MaximumPC 2005 12

You’ve surely read the news stories about color laser printers that secretly encode

each and every print with a hidden serial number, which would allow The Man to

track a print back to its owner. If you wondered exactly what is being encoded, the

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fi nally has an answer, at least for one type of

printer. After examining a mountain of printed documents that contain the virtu-

ally invisible yellow dots, the EFF has concluded that the printers encode the date

and time the print was made, as well as the serial number of the printer. So far, the

EFF has only been able to crack the encoding from Xerox DocuColor printers, but it

believes the codes from other printers reveals similar information.

Check out http://www.eff.org/privacy/printers to see if your color laser printer is a narc!

EFF Decodes the Secretive Laser

Printer Tracking Mechanism

If you’re feeling nostalgic for the good ol’ days of

arcade action, Hong Kong manufacturer Big Electronic

Games Ltd. is bringing the arcade experience home,

complete with a dozen Midway classics. The BigGames

Home Video Arcade is 62 inches tall, looks just like a

classic stand-up arcade machine, and features Joust,

Defender, Robotron, Bubbles, Sinistar, and more. The

Home Video Arcade will set you back 2,000 quarters

($500, http://www.mybiggames.com).

Home Arcade Action–

No Quarters Required

Will your next game console be nothing

more than a remote control for your PC?

That’s what Intel is hoping will happen

when it introduces a remote gaming plat-

form next year. The fl edgling technology

promises to extend PC video games to

the living room.

Intel’s new platform will be a simple

console box that connects to your TV and

decodes video streams from your desk-

top PC sent over a wireless LAN. Control

pad commands will be relayed back to

your PC through a remote USB standard.

All the heavy lifting is done on the

desktop PC, which intercepts the video

stream after it’s been rendered by the

graphics driver, and encodes it to MPEG-

2 or MPEG-4 format, which is then

broadcast to one or more game consoles.

Because the console boxes contain noth-

ing more than a few chips to decode the

video stream, Intel expects the boxes

to cost from $100 to $150. Intel showed

off early reference designs this summer

but said it hasn’t set a time frame for the

launch of remote gaming.

Intel Seeks a Piece of

Console Market with

“Remote Gaming Plan”

New technology lets you stream PC games to your TV,

so you can play them from your couch

12 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2005

quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL

THE FIRST RULE OF DRM IS...

If you live in Finland you better keep your trap

shut when it comes to digital-rights manage-

ment. A recent bill passed by the Finland gov-

ernment cracks down on people who violate

copy protection by copying music and movies,

going so far as to prohibit “organized discus-

sion” of DRM and ways to bypass it.

APPLE LAYS DOWN

THE LAW

Sellers of iPod-related

accessories were recently

forced to remove the

music-device’s trade-

marked name from prod-

uct names and website

URLs. Thus, iPodlounge.

com, for example, must

now be called iLounge.

com. Sellers were also given draconian instruc-

tions describing how they can refer to Apple

products, including the demand that the iPod

always be referred to as an Apple iPod Device.

ONE FINAL SERVICE PACK FOR XP

According to an article at Betanews.com, a

Microsoft rep in France recently let slip that

the company is planning a third Service Pack

for Windows XP. According to the article, the

update will be “significant,” though it was not

revealed what it would include. Because it will

most likely come out after Vista is launched,

Service Pack 3 could include the long-antici-

pated WinFX file system for XP.

AMD TOPS INTEL AT RETAIL,

FOR ONCE

CPU underdog AMD recently bested its arch-rival

Intel for the very first time at retail, outperform-

ing the silicon giant for the entire month of

September. Research data shows that AMD cap-

tured 52 percent of U.S. retail desktop sales in

this period, compared with Intel’s 46 percent.

FUNSIZENEWS