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iPhone App Store Flirts With an NES Emulator, Briefly

Posted by Jared Newman on December 22, 2009 at 5:15 pm

For a brief period last night, iPhone owners without jailbroken phones had access to a fully-functional Nintendo emulator. I’m kicking myself for not spotting 9 to 5 Mac’s story sooner, but it looks like the app got pulled very shortly, maybe a couple hours, after the news broke.

The app was called Nescaline, and its creator is Jonathan Zdziarski, who wrote iPhone Forensics. The $7 app included several homebrew games, but also allowed users to download more games by pointing the app to the URLs of ROM files. On his Web site, Zdziarski says an Apple rep told him the app was removed because it was an emulator. “Ironically, Apple currently has several emulators in the AppStore, so I am going with the belief that someone (likely Nintendo) probably pressured them about this particular application,” he wrote.

He’s right about the App Store having other emulators, but it’s more complicated than that. Currently, it’s possible to purchase C64, which lets you play classic Commodore 64 games, but it only found permanent footing on the iPhone after some drama involving the app’s BASIC interpreter and the ability to hack into it. More importantly, C64 maker Manomio has the rights to the games it sells. Nescaline, by contrast, opened the door to illegal game downloads.

It’s certainly possible that Apple’s trying to avoid legal hot water — Nokia attracted some unwanted attention by advertising that capability on the N900 — but I also think Apple is inclined to reject NES emulators in order to protect the App Store’s business model. When you have games that can make $1 million per month, why give people a bountiful source of free, classic games?

Given that Apple and Nintendo are now competing, I think an official NES iPhone app is unlikely. As for why Nescaline was approved in the first place, I’m thinking it was a simple blunder. I doubt Zdziarski was the first developer to submit a Nintendo emulator.

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comScore: Blizzard a Boon to Online Shopping

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 22, 2009 at 2:16 pm

Research firm comScore said Tuesday that the blizzard that socked the Northeastern United States with one to three feet of snow did not prevent holiday shoppers from going about their business: they just did it online instead. Retailers pulled in some $767 million in sales on December 19 and 20, up 13 percent from last year.

The full week also proved to be profitable: a one week sales record was set with shoppers spending some $6.8 billion online, up six percent from a year ago. Good news for retailers, some of which expressed concern that the timing of the snowstorm could have put a serious damper on what is traditionally the biggest shopping weekend before Christmas.

“Consumers have clearly continued to spend online later into the season this year,” comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said. “Retailers have been very aggressive with late season promotions while informing consumers that they could still get their purchases shipped in time for Christmas, and these tactics seem to be paying off.”

What also could be helping is anecdotal evidence that retailers are not panicking like they did last year, cutting prices early which in turn cuts into profits. I’ve heard quite a few shoppers complain that the deals “just aren’t as good as last year.” Well, this year retailers have gotten a lot smarter in managing inventories, thus meaning less overstock to get rid of at the end of the season.

So here’s a question for our Northeast US readers. Did you stay in and shop online?

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Microsoft Loses Word Court Case

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 22, 2009 at 11:06 am

Microsoft has lost the court case brought by a small Canadian software company over the custom XML feature in Word, and must remove it from Word by January 11th. According to Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet, Microsoft’s got a strategy for removing the offending functionality from Word 2007 via a patch. I wonder how many companies depend on Word’s custom XML–and how they’ll feel about it disappearing?

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Obama Taps Former Bush Adviser to Fill Cybersecurity Post

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 22, 2009 at 10:30 am

The White House said Tuesday that it had appointed former Bush cybersecurity adviser Howard Schmidt as Obama’s new Chief of Cybersecurity. Schmidt would serve on the National Security staff, and would work closely with the President’s economic advisers to ensure efforts do not hinder economic progress.

“Howard is one of the world’s leading authorities on computer security, with some 40 years of experience in government, business and law enforcement,” Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Assistant to the President John Brennan said.

Obama is acting on a promise made in May when he announced the creation of the post. The Adminstration sees cybersecurity as vital to national security, and it makes sense: increasingly the country’s enemies are turning to digital means to launch their attacks.

The recent example of Iraqi insurgents hacking into our Predator drones is certainly a good example of why we need to get more serious with the threats we face in cyberspace.

With the appointment, the White House is also making an effort to get the citizenry to become proactive in keeping themselves secure. A few boilerplate suggestions have been posted to the White House blog.

“Cybersecurity matters to all of us – and it’s our shared responsibility to mitigate the threats in this space,” spokesperson Macon Phillips wrote.

Schmidt’s appointment is also seen as a compromise between factions who have debated the course the Administration should take. Some are worried that extra regulation could harm innovation, while others are looking for swift action to prevent future attacks.

Putting someone in with business and government experience makes sense. Schmidt had served in executive positions involving security at both eBay and Microsoft prior to his involvement with the Bush Administration. Thus, he will have experience with both sides of the argument and may be able to bring everyone together easier than a political hack or some business leader with no government experience could.

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China Requiring Websites to Register or Face Blocking

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 22, 2009 at 8:33 am

New regulations handed down by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology over the weekend seem to suggest China may be creating a “whitelist” of approved websites. The Ministry said it is now requiring all websites to register, or face possible blocking by the authorities.

China’s latest censorship move seems born out of an effort to limit pornography, however critics seem to see porn being used as an excuse for broader net controls. Whether or not this extends to websites based outside of the country is unclear, although Chinese media is reporting that it will. If it goes through, the strategy would be a complete reversal of the way Chinese Internet regulators were previously doing business.

Under the previous system, websites were blocked on a case by case basis as soon as the Ministry learned about them. Here, everybody seems blacklisted first — and have to prove their non-subversiveness before being allowed into the walled garden that is the Chinese Internet.

The idea may be dead in the water: China could hurt itself economically as those who use the Internet to trade goods may find themselves unable to do business if the foreign site does not register. Additionally, the country does have a fairly long record of coming up with half-baked censorship schemes that are either not enforced or reversed after international outcry. A whitelist is certainly something that would cause the latter, I’d venture to guess.

China also last week limited .cn registrations to business users, Time reported last Friday. As far as I know, it would be the only TLD where private citizens are prohibited from purchasing domains. I wonder if ICANN would have something to say about that.

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Facebook Trojan Brazen but Benign

Posted by David Worthington on December 21, 2009 at 9:01 pm

This past weekend, a trojan mimicked Facebook’s native functionality and sent notifications on the user’s behalf. While Facebook says that the application was harmless, its ability to break through a boundary of trust on the platform alarmed me.

Continue Reading →

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The End of Music Games As We Know It?

Posted by Jared Newman on December 21, 2009 at 6:50 pm

Reuters dipped into the well of knowledge that is Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter and came up with a conclusion: Music games, such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero, aren’t the cash cows they used to be.

Pachter says that music games, which earned $1.4 billion last year, will only earn half that amount in 2009. And that’s not for lack of trying, as this year saw the release of Beatles: Rock Band, Lego Rock Band, Guitar Hero 5, DJ Hero, Band Hero, Rock Band Unplugged, Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits, Guitar Hero: Metallica and finally Guitar Hero: Van Halen, which comes out tomorrow.

But it’s important to note that Pachter’s not predicting the demise of music games. He’s merely saying that the boom is over, a bust is happening, and music games are coming back down from super stardom. His theory is that music game makers gave players too much in each release, so they don’t have to keep buying. I also like a theory posed in October by two marketing researchers from Northeastern University: There are just too many darned music games, and game makers didn’t realize they were riding a bubble.

It’s mildly amusing to me that marketing gurus and analysts are sticking with that conclusion now. Take a look at some reader comments at various gaming Web sites when Activision announced three “Hero” games at once and five different companies announced Lego Rock Band. The backlash was obvious, and that was in the spring, before the industry realized a recession was really happening.

Enthusiast gamers aren’t always great bellwethers — these are the folks who turn their noses up at the Wii — but I’m glad they were right this time. It’s insulting to see publishers churn out handfuls of music games in a single year, expecting players to lap them up. Maybe next year we’ll get a chance to forget the overplayed music genre, so we can some day remember how good it sounded the first time.

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Gizmodo’s Nationwide 3G Tests

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 21, 2009 at 5:39 pm

What’s this about bloggers sitting around in pajamas regurgitating the work of real journalists? Gizmodo undertook an uncommonly ambitious project to test 3G wireless speeds in twelve U.S. cities, from New York City to Maui. The results? In a nutshell, AT&T was fastest overall, competing fiercely with Verizon Wireless for download dominance, and sweeping Giz’s upload tests. (The results are worth comparing with PC World’s somewhat similar tests from last Spring; PCW used different methodology in a different set of cities, so it’s no shocker that its conclusions weren’t identical.)

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