Inspirated

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s bring our hands together for a clamorous round of applause. The greatest browser plugin since the invention of, well… browsers, has been unveiled. Welcome to Quake Live.

An year ago, anyone proposing the idea of running Quake III in a browser would have been sent to the local psych ward. Heck, even a week ago I would’ve been skeptical about practicality of any such development. But sometimes, it just feels wonderful to be proven wrong. This is one of those times and while I shoot railguns aimlessly in the other Firefox tab, I just can’t help staring at the screen in awe. In fact, I can even — for the time being — totally overlook any security concerns related to the plugin. If you own a decent browser, QL’s worth at least a try. I’m not a FPS fan either but this was just too good to be overlooked because of gaming preferences.

After Wii’s launch in UK, even I had started to see it as the potential console leader as it had beaten Xbox 360’s launch sales with a significant margin (105,000 vs. 71,000). Quite surprisingly, Playstation 3 surpassed Wii’s sales with almost twice that margin by selling 165,000 units within the first two days of the console’s release. If that wasn’t enough, from one million machines shipped across Europe, more than half (600,000) have already been sold. The figures have clearly overthrown predictions about Playstation 3’s demise in Europe due to the launch delay.

Things will only get better for the PS3 fans as there will be plenty of GOTY quality games out for them before 2008. Games like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Devil May Cry 4 are sure to satisfy customers about their money’s worth. If you are also into casino games, there are a variety of online slots games that can be played on different websites. The phenomenon of PS3’s success can also be used to explain the apparent win of Blu-ray in high-def format war. According to PC Advisor, Blu-ray discs have not only surpassed the 100,000 milestone in sales, but have also ‘accounted for approximately 70 percent of the high-definition market since the first week in January’.

Microsoft’s monopolizing tactics surely don’t work in all fields of technology.

At last, there’s some good news for PS3 fans like me. A hacker known as muslix64 has uploaded the BackupBluRay program. The software is still in its initial stages but at least things have now moved a step forward. Reportedly, people have been able to bypass AACS and play high definition movies in open source media players. According to muslix64, there are even few people who have burned successfully a Blu-ray HD movie to a HDDVD and vice versa.

This turn of events isn’t much surprising though, as content decryption for HD video was bound to happen sooner or later. Now we have to just wait and see the further counter actions that AACS folks are going to take against customers who demand fair-use. Things will supposedly get difficult for people who want to use the likes of BackupBluRay once the BD+ discs are widely adopted. However, that’s still not likely to dent the enthusiasm of the curious hacker community in any way. To know more about the current situation of HD discs’ copy protection, read this interview of muslix64 on slyck.com.

The whole thing has lifted my hopes once more. I can now look forward to buying pirated Blu-ray discs this summer when I buy a PS3. I have also noticed that the industry’s response to these attacks isn’t as aggressive as it was for CSS decryption, and there can only be two possible reasons for that. Either (more likely) they’re putting their hopes in BD+ and volume unique keys or (less likely) they have now accepted the harsh truth that piracy sells related hardware and most importantly, consoles :P .

Edit: It just came to my knowledge that the first Blu-ray rip has appeared on Bit Torrent network. The tracker is currently an invite-only site though and the movie size is about 22 GB!