Merry new Year and all the best wishes for 2012

This is from Trading Places, always makes me laugh

 

p.s. I’ll be re-designing my blog in the new year XD

Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.

The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.

The project’s organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.

Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.

Hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit – usually only for brief periods of time – but tracking the devices has proved difficult for low-budget projects.

The hacker activist Nick Farr first put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.

“The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let’s take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities,” Mr Farr said.

Beyond balloons
He cited the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the United States as an example of the kind of threat facing online freedom. If passed, the act would allow for some sites to be blocked on copyright grounds.

Whereas past space missions have almost all been the preserve of national agencies and large companies, amateur enthusiasts have in recent years sent a few payloads into orbit.

These devices have mostly been sent up using balloons and are tricky to pinpoint precisely from the ground.

According to Armin Bauer, a 26-year-old enthusiast from Stuttgart who is working on the Hackerspace Global Grid, this is largely due to lack of funding.

“Professionals can track satellites from ground stations, but usually they don’t have to because, if you pay a large sum [to send the satellite up on a rocket], they put it in an exact place,” Mr Bauer said.

In the long run, a wider hacker aerospace project aims to put an amateur astronaut onto the moon within the next 23 years.

“It is very ambitious so we said let’s try something smaller first,” Mr Bauer added.

Ground network

The Berlin conference was the latest meeting held by the Chaos Computer Club, a decades-old German hacker group that has proven influential not only for those interested in exploiting or improving computer security, but also for people who enjoy tinkering with hardware and software.

When Mr Farr called for contributions to Hackerspace, Mr Bauer and others decided to concentrate on the communications infrastructure aspect of the scheme.

He and his teammates are working on their part of the project together with Constellation, an existing German aerospace research initiative that mostly consists of interlinked student projects.

In the open-source spirit of Hackerspace, Mr Bauer and some friends came up with the idea of a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.

Used together in a global network, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time, while also making it easier and more reliable for fast-moving satellites to send data back to earth.

“It’s kind of a reverse GPS,” Mr Bauer said.

“GPS uses satellites to calculate where we are, and this tells us where the satellites are. We would use GPS co-ordinates but also improve on them by using fixed sites in precisely-known locations.”

Mr Bauer said the team would have three prototype ground stations in place in the first half of 2012, and hoped to give away some working models at the next Chaos Communication Congress in a year’s time.

They would also sell the devices on a non-profit basis.

“We’re aiming for 100 euros (£84) per ground station. That is the amount people tell us they would be willing to spend,” Mr Bauer added.

Complications
Experts say the satellite project is feasible, but could be restricted by technical limitations.

“Low earth orbit satellites such as have been launched by amateurs so far, do not stay in a single place but rather orbit, typically every 90 minutes,” said Prof Alan Woodward from the computing department at the University of Surrey.

“That’s not to say they can’t be used for communications but obviously only for the relatively brief periods that they are in your view. It’s difficult to see how such satellites could be used as a viable communications grid other than in bursts, even if there were a significant number in your constellation.”

This problem could be avoided if the hackers managed to put their satellites into geostationary orbits above the equator. This would allow them to match the earth’s movement and appear to be motionless when viewed from the ground. However, this would pose a different problem.

“It means that they are so far from earth that there is an appreciable delay on any signal, which can interfere with certain Internet applications,” Prof Woodward said.

“There is also an interesting legal dimension in that outer space is not governed by the countries over which it floats. So, theoretically it could be a place for illegal communication to thrive. However, the corollary is that any country could take the law into their own hands and disable the satellites.”

Need for knowledge
Apart from the ground station scheme, other aspects of the Hackerspace project that are being worked on include the development of new electronics that can survive in space, and the launch vehicles that can get them there in the first place.

According to Mr Farr, the “only motive” of the Hackerspace Global Grid is knowledge.

He said many participants are frustrated that no person has been sent past low Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

“This [hacker] community can put humanity back in space in a meaningful way,” Farr said.

“The goal is to get back to where we were in the 1970s. Hackers find it offensive that we’ve had the technology since before many of us were born and we haven’t gone back.”

Asked whether some might see negative security implications in the idea of establishing a hacker presence in space, Farr said the only downside would be that “people might not be able to censor your internet”.

“Hackers are about open information,” Farr added. “We believe communication is a human right.”

A boycott of US hosting firm GoDaddy looks set to go ahead even though the firm has said it no longer supports the policy that sparked it.

Customers were angry with GoDaddy over its backing of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

29 December has emerged as the day on which customers would transfer sites and domains away from GoDaddy.

The proposed boycott forced a U-turn from GoDaddy, but many remain committed to transferring.

SOPA, which has yet to be voted on by the US Congress, lets movie studios and record labels seek court orders to knock sites offline if they think they practice piracy or aid it.

Critics fear the broad wording of the act will lead to widespread shutdowns and change the web irrevocably. Tech firms including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay and many others have voiced their opposition to SOPA.

GoDaddy was one of the few tech firms to back SOPA but it took its name off the public list of supporters following pressure by big web names and many angry customers.

Wikipedia said it would move its domains away from GoDaddy, as did the Cheezburger Network, owner of Lolcats, and image hosting firm Imgur.

In a statement explaining its change of heart, GoDaddy boss Warren Adelman said: “Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why GoDaddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better.”

In an interview with tech news site Gizmodo, Mr Adelman took a neutral stance on SOPA but said the company might support it if there were a consensus among net firms on its wording.

Despite this change, many were expected to go through with their decision to transfer their domains and websites away from GoDaddy. On discussion forums and comments section on blogs, many said they would still transfer away from GoDaddy.

GoDaddy provides servers on which many people upload their websites and it also act as a registrar for internet domains – the familiar web addresses ending in .com, .org etc.

The idea for the boycott originated on the Reddit chat board and several sites have collected pledges from domain owners to stop using GoDaddy. Hundreds of people have pledged to take action on 29 December.

It is not clear how much impact these the pledges will have on GoDaddy, which claims to be the world’s biggest domain name registrar and oversees more than 50 million domains.

Analysis of the number of web domains transferred in and out of GoDaddy’s servers suggest many people have taken action despite the change of heart.

In one two-day period, more than 37,000 domains were moved to other hosting and registration firms. However, on some days more domains and sites transferred to GoDaddy than left it.

In a bid to stem the exodus, GoDaddy has taken out large adverts in the US press offering special deals on domain registration.

GoDaddy’s competitors have cashed in on the controversy, with many offering discounts if customers transfer to them from the hosting firm.

GoDaddy has courted controversy earlier in 2011 because its founder and former boss, Bob Parsons, shot and killed an elephant during a hunt in Zimbabwe and posted a video of this online.

In 2009 Sony decided to make a HD remake of their popular God of War Series, But has what it spawned a good thing for gaming? It seems all of our favorite game series like Metal Gear, Splinter Cell, Prince Of Persia, Sly Cooper, and many more are getting converted into HD ports. Sony made the God of war HD remake for the sole reason to introduce New fans to the older games and to introduce new ones as well, A simple concept that can please Gamers and put more money in their pockets.

With the success of the God of War collection, Sony seen an opportunity to make Another HD Remake and bask in the glory of their previous titles, This time it was sly cooper. If that wasn’t enough, Sony influenced Ubisoft to do the same thing with Prince Of Persia, Coming out a week after the Sly Cooper collection. These titles were very popular when the Ps2 was in its prime, so of course these collections sold well since there is no backwards compatibility with The Ps3 console, Unless you of course got one of the first Consoles they put on the market. Medal Of Honor also came out with a HD Remake, only releasing a month after Sly Cooper and Prince Of Persia

E3 2011 was were many Developers decided to announce HD remakes of other Popular Games, Titles Like House Of the Dead Overkill and another God Of War Collection. Many other titles were announced, And this is were it starts to seem that companies are turning their once popular game series into Cash Cows. At this point i was all for it, I wanted to be able to play my favorite games from the previous consoles on my new ones with Achievement/Trophy support. But as i thought about it more i realized how Idiotic i am as a consumer to buy the same product i did many years ago without any physical changes.

This year alone there has been many HD collections released, But only one of them went above and beyond the previous remakes to really stand out, and that was Halo Combat Evolved. They remade the game’s graphics whilst still maintaining the core gameplay, It was an actual Remake instead of a simple remaster. There has been even more HD remakes announced and none of them pick up after 343 Industries and their Actual Remake. HD seems to just be a gimmick for companies now, just there for them to make Maximum Profit for minimal effort. Its like Chevy Reselling a 1995 camaro with a new paintjob and calling it a 2012, It doesn’t seem fair to the consumers. The problem being is gamers like you and me continue to buy these Hd remake because we loved the original Game (for me Metal Gear) We are in a sense, Blinded by nostalgia.