Entries Tagged 'News analysis and background' ↓

At the gym yesterday the TV news in the changing room carried an item about Advent Computer Training going bust. One of the guys there said that he had been a victim of this company. He said a high pressure salesman had come to his house and promised him a highly paid career and that they would help him find a job. So he signed up to a finance agreement with Barclays for £5,000. When the course arrived it was no good for him and he gave up on it. But he still has to pay off the £5,000 to Barclays with several years of monthly payments. Even with Advent bust he will still owe that money.

It appears that what finished Advent off was Barclays stopping the supply of such student loans. In their words: “Barclays Bank are the main student funding partner and we have worked with them closely for several years. Just before Christmas Barclays informed us that they were pulling out of the student training sector with effect from 31st January 2010.”

So you can see what was happening here. Barclays were giving out loans to students and then handing the money over to the company. The company should have held that money in trust and only used it as the course progressed. But they didn’t. Obviously it was being spent, going somewhere, almost immediately. So when the supply of new money dried up there was nothing left to finance the training that the students had paid up for. Within weeks the company was bust.

I don’t like this business model. Why should the provider of a service (in this case training) be paid in advance with a lump sum for several years of that training? Universities and colleges don’t do this.

In my opinion using a finance company, like Barclays, is also pernicious. The student’s relationship for their course is with the training company, yet their relationship for paying for the course is with the finance company. This is not good.

You can see why Barclays may have got out. Even if the course is brilliant there are still going to be a percentage of people who have bought the wrong thing. And they are caught in a trap with years of monthly payments ahead of them. So they won’t be happy bunnies and, inevitably, they will take out some of their ire against the company they are paying the money to. Barclays don’t need this flack.

And remember that these courses are targeted at the young, the weak, the vulnerable. They are for people who are under educated and want to improve themselves. These people stand no chance against a highly trained high pressure salesman. Many of them become victims, they receive nothing yet have to pay out large payments every month for years. You can read about such victims here, and here.

Don’t these people realise that there are better ways to get an education? The Open University for instance. These guys don’t use high pressure salesmen, don’t use finance companies, have world class course material, give qualifications that are universally recognised, have first class training staff, don’t demand several year’s financial commitment up front and yet only cost a fraction of what some commercial trainers charge.They even hand out financial support to lots of students!

The Open University say: “Want to get a qualification that will help you develop or change your career? Learn a subject in depth? The Open University – voted top for student satisfaction for three years running – could provide the flexibility, the qualifications and the top-class teaching you’re after. For most courses you don’t need any previous qualifications. And with our world-leading blend of supported open learning and innovative course materials, you’ll get an exceptional learning experience.”

For example here is a course that provides an introduction to computing and human-computer interaction, including gesture interfaces such as the Wii Remote. It costs just £400. And it counts towards a degree.

Finally, here is some Advent marketing blurb:

Advent Training is Different.

At Advent, we not only provide excellent IT training courses, but we also offer specialist careers advice and support to help our students get a job in IT.

We understand how the industry works and we know what employers are looking for. We constantly research IT jobs in the UK to make sure our courses are up to date, providing you with the skills you need to get a job in IT.

Support Every Step of the Way.

Our certified trainers work closely with you to monitor your progress, making sure you move forward to the next stage only once you are absolutely ready. No-one is left to fend for themselves and everyone works at their own pace.

We also give every student comprehensive study guides, practical advice on exam preparation / technique and unlimited email and phone support throughout their course.

Whats more, our unique, introductory modules provide essential background information to enable you to understand more about computer skills in the IT environment and to be able to talk with confidence at interview or in a job situation.

Advent Training’s technical expertise is recognised through Microsoft’s Certified Partner accreditation.

At 6PM GMT today Steve Jobs will announce the iSlate (or whatever they are going to call it) at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco, in one of the most anticipated product launches in history. Jobs himself seems pretty nonchalant: “The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product we are very excited about.”

Here is some of what is being speculated:

• It will have a very highly developed gesture interface using multi touch. Possibly a big capability jump in this area. Apple have been leaders with the man/machine interface for 30 years now, here is another opportunity to stun the world.
• Backwards iPhone compatibility. So it will have access to 130,000ish existing apps from day one. Which means it will hit the ground running.
• High level of utility as a gaming machine. It is known that game publishers such as Electronic Arts are part of the project. To have platform specific game content at or near launch. Which shows that Apple have learned what customers want from the iPhone AppStore.
• It looks like it will also be an electronic book (and magazines, newspapers etc) reader, using OLED screen technology. Apple have been doing lots of deals for this sort of content. So they are going after Kindle, it can be no coincidence that Amazon have just launched a Kindle SDK and are going to open a Kindle application store. iSlate Vs Kindle could be a big upcoming battle.
• It will also stream television and play movies. So Apple really are going for a Swiss penknife device.
• 3D. Well it is all the fashion and it is technically possible (I wrote about this last July). If they really have done this then it will give 3D in consumer devices a bigger impetus than even Avatar has done.
• It will sell in huge quantities. Analysts reckon on 4 to 6 million units this year. And there are rumours of manufacturing capacity shortages in the sorts of display it will use because of Apple’s huge orders.
• Image recognition. We know from Microsoft’s Natal that there have been big strides in bringing this technology to consumers. It is a software thing and if Microsoft can do it, then why not Apple?

Presumably it will also do inter stellar travel and make the tea. The level of expectation is at a fever pitch and the air is thick with rumours. If it does what people expect then it will become a black market item from day one, selling secondhand at a massive premium on eBay. Some people just have to be seen with the latest toy.

And where does this leave Google and Android? Still catching up very quickly is the answer. Android will see very many devices this year from many of the world’s biggest consumer electronic companies. Google are in this for the win, their survival strategy depends upon it as the internet becomes mostly mobile. Apple are trying to put clear blue water between themselves and Android but they are just one manufacturer against many. Apple will need to innovate like crazy just to maintain position.

And where does this leave Microsoft with Zune and Windows Mobile? Trailing badly and losing position by the day is the answer. This is one boat that Microsoft have well and truly missed. They have failed to see that smartphones will become the main form of computing. This is as big a mistake for them as when they failed to understand the internet, losing major markets to competitors. It will take massive investment and stunning product announcements to even play catch up here.

So this looks like being a very big day in the history of computing and the history of gaming. Soon there will be over a billion new smartphones being made every year. They will become the main computing device on earth. They will become a commodity.  iSlate is a step by Apple to keep themselves ahead of and above the commodity market. But they are starting a technology race that they have to win every year.

George Hotz is a very well known American hacker, famous for being the first to break the security of the iPhone. Now he has told the BBC that he has cracked the Sony Playstation PS3 and that he will post the details of how to do this on the interweb. You can read about his progress on his blog.

There are lots of ifs here. If what he says is true, if he releases details out into the wild, if it can be easily replicated by others, if it is used for widespread game stealing and if Sony don’t come up with an effective counter. If all these ifs line up then Sony are in enormous trouble. The PS3 is just over three years into what should be a ten year life. So the loss in sales revenue from games will add up many hundreds of millions of dollars. A billion dollar reduction in revenue is not impossible. Not news that any company wants to hear.

The main protection on Sony consoles has come from the media. Playstation 1 used CD-Rom, Playstation 2 used DVD and Playstation 3 uses Bluray. Each of these media standards was very new when the consoles were launched so blank media and burners were very very expensive. Over the life of a console the blank media costs tumble, burners become cheaply and readily available and the thieves get up the learning curve of how to crack the machines.

I was at Codemasters when Playstation 1 game theft reached critical mass. We very suddenly went from being able to make a good living from PS1 games to making a loss on every one. There wasn’t platform proliferation then, the PS1 was the main show in town. So it hit us very badly. The thieving caused 20% of the workforce to lose their jobs. I was there through all the trauma that this involved. Fortunately the company survived, largely because of a PC game called Operation Flashpoint that went to number one in every country with a chart. But time were bleak until the Playstation 2 got up to a big enough user base to provide us with a regular living once again.

Things would not be so bad for publishers these days if the Playstation 3 really is cracked. Now there are lots of platforms and lots of business models. The industry just moves resources away from platforms that are badly effected by stealing to ones that are less affected. So the thieves shoot themselves in the foot as much less money is spent developing games for their machine.

Of course the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii are also cracked. With the 360 Microsoft have the simple solution of kicking modified machines off their Live service. This is a very effective deterrent as Live is one of the main reasons for owning a 360. The Wii being cracked is less of a problem because of the casual nature of their user demographic who are less likely to be bothered with trying to steal. And Nintendo make latest release games look for known platform modifications and then refuse to play if the machine is not kosher.

Of course Sony also can and will come up with a strategy to counter cracked machines. But obviously the degree of success they achieve has yet to be seen.

Once again we are seeing that the public cannot be trusted with physical ownership of games. If they can steal without getting caught then there are tens of millions of people who are happy to do so. They have no morals. Gaming is going to move increasingly into the cloud. MMOs and most casual gaming are already there. What are now console games will increasingly follow.

On my recent visits to video game stores I was unsurprised to see that the secondhand game section is now just as big as the new game section. This must make the blood of every game developer and publisher boil because they are getting no income from these sales, despite having done all the work to create the games. Add to this the massive bit torrent stealing of games, which can reach over 90% of all users on some platforms and you can see that there has to be another way.

Eight or nine years ago at Codemasters I came up with the Registered Player Service, an idea to tie each copy of a game down to an individual user and then to provide downloadable content (DLC) as an incentive for participation. So only if we, the publisher, had received a person’s money, did they get the full experience. If they had a pirated or secondhand copy then they only got a basic game. Because of politics at Codemasters this idea was never implemented.

So you can imagine how pleased I am that at long last this idea is being implemented. By BioWare, and they are calling it the Cerberus network. They have added the refinement that someone with a pirated or secondhand copy can still get the content, by paying a fee, currently $15. This is probably pretty close to the incremental nett profit BioWare would make from selling a legitimate copy of the game, so it cancels out the financial effects of both secondhand sales and game theft.

The first game this is being done with is Mass Effect 2, out tomorrow. Legitimate game owners and players must be very pleased, here is an anti piracy measure that doesn’t punish them and which forces everyone to contribute to the cost of making the game if they want the full experience.

From a marketing point of view this requires the philosophy shift to treat owners of the game as a community, not just as a number of consumers, the benefits for everyone are enormous. It is certainly something that needs to be brought to the Apple AppStore (and the many similar such models) if developers want to be adequately paid for their work.

President Chavez of Venezuela is not your normal world leader. In fact he is easily in the top 10 for causing, consistently, the most controversy. This former paratrooper is seen by some as the next Fidel Castro, he presides over the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere and he doesn’t like video games.

He recently said: “Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him’.” that games “promote the need for cigarettes, drugs and alcohol” and much more.

Saying things like this is going to ruin his reputation because for once he is agreeing with Western leaders like Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.

Of course they are all wrong, as I have explained many times before on here. And it is interesting that the political leaders in some other countries such as France, Canada and South Korea actually understand video games and encourage them because of the wealth that this industry can bring to a nation.

I have written on here before about Titan Rain, the ongoing attacks on American computers allegedly by the Chinese. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

Titan Rain was the U.S. government‘s designation given to a series of coordinated attacks on American computer systems since 2003. The attacks were labeled as Chinese in origin, although their precise nature (i.e., state-sponsored espionage, corporate espionage, or random hacker attacks) and their real identities (i.e., masked by proxy, zombie computer, spyware/virus infected) remain unknown. The designation ‘Titan Rain’ has been changed, but the new name for the attacks is itself classified if connected with this set of attacks.

In early December 2005 the director of the SANS Institute, a security institute in the U.S., said that the attacks were “most likely the result of Chinese military hackers attempting to gather information on U.S. systems.”

Titan Rain hackers gained access to many U.S. computer networks, including those at Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA.

This is very serious stuff. And if they can get into heavily defended top secret computer systems just imagine how easily they could get into yours or into the systems of your place of work. Against this background we have this amazing announcement from Google:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers……….….more

So there you have it, official. The Chinese put malware on people’s computers which they then use to their own ends. What better way to achieve this than by using a browser video game? The client software for browser video game is on literally tens of millions of Western computers. The operators of these games even encourage you to put it on your work computers. And there is nothing to stop them then extracting all the information they want. Passwords, credit card numbers, email addresses etc. And your virus software will not show this up, because it is not a known virus. And your firewall will not protect you because you installed the client. I wrote an article on here “Is Evony Malware?”. Here is one of the comments that a reader called Lee added to this article:

I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.

To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.

Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.

Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.

I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.

There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.

Thank you for reading this.

Lee

Please note that I am not saying that Evony is malware or is associated with malware in any way. I am just repeating what other people have said. But personally I would not install it on my computer.

So take care out there. Only play browser games from reputable companies that you know the provenance of. Who owns them, where they are based, their phone number etc. To let just any browser game put their client on your computer is very dangerous, they can do anything they want once it is loaded and you won’t know anything about it and can’t prevent it.

I first wrote about stereoscopic 3D in video games last May after seeing a Blitz game technology demonstrator and realising that it brought something new and good to the gaming experience. Since then I have written about it sporadically, most notably after seeing Avatar. So now I am convinced that it is a part of our future and that it usefully aids immersion and thus emotional engagement with a game.

And I am not the only one to think this. Las Vegas from January 7 to 10 saw the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) and it was one massive 3Dfest with all the world’s major consumer electronics manufacturers lining up to shout about where they are going with 3D and what products they will be offering to the consumers. This is the step change of the title.

I have said many times that the current LCD televisions are just an interim technology. They aren’t very good in most ways. This makes the TV manufacturers very happy indeed because soon tens of millions of consumers will be forced to throw their TVs away. Yet again. Apple are the masters of planned obsolescence with the iPod, it looks like the rest of the consumer electronic industry has been taking lessons. OLED and 3D will be the must have features for all the world’s living rooms just as soon as the factories can crank them out.

And remember that the futurologists are predicting that we are heading for a world where there are several televisions per person. You can see why, we become steadily wealthier and the cost of a television becomes less and less of a significant factor in buying one. This will become more marked with the ultimately cheap to make OLED technology. At the same time what a television does functionally in our lives has been increasing steadily. Originally they just showed real time broadcast material, now they are the key component of the entertainment hub, connected to all manner of other electronics and having considerable processing power of their own. I cannot see all screens going to 3D, but it will be essential for the main static viewing televisions.

Then there is content. This year the Western movie industry will produce about 170 feature films. Of these at least 20 are planned to be available in 3D. Partly this is the Avatar effect, partly it is the technology and customer awareness reaching critical mass. Soon nearly all movies will be filmed in 3D. Then there is broadcast television content, this is already happening, with sport being the obvious initial beneficiary. Watching soccer, darts, snooker, cricket etc with a stereoscopic 3D perspective will make 2D history very quickly. Which brings us to video games. From what I have seen the enhancement 3D brings is remarkable. Every developer and publisher should already have their 3D strategy mapped out.

Perhaps the biggest industry mover for 3D is Sony. It is almost as if they have bet the future of the company on it. Howard Stringer says: “We intend to take the lead in 3D. We are the only company fully immersed in every part of the 3D value chain”. This means their Bravia televisions, their Blu-ray players, their movie studios, their video cameras. And their game consoles. Sony have a strong and powerful strategy in place for the Playstation PS3 as a 3D gaming device. If they are quick and decisive they can at long last give themselves a competitive advantage over the Xbox 360.

Of course, like any electronic innovation, we need standards. It will be no good if every hardware manufacturer and every publisher implements 3D in a different way. The standards for gaming 3D are organised by Khronos and I suggest that everyone involved in the game industry takes a regular look at their website. Here is what they have to say about themselves: “The Khronos Group is a member-funded consortium focused on the creation of royalty-free open standards for parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.”

From a gaming perspective it is important to keep an eye on the fantastic NVIDIA 3D technology and to keep in mind that Microsoft Natal is a 3D input device that would integrate fantastically with a stereoscopic 3D display.

Overall 3D is going to be of massive benefit to the gaming industry. Not only will our content be more immersive, suspending disbelief yet further, we will also have a flowering of creativity. And it will be a massive boost to the market as hundreds of millions of consumers seek out new experiences. We will rise the the challenges this presents, it is another big step in the development and growth of gaming as the premier entertainment media.