Internet & Media

China to Google: No porn, or else

Google has acknowledged that the Chinese government asked it to disable a search feature with the goal of censoring pornography, but it still won't say whether the government ordered tighter censorship around the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The New York Times reported Friday that Chinese government officials ordered Google to remove the search feature--known as Google Suggest--that displays related search terms based on the original query typed into the search bar or face unspecified punishment. Apparently some queries brought up related results with suggestive implications, leading to criticism from China's state-run media and … Read more

Google, Facebook rush Iranian language support

Twitter has the starring role as opening up Net communications about Iran's turbulent politics, but Google and Facebook are jumping in with their its own hasty efforts.

Google is adding Farsi, or Persian, language support to its translation service, the company announced Thursday night. Google rushed out the support specifically because of events in Iran, said Principal Scientist Franz Och in a blog posting.

"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran," Och said. "Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use … Read more

Sony beefs up Blu-ray strategy

SAN FRANCISCO--Even as Blu-ray Disc and Blu-ray player sales are growing, Sony is looking to build out its larger strategy surrounding the company's high-definition disc products.

At a small press event here Thursday, the company introduced a new feature of BD-Live and a new piece of Blu-ray hardware.

MovieIQ will be included on some high-profile releases from Sony starting in September. It's essentially IMDb live--while a movie is playing, facts about casting, directors, production, and actors' filmographies pop up onscreen. It's powered not by IMDb, but by Gracenote, creators of CDDB, which Sony purchased just over a year ago.

It's the kind of feature intended to keep people from pausing a movie and hopping online to ask questions like, "I totally recognize that actress, but from what movie?" It's also meant to build on the inherent capability of Blu-ray players that have Internet access. Sony has tried to do this by allowing BD-Live access to exclusive trailers and some trivia games, but MovieIQ seems like something that users would engage with repeatedly, not something they'd just use once and forget about.

A senior Sony exec at the event, Tracy Garvin, called MovieIQ the "first killer-app for BD-Live." That sounded like an admission that none of the BD-Live features thus far have been all that compelling.

It's clear Sony is still in the process of fine-tuning its BD-Live strategy.… Read more

Court orders Jammie Thomas to pay RIAA $1.92 million

Note Legal experts now say that Jammie Thomas-Rasset may avoid paying damages to the recording industry by filing bankruptcy. Read the story here.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset was found guilty of willful copyright infringement on Thursday in a Minneapolis federal court and must pay the recording industry $1.92 million.

In a surprise decision, the jury imposed damages against Thomas-Rasset, who was originally accused of sharing more than 1,700 songs, at a whopping $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was ultimately found guilty of illegally sharing.

In 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America claimed in a lawsuit … Read more

Google Book Search gets a face-lift

All the talk about Google's Book Search lately has focused more on the law than the page, but Google continues to improve the product at the heart of those discussions.

Google rolled out several improvements to its Book Search product Thursday. Searchers can now immediately see where their search term appears in a given book, see thumbnails of all the pages in a book or magazine, and embed links to books in their blogs, among other things.

The improvements, detailed Thursday in a blog post, apply only to public-domain and those Google has negotiated the rights to publish. The … Read more

Google looks to fast-track employee ideas

Google is looking for ways to make sure its engineers have ways to get their ideas up the food chain before they take them somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has begun to hold "innovation reviews," where employees can pitch their bosses on their latest idea or product, who then in turn take the idea before Google's ruling triumvirate of CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It's part of an effort to make sure the ideas conceived in a Google employee's famous "20 percent time" have … Read more

3D means new rules for directors

The rise of 3D technology for movies and television will force a change in how directors tell stories.

Say good-bye to gut-wrenching drops off cliffs and swoops through asteroid fields to call attention to 3D effects. Be prepared for directors to use slower pans, less cutting, and more deliberate camera moves to blend the technology into the story. These new 3D movies may look boring in 2D, but they'll end up feeling more engaging when seen in three dimensions.

"Unfortunately, the history of 3D is bad 3D," says Sandy Climan, CEO of 3ality, a company that makes, as he calls it, "end-to-end technologies from image capture to processing" for three-dimensional entertainment. The technology hasn't been up to snuff until recently, he says. He claims his company's tech is leagues better, naturally. But the art hasn't advanced, either, and no amount of technology can fix that. Directors need new rules.

I talked with Climan about the changes coming to cinematography and television in the move to 3D, as well as to Didier Debons and Isabelle de Montagu, CEO and business development manager of 3DTV Solutions, which makes 3D video recording products, and Tuyen Pham, CEO of A-volute, a 3D audio encoding company. The short takeaway: if you're in the video or entertainment business, forget what you know about directing and editing. 3D changes everything.

Think 3D is a gimmick and that professional cinematographers and television directors don't take it seriously? Financials, Climan says, dispute this. 3D films in 3D theaters gross two to five times what the 2D versions of those films do. Commercials in 3D yield better recall rates. And it's not just the novelty factor, Climan says. If so, the trend would have faded. Grosses for 3D films are growing.

"The family movie business has largely moved to 3D," Climan continues, pointing to films like "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Coraline," and "Up"--the last two having being taken far more seriously than standard 3D matinee fare. On the grownup front, Climan says that for sports and concerts, there's nothing like the 3D movie or TV experience. The upcoming James Cameron film, "Avatar" is a 3D production and is expected to be a watershed for mainstream 3D entertainment.

For now, the growth of 3D looks inevitable. The next step for the medium, after family films and fantastic blockbusters, is for 3D to move into independent and artisan films. Climan thinks the technology is becoming straightforward enough to make that likely.

… Read more

Teen online safety mostly about behavior

In 1994, when I wrote Child Safety on the Information Highway, the first widely disseminated Internet safety publication, I advised parents not to let kids put personal information or photos online and--because of what turned out to be an exaggerated fear of predators--I urged them to avoid online conversations with strangers. Back then, along with trying to keep kids away from porn, Internet safety was mostly about protecting children from dangerous adults.

But starting around 2005, a new phase of the Web--often referred to as "Web 2.0"--prompted some Internet safety advocates to focus on ways kids … Read more

Soon, billboards that know male from female

Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*Star) has developed a gender recognition system that could change the way advertising works in the future.

The technology uses sophisticated algorithms to differentiate facial features of males and females. However, unlike Face Detection 3.0, which is employed in point-and-shoots such as the Fujifilm FinePix F200EXR, the gender recognition system can only detect faces that are facing the camera.

The A*Star-developed system is bring displayed at CommunicAsia 2009 held at the Singapore Expo. A representative at the agency's booth told us the technology is focused on advertising, so … Read more