Editorials

On the 19th of January Samsung announced that they had begun mass production of their 4GB HBM 2.0 3D memory. This announcement was the starting gun for the next big GPU race. As we know both AMD and NVIDIA are racing to get viable products to the market in time for Oculus and HTC to launch their consumer version VR headsets. Up until now we have really only seen the developers’ kits and while these have been impressive they are not what most are hoping for in the final product.

The world of copyright and patents is one of ignorance, greed and just plain stupidity. This is, sadly, on just about all sides of the game. From the people complaining all the way to the judges asked to decide these cases. We have already talked (at length) about the fantasy math the copyright holders use in determining damage and the massive impacts on privacy that they want to further their causes, but now we area in a situation where they have “won” something that no one every should have even considered.

In the war against (yes against) encryption there are many things to hide behind. One of the most frequently used is that criminals will use it to mask their dastardly deeds. The term criminal is, of course interchangeable with just about any other popular bad guy; pedophile, drug dealer, terrorist…. You know the list. Anytime there is even a hint that one of these media boogeymen used some sort of encryption, we hear that law enforcement and the government need to be able to break encryption.

The “adult toy” has been around for a very, very long time. They have examples of them going back to the Egyptians and earlier. For thousands of years they were pretty much the same with a few add-ons to make them a little more fun. All of that changed in the 20th century when electronics got smaller along with motors and other items. In the 21st century the addition of small personal area networks and the connected device brought a whole new game to this multi-million dollar industry.