Weekly News Roundup

Yep, it's that time again. I've emerged from under the haze of sickness with WoW-glazed and reddened eyes to venture forth with small glimmering shards of newsworthy items... As usual, mostly from Slashdot, but I'll start off with a gaming article from IGN and work my ways back chronologically.

Gold Messiah of Might and Magic

Ubisoft announced back on 10/9 that Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is officially gold, meaning work on the Source-powered first-person RPG is complete. The game is scheduled to arrive 10/24.

Developed by Arcade Studios (Arx Fatalis) and Kuju Entertainment using Valve's Source engine, Dark Messiah is a first-person action-RPG set in the Might & Magic universe. The game's single-player action spans 12 levels, while Dark Messiah's multiplayer mode supports up to 32 combatants playing across expansive maps.

There is a single-player demo version available via Steam (the distribution engine for other Source-engine games such as HL2 and CS:S), so I assume the final game would be distributed by the same. Check out the movies, this looks pretty cool actually... Got kind of a Battlefield 2 feel to it, but with swords and magics... Methinks this would be worth a gander when the demo is available...

Virtual Economies Attract Real-World Tax Attention

Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day... People who cash out of virtual economies by converting their assets into real-world currencies are required to report their incomes to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service or the tax authority where they live in the real world... 'Right now we're at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise - taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth,' said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.

Ah yes, Uncle Sam wanting its share of the pie. Yet I fail to see how anything good can come of this.

Who Cares If Privacy Is Slipping Away?

This morning MSNBC's home page is topped by the opening story in a series, Privacy Under Attack, But Does Anybody Care? Privacy rights have been debated to death here on Slashdot, but this article attempts to understand people's ambivalence towards the decline of privacy. The article discusses how over 60 percent of Americans - while somewhat unable to quantify what exactly privacy is and what's being lost - feel a pessimism about privacy rights and their erosion. However, a meager 6-7% polled have actually taken any steps to help preserve their privacy. The article's call to action: '...everyone has secrets they don't want everyone else to know, and it's never too late to begin a discussion about how Americans' right to privacy can be protected.'

Androids at China's Robot Expo

China's 2006 Robot Expo has wrapped up. Even though there is little information on it online, there has been much attention given to Zou Renti's android. It seems that everyone cool is making androids of themselves these days. There's a decent article on the state of androids in Japan but unfortunately, the concentration isn't on functionality, it's on fooling the humans the robot interacts with: "The key to a successful android, according to Dr. Ishiguro, is both very humanlike appearance and behaviour. One of his early android creations was cast from his then four-year-old daughter. While it looked like her, it had few actuators and its dull facial expressions and jerky movements proved so uncanny that the girl later refused to go to her father's lab because her scary robot double was lurking there." The latest robot he's built has 42 actuators, allowing it to wow many spectators at the expo. I wonder how much longer it will be before we see Blade-Runner-like cases on the evening news?

Perhaps we can finally answer the age-old question, do androids dream of electric sheep?

911 Call Tracking Site Stirs Concern

This story comes from the Seattle Post-Intellegencer. For the past year, John Eberly has operated Seattle911.com, a site that until this week took real-time feeds of 911 calls from the Seattle Fire Department and plotted them on Google Maps. But on learning of Eberly's site, officials cited 'security concerns' and altered the way they display 911 calls on their Web site, changing the format from text to graphical, preventing Eberly from acquiring the raw data. (Several programmers are quoted musing how trivial it would be to work around this evasion.) Fire officials worry that allowing others to display where fire crews are on an Internet map could make things easier if terrorists were planning an attack. That logic left Eberly and others scratching their heads, as the information continues to be publicly available on the Fire Department's site. 'We're not obligated to provide this information. It's something that we did for customer service in the first place,' a Fire Department spokesperson said. So is this public information? Should the data be available to the public in real time?

I find this whole debacle ridiculous from the start. The story ends with a quote from Bruce Schneier: "The government is not saying, 'Hey, this data needs to be secret,' they are saying, 'This data needs to be inconvenient to get to.'"

Airport To Tag Passengers With RFID

A new technology is to be trialled in Debrecen Airport in Hungary that will involve tagging all passengers with high-powered RFID tags. From the Register article: 'People will be told to wear radio tags round their necks when they get to the airport. The tag would notify a computer system of their identity and whereabouts. The system would then track their activities in the airport using a network of high definition cameras. "[The tags] have got a long range, of 10m to 20m," said Dr. Paul Brennan of University College London's antennas and radar group which developed the tags, "and the system has been designed so the tag can be located to within a meter, and it can locate thousands of tags in one area at a given time."' The system is being touted for 'Improving airport efficiency, security and passenger flow by enhanced passenger monitoring.' BBC is also reporting this story, and brings up such hurdles to the project as 'finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.' As for any mention of the 'hurdle' of people's rights, the article vaguely and briefly states that 'The issue of infringement of civil liberties will also be key,' but doesn't bother to go into any pesky details.

Gooooood little sheep. Move along now. Maybe they'll finally abandon all pretence of civil rights and just staple the RFID to our ear?

This Rare Friday the 13th

For those of you who hadn't noticed, last Friday was indeed the 13th. This note appeared on Slashdot that day, pointing out a Washington Times story about how special this particular Friday the 13th was. The digits in the numerical notation for the date add up to 13 - whether you write it in the US or the European form (10-13-2006 = 1+1+3+2+6 = 13). From the article:

The phenomenon hasn't happened in 476 years, said Heinrich Hemme, a physicist at Germany's University of Aachen who crunched the numbers to find that the double-whammy last occurred Jan. 13, 1520.

Now don't you feel more enriched for having known that? And if you had realized it on that day, would it have freaked you out, or at the very least made you stay indoors?