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There’s one word astronaut Michael Massimino uses over and over to describe the view from the Hubble Space Telescope: “Beautiful.”

“I tell folks … if you’re in heaven, this is what you would see,” said Massimino, a space walker on a repair mission to Hubble. “This is what heaven must look like. It’s beautiful.”

Today, when “Hubble 3D” begins showing in IMAX theaters, he says, moviegoers will get the best look ever at what he’s seen.

The movie — a joint project of Warner Bros., NASA and IMAX 3D — chronicles the last-ever mission to Hubble in May, when seven NASA astronauts journeyed via space shuttle Atlantis to install more powerful equipment on the orbiting observatory.

Young space buffs say the 3-D is breathtaking

Narrated by actor Leonardo DiCaprio and using the 3-D technology that has become increasingly popular in mainstream movies, the film showcases the nearly 13-day mission in ways never before possible, said the film’s director.

“I think there is a kind of innate curiosity in all of us and a thirst to travel to places that either we can’t go to or it’s extremely difficult to do so,” said Toni Myers, whose credits include a 3-D documentary about the international space station.

“It’s a sense of adventure anybody has, even if they want to indulge it from the safety of a cinema seat,” she said. “I think what I like about the combined technology is that it really does allow you and me, who aren’t astronauts, to travel to orbit and be there.”

The movie is being released Friday in IMAX theaters, with other theaters being added April 23, the 20th anniversary of Hubble’s launch.

A March 9 premiere was held at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The Hubble telescope was launched in 1990 to orbit the Earth while peering into the farthest reaches of the universe. The telescope has been enhanced over the years with new technology as well as fixes for high-profile problems like a faulty mirror that made Hubble’s earliest images less than impressive.

Last year’s mission, officially named STS-125 by NASA, included five spacewalks to repair and upgrade the Hubble.

Astronauts fixed two instruments, repaired two others, replaced batteries and installed insulation to keep Hubble running until at least 2014, when the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched.

Moviegoers will see 3-D images of those spacewalks, as well as three-dimensional shots of the shuttle’s takeoff and landing. They’ll also see photos Hubble has taken — including images of distant galaxies, colorful gas and dust clouds, and the remnants of supernovas — and witness the political debate over whether it was worth sending the shuttle to Hubble at all.

Massimino, a veteran of two space walks, joked that the astronauts aboard the Atlantis were nervous about their filmmaking duties.

“We’re basically a bunch of knuckleheads,” said Massimino, a graduate of Columbia University with a doctorate from MIT. “Just because you can walk in space and fly a space shuttle doesn’t mean you’ll remember to turn a camera on and off.”

But Myers said astronauts are particularly well-suited for receiving movie directions, even when they’re coming from about 350 miles below their orbiting stage.

“They’re the best learners in the world, or they wouldn’t be astronauts,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to teach them anything. They’re very quick studies.”

Myers said that working with astronauts on her films has another big plus: Like actors, they’re used to rehearsals and scripts.

“Each space walk is heavily scripted,” she said. “There are action-by-action time tags scripted. They do it relentlessly, over and over again, until it’s totally by rote.”

That helped her with a big challenge of the project: Although there’s 3-D footage of the shuttle’s takeoff and landing, the jam-packed mission had enough room to carry only eight minutes of 3-D film (Regular high-definition cameras caught other action).

Even that little bit required a mile of film, Myers said. She gave astronauts specific instructions on which moments of their scripted routines she wanted shot in 3-D.

“If a guy starts to do what you think he’s going to do but then says, ‘Wait a minute, I forgot this or that,’ that was the greatest fear,” she said.

Massimino and Myers said the Hubble repair mission had more than its share of drama, from the political fight over whether it should be funded in the first place to the fact that there will never be another like it.

“On a space station flight, if something doesn’t get done on a spacewalk, hopefully there’s something that can be made up by another flight coming up or the crew on the station,” Massimino said. “On Hubble, there ain’t gonna be another crew.”

But in the end, he said, just letting other people see the universe as he’s seen it is the movie’s highlight.

“The only sad part of it is, you get to go with six of your friends, but you don’t get to go with your other family members and friends,” he said. “You say, ‘Gosh, I wish I could have my wife and friends here and my family and everyone else.’

(CNN) — On a recent episode of the TV show “Modern Family,” a character named Mitchell gets in his car and does something that’s frustratingly familiar for early adopters of technology:

He tries to operate the machine by talking to it.

“CD player: next track,” he says.

“Say a command,” a robotic voice responds.

“CD player: NEXT. TRACK,” he says, clearly annoyed.

“Air conditioner on.”

“Dammit!”

The idea that people should be able to talk to computers, and that the computers should understand what we’re saying, has been coming in and out of vogue since the 1970s. The technology never really went mainstream, though, and to this day, it’s often talked about as a joke.

In recent months, however — despite the pop-culture parodies and the increasing popularity of the text message — researchers say voice-activated technologies have entered a renaissance of sorts.

The technological resurgence is happening in part because of smartphones, those handheld devices with tiny keyboards or awkward touchscreens that some big-fingered adults would rather yell at than type on.

So why not just take those frustrations and transfer them into navigation commands and text messages?

Increasingly, that seems to be what’s happening.

Mobile voice-recognition technology now allows people to send text messages to friends by talking instead of typing; to scan through transcriptions of voice mail instead of taking time to listen to them all; to tell their phones what they’re looking for on the Web; and, soon, to post to Twitter from their cars by speaking, allowing drivers to keep their eyes on the road.

“It’s now possible to pick up your phone and press a single button and say, ‘I want the Yelp.com review of the Capital Grille in Burlington, Massachusetts. Period,’ ” said Vlad Sejnoha, chief speech scientist at Nuance Communications, a major producer of voice-to-text software.

Phones should know by now exactly what Web link to find, he said, and users should get a result without ever typing.

A number of phone apps, from ShoutOut to Dragon and Vlingo, now translate speech into text messages and e-mails.

Additionally, Bing and Google both have mobile applications that let people search the Web by talking.

The voice-recognition software is also getting better, too.

The longer computers listen to us talk, the better they can predict what we’re going to say and understand how we say things, researchers said. Some believe that computers are getting almost as good at listening as we are.

“If you compare us to human performance, we are rapidly closing the gap,” said David Nahamoo, IBM’s chief technology officer for voice research.

The technology works by listening to a voice, translating it into digital data and then anticipating what sorts of sounds or words will come next. That’s different from early models of voice-recognition technology, which tried to understand every sound and used huge amounts of computing power as a result, he said.

Now, it’s more of a guessing game. Each voice-recognition program has a number of equations that analyze speech and use statistics to decide what noises match up to what letters.

Tech blog: The man who teaches computers to listen

Every year, the accuracy of these programs improves, said Bill Meisel, an independent consultant who has been working in the voice-recognition industry since the early 1980s.

In a recent comparison test of four programs, Meisel found that technologies that translate voice into text are roughly 80 to 90 percent accurate. That’s good enough for many common functions, like transcribing voice mail, he said.

“All the systems were almost perfect with phone numbers,” he said.

Still, a number of technological hurdles remain.

One, especially for voice recognition on the go, is background noise. A phone listening to a person on a bus, for example, can hear street noise and other conversations in addition to the person who is trying to give a voice command. It’s difficult for voice-recognition software to differentiate between all of those noises.

New hardware may help address that issue. Google’s Nexus One phone comes fitted with two microphones: one that records a voice and another that records interference noise and then subtracts it from the voice file, making it easier for the phone to determine what noise is human and what isn’t.

Another problem is the fact that no two people speak alike.

Even if we’re saying the same words, we tend to pronounce them different ways. And, often, even if we’re asked to say the same sentence twice, we might add different inflections or sounds that can throw computers off.

It’s “the whole thing of ‘I say toMAYto and you say toMAHto,’ ” said Nahamoo, who is Iranian. “I come from a foreign country, and some of the phonetic nuances that a native person learns, I don’t learn and I can’t reproduce.

“They all add up essentially to make me sound different.”

Over time, computers are getting better at recognizing those differences, he said, especially when an accent is fairly common. He said that is one of the major achievements of voice technology since the ’70s.

To be understood by computers, it’s more important to speak clearly and consistently than to have a perfectly neutral accent, he said.

Another issue: Not all phones have the computing power to handle voice recognition, said Tuong Nguyen, a principal analyst Gartner, the research firm.

“The biggest limitation that I see right now … is processing power,” he said. “It is fairly intense, so you do need a better, higher-end phone to do it. And then a lot of people speak with accents or colloquialisms or different languages or stuff like that, which provides some challenges as well.

“But overall, I’m pretty positive about the technology.”

Nguyen said it’s especially handy when he’s driving. In that situation, typing isn’t a safe alternative.

Meisel, the consultant, said voice may be the new way we interact with computers.

We’re already able to “have a conversation” with the technology to some degree, he said

The one-company, two-systems concept didn’t work for Google in China. It’s not clear how long having one system will work, either.

In following through on its very public threat to shut down its censored Chinese-language search engine on Monday, Google ended months of speculation about its plans following its January announcement that it had been hacked by cybercriminals working from inside China. And in the same moment that Google started redirecting traffic from Google.cn to Google.com.hk and its Hong Kong-based servers, a new era for Google and its operation in China began.

Google’s Hong Kong-based Chinese-language search engine is now its only Chinese search service: the highlighted text reads “Welcome to Google search in China’s new home.”
Hong Kong enjoys special legal rights that most of China does not, under the “one country, two systems” approach, allowing Google to remain technically inside of China but free to offer an uncensored search engine. But the vast majority of Chinese Internet users sit behind The Great Firewall of China, which gives the Chinese government the ability to restrict certain Web sites from appearing on computers in China.

That was the whole reason Google agreed to censor its search engine when it entered China, arguing that it wanted to provide a better searching experience for the vast majority of queries that aren’t politically sensitive. Such a choice, however, was seen by many as a violation of Google’s mission to organize and make accessible–as opposed to block–the world’s information, and it was said to personally bother co-founder Sergey Brin, a native of the Soviet Union.

So now Google will try a new balancing act. “Welcome to Google search in China’s new home,” read the message on the home page of Google.com.hk, greeting visitors to the former Google.cn.

Google very much wants to remain part of the Chinese Internet market, which is already the world’s largest, despite the fact that only 25 percent of the country is actively using the Internet. Its presence in that market will likely be dictated by Chinese Internet censors, who have already started blocking clicks to search results on Google.com.hk, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Brin told The New York Times on Monday that “there’s a lot of lack of clarity” regarding Google’s future in China. “Our hope is that the newly begun Hong Kong service will continue to be available in mainland China,” he said.

There’s a similar lack of clarity as to how Google’s decision will be perceived by Chinese Internet users. Google trailed homegrown search engine Baidu by a significant margin in the country, but Google was a favorite of younger users and technology enthusiasts.

Xinhua, the state-run official news agency in China, published a commentary on Monday, originally written by Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily, slamming Google’s “arrogance” for asking China to change its laws.

“China’s top leaders have a constant policy that stresses opening up to the world. But Google has challenged the Chinese government’s sovereignty by demanding the government accept Google’s presumed definition on ‘opening up,’” according to a translated version of the commentary published by Xinhua.

Google therefore might be perceived as an unfriendly interloper by a fair amount of Chinese Internet users, who will be quite content to use services such as Baidu, especially if Google’s performance is hampered from traffic having to pass through The Great Firewall to its site. And Google fans who wanted the company to stick it out in China could be disappointed by their decision, knowing full well how censorship works outside of China’s borders.

China has never been an easy subject for Google, and it has forced the humbling realization that while Google has arguably changed the world, it can’t change China. The Chinese government is not likely to forget this dispute and the very public way in which it played out.

Can Google maintain a compelling presence inside of one of the world’s most important countries working from the outside? Four years ago, it came to the opposite conclusion, before reversing itself Monday.

Unless things really do change inside of China, there’s not likely to be a third opportunity to take a new approach.

These charts show incidences of malware distributed by a number of ad delivery platforms over a six-day period last month that were detected by Avast. Yahoo and Fox have the highest counts.

(Credit: Avast)

Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast.

Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed “malvertising.”

Now, researchers at Avast are pointing fingers at some large ad delivery platforms including Yahoo’s Yield Manager and Fox Audience Network’s Fimserve.com, which together cover more than 50 percent of online ads, and to a much smaller degree Google’s DoubleClick. In addition, some of the malicious ads ended up on Yahoo and Google sites, Avast claims.

“It’s not just the small players but the ad servers connected with Google and Yahoo have been infected and served up bad ads,” said Lyle Frink, public relations manager for Avast.

The most compromised ad delivery platforms were Yield Manager and Fimserve, but a number of smaller ad systems, including Myspace, were also found to be delivering malware on a lesser scale, Avast Virus Labs said.

Found in ads delivered from those networks was JavaScript code that Avast dubbed “JS:Prontexi,” which Avast researcher Jiri Sejtko said is a Trojan in script form that targets the Windows operating system. It looks for vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat, Java, QuickTime, and Flash and launches fake antivirus warnings, Sejtko said.

Users don’t need to click on anything to get infected; a computer becomes infected after the ad is loaded by the browser, Avast said.

Since the malware started spreading in late December, Avast has registered more than 2.6 million instances of it on customer computers. Nearly 530,000 of those were from Yield Manager and more than 16,300 from DoubleClick, Sejtko said.

“The Google portion of JS:Prontexi is quite small and has gotten visibly even smaller as they have taken steps to improve the situation,” Sejtko said. “That is not the case with Yahoo and Fox.”

Representatives from Fox and MySpace declined to comment.

A Yahoo representative confirmed the report and said it was investigating the situation, but didn’t provide much information. “We have identified the creatives in question and are working to make sure they been deactivated in our system,” the company said in a statement.

“Yahoo is deeply committed to providing a high-quality experience for users, advertisers, and publishers. We expect our members to support and abide by our standards and guidelines around acceptable ad content and behavior,” the statement said. “On the rare occasion that an ad is served that is in conflict with our expectations and guidelines we take action to remove it as quickly as possible.”

A Google spokesman said the company had discovered malware in ads from DoubleClick on its own and halted them. “In this case, we stopped several of the ads in question on the same day, independent of this report,” he said.

“When our automated system is able to identify a problem, we immediately stop serving the affected ads, and then work to refine our security measures to help capture and disable similar ads for all DoubleClick publishers and advertisers,” the company said in a statement.

“DoubleClick’s ad serving products maintain a security monitoring system that screens ads and is constantly adapting to respond to new developments, yet publishers are in control of what ads they serve when using DoubleClick services,” the Google statement said. “We encourage publishers to maintain good quality processes, especially in terms of the networks and advertisers they deal with, and we provide tips and tricks at http://anti-malvertising.com/tips-for-publishers.”

However, the Google spokesman said it was highly unlikely that malware was served on Google, adding that DoubleClick ads do not run on Google search.

A “Red Steel 2″ sword and gunplay videogame hitting the market on Tuesday pays tribute to the nameless hero carved into film legend by director Sergio Leone.

The title capitalizes on enhanced motion-sensing controllers for Nintendo Wii videogame consoles to let players virtually wield samurai swords in battles with vicious thugs who have overrun a fictional desert town.

“In many ways this character and this world is my personal homage to Sergio Leone,” Ubisoft creative director Jason Vandenberghe told AFP while providing an early go at the game in San Francisco. “It is very melodramatic, which I love.”

Leone, who died in 1989, was famous for “spaghetti western” genre films starring a young Clint Eastwood as a “man with no name” who outsmarts and outshoots unsavory characters in cowboy towns.

The videogame plays out in a fictional “East meets West” setting in the US state of Nevada. Players take on the role of a banished clan member who returns home to find his town taken over by biker thugs.

The key weapon is a samurai sword realistically wielded by slicing, jabbing and blocking with Wii Motion Plus controllers.

“An impressive fusion of Eastern and Western influences, ‘Red Steel 2′ aims to bridge the gap between casual and hardcore players,” said Scott Steinberg, head videogame analyst at TechSavvy Global.

“The game should offer a compelling mix of sword/gun-play that gives the player a greater one-to-one connection to what’s happening on-screen and sense of overall empowerment.”

“Red Steel 2″ is the first swordplay action videogame customized for Plus devices that ramp up the precision of Wii controllers.

“It really makes that much of a difference,” Vandenberghe said. “With the Plus it is swing and bam, simultaneous action. You believe it.”

Ubisoft jumped early into making games for the Wii, releasing the original “Red Steel” when the consoles debuted in November 2006.

The original title sold 1.4 million copies and Vandenberghe is convinced the improved realism of in-game swordplay will win new fans for the franchise.

“There is something about this kind of game play that activates the Conan brain,” Vandenberghe quipped, referring to a barbarian hero from a fiction book series made into a film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“When you hold the Wii-mote and whack; I see again and again that it unleashes the barbarian inside people.”

Wii has been criticized for lacking the processing and graphics capabilities to handle action games that can be played on Microsoft Xbox 360 or Sony PlayStation 3 consoles.

“We are bringing a fun action game to the Wii,” said Vandenberghe, who guided the creation of ‘Red Steel 2′ in the French videogame star’s Paris studio.

“I fundamentally believe that if you make a good game and it is only available on the Wii people will buy it.”

Sony last week unveiled a motion-sensing controller that it hopes will boost interest in PlayStation 3 consoles.

PlayStation Move wands will hit the market in time for the year-end holiday shopping season and aim to tap into a zest for motion-sensing controls that made Nintendo Wii consoles marketplace superstars.

Microsoft is getting into the motion-sensing controller game with a Project Natal release slated for later this year.

Natal will let Xbox 360 players control in-game action with pure body motion, eliminating the need for wands or other hand-held gadgets, according to early glimpses at the technology

Authorities in China’s Xinjiang have restored access to email services and 32 Internet sites that were blocked after ethnic unrest broke out in the region in July, state media reported Sunday.

Restrictions on the number of text messages a mobile user could send have also been lifted, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Authorities in the Xinjiang will restore communication services “step by step,” Xinhua said, citing a spokesperson for the local government.

Internet and email services were cut following the outbreak of clashes between ethnic Han Chinese and mainly Muslim Uighurs, in which almost 200 people died and 1,600 were wounded.

The authorities accused Uighur organisers of using the Internet and mobile phones to orchestrate the unrest.

Twenty-six people were sentenced to death for their part in the rioting, which lasted several days after breaking out in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. Some have already been executed.

The FCC says that a lack of high-speed Internet access in U.S. homes is a detriment to economic growth.
(CNN) — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a national “broadband plan” Tuesday that aims to give 90 percent of Americans access to affordable, high-speed Internet by 2020.

“This is not something that is nice for us to do; it is everyone’s right,” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said at a commission meeting Tuesday.

The plan calls for billions of dollars in programs to extend fiber-optic Internet cables into new corners of rural America and to educate people about why they need the Web and how they can learn to use it.

The FCC says that if the U.S. fails to speed up Internet connections and make them accessible to more people, the economy will suffer, and unconnected Americans will be left without the information they need to function in a digital society. Many job applications, for example, no longer exist in paper form.

The much-awaited plan will be “revenue-neutral,” the FCC says. The commission plans to sell 500 megahertz of newly available spectrum for broadband use over the next decade, which it says will pay for any new costs.

Most of that spectrum, 300 megahertz worth, will be made available to wireless Internet providers over the next five years, the FCC plan says.

Other expenses will be covered by transferring funds currently used for other telecommunications into programs that promote broadband Internet expansion. The plan would move $15.5 billion into a fund that aims to extend high-speed Internet network into rural areas.

A recent FCC survey (PDF) found that about 5 percent of American homes are in places where broadband Internet connections are not available.

The webmaster without the high-speed Web

America’s Internet is widely criticized as slow by global standards, and according to the FCC, 35 percent of people in the U.S. do not have access to high-speed Internet in their homes.

The FCC says its plan would give 100 million American households Internet connections that transfer data at a rate of 100 megabits per second. Each community in the U.S. also would get access to at least one “ultra-high-speed” connection, with transfer rates of 1 gigabit per second.

Those speeds are far faster than current connections, which average about 3.9 megabits per second, according to the Internet monitor Akamai.

CNNMoney: FCC solutions may be too weak

Although the Internet was developed in the United States, the U.S. has only the 18th-fastest Web connections in the world, behind countries like South Korea, which leads the world with 14.6 megabit-per-second data transfer rates, Akamai says.

The FCC’s plan would have to be approved by Congress to go into effect.

The country’s broadband plan was required as part of President Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocated $7.2 billion to broadband-related initiatives.

The FCC’s plan has been criticized as not doing enough to create competition among broadband providers, which might lower costs of high-speed Internet connections.

“The United States needs to step it up and see what’s been going on around the world,” James Losey, program associate in the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, told CNNMoney.com.

“The challenge is, we don’t have competition: Most markets are duopolies that have two providers using the same infrastructure.”

U.S. Internet connections generally are slower and more expensive than those in other developed countries.

Read the proposed National Broadband Plan (PDF)

Speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Derek Turner, the research director for the nonprofit group Free Press, said the broadband plan does not do enough to reduce the cost of high-speed Internet connections, which he said is the biggest barrier to adoption.

Still, he said, he is hopeful that the federal government can address the issue.

“I’m actually very hopeful for some positive outcomes,” he said at the conference, “because I’ve seen stranger things happen in Washington.”

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has framed the broadband plan as a boost for the economy.

“The National Broadband Plan is a 21st century roadmap to spur economic growth and investment, create jobs, educate our children, protect our citizens, and engage in our democracy,” he said in a news release.

“It’s an action plan, and action is necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues.”

The plan also has the potential to anger broadcasters, which could be forced to give up spectrum that’s now used for TV but could be used for mobile Internet access.

“We were pleased by initial indications from FCC members that any spectrum reallocation would be voluntary, and were therefore prepared to move forward in a constructive fashion on that basis,” Dennis Wharton, of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a news release.

“However, we are concerned by reports today that suggest many aspects of the plan may in fact not be as voluntary as originally promised.”

Ubisoft’s Assassins Creed 2.

(Credit: Gamespot/CNET)

Gamers have long known that patience is rewarded with cheaper, less-buggy games. But does that adage hold true for the inclusion of digital rights management as well? Not always, but history does show us that time makes even the strictest of DRM less sucky.

This could become especially important given the latest round of DRM implemented by both Ubisoft and EA, a system that requires players to have a constant connection to the Internet in order to play. Otherwise, they’re simply kicked out to the main menu until a connection can be had again.

Needless to say, this new requirement has caused the ire of the PC gaming community, especially those who play games on a computer that may not always have an Internet connection, such as a laptop.

So far, Ubisoft’s solution, dubbed the “Online Services Platform” can be found in two of Ubisoft’s titles, Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2. The system has already seen its first setback, a pair of opening weekend denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Ubisoft’s servers that left European players of Assassins Creed 2 unable to use either piece of software for approximately six and a half hours.

As a response to the outages, Ubisoft released a patch last week that would allow players to start playing at the precise time where the connection failure had occurred. Previously, it would hop them back to a checkpoint, which was certainly better than nothing but could become frustrating on missions that went several minutes between checkpoints.

As for EA, the first title to take advantage of a similar service is Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, which is being released Tuesday. EA insists C&C4 has no real DRM, though it does use a serial key that can only be used for one online account. The player then needs to be online at all times they want to actually play the game.
The PC DRM connection

New, physical format PC titles almost always come with DRM. Despite the price, which is usually $10 cheaper than it is on consoles, the PC versions of any cross-platform game are the most pirated. The simple reason for this is that PCs offer a playground for potential pirates. Executable files can be fiddled with, as can incoming and outgoing traffic.

Publishers on the PC can fight back with third-party DRM solutions, as well as a first-party one from Microsoft that’s both hardware and software based. The company’s Games for Windows Live platform employs several types of copy protection, many of which exist on Microsoft’s servers and therefore cannot be hacked or modified as easily.

Like Ubisoft, Microsoft also offers a constant-connection type of DRM on any title, though it can also do “check-ins” on a more sporadic basis. These checks goes hand-in-hand with a user’s Windows Live ID, which means that anyone who wishes to play that game must share their information with Microsoft.

These efforts originate from the general success of gaming consoles. Console makers like Sony and Microsoft have been able to create closed boxes with complicated system checks and operating systems that run a security layer to keep unsigned code from running. Sure there’s a percentage of consoles that have been modified to run unsigned or otherwise modified game code–OK, actually it’s in the millions, but it’s nowhere near that of the PC.
The DRM waiting game

Spore, by Electronic Arts was heavily pirated. It had its DRM both cracked, and scaled back after two class action lawsuits.

(Credit: Gamespot/CNET)

Increasingly so, the joke seems to be on the customers who end up buying this software when it first comes out. A simple look back at some controversial titles has shown us that after the initial sales come, the publisher later removes the vast majority of the DRM, leaving gamers to enjoy the software with fewer restrictions.

Spore by EA may be one of the most high profile examples of this practice. It shipped in late-2008 with SecuROM, a copy-protection technology that keeps people from installing the game on too many machines. At the time of launch, that number was limited to three, meaning a user who had purchased the software would have to keep track of where that software was installed and deactivate any old copies before installing it on new hardware. The move to include this, along with a check that would verify whether a copy was legitimate each time a user went online, resulted in plenty of negative press, bad user reviews, and piracy on an absolutely massive scale after hackers were able to bypass the security measures.

After two class action lawsuits, which took aim at the company for failing to tell customers that the game installer would also install SecuROM, Spore publisher EA relented, cranking the number of installs up to five machines. Just two months after its launch, EA also released a version that did not have SecuROM at all, though it was sold through Valve’s Steam software, which has copy protection checks of its own (though they do not require a separate program, or limit installations–two of SecuRom’s follies).

SecuROM efforts on other games were met with similar results, including EA’s Mass Effect for PC, which used a five-machine limit. It too went DRM-free when it was offered on Steam in March 2009, a whole 10 months after its initial PC release.

The Witcher for PC supplied users with a patch after its release that let gamers run it without any digital rights protection.

(Credit: CD Projekt Red Studio/CNET)

BioShock from 2K Games also used SecuROM, though unlike Spore and Mass Effect, it limited players to just two installs. This was later pushed to five after 2K got into trouble for printing only a U.S. activation hotline number in its manual, which meant that people outside the U.S. had to make an international call to activate their copy. There was also a problem with the uninstaller not deactivating that particular user’s software activation slot, which led to the company putting out a deactivate tool. Eventually, when Bioshock had dropped into the bargain bin, 2K released an update that ditched the activation limit entirely.

Other publishers have been far more lenient with DRM pullbacks, though this tends to happen more with legacy software, or nonfranchise titles. Take for example The Witcher by CD Projekt Red Studio. Like many PC games, it required users to have the game disc in the drive at all times, though a year and a half after it’s release, the developer put out a patch that removed the need for that, as well as adding new game features.

Even Ubisoft, the purveyors of the aforementioned Online Services Platform, have scaled back DRM on legacy titles. This happened with 2009 title Dawn of Discovery, which used Tages, a DRM solution that keeps users from making a copy of the game disc. Ubisoft released a patch for the game that removed that protection, along with the need to activate the game online. It did the same thing last year for its World in Conflict title, developed by Massive Entertainment.

Similar efforts have been made by developer and publisher Activision, which back in January announced that it would be offering DRM-free versions of its “classic” titles on gaming site Good Old Games.
Is it worth the wait?

PC gamers, and gamers in general, are a restless bunch. Getting them to wait for anything is a hard sell, especially when it’s access to a new game. Pre-release copies of games showing up on file-sharing networks is now a common occurrence and one of the top reasons these more stringent DRM solutions are being put into place. So can you really blame a publisher for putting one of these systems in place in return for higher potential sales?

The one solution, as it is with most businesses, is to vote with your wallet and make it a point to the publisher or developer of a game that such systems are keeping your from purchasing a title, or greatly reducing your enjoyment of the game experience. That much is happening with Assassin’s Creed 2 on Ubisoft’s forums. Your other option, as mentioned before, is to be patient and wait for a version of the game that’s been stripped of some of its most biting DRM traits.

Still, this isn’t a good long-term solution. Early sales are often one of the big quantifiers in whether a studio will start working on a sequel, and if everyone were to wait to buy games once they hit the bargain price, publishers would simply stop making PC versions. There’s also no promise that the really heavy bits of DRM will be stripped out at a later date, except for the fact that most publishers are unlikely to want to maintain the cost of running the activation, and/or online verification servers for older software.

So will Assassins Creed 2, Silent Hunter 5 and Command and Conquer 4 go down in history as the first games to get away with always-online DRM? Or will they just be another, in a growing list of titles that have had to scale back on the protection after enough time and/or user outcry? We’ll find out soon.

For those who doubted that Microsoft was serious in its effort to re-engage with the Web, it’s time to put the skepticism aside.

At its Mix conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it’s calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype that’s designed to show off the company’s effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, just as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.

The new software is only a framework, raw enough that it’s still missing a “back” button. But with “a few” updated preview versions set to arrive at eight-week intervals, the project will develop into a beta, a release candidate, and eventually the full-fledged product IE9, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer and the executive who’ll describe the project at Mix.

Coming in the new version is support for new Web standards including plug-in-free video; better performance with graphics, text, and JavaSript by taking advantage of modern computing hardware; and a new effort at gathering and responding to feedback from those using the prototype software, Hachamovitch said.

Dean Hachamovitch, IE general manager

IE9 is months from release, but already it holds the potential to alter the browser market. Not only could it reinvigorate competition with a host of new rivals, it could help usher in the cloud computing era that some of those rivals are eager to embrace. In that era, the Web transforms from a foundation for static documents and Web sites into a foundation for interactive programs.

IE6, released in 2001 when Microsoft had won the browser wars of the 1990s, still is widely used today. It’s loathed among Web developers who want to use more modern Web technologies, and despite the release of IE8 a year ago, Microsoft is still saddled with a reputation as a company behind the browser curve. Mozilla’s Firefox now accounts for nearly a quarter of usage, Google’s Chrome has burst onto the scene and now is in third place, while Internet Explorer continues to gradually lose its share of usage.

With IE9, though, Microsoft is trying to rebuild the browser for the Web that’s to come through new standards such as HTML5 and CSS3, updates to Hypertext Markup Language for describing Web pages and Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.

The software caught the attention of Microsoft’s biggest browser rival. “IE9 looks great, very glad to see it. Congrats to the IE team!” said Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Firefox backer Mozilla, in a tweet.

New Web standards”We saw that HTML5 will enable a new class of applications. Those applications are going to stress the browser runtime in ways today’s Web sites don’t,” Hachamovitch said in an interview. “We realized very quickly that doing HTML5 right was much more about designing all our browser subsystems around what the new apps will need than it was about a particular feature checklist. It’s understanding where the apps are going to go and building the platform that will get them there.”

With IE8, Microsoft put a priority on complying with existing standards, a dramatic turnaround from an earlier attitude that resentful Web developers saw as “Standard? IE is the standard.” With IE9 Microsoft is moving its standards religion into the future.

The company signaled its heightened interest in Web standards through new engagement in developing HTML5 and SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics standard that the company shunned for years despite its possibilities for better rendering of graphics such as logos. IE9, those standards arriving as an actual product.

IE9 has “HTML5 through and through,” Hachamovitch said, as well as support for CSS3 and for showing SVG 1.1 imagery inline. Hachamovitch’s demo shows H.264-encoded HTML5 video, and he said that graphics such as maps are vastly more sophisticated with SVG support.

When Microsoft showed IE9 technology in November, it didn’t shy away from IE’s poor showing on the Acid3 test of compliance with various standards and technologies. IE8 scores 20 out of 100, the November IE technology reached 32, but the IE9 Platform Preview makes it up to 55. Microsoft also dings the test as imperfect, adding in a blog post, “A key part of our approach to Web standards is the development of an industry standard test suite. Today, Microsoft has submitted over 100 additional tests of HTML5, CSS3, DOM [Document Object Model, the structure of a Web page], and SVG, to the W3C,” the World Wide Web Consortium that oversees HTML and various other Web standards.

New JavaScript EngineAnother headline element for IE9 is a new JavaScript engine. When it comes to these engines for running Web-based programs, Chrome has V8, Opera 10.5 has Futhark, Safari has Nitro, and Firefox has the new JaegerMonkey.

Now Internet Explorer has its own new name for a JavaScript Engine: Chakra. On Microsoft’s test on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, IE9 Platform Preview is a tad faster than Firefox (using the older TraceMonkey engine) and a tad slower than Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

IE9 is competitive with rivals on the SunSpider JavaScript speed test.

(Credit: Microsoft)
The finer points of exactly where IE shows up in the rankings are less important than the comparison to IE8 and earlier versions, which by comparison crawl through JavaScript.

One big change in the JavaScript engine that Hachamovitch is proud of is its multicore support. As soon as a Web page is loaded, Chakra assigns a processing core to the task of compiling JavaScript in the background into fast code written in the native language of the computer’s processor.

Hachamovitch distinguishes this from the just-in-time compilation approach of other browsers, which he criticizes as a difficult balance of optimizing code well without slowing down the arrival of Web pages.

There are other efforts to make JavaScript a richer programming foundation, including the Web Workers standard to let JavaScript perform background processing tasks. Microsoft, though, wants to improve the Web as much as possible without requiring new programming approaches.

With the Chakra approach, “developers don’t have to change their markup. The Web page didn’t have to change. Essentially, dual- and quad-core machines get put to good use,” Hachamovitch said.

Microsoft already showed off IE9’s use of Direct2D and DirectWrite, interfaces in Windows Vista and Windows 7 that can accelerate graphics and text. At Mix, Hachamovitch’s demonstration shows the technology works to speed up SVG graphics as well.
Feedback time
The IE9 Platform Preview itself is a change, too. Previously, Microsoft delivered a more finished product to the world. Now it’s trying to get feedback at an earlier stage of development. And it’s explicitly seeking comment on a wide range of elements:

“The main technologies to call out here broadly are HTML5, CSS3, DOM, and SVG,” Hachamovitch said in a blog post. “The IE9 test drive site has more specifics and samples. At this time, we’re looking for developer feedback on our implementation of HTML5’s parsing rules, Selection APIs, XHTML support, and inline SVG. Within CSS3, we’re looking for developer feedback on IE9’s support for Selectors, Namespaces, Colors, Values, Backgrounds and Borders, and Fonts. Within DOM, we’re looking for developer feedback on IE9’s support for Core, Events, Style, and Range.”

Alphabet soup, to be sure. But when it comes to building a modern Web, those letters all reflect important standards. Microsoft’s embrace is all the more significant given that, with its Windows and Office businesses, has the most to lose from the migration of applications from the PC to the cloud.