Last summer, I brought you the story of how the Domain Name System (DNS) was under threat and how many of the world’s top tech companies were working together to solve it. Unfortunately, not everyone has updated the software on their servers to fix this flaw. While it’s not as big of a threat as it was last summer, it still poses a danger to the web. Almost a year ago, I explained a flaw in the encryption system that you use to securely connect to online banking sites and to safely purchase goods from Amazon, eBay, and many others. Today there’s more news about ways for that encryption (https) can fail.

The new attack is what’s known as a “man in the middle” attack. What this means is that some evildoer, or someone who just wants your money, watches your network and waits for you to go to your bank’s website. When you do that, the evildoer inserts himself in the middle of the communication and can start adding to the information that’s going back and forth. This allows him to do all sorts of nasty stuff from stealing your online banking information to tricking your browser to download malicious software onto your computer. Ideally, this is one of the things that the encryption is supposed to prevent. If all the communication between you and the server is protected with encryption, no one can insert themselves into your conversation. However, there is a flaw in the design of the protocol which allows this to happen at a crucial moment.

The flaw was came to prominence a few weeks ago, but many researchers said that the flaw was so difficult to exploit that it wouldn’t be a serious security threat. Then, a few days ago, a Turkish student used the flaw to steal some user names and passwords for Twitter. Fear not, he was not being malicious, but simply proving to the security community that this is a serious flaw that needs to be taken seriously instead of simply being dismissed. Twitter has since made changes to prevent the same thing from happening again and industry groups have begun meetings to determine a more permanent fix for this problem. These meetings have been going on since September, but it’s unclear if a solution has been found yet. This, like the other security problems I’ve written about before, will be fixed soon, but it will take a long time for the fix to go into wide use. It’s also a reminder that even our best and brightest will make mistakes sometimes with wide ranging impacts on our economy and the way we communicate.

image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/23905174@N00/

Heck no it hasn’t. Imagine complete cities powered by urine. You charge your cell phone by peeing into it and shaking it up, you run your car by connecting a tube to your bladder and constantly downing coffee (caffeine makes you pee), there’s a urine fountain in the city park…okay, that’s a little far-fetched and not quite in the scope of Pee Power, but there’s something to it.

Ohio University scientists are developing technology that will allow you to run your car, home and cell phone on pee. The new technology utilizes the abundance of hydrogen in our urine (yes there’s hydrogen in our urine) by bonding it to another element like oxygen which allows it to be stored and released using less energy than conventional power sources. The technology is still 6 months away, and I don’t expect it to be embraced by the public very quickly, but if we’re finding out ways to reuse our waste more power to you.

Apparently, similar technology has been looked at before.

image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/90417577@N00/

In the age of decontextualization, the growing masses of self-important messages have plagued the internet with gossip-like banality in ways no one could have foreseen.  While the off post may find its way to usefulness, the majority of tweets, status updates, and blahs drip with undeniable thoughtlessness. As caretakers of the thinking few, The Melon is pleased to offer this frequent commentary of the worse SIM of the day to awaken the inner scrutineer within us all.

And today’s winner is:

iamjacobblack

kim kardashian was on the teen choice awards…so watching them was not gay

Close second:

MattyTets

Gi Joe= great fucking movie

I encourage you to post your own in the comments as you find them.

Note: this may get us into trouble. We’ll see what happens if that happens.

Amazon and Sony are waging war. The nascent market for hand-held e-book readers is spurring these two to a knockdown fight for the first viable technological monopoly over digital books. E-books have been around for a while, but the release of Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader mark the first opportunity for consumers to actually have to make a choice between physical books and digital books. Previously digital books were limited on the supply side (primarily by such problems as the high costs of scanning or transcribing already published books and putting them on the Internet) and had low demand (because it sucks to read books on a computer screen at your desk).

Whenever I bring up the mere existence of e-book readers to fellow bibliophiles, I get an interesting response. “I’ve been reading about the Kindle,” I’ll say, and my friend will respond, “Yeah, but I like reading with real books too much. Kindle can’t replace that. There’s no way it can replace that!” And then I will listen to a long rant about the end of books as we know them. You’d think the new technology is committing genocide against the printed word. It is a bit like saying, “So did you hear about the new legal status of gay marriage in Iowa?” and hearing the reply, “Yeah, but I’m against raping animals, even in the bonds of marriage.”

I want to offer a few words of reassurance. First, who’s using e-book readers? Currently only tech nerds and people who read a lot anyway. Average folk are not choosing to shell out four hundred dollars – yet. Oh, as the price comes down it is certain that a chunk of the middle class will get one, but that’s not for a good ten years at least.

Second, why is everyone so convinced that e-book readers threaten the printed word as we know it? While the technological evolution is clearly ongoing, the direction of the readers is that of a general digital use device, with access to the Internet and in the end merely a strong emphasis on digital books. If anything Sony Reader and Kindle are the next big challenge to the iPhone and the Blackberry. Particularly the option to automatically receive newspapers and magazines makes me suspect that e-book readers will make businesspeople a key demographic.

If the opposition to e-book readers stems from a suspicion that they will cause the publishing industry to topple, the fear is unfounded. The newspaper industry has already harmed itself (almost?) beyond repair. The publishing industry should also take responsibility for its own troubles up to this point. Like giving Reagan credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, it hardly seems fair to blame new technology for what would have happened anyway. I believe that even if big publishers go out of business (and they have not yet – thanks, Stephenie Meyer!) that will signal merely a shift in direction for publishing. Small publishers previously specializing in Wicca and poetry will have the opportunity to make a profit at general books. That’s not a bad thing for consumers or the market, just current companies on the brink. (Whether or not it is good for authors depends on the specific problems of a new publishing game.) More concerning than whether publishers can tough it out is whether people read at all in the first place. Publishing companies are always on the verge of bankruptcy because the market is made up of a relatively small number of people who love to read and who buy a lot of books. Reading is not a national past time. But by making books cheaper (after the cost of the device) and access easier, maybe e-book readers will inspire people to read more.

The primary reason that people react so poorly to e-book readers, though, is the total experience of reading. The sensation of holding a book, smelling it, browsing a store or library, or striking up conversations with strangers about books are all aspects of reading that e-book readers cannot duplicate. And that is the crux of the matter: since they cannot duplicate the experience, e-book readers should therefore be no threat to real books. Consumers use them for different purposes. E-books will not pose a threat to the printed word, but merely nuance in consumption. Nor will they threaten libraries. Tacoma Public Library is one of many across the country to jump on the e-book train. Modern libraries are not just places to check out books or study. They are community resources, with classes, meeting rooms, cultural events, historical archives, DVDs and music, and much more. Libraries are more than capable of using technology to expand services.

Photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertogreco/

It’s finally time to announce my latest, greatest and formerly ultra secretive project/collaboration, minutaur.com. Initially conceived by my father in a rare moment of inspiration nearly a decade ago, Minutaur has been in development for over two years and soft launched last week.

So, what is Minutaur? Start by watching this video:

Read More >>

Too Much TV by Elliot Trotter

Today, June 12th, is the last day that analog television will be broadcast in the US. We’re going all digital, baby. As covered previously, the frequencies that analog TV was broadcast on have already been auctioned off to companies for whatever they want to use them for (with a few open access provisions). Digital TV requires either a new TV or a converter box with the US government has spent over $2 billion helping people buy. However, there are still about 2.2 million homes in America that haven’t made the switch yet. A lot of TV stations are going to keep their analog signals running messages about the digital switch for a few months or years to help make sure everyone knows. Honestly, only missing 2.2 million houses in the whole country is pretty impressive. Everyone who has cable or satellite TV isn’t affected by this, just those relying on broadcast TV. The question is, does this really matter?

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Continuing on a common theme for me, I want to talk about some of the news from the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) last week. As always, for full disclosure: I work for a video game company for a living, so take what I say with a grain of salt and, of course, these opinions are mine and not those of my company or anyone else. E3 is the video game industry’s annual trade show and has a long, storied history of being ridiculous and over-the-top. Those are great stories, but I’m more interested in all the talk of new controllers this year for all three major consoles. So if you’re interested in the cool and crazy stuff that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are doing, read on. Read More >>

The week before last, the folks who run The Pirate Bay were on trial for violating copyright laws in Sweden. The Pirate Bay is one of the largest and most popular Bit Torrent sites. They host millions of torrent files that allow people to connect with each other and share music, movies, video games, and other media. That’s right, they don’t actually have any illegal music or movies on their servers, they’re just showing you how to talk to other people who do. But what, you ask, does this trial have to do with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google? Read on to find out.

Read More >>

It’s Earth Day, baby! That means it’s time to go out and make some sweet, sweet love to mother Earth.  According to our potentially misleading friend, Wikipedia, Earth Day was founded in 1970 by US Senator Gaylord Nelson.  The decision to make Earth Day happen occurred at a meeting in 1969 in Seattle.

So what should we be aware about this year? Conservation, conservation, conservation AND BIONIC PENGUINS.

Firstly, let us illustrate the realities of global warming with these graphs straight from NASA:

Makes it pretty evident that we're heating up, no?

The data is there. Maybe global warming is man-made (it is), maybe it’s not but the reality of what our Earth will become based on our increasing temperatures isn’t pretty.

What’s more is in a report from New Scientist, our essential resources aren’t going to last much longer. See for yourself.

click to zoom

HOW CAN YOU CELEBRATE EARTH DAY?

• Leave the lights off in your house today
• Don’t drive. Bike, walk or run.
• Don’t eat beef.
• Plant a tree.

Earth Day isn’t a party this year, it’s a day of action.

BTW: If you’re interested in legislation in our country for the environment this site has great updates.

I think this qualifies as old news at this point, but I wanted to talk about it anyway. Back in March was the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC for short) in California. It’s a week long event that show cases the state of the art in game development. People come from all over the world to hear the best in the industry explain how they’re doing all the cool stuff they do. It’s also a chance for companies to recruit new employees and show off new games and technology. There were a lot of cool and not-so-cool things that came out of GDC this year, but one that got a lot of attention is OnLive. OnLive is a service where you buy games that run on the company’s servers. You have a controller at home and the button presses get sent to the server. The server does all the hard work that your computer or Xbox usually does and then sends the video back to you kind of like YouTube. The idea is that it will allow people to play the newest games without shelling out big bucks for a high end computer. Plus it would eliminate piracy in games because they all run sever side.

This isn’t an impossible dream and it’s something that I think is likely to happen eventually. However, several other companies have tried this in the past and failed pretty badly. There are 3 big hurdles that I see standing in the way this time just like they have in the past: attracting publishers, latency, and bandwidth.

The play experience (see latency and bandwidth below) has to be good before many publishers will sign up to release their games on the service. It’ll also be a hard sell to publishers before many gamers sign up for the service and it’ll be a hard sell to the gamers before many publishers sign up. Most consoles make it past this chicken and egg problem, though, and I imagine OnLive can, too. As publishers get more concerned about piracy and gamers come out more and more vocally against DRM in their games, options like this will become more attractive to both sides as a good middle ground. OnLive currently has a lot of good press and appear to be much farther along than previous companies were. So I think they’ll have a much easier time selling themselves to gamers and publishers.

Now to the harder problems: latency and bandwidth. These are the two measures of the network connection you have at home. Think about sending a letter to a friend. Latency would be how long it takes for the letter to get from your house to their hands. Bandwidth, on the other hand, is how much you can jam into the envelope before it bursts open and the postal service rejects it. Your ISP (Comcast, Qwest, etc.) usually advertise their bandwidth, not their latency. In this case, though, latency will be extremely important. If you have a connection with latency (that is, it doesn’t take the letter very long to reach your friend) then it’ll be similar to playing on your own computer. High latency, though, will mean that there could be a long delay between when you press the button and when the server notices that you pressed the button. In a fast, action-packed game, reaction time can be very important and high latency will really mess that up. Similarly, bandwidth problems could cause the video coming back to be choppy, making it hard to figure out what’s going on or what you need to do to make it to the next level. These are not insurmountable problems, but the Internet backbone in America just isn’t likely to be up to the task of doing this. OnLive will have to have large servers in every major city and in most smaller cities to make this even begin to work. And, of course, it will only be available to people with fast Internet connections (6 Mbps or more) which are often hard to find away from heavily populated areas. Most other industrialized nations have much better network infrastructure than we do, so OnLive would probably do fine there. Here in America, though, it’s going to be rough at best.

OnLive managed to capture some lightning in their bottle this year at GDC. They got a lot of attention and became somewhat of a media darling. They still have a lot of work to do, though, before their service is ready for consumers. Given the long history of similar failures, though, I’m going to believe this one when I see it.

For full disclosure: I hear that a couple of the people who founded OnLive used to work for the company that owns the company I work for. I’m sure they’re nice folks, but I’ve never met them and don’t even know their names. So feel free to take what I’ve said with a grain of salt (pepper is also allowed) if you’d like to.