Hasta La Gadget!

The virtual goods economy of massively multiplayer online games may be thriving, but it’s also stimulating an undesirable side-effect: exploitation. A former detainee at a prison in Heilongjiang province, China, has told the Guardian about how he was habitually forced into playing MMOs like World of Warcraft for the collection of loot, which the prison guards would then resell online for as much as ¥6,000 ($924) per day. Such totals would be the product of up to 300 inmates working 12-hour daily shifts, though predictably they saw none of the profits themselves. The unnamed source was at a “re-education through labor” camp where the usual toil would involve actual, rather than virtual, mining. The profitability of the online market has seemingly inspired prison bosses to move with the times, however, with business being so brisk that the computers “were never turned off.” A Chinese government edict from 2009 is supposed to have introduced a requirement that online currencies only be traded by licensed entities, but it’s believed that the practice of using prisoners in this fashion continues unabated.

Chinese prisoners forced to produce virtual gold, real profits for their guards originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 May 2011 05:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Some of the UK’s most remote parts still don’t have access to broadband of any kind, but later this year, they might have the sort that makes us look on in envy. BT and Everything Everywhere are planning to start an LTE trial in Cornwall, England’s most southerly county, which will last from the 1st of September through to the end of December. Connection speeds could scale as high as 40Mbps, though the typical rate is expected to be closer to 10Mbps. Volunteers are now being sought to participate in the trial, though they have to reside (or be willing to move, we presume) in the pretty tiny 4G coverage area near Newquay. BT and T-MOrange have been allowed a temporary slice of 800MHz spectrum to do their experimenting in, which will likely be up for grabs in the LTE spectrum auction that’s set for next year. First we take Newquay, then we take the world.

Continue reading BT and Everything Everywhere will start LTE trial in rural UK this September

BT and Everything Everywhere will start LTE trial in rural UK this September originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 May 2011 03:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep, your email inbox steadily increases in size as bosses, co-workers, friends and spammers hit you up with every query and joke imaginable. More »

Protecting intellectual property sounds like such a noble cause that you’d have to be a anarchistic free-market extremist to be against the idea, right? Actually, we don’t think Google CEO Eric Schmidt is particularly extreme in any definable way, yet this past week he spoke with gusto, railing against the proposed Protect IP Act, which was designed to “prevent online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property.” If passed into law, it would give the government the right to shut down any “Internet site dedicated to infringing activities” — “infringing activities” largely being of the sort that allows dude A to download copyrighted item B from dude C when it’s unclear whether dude C has legal rights to be distributing B in the first place.

So, you know, it’s targeting the Pirate Bay and its ilk, giving government officials greater power to sweep in and snag the domains of such sites. Schmidt calls this approach a set of “arbitrarily simple solutions to complex problems” that “sets a very bad precedent.” The precedent? That it’s okay for democratic governments to go and kill any site they don’t like, something Schmidt says would only encourage restrictive policies in countries like China. While we don’t think China really needs any sort of encouragement at all to keep on building up its Great Firewall, we tend to agree that this is a much more complicated problem than the Act makes it out to be. That said, one must admit that Schmidt’s opinions are necessarily somewhat swayed by the knowledge that any such law would also have a negative impact on the business of search engines in general.

But of course no such volley of words could go unanswered from the two shining knights of copyright protection, the MPAA and RIAA, which mounted up their corporate blogs, rode down from twin castles full of lawyers, and collectively told Schmidt he’s full of it. The MPAA spun Schmidt’s comments into some sort of act of civil disobedience, saying that “Google seems to think it’s above America’s laws.” Meanwhile, the RIAA called the statement “a confusing step backwards by one of the most influential internet companies.” Obviously it’s only going to get nastier from here, so buckle your seatbelts, place your bets, and hang on to your BitTorrent clients.

The Protect IP Act: Google’s Eric Schmidt squares off against RIAA and MPAA originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 May 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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U, S, A! We’re number nine! Wait, nine? At least according to a recent broadband survey by the FCC, yes. The good ol’ US of A ranked ninth (out of the 29 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in fixed broadband penetration on a per capita basis, and 12th in terms of pure percentage — behind the UK, South Korea, Iceland, the Netherlands, and plenty of others. Though, granted, these nations lack the sprawling amber waves of grain that America must traverse with cables. The US also trailed in wireless broadband adoption, ranking ninth yet again, behind the likes of Ireland, Australia and Sweden. Worse still, even those with broadband reported slower connections than folks in other countries. Olympia, Washington had the highest average download speeds of any US city with 21Mbps (New York and Seattle tied for second with 11.7Mbps), but was easily topped by Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul (35.8Mbps). Well, at least we beat Slovenia… if only just barely.

US lags in broadband adoption and download speeds, still has the best rappers originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 May 2011 18:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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