Buyers and VideoGames....

I know that most people have heard of Nintendo and know that it was one of the first mass distributed videogame system to catch on. But over the last 5 to 7 years they faded to the back of the major video game console market behind Sony's Playstation series and Microsofts Xbox series. I found this article talking about how Nintendo has found a solution and how it began.

How the Wii is creaming the competition

It talks about how the head of Nintendo took the time to see what could be done to improve and expand the market of video games and they hit the jackpot. With the Revolutionary Wii Remote, the Wii, Nintendo's newest console, is utterly smashing Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 sales since January.

I love that the Wii takes games to the next level. Since Nintendo made the basic paddle design for the game controllers and they really haven't changed since, im glad they did what they did.

The Wii is addictive. With all the new involved games you have to get active to play these games now, no more just sitting on the couch being a couch potato. "Nintendo's top strategists knew early on that they wanted to build a machine with a wireless, motion-sensitive controller." And with that they have a console that plays fun for everyone, 5 year olds to grandma's.

An example of why the Wii is also selling fast is that it comes with its "killer app" Wii Sports, a variety of sports games you can play solo or with friends. These games come with a play mode AND a workout mode. For example the Wii Boxing has you "box" with the Wii remotes in hand it tracks all your movements and transfers them to the character you are controlling. I've played it and didnt expect to work up a sweat, but hey when your having fun work doesn't seem that hard.

I hope everyone gets a chance to try it. If just for fun, hopefully you'll enjoy it.
:-)

PC Magazine's Security Super Guide...

PC Magazine Article

The Internet today is not the relaxed semi-safe place it was some 10 years ago. Now you can't go a day without being attacked by something from the web. Whether you know it or not, the net has constant attackers and now there is a pretty large commercial market to try to protect you.
In this article i read from this months PC Magazine, they go through a range of products, some of which i use, and some ive never heard of. I was interested to see how the money i spent really stacked up to the varying levels of security.
They talked about good ol' antispyware, software that searches, seeks out and is suppose to remove anything that gives someone else the ability to see whats on your computer or what your doing on your computer. The two pieces of software i use, webroot's Spy Sweeper and Norton Internet Security 2007.




It was nice to see that both products did well when compared to other products and did well overall. Spy Sweeper Averaged a 8.725 overall on blocker spyware, removing it and handling keyloggers (programs that record every key you press on your keyboard). Quite nice for a Standalone product. Made me feel better about surfing the web. :-)
Nortonn Internet Security 2007 scored and average of 8.8 with a perfect score in Keylogger removal and a 9.4 in keylogger blocking. With all these excellent scores you would think that im safe from lots of things.... WRONG!!!!!
Thats just the tip of th iceberg.
Luckily for me and a couple thousand other people, we have Norton Internet Security 2007, its handy because it includes a whole lot of tools for your personal protection. It has a Firewall, AntiSpyware, AntiVirus, AntiSpam, and EVEN Privacy/Parental controls (dont know why id need parental controls, but hey its free with the software. :-P) With all the different functions it can do, it can make your surfing experience so much safer, help you sleep at night, knowing that your computer is not being over run by spyware, and people looking to use your computer to do harm to others.

oh and Plus, your computer will run faster, so you can play all the fun games you like :-)

All these software solutions are nice, but there is always something that someone is working on or testing that finds ways around the security you put up. Your computer is just like a bank, you have all theses fancy monitors and security guards and vaults, but in the end, people still find ways to rob your bank. So all you can do is be vigilant in double-checking where your going on the web and scanning and downloading new updates all the time.

Wikipedia - "The Book Stops Here"

Wiki's, what a great creation. In Daniel H. Pink's article, "The Book Stops Here", he discussed the way Wikipedia came about and how addicting it can be.




Jimmy Wales creation has gone from Nupedia, a "One Best Way" model,(uses experts to write articles on specific subject areas) and 12 articles in 18 months, to the now a million plus articles of Wikipedia.

We have talked about Wiki's before, but this article takes it to the encyclopedia area. It talks about how Wikipedia is comparable to Britannica and Encarta. Both of these encyclopedia's are well known and formally known as the books to find info on everything. But Pink shows that, in 2005, Wikipedia had 500,000 articles while Britannica had 80,000 and Encarta had 4,500. Now to me, I see Wikipedia as a better resource for locating info.

We had the discussion in class about the accuracy of Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedias, and it turned out that they share about the same accuracy. To think, something made by regular people is just as accurate as something put together solely by "experts" of the field. hmm, Never underestimate the regular man.

I think that Wikipedia should be allowed to be legitimate resources for papers and such since it is comparably accurate to those of bound encyclopedias. PLUS its up to date with current information that book bound encyclopedias cant do.

Looks as if the world of Web 2.0 is sprouting and we need to get Universities into the mix of it before we are the only ones using books to do research :-P

Hackers and Security

Well, as a computer programmer I like the idea of having a few free spirited people out there doing things a little different. Its interesting to see the Wikipedia article on Hackers, and to see the different types of hackers there are.

• Hacker may mean simply a person with mastery of computers; however the mass media most often uses "hacker" as synonymous with a (usually criminal) computer intruder. See hacker, and Hacker definition controversy.

• White hat:An ethical hacker who breaks security but who does so for altruistic or at least non-malicious reasons. White hats generally have a clearly defined code of ethics, and will often attempt to work with a manufacturer or owner to improve discovered security weaknesses, although many reserve the implicit or explicit threat of public disclosure after a "reasonable" time as a prod to ensure timely response from a corporate entity. The term is also used to describe hackers who work to deliberately design and code more secure systems. To white hats, the darker the hat, the more the ethics of the activity can be considered dubious. Conversely, black hats may claim the lighter the hat, the more the ethics of the activity are lost.

• Grey hat: A hacker of ambiguous ethics and/or borderline legality, often frankly admitted.

• Blue Hat: Refers to outside computer security consulting firms that are used to bug test a system prior to its launch, looking for exploits so they can be closed. The term has also been associated with a roughly annual security conference by Microsoft, the unofficial name coming from the blue color associated with Microsoft employee badges. Also see Big Blue.

• Black Hat: Someone who subverts computer security without authorization or who uses technology (usually a computer or the Internet) for terrorism, vandalism, credit card fraud, identity theft, intellectual property theft, or many other types of crime. This can mean taking control of a remote computer through a network, or software cracking.

• Cracker:
  1. A black hat hacker. Often used to differentiate black hat hackers and the general (positive) sense of hacker. The use of the term began to spread around 1983, probably introduced both due to similar phonetic sound and as construction from the historical slang of safe cracker. Also theorized by some to be a portmanteau of the words criminal and hacker.
  2. A security hacker who uses password cracking or brute force attacks. Related to the term safe cracker.
  3. A software cracker. A person specialized in working around copy protection mechanisms in software. Note that software crackers are not involved in exploiting networks, but copy protected software.

• Script kiddie: A pejorative term for a computer intruder with little or no skill; a person who simply follows directions or uses a cook-book approach without fully understanding the meaning of the steps they are performing.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Looks like a Script Kiddie to me LOL
  
  
  
  
  
  As I look at this list of "hacker types" I see some good, some bad, some I could use as friends, and some I'd hate to have as enemies.
  I could see myself possible being a White or Blue hat if i wanted to. I like the idea of getting paid to do what others go to jail for and being able to say, "Yeah I helped make that system hacker proof, or hacker resistant." These are the kind computer people who love what they do and have strong moral values :-P
  Its those Green and Black hats I'm worried about. In most senses the color green means go, I'd like them to STOP. hehe. Borderline legal, could be good, could be bad, but no moral/ethical code to stand on????? Not sure its better for everyone to have these Green hats. Black hats, The people you buy Norton SystemWorks and Norton Internet Security for. These guys what all your money, all your information, basically they want you AND your identity. Now there are some things that these Black hats do that computer users may like, but is not LEGAL or right.
  
  
  • Cracking Software - breaking the security features of intellectual property and making these programs "free" to use. Usually done for high end software ranging from $150 - $1000. Some times Games too :-) --Logan Taylor
  In the current world we live in all the hats work side by side to give us the online communities we have and things we use everyday. This very blog service for instances was probably tested by a blue hat firm or one that Google has inside its payroll. As I looked for security stories on CNN I had issues using the links. The stories may have gone out of date because the stories i clicked on said,"
  
  
  
  
  The page you requested cannot be found. The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
  
  
  Please try the following:
  • If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
  • Open the www.cnn.com home page and look for links to the information you want.
  • Use the navigation bar on the left to find the link you are looking for.
  • Click the Back button to try another link.
  • Enter a term in the search form below to look for information on CNN sites or the Internet.
  
  Maybe a Black Hat changed the links so he wouldn't get caught?!?!?!?!?!?! All things are possible ;-)

Web 2.0

Hmmmm... Web 2.0, I'm interested in how the Net is moving toward a "true" would wide network and not just a network of networks. Steven Johnson's piece of the development of Web 2.0 and a comparison of the current web and the possible way Web 2.0 could have us living. Why the Web is Like a Rain Forest is a nice in that it gives a simple example of the way in which the new software developments could make life easy and efficient.
When Johnson spoke about the becoming a huge social library it tickled me inside. Just imagine, you could have 100 lifetimes of knowledge waiting for you to open your mailbox, and all u had to do was type in 3 words or so. In todays net, we have to go search out this info and track down sources and try to verify them. In the future we would only need to sit at the computer or walk with your computer headset ;-) and open your mailbox and pick from thousands of sources ready for your reading and picked according to YOUR request.
As I read this article I thought about Wiki's and how its a community that regulates the data and info there. In the idea that Johnson gave, it would be others interested in your topic, similar to how Wikipedia, for example, is managed, and you have the newest info right there for you to have. No more hours of searching Google or the Library of Congress. Soon enough you will be able to just click and type once and have an unlimited amount of info on ANY topic delivered to you anywhere your computer-device can receive.

I just hope it hurries on up and gets here, cause I need that Web 2.0 to help me do my research paper :-P

Google and Books...

"Throwing Google at the book" by Farhad Manjoo, I actually used Google's Search Engine to find an online copy of this work. This article is from late '05 and touches on a very powerful and influential move by Google to create and online catalog of published books and written works.

The main theme is that Google is infringing on the Copyrights of the authors and pockets of both the authors and publishing companies. At publication, Google had a good number of books published before 1923, scanned and search-able. All these books were mostly published without copyrights and put straight into the public domain (from: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html) Google ran into issues with new books that are still being published and copyrights intact. Google argues that its doing good for the authors and publishers by making all these titles search-able, which will allow more exposure of the works, and will give "majority" of the money made off of this new Google feature, "Google Print", back to the publishers and authors.The authors and publishers on the other hand believe that Google will be doing harm to their business and only make Google more profitable and powerful.



When I read this article, I looked at it from a students perspective. For example, with Google's proposed system I would be able to search millions of books and find the lines or topics I'm looking for just by searching one database. After I find them I have to option to buy the book of i feel that it has what I need. To me its a great idea. But when I look to see what the authors see, I'm confused about why they would be against it. The article mentioned that only a few books sold over 5000 copies in a given year. I see that the smaller authors and publishing firms could have this as a great option to expand their reading and BUYING base.

But as we move further into the Information Age, I see all data becoming public domain eventually and this is one big step in the picture of today and a small step into the future of free trade of information, copyrighted or not ;-). I say give us BOOKS through Google and make our lives easier.

-Logan

Cable Internet Service

CABLE INTERNET

A very fast network connection to the Internet. Cable internet access has many benifits over its forefathers.


Before Cable internet access there was dial-up access. With a maximum speed of 56 kbps, dial-up is extremely limited by speed. Cable now has the ability to go up to speeds 6 to 8 Mbps. A massive change in speed capability.

Now that we have this "high-speed" connection, more media mat be passed to the users and we can have more interactive experiences while we "surf" the internet

More High-Speed Internet

High Speed....