News

About a week ago we first learned of a Russian company called Pirate Pay. This little startup that had its beginning as a traffic routing system for ISPs had come up with a very interesting way to protect movies from being downloaded by BitTorrent users. They would literally attack the torrent swarms with poisoned clients and generate what amounts to a DDoS (Distributed Denial or Service). At the time we discussed the implications of this type of protection as well as the legality of it.

ACTA is in the news again today as we hear from more than a few people on the implications of the treaty and what consequences it might have. Interestingly it looks like ACTA was originally designed to handle the large scale manufacture and distribution of counterfeit physical products (for prescription drugs actually). Some have suggested that the import of items (like the fake Gucci and Fendi bags you can find for sale on some street corners…) has a drastic impact on the sales and profit of those companies. This is the same logic that is put forward for the theft of virtual property like IP, music, and videos.

At CES this year we saw a few very interesting gadgets. One of them was a computer on a USB stick that went by the name of Cotton Candy. We saw them not only during Show Stoppers but also a later at Last Gadget Standing. This small device featured a dual core 1.2 GHz ARM CPU, 1GB of RAM, Wireless connectivity and more. The only problem is… you cannot get them yet.

Two more pieces of the puzzle are falling into place with the move away from silicon in microprocessors. Silicon has been the mainstay for creating processors for… well for a very long time. However, it has its limitations as the need to make the transistors smaller continues to increase. Even if you are not a believer in More’s Law you still cannot get around the fact that processors (GPU CPU and “other”) are all growing more complex. This means that the number of components continues to grow and we are faced with a couple of choices; either die in the vacuum of space or… no wait that is someone else. The choices are actually very clear; make the processor dies larger and larger or shrink the manufacturing process.