Kendle’s World

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

“It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer,” said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv.

“It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively,” she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity.

Ms Le said: “Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we’ve created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically.”

Headsets which read neural activity are not new, but Ms Le said the Epoc was the first consumer device that can be used for gaming.

“This is the first headset that doesn’t require a large net of electrodes, or a technician to calibrate or operate it and does require gel on the scalp,” she said. “It also doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars.”

The use of Electroencephalography in medical practice dates back almost 100 years but it is only since the 1970s that the procedure has been used to explore brain computer interfaces.

The headset could be used to improve the realism of emotional responses of AI characters in games Tan Le, Emotiv

The Epoc technology can be used to give authentic facial expressions to avatars of gamers in virtual worlds. For example, if the player smiles, winks, grimaces the headset can detect the expression and translate it to the avatar in game.

It can also read emotions of players and translate those to the virtual world. “The headset could be used to improve the realism of emotional responses of AI characters in games,” said Ms Le.

“If you laughed or felt happy after killing a character in a game then your virtual buddy could admonish you for being callous,” she explained.

The $299 headset has a gyroscope to detect movement and has wireless capabilities to communicate with a USB dongle plugged into a computer.

The Emotiv said the headset could detects more than 30 different expressions, emotions and actions.

They include excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis).

Gamers are able to move objects in the world just by thinking of the action.

Emotiv is working with IBM to develop the technology for uses in “strategic enterprise business markets and virtual worlds”

Paul Ledak, vice president, IBM Digital Convergence said brain computer interfaces, like the Epoc headset were an important component of the future 3D Internet and the future of virtual communication.

AT&T and Verizon will be shutting down their old, analog AMPS networks next Monday, and AT&T will also turn off its old TDMA network, with smaller providers expected to follow thanks to a sunset date set by the FCC. After these old networks are shut down, the networks will be all digital. Of course, if you have one of those old fashioned ‘just a phone’ cellphones and it happens to be analog, you’d best enjoy the last few days before it becomes useless.

The Wall Street Journal discovers that cable’s answer to FiOS will be DOCSIS 3.0. While the article doesn’t offer anything we haven’t been talking about for ages, it does offer up the reminder that Comcast, for all their faults, is the only major cable operator who’ll be seriously upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 this year. Even then, the company plans to have only 20% of their footprint wired with DOCSIS 3.0 by the end of the year, though they should have 50Mbps tiers available to some before 2009. Other cable operators are even less enthusiastic:

Other cable operators, including No. 2 operator Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc. and Charter Communications Inc., say they’re experimenting with Docsis 3.0 technology and plan on putting it into play in one form or another over the coming years. Just how aggressively they roll it out will partly depend on Comcast’s success, predicts Soleil Securities analyst Laura Martin.

Apparently many U.S. cable operators think that most Americans will be perfectly happy, for at least a few more years, by the speeds currently provided by DOCSIS 1.x (or in Cablevision’s case 2.0) networks. Smaller operators like Mediacom, with only Qwest to worry about, have publicly stated they’re taking a “back seat” on DOCSIS 3.0 deployment. In Canada, Videotron recently was the first North American cable provider to offer 30Mbps & 50Mbps pre-certification DOCSIS 3.0 speeds (albeit with caps and overage charges).

source:  www.dslreports.com

When The Pirate Bay was raided back in 2006, three men were brought in for questioning, and the interrogations continued in the months that followed. The police’s goal was obviously to let the people behind the site confess to something they didn’t do. This led to a series of the most hilarious interrogation transcripts.
Not surprisingly, “the confessions” of the Pirate Bay three didn’t help the police much. Earlier this week, the Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall charged four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay for “assisting copyright infringement”. Actually, this is a surprisingly mild accusation if you consider that he called the Pirate Bay “terrorists” only a few months ago. The response of Brokep’s lawyer sums it up quite nicely: “My client will plead not guilty, but i’m not sure if what he’s being charged with, is a crime at all,” he said.
Below you can read some of the transcripts of the interrogations of Brokep, Anakata and TiAMO, translated from a Swedish article published by IDG.se.
Brokep

I: Interrogator
B: Brokep (Peter Sunde)
I: You are under suspicion of assisting copyright infringement between 2005-07-01 – 2006-05-31 by running and maintaining The Pirate Bay, and thereby assisting in other peoples’ copyright infringement. Another accusation is conspiracy to commit copyright infringement during the same period of time. This has been done through The Pirate Bay where a large amount of so called torrents of copyrighted files or content are made available. It’s customary to ask the person being interrogated if he admits or denies committing a crime?
B: I deny.
I: You deny.
B: Definitely!
I: Yes. And this thing with The Pirate Bay. I don’t know your position on anything about what you have been accused of, but I say you are one of the people who run this site, The Pirate Bay. What do you say about that?
B: I have no comment.
I: Why not?
B: I don’t want to make a statement about it.
I: What do you want to make a statement about?
B: I’ll probably not make statements about very much.
I: Okay. Then what are we doing here?
B: Well it was you who wanted to (not recognizable, laugh) interrogate me.
I: Yes, because you have the opportunity to explain you ideological position.
B: But I think…
I: ..the purpose of The Pirate Bay etc.
B: Oh, well I don’t think my ideology has anything to do with an interrogation. My ideology and my views on things are… Well it’s my political opinion and I can keep that to myself.
I: I’m not asking about your political opinion, I’m asking about your stance on….
B: But I think copyright is a political issue. So if you ask me about my opinion on a copyright policy issue, I will answer that I don’t wish to make a statement on my policy and my political views.
[…]
Anakata

I: Interrogator
A: Anakata (Gottfrid Svartholm)
I: Well! What do you know about this site, The Pirate Bay?
A: Well it is a site.
I: Yes…what is it?
A: Yes bits and trackers and related services.
I: What is your part in this site?
A: No comment!
I: No. Anakata – Who is that?
A: No comment!
I: No. Do you know how long this has been going on, The Pirate Bay?
A: Like a couple of years!
I: Were you involved in starting it?
A: No comment?
I: No, I will ask a lot of questions!
A: Okay, you will have to annoy me then!
I: Do you have any idea how many users per day The Pirate Bay gets?
A: No comment!
I: Do you have any idea who maintains the homepage?
A: No comment!
I: How can one translate the word tracker? (Note: same in Swedish)
A: It is not possible to translate.
[…]
I: Okay! Is there anything else that you want to say, that we might find valuable to know?
A: No! Yes… there… you can tell Roswall that he is a damn clown, he can … can stop abusing the judicial system!!!
I: You have said this before!
A: Yes. It is the third or fourth time i have said it!
I: Okay!
A: I said it in the media earlier!
I: Well! Then I will end the interrogation at 12.25.
[…]
In a later interrogation Anakata was questioned about an interview with IDG.
I: Okay. During last year, or maybe it was this year, there was an interview in the Hot chair at IDG where you talked openly about The Pirate Bay’s operation. Have you got any comments on..(interrupted)
A: No! No comment.
I: Is it correct that you where in this..(interrupted)
A: No comment!
I: …interview. Okay.
I: We have been talking about this nickname Anakata, and we still claim that is you.
A: No comment!
I: You don’t want to comment on that either. Okay, then lets move on and make this effective instead!
[…]
TiAMO

I: Interrogator
T: TiAMO (Fredrik Neij)
I: This has been a police investigation for a long time. The prosecutor’s case is one of copyright infringement, assisting in copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. What is your position on this?
T: That he is wrong. That if we are guilty, then Google is guilty too.
I: You mean you can compare Google to The Pirate Bay?
T: Almost.
I: What the difference between them?
T: Well… One difference is that you can upload torrents on The Pirate Bay, but it’s really the same thing because if you have a site with copyrighted material, you can add the link to be indexed on Google. It’s the same level as both sites are handling user-generated material. We don’t have any views on what the content is, we just provide a search engine.
I: But these torrents.. Uhm.. I don’t know what it is in plural (ED: The word “torrent” sounds weird in plural in Swedish)
T: Files of meta data..
I: Yes, I know but what… torrents. If we talk about torrents as more than one, they actually end up on The Pirate Bay’s servers. That’s different to Google?
T: But in the same way it’s… we have a torrent file that is a reference to the material. Someone who only uses a meta link and doesn’t host the file but the file is still available on the filesharing network. Should that be less illegal or more legal? Just because you store the binary data for the hash file locally on a server?
I: But that’s more than Google provides. They only provide a link in that case. While a user or a specific computer in another network provides with the actual… meta data. That has nothing to do with…
T: But then you had to decide whether meta data in itself is illegal or not.
I: But surely it’s not!
T: No.
I: I don’t believe so either, but the summary I mentioned, assisting to commit a crime, that is supplying or owning certain things that can be used for a crime. In this case, it’s providing a tracker, providing a collection of torrent files, you have… It’s about a search engine and so on. That’s more than Google does?
T: Yes
I: And furthermore there was a change of legislation July 1 2005, which means the copyright law has been made tougher than before. I don’t know if you are familiar with the mp3 trial that many refer to in this context, that it is not permitted to link to copyrighted material?
T: Yes.
I: That sentence may be obsolete now, it’s not relevant anymore since the legislation has changed. That’s the foundation of the crime we investigate today. So this thing with Google, it isn’t quite the same thing.
T: I still don’t believe the way we have interpreted it, and we have consulted law people on this. They say that torrent files are not illegal and providing them is not illegal. Since we haven’t actively encouraged the users to upload copyrighted movies and not (not recognizable). We haven’t said anything. We have created an empty site where the only condition was that you cannot upload something where content doesn’t match the description, or if it blatantly is criminal in Sweden.
I: But at the same time, you ridicule Microsoft etcetera on another page of The Pirate Bay?
T: That’s because they try to apply US laws to Sweden.
I: Yes, but what they are really doing is making you aware that there is copyright infringing content on the site.
T: Yes.
I: It comes as no surprise to you that such content is available there?
T: No..
I: So you are not unaware that there is copyright infringing content, but still you chose to remain passive and not remove it?
T: There are links to copyrighted content!
I: Yes exactly, there are links to copyrighted content!
T: Yes.
I: And you are aware of this?
T: We have always had the policy not to interfere with the content on the site.
I: Ok.
T: Since the site was created by Piratbyrån, who stand for free speech and freedom to share without some bully trying to interfere, the policy (not recognizable)
I: That’s what we have left here (not recognizable). You say yourself that Piratbyrån is not a part of it anymore and that the ideological thing has faded during later years?
T: Yes, but I believe Gottfrid for example is ideologically in line with Piratbyrån. Peter as well.
I: And you aren’t?
T: I agree with much of what they say, but it’s not like I would go out on a cold rainy autumn day and protest with a sign against something (not recognizable)
[…]
This is an article from: TorrentFreak
The Pirate Bay Interrogations