Is Online Gaming A Free For All, Or Orwellian Despotism?

By | November 24, 2011
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More on the story about The Sims Online and the seedy goings on in Alphaville. The Independent’s Andrew Gumbel writes about the case, saying the expulsion of academic Peter Ludlow from the game “was only the beginning of a fascinating new phase”.

Since then, he says, “Electronic Arts, through its online game controller, Maxis, has been cracking down on bad behaviour to clean up Alphaville and, one assumes, try and boost its audience which is stuck at a 80,000 (EA had hoped for a million by now). Evangeline and the psycho-granny have been disciplined, as have various mafia syndicates and a parallel city government set up as a player-based alternative form of authority.”

He then talks about the philosophical aspects of all this, which make for interesting reading.

The Future Of Domain Names?

By | November 24, 2011
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Interesting piece from The Register’s Kieren McCarthy on the changing nature of domain names. He points to the recent case of a guy renting out beef.com to allow People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to lead a very successful campaign on the BSE issue. In the future, individuals and companies may end up renting out domain names rather than selling them:

As anyone who follows the domain name market will tell you, the price of domains has recovered and is almost standing at pre-dotcom-bust figures. It makes sense then that some speculators may invest in an expensive domain and then lease it out to people in fixed-term contracts – just like the housing market. You need not sell the domain completely – you simply accept a long-term lease or even monthly rents, depending on the market and the domain.

The Register reckon this might redress some of the imbalance in the domain name market, pulling “God-like power over domains away from companies like VeriSign which have abused the market for long enough but are impossible to remove”.

The Future Of Data – Watch That Dial

By | November 24, 2011
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Here’s something to separate you from the rest of the boardroom: The Executive Dashboard.

As far as I can work out it’s a three-panel board of dials, upon which you hook prepared overlays of, for example, the countdown to your next sales meeting, the number of emails waiting for you, or how the market is doing. Data is fed to the dashboard through a national radio network, prodding the needles up the dial.

Not a bad idea. The approach is to have information seamless appear in the environment, rather than thrust at you — ‘push’ — or at the end of a long corridor called the Internet — ‘pull’. As the folks at Ambient Devices say, their vision “to embed information representation in everyday objects, making the physical environment a seamless interface to digital information”. (These are the guys who made the Ambient Orb, which “slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or kid is on instant messenger.”)

Beware Screen Spam

By | November 24, 2011
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The new horror: screen spam.

These screen spam advertisements take over your screen and appear as large animations that play across the web page you’re trying to read, or as large letters and lines that appear to be scrawled across the page, obscuring the website content underneath. They look like this:

They’re a bit like pop-ups, and to me they don’t look that new, but according to Mike Adams, “a permission email marketing pioneer who holds strong beliefs about spam vs. permission marketing”, it’s “the most aggressive, obnoxious form of interruption advertising yet conceived on the web”. He also says the most surprising kind of folk do it, including Microsoft. And he reckons it’s not going away soon. “Screen spam devalues the Internet,” he says, “by obscuring useful content with poorly-targeted commercial hype.”

I haven’t come across this yet, at least knowingly. It does sound pretty offensive. But will the new IE, which is supposed to block pop-ups, end up blocking Microsoft’s own ads?

Microsoft Does The Decent Thing

By | November 24, 2011
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Good news for Windows 98 fans, and for folk who don’t believe in upgrading their software just because companies say it’s the cool thing to do. Microsoft has relented on its decision to abandon updates for Windows 98 and Me this week, saying it will continue to provide limited support for the operating systems until 30 June, 2006. During that time, ZDNet says, paid over-the-phone support will be available, and “critical” security issues will be reviewed and “appropriate steps” taken. Here’s another piece on the move from eWeek.

I think this is wise and decent of Microsoft. Although some figures for the numbers of users still clinging to the older operating systems might be skewed, a company like Microsoft can’t claim to be giving priority to security issues with one breath and then leaving many of its customers high and dry by not helping them with security fixes with the other. And while some folk might argue that XP is a far superior product and that customers who do not upgrade to it are, and I quote, ‘doofuses’, I can quite understand if someone feels 98 or (gasp) Me is enough for them. Let’s face it, for most tasks there’s not much more you need than a basic operating system that works. Software is digital, and therefore not a product that declines with age, so it could run forever. Microsoft should be happy people are still using their older programs, and be keeping them happy.