Week of November 20, 2005

By far the top story in tech news and electronic entertainment this week was the Xbox 360’s big debut....

Standing in line last night for the arrival of the 3 police-escorted trucks containing 3,000-or-so Xbox 360s, then watching them being handed out by multiple Best Buy employees was like being at "the world's most expensive soup kitchen," reported editors at gaming news site 1UP.com , who joined "hardcore Xbox 360 fans from all over the globe for a chance to buy the very first retail kits anywhere.” The handing out happened in "a gigantic aircraft hangar" in California's Mojave Desert, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

Here's GameSpot's exhaustive review of the 360 and one more for the layman at the New York Times . What it and a lot of the reviews say is that - though this next-gen system is multimedia (it'll play music and video, serving as a “Media Center Extender,” Bit-Tech.net explains) - it's still very much about games. Only now there’s a strong online focus, which should tweak parental antennas - who are the fellow players our kids are texting and chatting with online?

The 360 offers two levels of Xbox Live (the basic one free), which means voice and text communications and evenutally video messages, with players anywhere in the world. Xbox 360 reportedly also has some parental controls parents might want to configure (e.g., restricting access to online chat and to games rated "M" for Mature), according to the Ferrago.com gamers' blog.

In other gaming news, "the US has been declared the top gaming nation at the World Cyber Games" held in Singapore last week, the BBC reports. "America's 16 players won two gold medals and one silver to top the national rankings"; South Korea and Brazil came in second and third, respectively. Here's the Washington Post's list of videogames that "have gamers abuzz" this holiday season . And Common Sense Media looks at the question, "Is your kid ready for a gaming system?".

In Other News

  • Guide to student blogging. "Millions of students across the country are speaking their minds in Internet blogs, and some kids are getting punished for it despite their right to free expression," writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties organization. So the EFF thought students and their parents might want answers to the question: "Just what are students allowed to publish about their school, their teachers, and their classmates?" You'll find them in the organization's just-released guide to student blogging - including the rights of students at public vs. private schools.
  • Heads up, Mac users! This CNET report about how malicious hackers are branching out says the Mac OS X is increasingly vulnerable. "Online criminals shifted their attacks in 2005 from operating systems such as Windows to media players and software programs," CNET reports, citing the latest "Top 20" computer vulnerabilities from the nonprofit SANS research group. Here's the Top 20 list , which - besides the UNIX-based OS X, MP3 players, and Microsoft's Explorer Web browser - includes software very popular with kids: file-sharing, instant-messaging.
  • 'Paradise Lost' in a nutshell ... or on cellphones, anyway. We're talking about text-messaging as a learning tool for students of English literature. Here's John Milton's "Paradise Lost," as pointed out by the San Jose Mercury News:

    "devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd'off wiv god so corupts man(md by god) wiv apel. devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind."
    Just one of a number of "condensed masterpieces" that a service called dot mobile will be offering students starting in January. Parents, you have heard of CliffsNotes.com and SparkNotes.com, right? What's really notable, here, is that everything's moving onto mobiles in interesting ways like this.
  • Web search No. 2. Though IM is No. 1 with teens, email is still the top Internet activity among Internet users as a whole, with Web searching now No. 2. "Of the 94 million American adults who went online on a given autumn day this year, 63% used a search engine," the Associated Press reports. The email figure is 77%, according to the latest data from the Pew Internet & American Life project. Here's the latest on teens using IM vs. email.
  • Death to DRM?. "DRM" is digital-rights management, or anti-piracy tech, on CDs, DVDs, etc., and Sony's use of it so far may not spell death to DRM but has seriously damaged whatever good name the technology had. In fact, from now on digital-media companies will probably go to great lengths not to set off a similar p.r. disaster. Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs reports that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is suing Sony BMG for its anti-piracy practices, the first the first lawsuit filed under Texas's new spyware law" (lawyers in California and New York have filed class-action suits against Sony, he adds). Here's Sony's list of 52 CDs that have the offending DRM technology on them. The good news is, Sony is offering replacement CDs (without DRM on them) for all 52, CNET reports.

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