Alex Reid

“Student warning!” Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales tweeted on Monday. “Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!”

The bad law is the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act and the backlash officially starts tomorrow. See here for more info.

Wikipedia’s decision to participate with a 24-hour blackout was a decision of the Wikipedia community, and intends to bring the lobby message to the masses.

News crowd sourcing site Reddit said they’ll go offline for 12 hours in protest, displaying a “simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit.”  Even Mozilla is planning to participate in the protest, replacing the content on its various sites with anti-SOPA messages.

Some called for Facebook and Google to join the blackout, saying their participation alone would kill the bill. Google has been a vocal opponent of SOPA/PIPA since the beginning. Google won’t blackout, but they will provide a link to some anti-SOPA information on its homepage.

Here’s the list of companies and organizations backing the bill.

Car accidents are a leading cause of death, especially for younger people.

In 2005, the UN said that the number of road traffic deaths and injuries would exceed the damage wrought by HIV by the year 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicted that that road traffic injuries will rise to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030.

Most of all, it’s human error that often causes accidents.

Nevada became the first jurisdiction in the world to allow autonomus vehicles on public roads last month. For the past few years, DARPA has been driving (no pun intended) towards driverless vehicles (think robot soldiers), and Google was behind the lobbying so that they could test their driverless project, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Sebastian Thrun on Google’s driverless car (Youtube).

Google wouldn’t say why they choose Nevada, and while it could be that the Google founders like Burning Man, the state is known for its testing grounds – nuclear weapons and rocket cars.

Google has ben testing a fleet of seven vehicles, consisting of six Toyota Prii and an Audi TT. Their software drives the vehicles at the speed limit it has stored on its maps and maintains its distance from other vehicles using its system of sensors. The system provides an override that allows a human driver to take control of the car by stepping on the brake or turning the wheel, similar to cruise control systems already in cars. (source)

Most auto technology already uses sensors and cameras, but most of the advances available have simply been corrective or assisting technologies like the “Lane Keep Assist” ability of the 2010 Toyota Prius that uses a camera to detect lane markers and automatically steers the car toward the center of the lane.

Google says they’re just playing around with the idea, and no matter the commercial value of such an idea, the social benefits alone in preventing car accidents, by drunk or other human error, is an idea beyond worth merit.  I see this as a positive alternative for drunk drivers, but chauffeurs might be out of work soon.

Safety is the sell here, and it may still be simply an assisting program, but even with the risk of computer error, I see huge potential for this to revolutionise the auto market and save lives.

Somehow I suspect the built in GPS sytem will be Google Earth.

Over 1,100 American cities applied for the Google Fiber project which promises to provide an ultra-fast fiber optics network which is expected to be 100 times faster than conventional broadband.

Today, Google announced that Kansas had won the opportunity based on positive community and government relations. Google plans to offer service to between 50,000 and 500,000 people, and says they expect the network to be up and running by early 2012, ready to ” develop the gigabit applications of the future.”

You may remember it was nearly five years ago that Google setup its home town with free wifi, so these are still baby steps for Google to become the next big ISP.

Intel released their second-generation Intel Core processor recently, showing off some new toys at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, and Hollywood is very excited about it.

For one, the chips offer improved efficiency, reduced power consumption and enhanced graphics handling; specifically, the chips are promised to deliver better video streaming (1080 p HD) and other data-rich content like video games.

But there’s something else that isn’t getting much press; anti-piracy technology embedded in the chip. Perhaps a first, Intel has created a chip that not only handles processing tasks, but recognizes intellectual property.

Intel calls it “an extra layer of content protection” or HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection). Intel has been over the top in explaining that this is not DRM (Digital Rights Management) undoubtedly because that term has snowballed so much criticism against it that Steve Jobs denounced it in a public letter four years ago.

The technology known as Intel Insider does one thing and one thing only. It protects movies delivered from service providers that are specifically using Intel Insider to protect their content. It has to be enabled on the service provider side. Consumers with Intel Insider enabled PCs will have access to content in higher resolution (1080P) and potentially earlier release.

Intel Insider in no way affects any other new or existing media. It does not matter if you buy from iTunes, use home movies, or buy from a CD store, rip from vinyl, or from an 8-track, or bit-torrent. Intel Insider will not touch it.

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The only people that will be negatively affected are those who wish to pirate content from services that support Intel Insider.

Intel’s supporters and collaborators on this technology include film companies such as Warner Brothers, Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox.

The International Telecommunications Union reports that there are 4.6 billion cellphone subscribers world-wide, a trend that outpaces Internet connectivity rates.

It should be noted that “subscribers” shouldn’t equate to “people” as some individuals have multiple phones. For example, both Israel and Italy have 1.3 cellphones per person. It was nearly a decade ago when Motorola found in a study that one in ten subscribers had a second cellphone for engaging in “extramarital affairs or clandestine business dealings”.

It is the developing countries that are seeing more cellphone usage because of its price thanks to steady competition (far better than Canada); the study says 57% of people in those countries are using cellphones.