Allowing journalists access to an uncensored Internet apparently isn’t on the International Olympic Committee’s list of things to do before the Beijing games begin next week.

When Chinese officials were bidding for the right to hold the games seven years ago, they assured international organizers that there would be ”complete freedom to report.” In April, Chinese organizers told International Olympic Committee members that Internet censorship, which is routine for China’s citizens, would be lifted for journalists during the games.

Media watchdog Reporters without Borders said it was increasingly concerned that journalists would face many cases of censorship during the Olympics.

However, IOC members issued a clarification Tuesday, saying that Internet freedom applied only to Web sites related to ”Olympic competitions.” Some journalists expressed frustration at the slow download rates and even voiced suspicion that it was deliberate and intended to discourage use.

“We condemn the IOC’s failure to do anything about this, and we are more skeptical about its ability to ensure that the media are able to report freely,” the group said in a statement.

“I regret that it now appears BOCOG has announced that there will be limitations on Web site access during games time,” IOC press chief Kevan Gosper told Reuters, referring to Beijing’s Olympic organizers. “I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered games related.”

The revelation came a day after journalists learned that organizers had backtracked on earlier guarantees that journalists would have access to an uncensored Internet at the Main Press Center and athletic venues. The announcement meant that thousands of reporters working in Beijing during the next several weeks won’t have access to a multitude of sites deemed embarrassing to the Chinese government, such as Amnesty International or any sites related to the crackdown in Tibet or the banned spiritual group Falun Gong.

A day after journalists learned their Internet activities would be limited, a senior IOC official admitted to Reuters on Wednesday that committee members had cut a deal to let the Chinese government block sensitive Web sites, despite promises of unrestricted access.

Tell me, are you more likely to consider a UMPC (FlipStart or otherwise) for $699 or do you feel that still too much to pay?

Coincidentally, I’ll be posting a full review of the Wibrain B1 later today (covered previously on Crave here and here), which is the cheapest UMPC I’ve seen–priced at, you guessed it, $699. The review will be live later today here.

At its starting price of $1,999, the Vulcan FlipStart was egregiously overpriced when we reviewed it last spring. A $500 price cut last fall failed to impress, so yesterday Paul Allen and company lopped more than half off the price, lowering it to $699.

Do you like me more for $699?

Prior to the patch, the bad guy had a 1 in 65,000 chance of getting it because the transaction ID is based, in part, on the port number used. With the patch, the chances decrease to 1 in 2,147,483,648. Kaminsky said it’s not perfect, but it’s a good enough start.

The question is why would someone bother? Well, Kaminsky talked about how deeply embedded DNS is in our lives. Kaminsky said there are three ages in computer hacking. The first was attacking servers (for example FTP and Telnet). The second was attacking the browsers (for example Javascript and ActiveX). We’re now about to enter the third age, where attacking Everything Else is possible.

LAS VEGAS–Speaking before a packed audience, researcher Dan Kaminsky explained the urgency in having everyone patch their systems: virtually everything we do on the Internet involves a Domain Name System request and therefore is vulnerable.

Security researchers always thought it was hard to poison DNS records, but Kaminsky said to think of the process as a race, with a good guy and bad guy each trying to get a secret number transaction ID. “You can get there first,” he said, “but you can’t cross finish line unless you have the secret number.”

Click here for full coverage of Black Hat 2008.

We know that if we type a name.com into a browser, the DNS resolves it to its numerical address. But what we don’t realize is that same process occurs when we send e-mail or when we log onto a Web site. These also require DNS lookup.

Expectations were running high before Wednesday morning as Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for IOActive, had revealed little about his DNS vulnerability up till then. That didn’t stop others from trying to figure it out. But that actually helped Kaminsky in the end; it meant during his speech, he was able to skip the what and go directly to the why.

I have to say, Wrex is pretty frakin’ freaky, especially when he does his cat impression as seen in the video. He’s definitely no “Lucky” in the cute department, but he actually has does have a few more features, including more than 18 different tricks (some of which are detailed here). One trick is that he breaks down…on purpose. OK, that part of the video was actually quite endearing; the farting part, not so much.

Still, I can’t wait to terrorize my cats with this guy.

(Credit:
Robotsrule.com)

While we covered WowWee’s Wrex the unruly robo-dog a couple months back, he is finally available at U.S. e-tail stores. I know we’ve all been waiting for an unruly, uncouth, ill-behaved robot dog to complement our unruly, uncouth, ill-behaved real dogs, so wait no longer.

Amazon.com has him for $141 and is currently listed as in stock.
Buy.com has him for $150, but currently lists him as out of stock.
Hammacher Schlemmer has him listed for $130, but has an expected ship date of September 26.
Major retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart don’t yet have him.

I’ve been a fan of the original SpaceNavigator for a while now. It makes a huge difference to navigating through Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth. I tried out the new SpaceNavigator for Notebooks with these applications. All other things being equal, I marginally prefer the larger size and greater heft of the desktop model. However, if I were regularly using a 3D application on my notebook while traveling, the new device’s design strikes me as a reasonable tradeoff for the weight and bulk savings.

(Credit:
3Dconnexion)

The company calls the SpaceNavigator a "3D mouse" but that’s a misnomer. It’s only a mouse in the sense that it’s roughly the same size as a mouse and you operate it with one hand. If anything, it’s closer to a trackball. However, it’s really its own class of input device and does not, in any case, replace a mouse except for navigation (specifically) within about 120 supported 3D applications. But it’s understandable that "6DOF controller" might have been a wee too geeky for the general population.

As I’ve written about previously, we’re starting to move beyond the familiar keyboard  and mouse/touchpad, and two-handed game controller as ways of interacting with our computer systems. In the gaming world, the motion-sensing
Nintendo Wii remote is the most obvious innovation. Elsewhere, multi-touch screens, either on the large scale (Microsoft Surface) or small scale (Apple iPhone) have been garnering a lot of attention.

Another interesting category is the six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) controller. These aren’t particularly new but, until recently, they’ve been targeted primarily at 3D CAD professionals and have been priced in line with relatively expensive engineering software. If you’re spending thousands of dollars for a CAD package, spending a few hundred for a piece of hardware that lets you use it more easily is pretty much a no-brainer. (Devices of this type are also a good match for controlling robotics.)

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6DOF refers to the fact that you can use the controller to generate six different motions. Pressing it front/back and left/right are the two motions that correspond to moving a mouse around the desktop. Pressing down and pulling up translate you vertically ("z" dimension for the mathematically inclined); this corresponds to altitude or zooming in Google Earth. The other three motions are those familiar to joystick users: rotation around the three perpendicular axes, i.e. yaw, pitch, and roll (or spin, tilt, and roll as 3Dconnexion calls them).

At least for me, actually using the controller feels intuitive even if it’s a bit hard to explain how it works. It’s a fun toy even if you don’t have a serious need for one. (One hint. For Google Earth, I prefer to turn off tilt in the controller’s customization panel. The tilt rotation is the one that lets you look at the surface of the earth from an angle. I typically prefer to keep the view from straight over head and, if tilt is on, it’s hard not to shift it a bit while you’re moving around the surface of the globe.)

Batteries with different chemistries as well as ultra-capacitors, such as the ones being developed by secretive start-up EEStor, serve this end of energy storage, Nordan said.

Another flow battery maker, VRB Power, is currently testing systems, including a 5-kilowatt, four-hour prototype in Florida.

Air is compressed and pumped underground into geological features like depleted gas wells or limestone caverns. There are currently two compressed air energy storage (CAES) plants in operation with a few others in development. But some utilities are seriously considering CAES.

“I think we will see a lot of deployments in the next few years that will change how the grid works,” Fulop said. “Then we’ll see utilities jump on the bandwagon.”

“If you could take the wind power, store it in batteries, and discharge when the wind starts again, then that’s a fine application of storage,” he said.

Technology optimists say that wide-scale energy storage will change the face of the transmission grid and make wind and solar power more compelling economically.

Many of these technologies don’t have a 15-year track record that utilities like to see, which makes them skeptical. Large-scale battery projects requires systems integration that involves batteries, electronics, software, and thermal management systems, said A123 Systems’ Fulop.

It’s targeting what’s called grid stabilization, or grid support, where warehouse-size installations of lead-acid batteries are the incumbent technology. That alone is a multimillion dollar market and will pave the way for different grid storage applications, he said.

This “peak shaving” practice avoids the need to build new power plants to meet growing demand. Utilities could also idle dirty and expensive “peaking plants,” which are only turned on during times of high demand, such as very hot summer days when air conditioners max out the load.

If only 10 percent of the installed wind power plants adopted large-scale energy storage, the market would hit $50 billion, according to Lux Research. That’s because electricity costs more for utilities to purchase and deliver during peak times.

Start-up Deeya Energy says it is developing a flow battery for grid backup power or to integrate wind and solar power that will be far cheaper than lead-acid, lithium-ion, or nickel-metal hydride batteries and cheaper than fuel cells. Its products will be able to delivery between 2 kilowatts and 2 megawatts of electricity for 2 hours or up to 24 hours, it says.

But as utilities try out new technologies for different uses, Fulop and others predicted that storage will start to take hold in a variety of ways.

“Buying power at night and then selling it during the day–something like that will happen maybe in 30 or 40 years when storage technologies are one-tenth the costs they are today,” said Ric Fulop, co-founder and vice president of business development at lithium-ion battery company A123 Systems.

The latest generation of concentrating solar power plants are being developed with integrated storage, in the form of hot water or even molten salt to deliver electricity after the sun goes down.

The end game is to allow utilities to provide baseload power–meaning electricity during the middle of the day when demand is highest–with stored energy.

“The market rules have to change to allow nongeneration assets to connect to the grid and get paid for it,” he said. “And to make the grid look more like a Prius, utilities need to change their mindset to make more efficient use of the generation system.”

One company tackling bulk storage head-on is General Compression, which is developing a wind turbine with an integrated air compressor.

They are also very capital intensive. To get around that problem, Beacon Power doesn’t sell its flywheel. Instead, it bids on power generation contracts and sells the electricity to utilities.

Flywheels are also a viable alternative. Flywheel maker Beacon Power earlier this month said it expects to have a megawatt-size machine, able to store 15 minutes of power, on the grid by the end of this year.

In this scenario, utilities store electricity made from renewable sources or produced during off-peak times. Then, when demand for electricity peaks in the middle of the day, they could draw from the stored-up charge.

But utilities are risk-averse, and power plants take 5 to 10 years to construct. As a result, Lux Research pegs the market at $600 million in 2012, growing at about 25 percent per year.

With grid stabilization, kilowatts’ or a couple of megawatts’ worth of electricity are pumped onto the grid for a short amount of time, from a few seconds to under an hour. It’s used to match grid demand and supply to make generators run more efficiently or to ensure a steady frequency.

Utilities are showing interest in more options, but storage is still very much an emerging technology.

Regulations for utilities are written around power generation units, but not energy storage, said Matt Lazarewicz, vice president and chief technology officer of Beacon Power.

Rising fossil fuel prices are an incentive to explore energy storage, as well as the rising costs of constructing new plants.

“There is an increasing gap between the growing demand for electricity and the availability of options,” said Julianne Zimmerman, chief marketing officer for General Compression. “With increasing shareholder resistance to new fossil fuel and nuclear plants, there’s a shrinking set of options.”

So-called flow batteries, where liquid chemicals move between huge storage tanks to deliver a charge, are also being tested on the grid.

This part of the market, where companies are developing a range of technologies, from so-called flow batteries to compressed air storage, represents the biggest business opportunity in grid storage.

But moving megawatts’ worth of electricity around the grid like files on a computer is more theory than practice these days.

“There’s a lot of technology development and new work. But one of the reasons we don’t see more of it today is because the economics of this are actually quite complex,” said Bruce Phillips, director at Northbridge Group.

Earlier this year, grid operators in Texas had to shut down power to its customers because the wind died down momentarily, effectively cutting off supply from its wind farms, noted Lawrence Gelbien, vice president of technology at utility NStar.

Challenges

But for all the promise of making the grid operate more like a hybrid
car, there are serious challenges, panelists said.

Dizzying array of technologies

At the opposite extreme are companies pursuing the “bulk storage” market where power is delivered for more than an hour.

Gelbien said that storage units could be deployed in place of installing more “wires and poles” in a place that isn’t served with enough electricity to meet demand for only a few days of the year. Because storage devices are movable, they could be redeployed in other places after a few years as the need arises.

Ideally, a utility would be able to get money from a storage unit in multiple ways. One rural co-op installed a four-hour, 300-kilowatt storage system to offset peak electricity rates and to provide backup power to a nearby industrial company, said Matthew Johnson, director of business development at Gaia Power Technologies.

Different types of batteries are competing for bulk storage as well.

Grid support is relatively mature at about $2.4 billion and growing at 3.3 percent per year, said Lux Research President Matthew Nordan.

Two markets for energy storage

A123 Systems, which makes batteries for plug-in hybrids and power tools among other devices, is actively pushing into utility storage with more than 100 people dedicated to the market, said Fulop.

Someday, the electricity grid will operate with the equivalent of a giant hard drive. But in the short term, grid storage will look more like a PC’s cache or RAM, able to serve up small bursts of power to keep things from crashing.

A panel of experts, organized by the New England Clean Energy Council, earlier this week said that the utility storage field has enormous potential. But rapid deployment of storage devices is held back by concerns over technology risk and financial complexity.

Anything I might have missed? Anything you’d like to see in Vevo? Let me know in the comments.

2. An awesome community I love reading comments on YouTube. Popular music videos have hundreds, if not thousands, of comments from both fans and haters alike who want everyone to know their opinions. Vevo needs a community like that to be successful. Watching music videos is fine, but if Vevo really wants to keep people coming back, allowing them to comment is a must. There’s a reason why most sites allow users to post comments; they keep people interested in content they’ve already consumed. That’s what Vevo needs.

3. A voting mechanism Wouldn’t it be great if Vevo had a voting mechanism that let us decide which videos were good? Similar to Digg, people would be able to vote on the quality of the songs and videos. The videos could be filtered by release date or by the number of votes they have, so people can find the most popular videos at any time. Deploying a voting mechanism could help Vevo become the New Age Billboard chart, informing the world of the top songs at any time. And it would definitely help artists determine what we really like. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I think it could mean better music.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter stream, and FriendFeed.

5. Embedding This one might be a long shot, but I believe that if the music industry really wants to be successful on the Web, it needs to embrace its users. And one of the best ways to do that is by allowing them to embed music videos on their own sites. The music industry has historically been suspect of consumers. But to be a successful video streaming site, the content needs to go wherever the visitors want to take it. Without embeds, Vevo will be criticized for being yet another example of the music industry just not “getting” the Web. A similar stigma was placed on the television industry until Hulu started providing embed code and the option to send its content to Facebook, Delicious, and a variety of other social networks. Vevo must follow suit to be successful.

1. High-quality video Whenever you try to watch music videos on sites other than MTV.com, the video quality is usually poor. But if Vevo offers outstanding video quality, it will certainly make pople notice. If you’re going to a site to watch music videos, wouldn’t you expect them to look good? Yeah, me too.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a site like this. Vevo could still become a great site–but not if it just streams music videos. Here are five features that I’d like to see on Vevo at launch:

4. More content Vevo needs a lot of content to be successful. That’s only possible if Universal Music can join forces with its competition. It might be tough, but considering most of the major TV networks teamed up on Hulu, why can’t the music industry follow suit? In a conference call with the media Thursday, Universal Music CEO Doug Morris said he’s negotiating with other top record labels and is confident they will join. For Vevo’s sake, he better be right.

“The reason is because HP hasn’t moved to keep the Blackbird’s specs up to date. We loved that system then, but we’d definitely think twice before purchasing one now…Until HP updates the Blackbird’s configuration options, we can’t take that system seriously as a high-end gaming PC.”

“That said, we are very passionate about making sure the Blackbird stays on top of the gaming PC heap. We’ll do it methodically, and won’t be forced down the “4 GPUs in a system” path unless we see some constant stability. We have full intentions to continue pushing the technology that we feel is worthy of our systems.”

In our recent review of the Dell XPS 730 H2C high-end gaming PC, we said the following to explain why we didn’t include HP’s competing Blackbird 002 in that review’s performance charts.

As Rahul Sood tells it, it’s not an accident that the Blackbird has not kept up with the latest performance hardware.

(Credit:
CNET)

We can’t say we’ve seen major stability issues with the few quad-GPU PCs we’ve seen, but we do find the idea of dropping $7,000 or more on a desktop just to play Crysis maxed out very narrowly-focused. You can spend half of that to get similar top-end performance on every other PC game out there. That said, there will always be well-heeled shoppers for whom both practicality and frugality are foreign concepts, and neither HP nor Voodoo (which also has no quad-GPU option) can serve them right now.

Even if HP and Voodoo are OK losing the business of a few lottery winners, it bears looking at the hardware that the Blackbird does currently offer. Spec out a Blackbird and an identical Ephex over at Maingear and the Maingear system comes in about $500 less, and with more up-to-date 3D cards and faster CPU overclocking. Perhaps you can let that slide if you find the Blackbird’s imposing chassis worth a premium. You can also look forward to whatever updates HP might have coming down the pike, too. But as Blackbird currently stands, we liked it better when its specifications and price compared more favorably with the rest of the market.

HP’s Blackbird 002 has lagged behind its competition in offering the latest PC hardware.

Rahul, if you’re unfamiliar, is one of the founders of boutique PC maker Voodoo PC, which was acquired a few years back by HP. He still runs Voodoo PC, but he has also lent his company’s expertise to HP’s own product development, and the Blackbird 002 is the first result of that joint effort.

“We acknowledge that we haven’t announced a significant component upgrade in some time, but there is a reason. We take a very rigorous–and yes, sometimes time consuming–approach to Q&A before we announce any upgrades. We feel strongly that this strategy is in the best interests of our customers.”

Two years ago, Computerworld reported that Google was actively testing Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris Unix distribution as a possible adjunct operating system to be used internally with its existing modified Linux distribution. While I’m sure there continues to be active experimentation at Google around OpenSolaris, I suspect any move away from Linux remains highly unlikely, at least in the short term.

CORRECTION at 6:30 a.m. PDT September 2:
This blog inadvertently had linked to old information about Google’s work with OpenSolaris. However, having discovered the mistake, the author realizes how salient the content is to Google’s announcement Monday of its new browser.

Exactly. Google is the performance king, and so it might have been willing to make a bet on OpenSolaris that others (like eBay and Yahoo) also made. Solaris has long been considered the gold standard for performance.

Switching to OpenSolaris would be a natural move for Google, which has a large number of former Sun employees and is striving to push the performance of its data centers, (technology consultant Stephen) Arnold said. But he added that he doubts Google is widely deploying OpenSolaris yet. “Will it quickly replace Linux anytime soon? No,” he said.

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Sources outside Google of said that its servers currently run a stripped-down version of Red Hat Linux that has been modified by the company’s engineers. A Solaris systems administrator who recently interviewed for a job at Google said that he was told by employees there that the search engine vendor plans to create and test its own modified version of OpenSolaris….

This is just one reason I think that Chrome is unlikely to displace
Firefox in Google’s affections, at least anytime soon. OpenSolaris (and Chrome) may have technical superiority to offer them, but they have nothing to offer in terms of market momentum. And Google knows how to read the momentum tea leaves.

According to the 2006 Computerworld article:

In a similar vein, Monday’s news of Google’s creation of a new Web browser–Chrome–may not spell the end of Google’s cozy relationship with the Firefox browser either.

Our chart is necessarily local. We compare the HD channel lineups available near the CNET New York offices from the aforementioned big three, along with cable providers Cablevision (Long Island), Comcast (New Jersey) and Time Warner Cable (Brooklyn and Queens). That leads to some important points.

That’s a lot of caveats, but at the end of the day, we still think it’s valuable to provide a snapshot of the true state of the HD channel-quantity race as it stands today. Expect more updates to the chart as the providers roll out additional channels in the coming months. Thanks to Matthew Panton for heavy lifting on the chart updates.

The key here is our definition of “national and local.” The big three all tout HD channel counts near or above the nice round number of 100 in their advertising campaigns, and by our count of “total channels,” they all come more or less close enough, but we took a closer look at the channels themselves, and broke down national and local channels we consider important. That includes local broadcast channels like PBS (which neither satellite service offers), ABC and Fox, premium movie channels like HBO and Max (formerly Cinemax), and the myriad niche channels from ESPN to Mav TV to Palladia to World Fishing Network. We specifically exclude
Regional Sports Networks, exclusive channels like Voom (which is only available on NY-area provider Cablevision), and duplicate feeds of premium movie channels, such as HBO (east) and HBO (west) carried by DirecTV and Fios.

(Credit:
Verizon)

Feel free to argue with our methods in the comments section below, but the goal is to even the playing field and call the various providers on their inflationary channel accounting. It’s also sadly true that many so-called HD networks don’t actually carry much HD content–but they have the potential to, and will probably carry more actual high-def going forward.

First off, your local cable service will likely have different HD channel lineups–in the case of TWC and Cablevision, you’re likely to have fewer HD channels than we enjoy in the NYC area. Right now CNET just doesn’t have the resources to collate all of the cable services nationwide for comparison in a big chart.

Check out the updated HD programming compared chart.

Second, availability is local-within-local. Just because Fios is available, according to the Web site, in the Manhattan zip code of 10013, doesn’t mean you can actually get it in your building. The build-out and availability of Fios will take years in New York City, as it has in other parts of the country. The same goes for satellite, of course; many buildings don’t allow dishes, for example. Also, perhaps because Fios is available in Queens and Brooklyn more widely, Time Warner Cable offers more HD channels in those boroughs than in Manhattan, so we used the TWC channel count for Brooklyn and Queens, not Manhattan.

Note: CNET is a wholly owned subsidiary of CBS.

What do you think? Do stratospheric HD channel counts matter to you, or are 50-odd HD channels enough? Is your cable provider delivering enough high-def, or are you considering a switch to satellite or Fios TV?