The King of Pop breaks out the infernal horn in a bid to dissuade pirates.
With the shame of England's performance in the World Cup now but a bitter, faded memory, you may have relegated the musical stylings of the vuvuzela to that same dark period - a droning reminder of a time when Germany apparently kind of technically beat us a bit. Or something.
Not so for games publishers Ubisoft. For their upcoming Nintendo DS title "Michael Jackson - The Experience", Ubi have dug out their own stash of the "instruments" to be used as an anti-piracy strategy. Said strategy being "make the game too annoying to play".
Not only do Ubisoft's anti-piracy methods remove the on-screen prompts on illegally downloaded ROMs of the game (making them completely unplayable) but Michael's performances are drowned out by the all-too-familiar, hornets-in-a-metal-bin siren of vuvuzelas. Well, it's an improvement on the DRM tribulations that have been plaguing the PC gaming world the past few years. Probably.
Check out the video below for a clip of Ubisoft's anti-piracy tactic in action. It's only 12 seconds long, but trust us, that's long enough.
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Google apps of the future to sport voice output as well as input.
Google is taking us another step towards the space-age computing future TV has been promising us for decades, purchasing speech synthesis company Phonetic Arts, a team of UK-based developers whose work it is to make the way computers read text sound... well, less like a computer.
According to the Phonetic Arts website, the company's goal is "deliver technology that generates natural expressive speech, allowing computer games to say any sentence in any type of voice."
The end result of the acquisition will be Google apps that can communicate with users via speech, rather than just via text output. Obvious existing Google candidates for a more human speech upgrade include Google Translate, which currently offers to read out translated words and phrases as Stephen Hawking-esque roboticisms.
Mike Cohen, a Google Manager posting on the Google Blog, said that his team were "excited about the technology, and while we don't have plans to share yet, we're confident that together we'll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future".
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After over a decade of below-board file swapping, LimeWire, the world's biggest peer-to-peer filesharing network, will be closing up for good on New Year's Eve, when it will shut down its legitimate online music store.
According to a spokeswoman for LimeWire, "as a result of our current legal situation, we have no choice but to wind down LimeWire Store operations".
The announcement comes just two months after US courts outlawed LimeWire's peer-to-peer client, the programme that allowed users to upload and download music, films and software illegally and for free, much to the chagrin of the industries.
The legitimate LimeWire store has already blocked would-be users from creating new accounts, although existing users will still be able to log in and purchase music until the end of the year.
LimeWire's popularity with pirates peaked after the demise of Napster, and waned with the advent of BitTorrent, a method of file-sharing which also took a hit recently with the jailing of the founders of The Pirate Bay, the world's largest torrent site.
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