The Musings of Harry

Stunning new screenshots for Project Gotham Racing have been released. They really do look photo-realistic.

I wonder how good they’ll look at 150Mph, but still - impressive.

The US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly voted — 355 to 21 — for a federal inestigation into GTA San Andreas’s sex scenes.

I’ve already posted about the ridiculousness of this whole ’scandal’, but this takes the biscuit. One would think that the US Congress has better things to do than investigate cartoon sex. Apparently not.

I’m beginning to think that everyone inolved has been lobotomised, or something…

I thought I’d post about this — I think it’s a really good example of how to advertise on the internet.

More often than I like, I go to a website to read an article, and a stupid floating <div> with some garish animation pops up right on top of the thing I’m trying to read. It’s immeasurably irritating. The newer ones even make you wait a few seconds before presenting you with a way to close the ad. The utter stupidity of this is baffling: why does a website owner use advertising that actually impedes the site from perfoming its function? That prevents users from reading the page, which is most likely the only reason they’re there at all? What does it say about the respect that the owners of such websites have for their visitors? Grrrr!

Anyway, I visited TechWeb today for the first time, and they have a really clever ad. It uses the same principle as the annoying floaty ones, but the implementation is much cleverer. It has a small animation on the top right hand corner of the page that looks like a folded corner on a paper page. This animation resides in a blank area of the page, so it doesn’t obscure content, and it is not excessively garish, so it isn’t too distracting. When you roll the mouse over the animation, it slowly scrolls down to cover an area on the top right of the page about 500 pixels square.

I like this! It piqued my curiosity, increasing the chances that I’d click on it — or at least, view it. It wasn’t obtrusive until I asked it to be — excellent! I think it’s a really good example of a good way to advertise on the web. It’s not obtrusive, but not invisible.

Whoever thought of it deserves some kudos!

Canada has a real-life Mr Hanky!

The seven-foot turd is the mascott of the People Opposed to Outfall Pollution , or — you guessed it — POOP. He has a song and everything!

The organisation is campaigning for proper sewage treatment for their city, which — somewhat surprisingly — dumps 120 million litres of raw sewage into the sea every year. Isn’t sewage treatment a pretty basic need? Even in Canada?

Unfortunately:

While POOP and the Alliance say Mr. Floatie has people interested in the issue, Blackwell, a Langford councillor and chairwoman of the Capital Region District’s environmental and liquid waste committees, said the mascot is a waste of time.”It’s so juvenile that he draws attention to himself, not the issue,” she said.

Well, there’s a shock. Still — here’s to giant poo mascots.

… companies like Microsoft use them to protect such ‘innovations’ as the smilie. Yes. The smilie. The humble emoticon.

ZdNet reports that Microsoft have filed for a patent covering “selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission”. If you’re interested, you can read the patent yourself.

The FFII has commented, pointing out that this is clear evidence that large companies are not using patents to protect their innovations and R&D budgets, rather, they are using them to stifle competition: this patent could allow Microsoft to stop other IM providers from using emoticons in their products.

Sigh.

Addition:

It’s not entirely accurate to say that they’re trying to patent smilies. The patent seems to cover quite specific emoticons - the size and graphics format are specified - and the process it mentions is the one used to transfer a custom emoticon from one person to another, so that it can be correctly displayed at both ends.

Still, this isn’t innovative in my opinion: I don’t see how it advances the state of the art, I don’t see an inventive step, and I do see how this could be abused. It’s a basic idea, and if I want to implement something similar in my application, I don’t want to have to pay Microsoft.

Not really much to say here — Bruce Schneier has posted an excerpt from his book (Beyond Fear) about profiling, along with some extra points.

This is well worth reading — an excellent critique of the strengths and weaknesses of profiling as a security measure.

According to Wired, a whoooole bunch of stupid nonsense is arriving in the aftermath of the Hot Coffee ’scandal’.

Take Two has announced that it is “exploring its legal options as it relates to companies that profited from creating and distributing tools for altering the content”. Datel Design & Development, the company that makes the ‘Action Replay’ system that allows Playstation users to use the Hot Coffee mod, hasn’t commented — but their US distributor said they’re keeping on top of it, to see how it plays out. I wouldn’t be too worried if I were them — this has all been done before, and precident is in its favour.

Take Two has also responded to pressure from the ESRB to “… proactively protect their games from illegal modifications by third parties, particularly when they serve to undermine the accuracy of the rating”. Their answer? Added security on the disks, in an attempt to prevent modders from changing things. Fred von Lohmann, of the EFF, has chimed in to point out that just a small measure of technical protection could qualify games for protection under the DMCA that would allow them to prosecute modders.

So, in summary: a modder makes a mod that pisses off idiots. In response, the ESRB reclassifies a game to the extent that it is unmarketable, and demands that game makers prevent users from making substantive modifications to their products — which is impossible anyway. Take Two then announces new security measures, which, whether or not it’s their intention, will make mods to the game violations of the DMCA.

The result? Because of idiots, and their idiotic priorities, the modding community now has to worry about the DMCA, ratings, the ESRB and Hillary Clinton before they can persue their hobby — a hobby which, by the way, bears sole responsibility for keeping many games alive, and is directly responsible for some of the most popular online games of all time. Just ask Valve.

Sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction… when will this foot-shootery shoot itself in the head and go away?

Firefox is so cool!

I tried this as an offhand experiment, not really expecting it to work — but it does. So, behold: the iconified select.

It was originally a bit buggy, with icons not displaying properly when the page loaded, or when the selected option was changed with the cursor keys rather than the mouse - these were not hard to fix, however: a bit of javascript and some DHTML reading later, it was working fine. Just not in IE! Perhaps it will in IE 7. Not sure about other browsers, but if anyone out there would care to test in Safari/Mozilla/Whatever, I’d be interested to hear how it behaves.

Freedom to Tinker reports that the US Federal Trade Commission is starting a programme that asks ISPs to monitor for ‘zombie-like’ traffic and disconnect users who are (intentionally or otherwise) spamming others.

I think this is a great idea, for things that are readily detectable. I’m surprised that US ISPs aren’t doing it already - we’ve been doing it in the UK for some time. As far as I know, it’s happening on a voluntary basis. I know several people who have been disconnected, and when they call support, they’re told to tidy up their machine, and then are reconnected - to allow them to conduct virus scans and get updates, and soforth.

Unless people are sufficiently inconvienced by zombies, they are unlikely to spend the time/money required to do something about it. As FtT points out, many zombies are designed to be stealthy and unobtrusive, so as to be more effective to their owners. These zombies are unlikely even to be noticed by users - so some action from an ISP is required before any corrective action can be taken.

I think this is a great policy that could do some real good.

After a bunch of completely stupid political nonsense, the ESRB has reclassified GTA: San Andreas, giving it an “adult’s only” rating.

The complete, nonsensical stupidity of this just beggars belief. This is a game dedicated to violent, murderous gang crime — the very object of the game being to steal, pillage and shoot your way through the game to become the “King of San Andreas”. By the way, did I mention that it’s awesome?

Anyway, the whole point of the game is to steal stuff and kill people — which is apparently a perfectly decent thing for people aged 17 and up to be exposed to. Sex, however, is clearly not. You’ve got to be 18 and up before it’s safe for you to be exposed to consensual sex. Not 17. At 17, your mind could be corrupted by cartoon carnality, but not, it would seem, by cartoon carnage. Not to mention the fact that — for someone of any age — a depiction of consensual sex has got to be less ‘corruptive’ than explicit violence.

Hillary Clinton just made my People Who Totally Suck™ list.