New Universal Blu-rays come with iPhone interactivity

Excluding the recent Netflix PS3 disc, BD-Live has been a bust. Still, we give the movie studios credit for not completely abandoning the technology yet, and according to a recent Video Business story, Universal will feature iPhone interactivity on many several releases, "including Bruno, Public Enemies, 9, and Inglourious Basterds".

While it's easy to write it off as a gimmick, the iPhone functionality (called "Pocket Blu") is aimed at overcoming one of the biggest hurdles to interactive content, which is the painful process of entering text using a standard Blu-ray remote. While iPhone functionality won't solve that problem for Blu-ray owners that don't own iPhones, it's probably the easiest workaround at this stage (we would have loved if Blu-ray players included a remote with a built-in keyboard, similar to Vizio's bluetooth remote).
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Up to 1 million Xbox Live players banned due to piracy

It's oh-so enticing: You find a copy of a brand new game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on a pirate site and the temptation to download it is too strong.

Well, that temptation may have cost up to 1 million users of Microsoft's Xbox Live the ability to use that service. According to a report in InformationWeek, Microsoft has banned as many as a million players from Xbox Live for altering their consoles in order to play pirated versions of games.

This week, Activision's new Call of Duty was released, and InformationWeek speculated that because pirated versions of the game appeared on various sharing sites in advance of the release, the game's developer may have exhorted Microsoft to enact the bans.
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Grass-covered mouse

Japanese artist Hanaoka likes to cover objects in grass. Cars, business card holders, cufflinks, ashtrays, compact mirrors... you name it. He even blankets computer peripherals with the stuff.

To wit: The grass mouse pictured at right. Pair it with this grass cell phone and start the hose (or maybe that's not such a good idea).

Thanks to my ever-helpful co-worker/translator Takayuki Sakurai, I'm able to glean that Hanaoka has, in the past, made his verdant mouse available for purchase,
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Google Chrome to hit Macs in December

Google plans to release a Mac beta of Chrome in early December, judging by some chatter on a mailing list for the browser.

Chrome 4.0 is available today as a beta version for Windows, but on Linux and Mac OS X there is only a rougher developer-preview version. The standout feature of the new version is customization through extensions, a technology that long has been a core asset of another open-source browser, Firefox.
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Porsche illuminates with premium flashlight

Flashlights are becoming more and more sophisticated, as well as rather expensive. Case in point: The upcoming mPower Emergency Illuminator, which made its press debut this week at an event in New York. Designed by the Porsche Design Studio to be "a stylish product with emergency utility, it will cost somewhere between US$250 and US$300 when it comes out in March of 2010.

Aside from the fetching design, the mPower Emergency Illuminator boasts some innovative battery technology. One battery "tube" stores two CR123 batteries, while the other has what's called an OnCommand Reserve Battery that the company says has a minimum 20-year shelf life and will deliver "power on command when and where you need it."
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