The Times: Tech column - The matrix/phone taps/Microsoft's iLoo
By David Rowan
THE peer-to-peer networks are buzzing with excitement about The Matrix Reloaded, the geeks' most anticipated film release of 2003. The challenge is to find pirated pre-release copies, as happened with Spider-Man, something the movie studios have gone to unprecedented lengths to prevent. Sure enough, on networks such as KaZaA and Gnutella I found dozens of files at the weekend entitled "Matrix Reloaded".
But though trailers are certainly out there, all the supposed full-length versions I downloaded proved to be fakes or empty files. That will please the studios, although they know that as soon as the prints hit cinemas, illegal recordings will find their way online. What is more interesting about this movie is the impact it will have on the video game industry. The tie-in game, Enter The Matrix, cost up to £20 million to develop, making it the most expensive yet. As spin-off entertainment, it is as integral to the film as Keanu Reeves's embarrassingly cool shades.
The game was written and directed by the Wachowski brothers, who made the movie; the actors' every move was recorded specially by 32 motion-capture cameras, and players even get an hour of dedicated location footage. "They treated this like the third movie," says David Perry, president of Shiny Entertainment, the Atari subsidiary that made it. Early critiques are mixed, but the scale of the game's ambitions has raised the stakes of what players will come to expect.
The ultimate coalescence of the film and video game industries will come next year with the release of The Matrix Online, a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" from Ubi Soft that will allow millions of players around the world to inhabit the same virtual universe. Hollywood is determined to win control of your console or your PC entertainment experience. After all, if Warner Bros can make £500 million from the first Matrix film on large and small screen, it makes sense to extend the franchise to take on the little games designers whose only asset is their creativity.
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IT EMERGED at a London School of Economics conference last week that government agencies are demanding data on 100 million of your phone calls each year. Privacy International, a campaign group, made the calculation from figures obtained from ministries, MPs and the communications industry, and it believes the true figure, excluding e-mail taps, could be much higher. Its director, Simon Davies, says: "The extent of data retention and access is now beyond reasonable levels. We don't even know who is keeping what, or for what periods. No one is saying anything."
So Privacy International is encouraging consumers to use "subject access requests" under the Data Protection Act to find out what information telecommunications companies have on them. You can find sample letters at www.privacyinternational.org.
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TWO WEEKS AGO this column urged you not to laugh at Microsoft's big summer product launch, the iLoo "internet-enabled" lavatory, to be unveiled at Glastonbury. Predictably, the resulting mockery has been causing a stink back at global HQ.
First, Microsoft's main press office at Redmond, Washington (not in Virginia, as an editing error had it last week), claimed that the iLoo was never serious and berated the media for being sucked in. Then the London office firmly insisted that the iLoo was still "a serious concept". Finally Microsoft was forced to admit that, well, the iLoo was real, but a "misunderstanding about the context of the initiative" meant that it would not, after all, be built. How, I wonder, will The Onion satirise this?
(The Times, May 20 2003)
THE peer-to-peer networks are buzzing with excitement about The Matrix Reloaded, the geeks' most anticipated film release of 2003. The challenge is to find pirated pre-release copies, as happened with Spider-Man, something the movie studios have gone to unprecedented lengths to prevent. Sure enough, on networks such as KaZaA and Gnutella I found dozens of files at the weekend entitled "Matrix Reloaded".
But though trailers are certainly out there, all the supposed full-length versions I downloaded proved to be fakes or empty files. That will please the studios, although they know that as soon as the prints hit cinemas, illegal recordings will find their way online. What is more interesting about this movie is the impact it will have on the video game industry. The tie-in game, Enter The Matrix, cost up to £20 million to develop, making it the most expensive yet. As spin-off entertainment, it is as integral to the film as Keanu Reeves's embarrassingly cool shades.
The game was written and directed by the Wachowski brothers, who made the movie; the actors' every move was recorded specially by 32 motion-capture cameras, and players even get an hour of dedicated location footage. "They treated this like the third movie," says David Perry, president of Shiny Entertainment, the Atari subsidiary that made it. Early critiques are mixed, but the scale of the game's ambitions has raised the stakes of what players will come to expect.
The ultimate coalescence of the film and video game industries will come next year with the release of The Matrix Online, a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" from Ubi Soft that will allow millions of players around the world to inhabit the same virtual universe. Hollywood is determined to win control of your console or your PC entertainment experience. After all, if Warner Bros can make £500 million from the first Matrix film on large and small screen, it makes sense to extend the franchise to take on the little games designers whose only asset is their creativity.
++++
IT EMERGED at a London School of Economics conference last week that government agencies are demanding data on 100 million of your phone calls each year. Privacy International, a campaign group, made the calculation from figures obtained from ministries, MPs and the communications industry, and it believes the true figure, excluding e-mail taps, could be much higher. Its director, Simon Davies, says: "The extent of data retention and access is now beyond reasonable levels. We don't even know who is keeping what, or for what periods. No one is saying anything."
So Privacy International is encouraging consumers to use "subject access requests" under the Data Protection Act to find out what information telecommunications companies have on them. You can find sample letters at www.privacyinternational.org.
++++
TWO WEEKS AGO this column urged you not to laugh at Microsoft's big summer product launch, the iLoo "internet-enabled" lavatory, to be unveiled at Glastonbury. Predictably, the resulting mockery has been causing a stink back at global HQ.
First, Microsoft's main press office at Redmond, Washington (not in Virginia, as an editing error had it last week), claimed that the iLoo was never serious and berated the media for being sucked in. Then the London office firmly insisted that the iLoo was still "a serious concept". Finally Microsoft was forced to admit that, well, the iLoo was real, but a "misunderstanding about the context of the initiative" meant that it would not, after all, be built. How, I wonder, will The Onion satirise this?
(The Times, May 20 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, May 20, 2003
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