Looseleaf

U of Toronto CSC300 Blog by g2ynkym

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Yay and Nay of Web Payment Standardization

With HTML5 and the boom of web apps, there are increasing chances for us to using payment through these online applications. How to technically achieve transaction online differs from platform to platform today. The greatest challenge in handling online transaction would be security since payment information including credit card numbers is a very sensitive and personal. There are quite few services that will do the handling for you such as Paypal, Google Checkout or Amazon Payments, but there is no unified way for both developers or customers to handle web payments.

The new Firefox OS comes with an attempted solution by Mozilla. This Javascript API navigator.mozPay() will be aiming to standardize the way online payments are handled in various online apps and websites. One notable (upcoming) feature of mozPay is that they intend to not restrict the payment option to just bank transfers and credit cards. In the final product, supposedly the user will be able to choose any option they like.

The security would always be an issue for online payments. No security is perfect; even the copy-prevention security for Blu-ray players is predicted to be cracked in 10 or more years. The security needs to keep evolving in order to escape the crackers. For the online payment system, one of the risk for unifying the interface is that if the security is broken, every users may get into trouble. Right now, even if one payment method may have been compromised and were able to be “injected” unintended purchases, other methods most likely will stay secure. If the online payment is standardized to mozPay, such buffer will not exist.

However, standardizing payment method will also be convenient for every users, because each user do not have to register with many different services in order to make payments in different websites. The different options a web services may have for payment will not be the factor to encourage or discourage users anymore. This would lessen the barrier between startup and shareholders since making many different payment options available will increase maintenance cost for the service providers. Not having to enter and store your credit card numbers in many different locations on the web will also be a good consequence of standardizing payment methods.

I am overall for standardizing online payment options because while I would trust some services to hold my credit card information, there are also some services that I don't but I still want to make purchases from. If the unified method is secure enough that we can trust it, it should be a benefit for both the customers and sellers. Of course, a question will arise for who will be responsible if any leak or hack happens – I have a feeling there is going to be a statement in the terms of service once it is released that Mozilla would not be held responsible, unless the credit card information is stored in association with some user account in cloud or somewhere on their server. Hopefully if the credit card information is only stored locally analogous to browser cookies, it will also be encrypted and not easily visible.

Sources:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mozilla-Wants-to-Standardize-and-Fix-Web-Payments-Starting-with-navigator-mozPay-343075.shtml https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/introducing-navigator-mozpay-for-web-payments/ http://sixrevisions.com/tools/online-payment-systems/

[ynkym-blog]

A Super Computer Learning To Become A Doctor

Who would you think of when you hear of the name “Watson?”

The famous fictional character, apprentice of Sherlock Holmes, created by Doyle?

Or John Watson, a behavioral psychologist known for the Little Albert experiment?

Or Thoman J. Watson, the first president of IBM?

Or ... the super computer developed by IBM named after him?

Watson, the super computer, was a project to challenge human quiz champion in the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Where the amount of miscellaneous knowledge are put into test along with the wits to understand and interpret the question being asked. For a computer to tackle the problem given in Jeopardy, it would have to parse the question, determine what to look for, choose keywords to look up, search through its knowledge-base, filter for relevant information and statistically choose the answer. In 2011, Watson competed against the human champions Jennings and Rutter and won the match.

Now, Watson is studying medicines and is getting ready for the on-site training. After the accomplishment, IBM is looking forward to applying Watson's ability to answer questions to medical field. Currently Watson is able to diagnose a patient 90% of the time, and will suggest few few treatment plans with how much confidence he has in it. In addition, Watson is able to adjust the plan as new information about the patient are provided. The accuracy is still not too good for Watson to function as a solo doctor, but his advice most likely will be a good help a human doctor can consider.

The medical advising by Watson is going to be provided through cloud. This means Watson is able to provide the service to any place that have internet access. Rather than trying to replace doctors in advanced countries like U.S., I think Watson's medical advising service may be a great step forward toward solving doctor shortage in places like third world countries. As long as there are equipments to measure various data of the patient and possibly a nurse to interview about the symptom, the patient is able to access diagnostics that models decision of a good doctor with 90% accuracy. The equipment availability, internet environment, and nurse shortage will still be a problem, but the implication of an advisor available to anyone, anywhere, anytime is huge. If Watson's Q&A system gets generalized to other fields, someday a company might ask a computer to make business decision, a police to ask for the best patrolling route, or a mother might ask what to cook for the dinner tonight. Is the computer's answer really going to be the best answer? Since its knowledge-base will come from records of decisions made by humans, for systems like Watson who bases its answer on statistics, we need to keep making our decisions as well to give feedback to the computer.

More about Watson: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/

[ynkym-blog]

Privacy of Biometric Security

Identification by biometrics is not really new. In 1800s, humans already had known that fingerprints are most likely unique between individuals and therefore can be used to identify criminals. After development of DNA analysis technology, criminal investigation then used not only fingerprints but hair and other traces that could tell its origin. However, it may be relatively new that these biometric technologies came to be applied as identification technique for non-criminals as well.

Biometrics, if they work correctly, will provide better security than text-based passwords. Simply the difficulty in generating a “guessed” data to enter means a lot in security since we don't need anymore to specify to the user that the password must be more than 8 characters long and include a number and an uppercase letter. There is also no worry in forgetting your password, because your physical body instead of something you might forget will be representing you. It seems like biometric security provides less hassle and trouble for the honest users and more for cheaters, which sounds ideal.

However, biometrics, too, have hurdles to overcome. The reason biometric data is able to identify you is because your DNA is different from others. The DNA sequence generates unique pattern of i.e. fingerprints, iris patterns, voice patterns, blood vein patterns, etc, which the digital devices will be able to read and compare with expected pattern. Well, are there really no other people who have same DNA pattern as you do? If you have an identical twin, yes. Although identical twins will not have exactly same biometric pattern, since the underlying DNA is same, distinguishing between identical twins continue to be one of most difficult task to achieve in biometric security. There is also problem with aging; your DNA information could deteriorate as result of aging, exposure to radiation and other causes. Intuitively, there is no way that identifying a young man and an old man as same individual across 20 years of age will be easy. Therefore your biometric information will need to be updated periodically to make sure that you will be correctly recognized by the security system.

Now, biometric information will be way more sensitive than passwords to protect because you cannot change it easily even if it has been (somehow) compromised. After all, it is scanned or analyzed data that is being compared, so it's like an extremely long, complex and random password. The weakness does not change that if the data stored in the system is stolen, anyone will be able to disguise as you. It even seems like a greater disaster than text password that you are not able to change the biometrics very easily. Therefore it is natural for you to store your biometric “password” in as few places as possible. Considering also the amount of space that will be required for storing individual passwords, I think biometrics will most likely not completely replace text passwords and be in use everywhere. Casual web services like twitter do not need such edged security, in the first place. Usage in banking and airport security, as starting to be seen in countries like Japan, probably is an appropriate use of biometric security as it is. In these places, text-based passwords were not used (even banks only had 4-digit pin traditionally), therefore biometrics will definitely be an addition to the security. As long as scanners are not too slow, the verification should not slow down the process too much since there is no need for time to try to remember your password. Since your passports are renewed every few years, aging also will not be a big issue.

I think it will be cool if someday computers are able to read our minds to identify individuals. Physically, there are already sensors and devices that could detect what brain signals are fired in our brains. If we figured relationship between our minds and firing of neurons, someday we might be answering an open-ended question like “What were you thinking the last time you called your parents?” in order to identify ourselves.

References: http://www.biometric-news.com/intel-to-replace-passwords-with-biometrics/ http://www.biometric-news.com/can-some-biometrics-stand-the-test-of-time/ http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/2508129/security_challenges_for_wearable_computing.pdf http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/identical-twins-ultimate-test-biometrics

[ynkym-blog]

Even More To Come In Search Engines

The amount of digital data available to us is increasing rapidly. Cheap storage space, increasing internet speed and distributed computing has enabled everything to be done and hosted online in cloud. We are in the age of Big Data, where almost anything – information from every sensors, every entries of every weblogs and tweets, every search queries typed in – could be stored easily. To navigate through as much as petabytes or even exabytes of data, we rely heavily on search engines. As the digital data keep growing, more improvements are made to the search engines as well, but speed is not the only change we will see. Recent updates to technologies surrounding searching information seem to hint that we are going toward different types of searches.

Facebook Graph Search In January, Facebook started beta testing the new search in its social networking service. Graph Search tries to optimize the results to best reflect the likings of you and your close friends. The search is based on information of who are friends, who liked what, and all other personal preferences and interests users have disclosed on the facebook. Using these information, it attempts to personalize your search results – so when you search for restaurants, ideally it will recommend a restaurant your friends liked so you have something to talk with your friends. In a sense, it has characteristic of recommendation an e-commerce website gives you. Graph Search will not function well as a regular search engine to look for information, but it will be a powerful tool to help you socialize.

Hashtags When we search by tags, it does not make much difference user-experience-wise as searching by keywords like in regular searches. We just type into the search box what we are interested in, and the results return relevant media that includes the words we have typed in. The advantage of hashtags lie in bringing together unorganized contents and creating connection in between. When you use hashtags, you know how to join conversation and share your opinion about the particular topic you are tagging. If anyone gets interested, they could immediately click the tag to see what other people are saying. No matter how diverse the actual opinions might be, you can “connect” with others in not just pre-defined but any random topic you choose. Just like graph search, hashtag helps you explore your interests and possibly connect with other people. It lets you create your own list of tags you can casually click on to search and form loose communities around particular topic.

Neural Networks On March 12, Google bought up a startup company started by Professor Geoffrey Hinton at University of Toronto and two of his students. This company, DNNresearch, centered on research of neural networking, which might bring new powers to search engines. Neural networks is a mathematical model that tries to simulate human brain mechanism, which in physical sense is interaction of neurons turning on and off. Professor Hinton's research already has implications in areas such as speech recognition and computer vision. Search engines have traditionally focused on searching texts but not images or audios because images and audios cannot be compared easily. Human brains could look at objects from different angles and recognize them as same object, or listen to speeches in different accents and still understand they are same language, but these tasks have been very difficult for computers to achieve. Neural networks models human brain and essentially will try to simulate human brain in a computer. The advance in this research could possibly mean a future where we could search for songs by melody, look up movies using screenshot, or search and jump to particular topic in a long lecture recording.

additional resources:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/14/hashtags-on-facebook-would-open-up-exploration-and-discovery-way-more-than-graph-search/

[ynkym-blog]

Upcoming Next: Wearable Digital Devices

The first computer in the world was about the size of a room. Then desktop computers became available for not just businesses but also for families. Few decades ago, laptops were produced, and today many people own their own laptops instead of sharing one in their whole family. Mobile phones started large as well, but as time passed, it became both smaller and packed with features. With tablets and smartphones, we are almost at the stage to assume personal use and total ownership by single person for digital devices. These mobile devices are not designed to be shared by many users, and will specialize to the needs of the owner to assist our lives.

The digital mobile devices has become a very intimate personal tool in our lives. The next stage is approaching – wearable mobile devices. Many of you have probably heard of Google Glass project, which attempts to augment the reality with digital information by displaying it on the lens of glasses. Its mail control, according to the official website, is by voice. You would be able to take picture, record video, send message, and google by saying commands out loud to the glass – you will be hands-free all the time. Right now, everything in digital world has to be observed through a screen or display. However close a portable digital device becomes to us, we have to intentionally look into the display to see what is going on in the digital side of the world. It is a strange reality because our lives today cannot be separated between digital and analogue. Google Glass tries to blur the boundary that existed between us and digital world by basically merging the digital display with our eyesights. Digital is not virtual, it's already part of our real lives.

Another digital device that we might want to look forward to is iWatch from Apple. The display boundary will continue to exist between the digital world and us, but the interface will be more intuitive in the sense we are used to touch panels with smartphones and tablets. With “smartwatch,“ we will be able to check back not just to time but also to various information with a glance (and perhaps few touches) to our wrist. This will help reducing our daily effort to frequently take out a phone, swipe to unlock, tap few times, and put it back again in our pocket. There is no reason to not have audio control in iWatch, so perhaps you don't even need to tap to move between screens. By making the watch a digital display, you will be able to freely customize your watch appearance, therefore it may also create a boom of watch fashion similar to smartphone covers.

I would be more interested in trying out Google glass because I am curious how awkwardly or naturally digital components could reside in our eyesight. Using Google glass, I might be able to work more efficiently by typing on a computer with two hands and simultaneously working with google glass using my voice. iWatch is probably not designed to be used side-by-side with a computer, because you would have to look back and forth between the computer screen and the watch all the time. In addition, I face watch on same side as my palm rather than back of my hand, so I would have to turn my wrist every time I want to look at the watch display.

[ynkym-blog]

Computer Graphics Starring in Advertisement

  Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) was a popular actress in Britain probably best known for Roman Holiday (1953). She is one of the few actresses who has received all Academy Award, Tony Award, Emmy Award, Grammy Award. Even after her death she continued to be popular as fashion icon.

In Japan, Mitsui Sumitomo Bank starred Hepburn in Internet Banking service for female by dubbing scenes from her movies with lines related to the service. Well, it would be great to be able to choose any historic stars as campaign icon for your products, isn't it? But re-dubbing films would look like a parody, and since those scenes were filmed originally for a different purpose, it may not have the impact as a real star would have acted.

A UK chocolate company Galaxy made a new commercial going to be first aired in March 3rd , starring Audrey Hepburn (!) in 1-min long advertisement. What's surprising is that this Audrey Hepburn is not just “borrowed” from her past movies – it's computer graphics modeled after her. All other people in the commercial are real actors, but amazingly this CG Audrey Hepburn seem to fit in really well.

If this technology to make computer graphics very close to real human spreads, it may be possible that we will someday see in our daily lives stars from past and present acting together in commercials. At that point, we probably will come across another controversy – How “free” are the CG actors modeled after past actors/actresses for use in advertisement? At current stage, apparently the families and descendants of the actors has the right to say Yay or Nay (This is the case for Audrey Hepburn in Galaxy commercial). How about those actors with no families or descendants alive? These questions are somewhat similar to “how much rights should A.I.s have?” but is rather question about copyright because the stars who the CG actors are modeled after may want to restrict use of them (i.e. from porn movies). As computers are becoming able to simulate reality well, we need to think more about what legal regulations to apply on the digital world.

[ynkym-blog]

“Could Internet be a Quick Way To Earn Money?”

I encountered this question when I had a dinner with another non-CompSci student in U of T. He was ambitious about starting a business as soon as he is ready, and has always been exploring ideas and methods about making money for as long as I've known him. “Even if I had a good idea,” he asked me, “I will need the fund to start the business. Is it possible to quickly earn cash using web?”

My instant answer to him was “It is easy to get started, but it will not be easy to succeed.” The first method to earn money on web that came to my mind is ad hosting like Google AdSense. I've never done ad hosting, but I have my own website where I've done some web scripting as well. It is quite easy to get started with having your own website:

Type up HTML (free tutorials and templates can be found everywhere)

Rent a server (costs $5~/month)

Sign up for a domain name if needed (costs $10~/year)

Upload files to server

Done.

Hosting the ad probably wouldn't be too hard as well; simply register to services like Google AdSense and wire up scripts together (often this is just pasting some source into your page). Although you will need to pass Google's inspection of your website, you can get a chance to earn cash monthly for free. If you would like to have a community in your website, you can get a good forum script off from internet (there are free ones but even shareware are not expensive) instead of having to build everything from scratch.

Many things can be found free on internet (often thanks to open-source nowadays), so indeed, it is very easy to get started with publishing something on web. Or faster yet, some people don't even build a website but gets away with writing interesting articles on blogs. However, this means it is easy not just for you but for anyone to get started. To stand out and drive people's attention, you will need to pay attention to a lot of things. Does your website appear in web searches? Is the website easy to navigate? Is the server speed comfortable? Most importantly, is the content interesting and worth spending time on? It will still resemble a small business where you are trying to sell something in exchange with clicking on the ad. You may also accept donations through PayPal, but again, it's not a free ride although it is relatively easy to set up.

According to a blog article on Earning Money Jobs for All Tips, money earned from Google AdSense varies from $0.01 to $10,000 per day. This wide range I think is characteristic of whole scalability that web platform provides. The easiness of digital data copying enabled only one copy of original content to be disseminated in large scale with little cost. You can start small – that's why you only need little to no initial investments – and expand later as you need. Whether the “expansion” will be called for is totally up to the content you provide and is where competition is fierce. To sum up, it is most likely easy and low-risk to get started with earning money on web, but lot more time (and perhaps money) investment may be needed to achieve good income.

Further Readings: How to Start An Online Business - http://www.pcworld.com/article/153311/startonlinebusiness.html

[ynkym-blog]

Emerging Alternative Business Models for Music and Other Digital Media

During the lecture about intellectual property and copyrights, I was very impressed with example of iTunes business model of providing additional service that makes us want to pay instead of simply downloading pirated mp3s from online. As copy protection seemed like a never-ending cat and mouse game, I feel this is the way of innovation that does good to both consumers and producers.

In my opinion, there are mainly two reasons why anti-piracy or copy protection is difficult. Firstly, the encrypted content must be correctly readable and decrypt-able by authenticated devices, so theoretically there will be no “unbreakable” protection; at the very least, they are breakable by those authenticated devices available in the market. Even the Blu-ray copy protection methods are expected to be broken eventually by its own developers. (Side note: for those who are more interested in argument of pirates only having to “mimic” authenticated devices on theory basis, reading on P=NP problem might interest you.) Secondly, the copy protection often casts some kind of inconvenience for the customers i.e. only one computer can be registered with one license, the content cannot be accessed without internet nor can it be downloaded to local storage, or worse yet, having to enter the activation key every time you launch the software. The cracked copy of these kind of softwares have often removed these constraints, making the pirated copy more convenient and valuable.

I find the iTunes business model example impressive because it deals with the second problem very effectively. Copied downloads cannot surpass the original because the copied content does not have the service (i.e. synced play lists) attached to it. Then the original content will remain valuable as much as its price says.

Of course, this should not be the only and ultimate way to bring freedom, convenience and justice all to digital content industries. In last200, Steve O'Hear lists some music-related services that are selling music in new business models. Subscription model looks somewhat promising considering what other services are provided on subscription plan: TV, some mobile data transfer, internet connection, etc.

According to a paper by Barria et al, the voluntary model (“pay as much as you like” model) is empirically shown to be successful to some degree. However, I doubt that this model will be the majority in future because it will be hard for the management people to predict how much they will sell and distribute resources for future releases. I would suppose management people are more hesitant about freely distributing contents than actual artists because they don't get as much satisfaction from simply lots of people listening for their music. After all, it is their job to collect money for how much the music is (believed to be) worth.

[ynkym-blog]

Manga Scanlation – A Form of Digital Publication (2)

I have described in previous post a similar situation as mp3 downloads and record industry in Japanese manga scanlation and publishers. Just like the record industry, the Japanese and U.S. publishers who has the license to publish the manga is perceiving the scanlations to be a “pirated” product although there has been some work that was put into the piece.

However, whether scanlation is piracy or not is not what I want to discuss here. Rather, I would like to introduce few movements that I think could bring innovation to this manga industry.

Since the scanlation teams had to gather human resources for translating text, cleaning up scans and typesetting etc, ironically they had developed online platform already to publish manga series in multiple languages. One of these platforms is a forum called mangahelpers, and they are still active in providing translations. When publishers declared to take legal actions against scanlations, they stopped hosting actual scanlations and Japanese raws, but instead they consulted the original Japanese publisher about publishing digital versions of manga online in multiple languages and offered to assist running web platforms. After all, the main motivation for these people who worked in scanlation teams was to provide version of their favorite manga series in their language so other people could enjoy. These translators were probably happy to work as official staff, and the publishers should be able to make some revenue through the officially sold digitalized manga since the number of downloads clearly shows there are significant number of people who want these contents. Unfortunately, the Japanese publisher turned down the offer by mangahelpers in 2010 and decided to stick with fighting scanlations off of internet.

However, publishers will not be able to stop the innovation. Mangahelpers is announcing a new platform called Manga Reborn and slowly growing its free and lawful collection of digitalized manga in many languages around the globe.

Another notable movement between 2010 and 2013 was an announcement by Shuho Sato, the manga artist of “Say Hello to Blackjack,” stating that he is allowing anyone to publish any secondary work, whether free or commercial, that are derived from “Say Hello to Blackjack” series. In other words, any novelizing, translating, making into movie, or just publishing fan arts will be totally legal for this series. Shuho Sato feels “the traditional business model to make money using copyright is getting old,” and is hoping to “see how allowing publication of secondary works will help spreading the original work and whether it will benefit the artist or not.”

Quite few other artists interested in digital manga are also cooperative with Manga Reborn, but it may still take time for Shueisha, the publisher of most popular titles like One Piece and Naruto, to get involved in this movement.

I personally am always frustrated for not having any way to buy the Japanese manga magazine while in Toronto, so I am totally for digitalizing manga publications. The way people cooperate in the scanlation community is similar to crowd as well. Personally I don't really see how this will hurt the publishers since the scanlations are downloaded in great number already, and getting payback for even some of these downloads should help the artists. I feel Japanese companies have tendency of innovating only after it's been proven profitable, so I really wish that attempts like Manga Reborn will be successful.

[ynkym-blog]

Manga Scanlation – A Form of Digital Publication (1)

Many of you would probably recognize Japanese manga comic titles like One Piece, Naruto, Death Note, or Detective Conan. Many titles are turned into anime series each year, and is a significant industry in Japan, with about $5.5 billion circulating each year according to Wikipedia.

As far as I know, this industry has similar problems with mp3s and record industry – license holders believe contents on internet is damaging their profit. I will be describing the situation this week, and I also intend to talk about some attempts to solution next week.

When I introduce myself as Japanese, I occasionally hear from people “Hey I am fan of … series.” I recognize (and am proud) how the Japanese manga/anime are also appreciated by people outside of Japan and anime forums are active with discussions about characters and chapters that are released weekly (or monthly for some series).

Once the original Japanese chapters (called raws) are published in Japan, these fans in the anime forum scans, translates, and re-type texts to create so-called scanlations of the chapter in English and many other languages. These scanlations are often uploaded onto web and, as many may know, are often available to read online for free.

The Japanese publishers are not very happy with the free availability of these scanlations on internet because it gives away the plot and the artwork of manga. In my opinion, one of the problems is that scanlators are too quick; scanlations of popular weekly series like One Piece gets uploaded every week on Friday or Saturday, but many don't know that official publish date is following Monday in Japan. So even some people in Japan would turn to these scanlations online to find out what happens next in the story. Publishers believe that this spoiler is decreasing the revenue of manga magazines.

The U.S. publishers who are license holders for the manga title in U.S. also do not like the scanlators; obviously, these scanlations has done all the same work of translation but is providing for free and in convenient digital format. For Japanese publishers, at least the one who is scanning the magazine has bought the magazine, and those who'd rather read chapters in original Japanese would still buy the comic books; however for U.S. publishers, they are publishing on paper few years after scanlators had released digitally, and with price like $9.99 per volume. It almost seems the only element that publishers beat scanlators on is lawfulness.

The more the foreign publishers are hesitant on buying the license to publish “official” English version of the series, the more likely scanlation teams are inclined to provide English scanlations to the fandom, even with tentative translations. The core problem is the unavailability of English chapters (or any other language) which can be purchased easily and (perhaps most importantly) on-time with Japanese original. But scanlations discourage publishers; the industry is caught in a negative spiral.

In 2010, U.S. and Japanese publishers decided to take legal actions to take down websites that host the scanlations. It looks like they, just like record companies, would rather restrict internet rather than using internet to innovate.

[ynkym-blog]

Swears On Twitter and Publicity of Tweets

Are you using twitter? If so, do you follow any celebrities? If so, do you send them any mentions?

Twitter is a social networking tool that can be used for a lot of different things. You can keep a mini blog where each post is 140-characters long tweets, or it could be your newsfeed like RSS if you follow news accounts. It could also be an advertising tool for companies. In any case, twitter is not a very private tool; you can make your tweets private, but they are often meant to be public and broadcasted to wide range of people, especially so for official accounts like @sony, @generalelectric, @BarackObama, @MedvedevRussiaE, and others.

Just like facebook, if your account is public, you can send mentions to these official accounts anytime you like. One thing that is different from facebook on twitter is that your message sent to these official accounts cannot be found by  others unless someone is following both you and the official account, or someone's search hits your tweet. Although tweets are not private, there is no explicit eyes watching what mentions you send to these official accounts; this lack of surveillance seem to make some people send messages which they probably would not in other situations i.e. in person.

For example, I can search “@Pontifex” to see public tweets that mentions Pope Benedict XVI's official account. While many tweets don't have any problems, some of them seem too frank or shameless. I find more shameful mentions in Japanese (probably because they assume whoever is behind Pope's twitter account wouldn't understand them), like “Yo you've got so many followers why not give some to me” and swear words I don't even want to translate.

Perhaps twitter could implement NG words that cannot be tweeted, but that wouldn't stop people from e/s/c/a/p/i/n/g. As much as need for education on media literacy is being called, we probably have to start teaching children moral behaviors over the internet as well; at bottom line, in social networking services there is someone behind every account including official ones who may be reading the messages. Some people seem to be forgetting that what would be a rude behavior on real world is still a rude behavior in the internet. If celebrities get socially punished for tweeting swear words, why not other users?

I am not sure if internet could be kept “moral” at all – after all, we might just have to work with reporting rude accounts as spams. One thing that may help in education is to let people know that whatever you type on internet and SNS is not as private as you'd think – in example of tweets, someone could find it in search. The publicity of our information is what some of us really hate about SNS, but it may also work as discouragement of lawless behavior.

[ynkym-blog]

In-app Purchase in Games

According to Torrentfreak, most pirated video game in 2011 was Crysis 2. Quite few other games have estimated over 1 million (illegal) downloads. It is only natural that people in game industry would try preventing piracy to not let those who actually paid for the game feel cheated. In Japan (my home country), we tend to view second-hand shops also problematic for similar reasons; no matter how many times a particular title is cycled, the game developers gets paid only the first time. No matter how many times a title gets downloaded because it's awesome, if the game developers do not benefit well, they wouldn't be able to keep making games.

There are mainly two approaches to this issue in the game industry. One approach is to try protecting the game so that one cannot actually play the game unless it's legally purchased. But there is always some hacker who breaks the protection. Sony has recently patented a technology to pair the media (DVD or other) with the console. Although it's not yet known whether this technology will be implemented in next generation Playstation, the company will be able to block second-handed games. Personally I am worried that pairing media with single console would cause problems when console needs to be repaired or replaced, or when someone has multiple consoles. Implementing this technology means forbidding lending softwares between your friends as well.  It seems trying to force people to legally purchase softwares this way would also force some inconvenience. On the Christmas last month my family bought a Wii U, but apparently it comes with region code which makes English games bought in Canada unable to be played on the console bought in Japan. I am not convinced why I should not be able to play one game in Japanese and another in English on same console (It does not seem to be the case that every language edition is available in every region).

Another strategy I find in market is the freemium business model, or the in-app/in-game purchases. Making money this way depends less on whether the software is downloaded, purchased on package, second-handed or totally new. Although it may still be possible to cheat, I think it is more reasonable model that fits better in recent society. Those who play more will pay more. Those who just want to try only has to pay little or perhaps play for free.

I think it is hard to make money from games because it's an entertainment; it's not something we must regularly buy in order to live. Still, there are lots of work put into any games out in the market, so I wish the developers would be paid worthy for their product. Rather than fighting piracy head-on by putting more and more work into protection, changing when and what customers can pay seems a better idea.