For a decade or more, some in the gaming industry have been predicting the death of the console. In fact, there are those who believed that the Xbox 360 or PS3 would never have come to market. They argue that PCs are much more powerful, upgradable, and robust than consoles, and that game developers have much more flexibility on that platform.

Unfortunately for these futurists, their predictions have failed to come true. This is at least in part due to the fact that console gaming has historically appealed to the masses; a family can invest in a gaming console for a $300 price point and use it for 4-5 years before replacing it with the next generation. Gaming-worthy PCs cost 5 times as much and have to be upgraded just as frequently.

Yet, there’s a new trend that may really strike a serious blow to not only console gaming, but PC gaming. Like so many other services, gaming is now moving to the cloud.

Cloud gaming: OnLive
OnLive is the first such service of its kind, but it’s certainly not going to be the last. The basic premise of OnLive is this: you should be able to play the games you want to play anywhere, anytime you have an Internet connection. If you want to play a game on your TV, great. If you’d rather play it on your PC, that’s fine, too. You can even play it on your tablet, in some cases.

How this obsoletes consoles
Cloud-based gaming services don’t require constant hardware upgrades. Because the heavy lifting is done on the service provider’s equipment, all you really need is a reliable broadband connection to get a high-quality gaming experience. Buying games via a cloud service means never having to upgrade to the next generation of console, and not having to purchase multiple consoles. Sure, you need a game system like the OnLive system to play on a TV, but these systems come much cheaper – and don’t require you to upgrade.

Technical limitations
There are, of course, limitations to the cloud gaming proposition, at least right now. There are a very limited number of titles ported to the cloud gaming format. In addition, while it sounds like it would be cool to play certain games on a tablet, most games simply aren’t built for a touch-screen implementation.

For cloud-based gaming to really catch on, it will have to receive support from multiple development studios. If there should be another generation of consoles released, it will be a hard fought battle to get the consumer to move away from their trusted format to a cloud service.

In the same way that Netflix has, for many people, replaced the DVD player, so too cloud gaming could one day replace the console experience. Even in the PC realm, users may find that they’re more likely to use a cloud-based version of a game rather than the PC port, simply because they’ve already purchased it for the cloud.

Whether cloud gaming will be the nail in console gaming’s coffin is yet to be seen, but one thing is clear: if done right, there’s a heck of a lot of potential in this technology.

==== About the Author ====
Eric Greenwood is a technophile whose interests have lead him to study all things cloud from software as a service to the online storage movement. Get more tips and advice on the blog Online Storage!

BSNL just can’t get enough of the negative lime-light. It has not even been two months since we reported BSNL getting compromised, and here we are again. A self-proclaimed Pakistani hacker has defaced a public BSNL page. Last time, we revealed a serious security flaw in an internal application at BSNL called Dotsoft, and funnily enough, the vulnerability still exists.

Apparently, Dotsoft became a hot topic with ethical hackers earlier in 2009, here is a clear proof-of-concept hack attempt aimed at Dotsoft. Though, this time, the situation is even worse. Today, a sub-directory on the BSNL website was hacked by a Pakistani hacker. The hacker, who calls himself ‘KhantastiC haX0r’, placed an index.html file on the sub-directory to prove that he has write-access to the web server.   He has also stated he has copied and removed all logs of the intrusion, as well as copied the databases — possibly being held for ransom? The defaced site is available at http://www.bsnl.co.in/tender1/ and doesn’t seem to affect any other pages within the same sub-directory, like http://www.bsnl.co.in/tender1/archive3.php.

It is worth mentioning that although ‘Khantastic haXor’ claims to have connections with the PCA, he was actually thrown out of the PCA according to online reports. The situation was so bad that his personal details were exposed by a rival online ‘crew’. They went so far as to include personal photographs of the person in question. In any fashion, KhantastiC haX0r doesn’t seem to take his online anonymity very serious, as his Google+ account features pictures in high detail.

BSNL seriously needs to strengthen itself against attacks like these, with over 90 million subscribers, it’s a wonder they’ve managed to stave off theft of credit cards, passwords and other internal databases. It would seem like this is an online turf-war and BSNL was simply caught in the middle, perhaps their state ties can help them with building a more robust and secure network.

This makes for a good Diwali gift for BSNL from Pakistan.

In the raging browser wars, features, security and stability are paramount to competing. Opera might want to get a serious handle on things with the next release they push.

There is a memory corruption bug that has been present in Opera 10, 11 and the pre-release of 12 on Windows XP SP3. The vulnerability exists within SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) layout handling. By nesting SVG functions within XML calls, an attacker is able to crash Opera. While crashing a browser might not seem like a huge deal to some, couple it with code injection and you have an exploit that can lead to complete remote code execution, and then it’s game over.

The exploit, which was discovered over a year ago, was reported to Opera but never fixed. Jose Vasquez, the original author, has published full details on the vulnerability as well as written and released a complete Metasploit module. Metasploit is a security framework for penetration testing, allowing a large number of security professional to collaborate on software and service vulnerabilities.

What might seem like a benign crash of your browser, might turn out to be an attacker positioning themselves to take control of your computer and network. Although it’s been previously broken, Jose also indicates it may be possible to bypass DEP, which is an active security feature provided by Microsoft,  specifically made to prevent unwanted code execution.

In an interview, Opera’s co-founder,  Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner indicated their number of users grew from 50 million in 2009 to over 150 million in just one year. There are a lot of users who are potentially vulnerable to exploitation of this bug. When Opera 11.51 was released, major security and minor stability issues were the reason for the update. If we consider that  this bug has been present since 10.50, disclosed to Opera over a year ago, and still left unfixed — many users may want to look at switching to the very popular Chrome  or Firefox 7  until Opera fixes this issue.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get to watch all your favorite Bollywood (hindi) movies online for free? Well, I don’t think anyone will say no to this. However if you think that we are going to tell you about illegal ways of watching Hindi movies online then this post is not for you.

Bollywood films distributor – Shemaroo has taken a unique initiative to put good hindi movies online including golden oldies and latest flicks so that users can easily see their favorite movies without much hassle. In order to make this happen, Shemaroo has created an exclusive video channel on Youtube called Shemaroo Movies. The channel has full length videos of various Bollywood films which users can view for free.

Currently the channel has around 20 titles ans Shemaroo has plans of expanding it gradually with more movies. The best part about it is that they have the right mix of current blockbusters as well as all time classic movies. Short 5 – 6 second in video advertisements which play at regular intervals while watching the movies is how Shemaroo is planning to generate revenue from these online movies.

One concern which I had while viewing movies on the Channel is that, it is very easy to download videos from Youtube using already available online video download tools. These might prompt certain users to download the movies from the Shemaroo channel (meant for viewing online). So, in a way is this not promoting video piracy? Do let us know about your thoughts in the comments section below.

MeriCar.com is a unique car portal that helps car owners to search for car service centers and car spare sellers in their neighbourhood. All in all, MeriCar.com can be termed as an online car repair shop. The portal lists car service centers for various brands and helps users connect to the right car workshop, thereby saving on car servicing bill.

MeriCar.com has raised it’s seed funding from debutant Seed fund firm – MyFirstCheque. Although there has been no official word on the amount of investment yet but MyFirstCheque typically invests amount withing Rs 20 lakh in startups and takes an equity stake between 15 to 25 per cent.

Rakesh K Sidana, the CEO of MeriCAR.com said that My First Cheque recognised the potential of his idea and has made the much required investment with which, the company looks forward to strengthening the core team and expanding the MeriCar.com network further across the country and servicing a larger base of car users.

Microsoft has been able to able to build a powerful social presence with active twitter and Facebook accounts for product teams. Leveraging this social network presence, Microsoft will be having a online based reality show with 9 contestants.

The 9 contestants with proficiency across Microsoft technologies will be given tasks to complete and everyone can follow their progress online. The show is called Career Factor, first spotted by Joe Wilcox the introductions of the contestants are available on Microsoft Learning’s Youtube page. The show updates can be followed on the Twitter account MS Career Factor.

The show is part of Microsoft’s Born 2 Learn initiative. Links to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles of the 9 contestants can be found here. A forum with sections dedicated to the contestants has been setup as well. While the show won’t be the next Apprentice, the concept is interesting.

With the recent spate of attacks on Wikileaks (and as a side effect, the anon culture of 4chan and Usenet) anonymous freedom groupAnonymous has decided to ante up the pressure on traditional global media. Anonymous is urging faceless internet users to move into the real world and protest against the censorship of news and Wikileaks.

While the common internet user will not know the implications of hindering net neutrality, free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly the very things that Governments are vouching to quell and prohibit on the internet protests such as these will be an eye opener for many such users.

With banners stretching across The Pirate Bay and other free speech and pro-piracy websites as well as 4chan’s notorious /b/ board, it is safe to assume that January 15th will be quite the red-letter day in the history of the free society movement. Actively denouncing aggressive copyright policies and standing up for ideas rather than authorship, the protest aims to be so large that the traditional media will have to cover this activism. Anonymous calls people all over the world to peacefully protest on the streets of their city for these ideals.

One can see and join events all over the world (or create one of their own) at whyweprotest.net

As more and more Indians are getting on the internet, the web is becoming a high potential property for businesses to showcase themselves to users. According to a survey conducted by IAMAI, the online advertising market in India (including both text and display ads) is expected to grow by 26% to Rs 993 crore in the upcoming financial year.

Here are some charts that show the online ad spending according to various sectors. While, banking and financial services lead text ad spending (24 per cent of the total text ad spend), the travel sector leads the display ad spend accounting to 14 per cent share.

Another interesting thing to note in the survey was that the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) industry spends more on display ads than text ads. The display ad and the text ads spends for the FMCG industry stood at Rs 26 crore and Rs 13 crore respectively.

Charts via Aloo Techie

Of course, it’s all PC Gaming, at the end of the day, right guys?

Facebook has an abnormally large amount of users playing games. Games such as Farmville or Mafia Wars. The annoyance factor of all these games on other peoples’ walls ranges from terrible to depressing. However, just how many of those daily Facebook loggers play games?

According to unofficial Facebook fan-site All Facebook, about 50% of Facebook log-ins are specifically for playing games, with over half of Facebook’s users playing these games.

However, out of these 250 million plus users, about 19% say that they are addictedto these games. A very loosely used term, I’m afraid for addiction, as a medical term, is really serious business. It’s exactly the kind of thing that is overused in the media while debasing video games as a whole. However, since it concerns Facebook, I do not mind it all that much.

Nevertheless, the other statistics are most interesting. 56 million people play such games daily which is most of the UK’s population. The average time per month spent playing games is around seven hours! That’s probably a little less than the amount of time I spend playing every week. Considering that Facebook is a social networking site, this is pretty big.

More facts here.

Despite various problems caused by shrinking school district budgets, there’s one sign of hope and innovation the virtual classroom. Online learning is now being used in the majority of the country’s school districts and universities and is allowing administrators to offer crucial courses to their students despite less funding.

Meeting Needs
Shrinking school budgets have caused many districts to reduce staff sizes and cut their traditional course offerings. Both of these moves would have been detrimental to the learning of students in the districts were it not for the implementation of virtual teaching. Virtual teaching is meeting many of the needs in school districts by offering core classes that would not have been a possibility with traditional classroom learning.

Advanced courses are also on the rise again because of online learning options. Often, advanced courses only include a few students and are therefore unsustainable on shrinking budgets when offered in brick and mortar classrooms. However, because of online learning, students are again able to get a head start on their college courses by taking advanced virtual courses.

The needs of students with disabilities are now being better met by virtual classrooms. By using online learning, these students can obtain crucial life skills from home or in settings that are more accommodating to their needs. Even students who are facing school suspensions can remain caught up on the majority of their coursework with virtual courses.

Fewer Restrictions
Online learning is also changing the way teachers think about their jobs. A main complaint of instructors who teach in traditional classroom settings is they are overworked and underpaid. However, online teaching opportunities are changing this issue.

Now, instructors can literally be anywhere in the world while instructing their students. In most cases, all that is needed is a computer and an Internet connection. This change is reducing the stress felt by teachers and will hopefully be enough initiative to recruit more college students to choose teaching careers.

The College Scene
School districts aren’t the only institutions using virtual professors. In fact, the majority of colleges and universities now offer full online degrees for their students. In fact, online programs are the only way many non-traditional students have found the time to earn college degrees.

The college students that virtual learning has likely benefited the most are soldiers who are currently deployed. These young soldiers sacrificed the normal lifestyles that many people take for granted to serve their country. However, they no longer must give up as much by remaining on track with college degree programs, using virtual classes.

Many college classes now being offered through online courses and the options are expanding each year. From graphic design and writing classes to calculus and other math classes, the possibilities are nearly limitless.

As this educational technology expands, many more school districts and universities will likely begin implementing virtual classrooms into their curriculum. The newest generation entering the school scene has grown up with computers and should therefore be able to easily adapt to online learning.

Guest post by Stephen Cline, who has an MBA and has worked in the finance industry. You can follow him on Twitter @stephlines or check out his writing at http://www.economiccrisisblog.com/.