from Joystiq: “Wii Sports will be bundled free come November 19 when Wii launches for $250 stateside. That much we know. But how many mini-sports games will be included in the package title? While sources close to EGM (Oct issue, page 74) suggested that the game “is going to sport over 30 different games” and USA Today name dropped a basketball game (typo?), the official Wii Sports fact sheet only mentions tennis, baseball, golf, bowling, and boxing.

From the release: “Wii Sports offers five distinct sports experiences, each using the Wii Remote to provide a natural, intuitive and realistic feel. Players can use their own Mii caricatures in the game and play them against their friends’ Miis for a more personalized experience. As players improve, their Miis’ skill levels will increase, so that they can see exactly how much better they’ve become.”"

Straight from Ars Technica: “At a press event today, Microsoft showed off the first iteration of the Zune digital music player along with a handful of accessories. As expected, the device has a 30GB hard drive, WiFi connectivity, an FM radio tuner, and a 3-inch, 320×240 screen. Zune owners will be able to connect the devices to a service dubbed the Zune Marketplace.The Zune will come in three colors: black, white, and brown and will have music and videos from Virgin Records, Sub Pop Records, and a handful of other labels preloaded. If users don’t find the basic Zune UI appealing, they will be able to customize it with images or themes.”

Straight from Slashdot: “A Chinese computer company hopes to sell low-cost PCs to schools and government agencies, but allegations of ripped-off processor designs might slow the effort. From the article: ‘Chinese-based ZhongKe Menglan Electronics Technology Co. will produce several thousand low-cost PCs to distribute to schools and local governments. The PCs, which will initially sell for $150 to $175, will run on Linux and include 256Mb of RAM, a 40 or 60GB hard drive, and a Godson-2 CPU clocked between 800Mhz and 1Ghz. If initial sales of the product are successful ZhongKe will begin mass production of the units for sale at around 125 US dollars. However, the Godson-2 CPU included in the PCs has come under scrutiny of late. BLX IC Design Corp., producer of the Godson-2, produced its first working prototype in 2005. The chip clocked at 500Mhz, and BLX at the time claimed the Godson’s performance rivaled that of higher-clocked Pentium III CPUs. However, the chip’s architecture has gotten attention around the industry for its similarities to the MIPS chip from MIPS Technologies Inc. According to market research group In-Stat, the Godson-2 is about 95 percent compatible with the MIPS R10000, which was introduced in 1995.’”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Dell Computer has announced that it is rolling out four new desktop models and expanding its line of Dimension products. The new models include a slim consumer tower called the C521, notable for its use of an AMD processor. While Dell has released servers with AMD processors in their consumer computers earlier this year, this is the first time that they have offered AMD chips in their consumer products. The C521 line uses AMD Athlon 64 in both single and dual-core (X2) configurations. The other new models use Intel Core 2 Duo chips.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “A group of Princeton computer scientists has published a study that examines flaws and vulnerabilities in Diebold’s AccuVote-TS voting machines. Complete with a video that demonstrates the ease with which the electronic voting machine can be compromised, the study provides chilling insight into the serious risk of election tampering and fraud created by modern voting technology. The vote-stealing demonstration software developed by the computer scientists “can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss.”The study reveals that “[m]alicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection,” and that the software can be installed on a voting machine in only a minute by anyone that has physical access. The study also discovered that Diebold’s AccuVote-TS systems can be targeted by self-propagating viruses “that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity.” The computer scientists conclude that defects are present in the hardware of the AccuVote-TS as well as the software. Although some issues can be mitigated by software updates, the machines themselves will have to be replaced in order to eliminate some of the problems identified by the study.”