The Times: Tech column - Toy trends/Viruses/Belle de Jour
By David Rowan
HERE'S AN EARLY tip for Christmas: start stocking up on batteries. This year children's toys will be more high-tech than ever, with microchips embedded in everything from Barbie dolls to Brio wooden trains. As toy manufacturers struggle to compete with booming sales of DVDs and computer games, their response has been to design toys that respond to specially enhanced TV shows. And not all parents will be pleased.
At last week's American International Toy Fair, the New York trade show that determines next Christmas's bestsellers, the buzz-word was "interactivity": toys that a child can use while simultaneously watching the box. For Mattel, that means a Batman range which responds to signals transmitted by a new Batman TV show, and a cat that sings when prompted by a Barbie DVD.
Hasbro has updated its Wheel of Fortune game to pick up signals broadcast with the TV game show, so that you can play along in real time. Why, there is even a wireless controller from Fisher Price that lets younger children play along with DVDs featuring their favourite cartoon characters.
There's no stopping progress. But I cannot help recalling the quaint notion that children might benefit from playing with their toys rather than watching TV.
+++
THERE IS NOW another reason never to click on unsolicited e-mail attachments: if a virus infects your PC, you could become an unwitting participant in a nefarious black economy. We have known for a while that viruses called trojans are designed to hijack PCs and use them to distribute spam. Now, it seems, the virus writers are actively selling the internet addresses of infected machines -so that anyone could buy access to your desktop without you knowing a thing.
The German computing magazine c't claims to have bought the internet addresses of infected computers from the authors of one such trojan. Anyone with the internet protocol (IP) addresses of compromised terminals could use this information to send out illegal junk mail, or launch denial-of-service attacks, while protecting the perpetrators' identities. One distributor of these viruses who offered to sell the magazine a bunch of IP addresses lives in Britain. Virus writers are usually assumed to be motivated largely by ego. If they are working for profit, we should worry.
+++
FOR MONTHS I've wrestled with the ethics of sending readers of The Times to visit a London call girl. But what the heck. If you have a spare moment (and a robust tolerance of the salacious), you might like to visit an extraordinary online diary at belledejour-uk.blogspot.com. Purportedly the personal journal of an unnamed prostitute in her twenties, this stylishly written confessional has become one of the year's most talked-about weblogs -and not simply for its prurient content.
Much of the buzz concerns its alleged veracity: could its author be an established literary figure capitalising on the weblog format to generate word-of-mouse attention?
Inevitably the publishing world is scrambling for the rights, and we can expect the usual tabloid chase to identify Belle de Jour's true identity. But if Belle proves to be fictional, she will at least have confirmed the weblog's arrival as a cultural force. After all, when Sex and the City began life in the mid Nineties, its author had to rely on that stuffy old medium, a newspaper column ...
(The Times, February 24 2004)
HERE'S AN EARLY tip for Christmas: start stocking up on batteries. This year children's toys will be more high-tech than ever, with microchips embedded in everything from Barbie dolls to Brio wooden trains. As toy manufacturers struggle to compete with booming sales of DVDs and computer games, their response has been to design toys that respond to specially enhanced TV shows. And not all parents will be pleased.
At last week's American International Toy Fair, the New York trade show that determines next Christmas's bestsellers, the buzz-word was "interactivity": toys that a child can use while simultaneously watching the box. For Mattel, that means a Batman range which responds to signals transmitted by a new Batman TV show, and a cat that sings when prompted by a Barbie DVD.
Hasbro has updated its Wheel of Fortune game to pick up signals broadcast with the TV game show, so that you can play along in real time. Why, there is even a wireless controller from Fisher Price that lets younger children play along with DVDs featuring their favourite cartoon characters.
There's no stopping progress. But I cannot help recalling the quaint notion that children might benefit from playing with their toys rather than watching TV.
+++
THERE IS NOW another reason never to click on unsolicited e-mail attachments: if a virus infects your PC, you could become an unwitting participant in a nefarious black economy. We have known for a while that viruses called trojans are designed to hijack PCs and use them to distribute spam. Now, it seems, the virus writers are actively selling the internet addresses of infected machines -so that anyone could buy access to your desktop without you knowing a thing.
The German computing magazine c't claims to have bought the internet addresses of infected computers from the authors of one such trojan. Anyone with the internet protocol (IP) addresses of compromised terminals could use this information to send out illegal junk mail, or launch denial-of-service attacks, while protecting the perpetrators' identities. One distributor of these viruses who offered to sell the magazine a bunch of IP addresses lives in Britain. Virus writers are usually assumed to be motivated largely by ego. If they are working for profit, we should worry.
+++
FOR MONTHS I've wrestled with the ethics of sending readers of The Times to visit a London call girl. But what the heck. If you have a spare moment (and a robust tolerance of the salacious), you might like to visit an extraordinary online diary at belledejour-uk.blogspot.com. Purportedly the personal journal of an unnamed prostitute in her twenties, this stylishly written confessional has become one of the year's most talked-about weblogs -and not simply for its prurient content.
Much of the buzz concerns its alleged veracity: could its author be an established literary figure capitalising on the weblog format to generate word-of-mouse attention?
Inevitably the publishing world is scrambling for the rights, and we can expect the usual tabloid chase to identify Belle de Jour's true identity. But if Belle proves to be fictional, she will at least have confirmed the weblog's arrival as a cultural force. After all, when Sex and the City began life in the mid Nineties, its author had to rely on that stuffy old medium, a newspaper column ...
(The Times, February 24 2004)
<< Home