I haven’t seen one of the new 3D movies. We didn’t go watch Avatar when it was in theatres, and personally I think the technology seems pretty hokey. But what about choose your own adventure?

The clip below, from a company called 13th Street is advertising a new kind of cinema, one in which the viewer can interact with the film and change the outcome. In this case, it’s done by phoning different viewers in the audience and changing the outcome of the film based on recognized voice commands. Is this the new step in immersive horror films or just another hokey Hollywood breakthrough?

What do you think? Leave a comment.

Google’s battle with the Chinese government has been brewing for some time now but it appears as if it’s finally come to a head.

Since they first came onto the scene in China, Google’s position in the communist country has been tenuous at best. For a company who’s mantra has been “do no evil,” censoring search results in order to hide and cover up dissension within the country seems to be pretty, well, against code. If you aren’t aware, China’s Internet policy is among the most strict in the world. The government actively filters out content which it doesn’t want its citizens to see online. That includes dissenting comments, protest movements, blogs, and, as far as I know, anything that’s overly critical of the Chinese government. (I’m probably blocked now, too!)

Even worse, Google has recently uncovered an enormous string of hacking attempts and successes on a number of its services—namely, Gmail—which it traced back to the Chinese government. According to Google, it was the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists which were the target and these accounts, it says, were routinely accessed by government officials in a kind of cyber-espionage.

Up until now though, Google has been pretty complicit. There have been ups and downs between China and Google and much, much, global criticism leveled against the search engine giant, but for the most part Google has gone along with the government’s Internet policies. The government hacking was the crack that broke the dam though, and today came the flood.

Beginning this afternoon, all traffic to the China search engine page, says Google, is now being redirected to their unfiltered servers in Hong Kong. Here’s a snippet of the press release,

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from [Hong Kong] is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.

What’s more, Google has set up this page to monitor exactly what the Chinese government is blocking access to. That means if China decides to block Google’s new unfiltered searches, the world will find out.

It seems like Google is finally taking serious steps towards a sensible Internet policy in China.

Even if you only have a pedestrian interest in copyright law or the Internet this is a very enjoyable read. Heck, even if you’re only a casual YouTube user, you’ll probably get a kick out of it. It’s YouTube’s opening briefs in the lawsuit that Viacom has brought against them.

Viacom is suing YouTube for not removing copyrighted videos from its website, videos that Viacom held the copyright to. It sounds straight forward enough except for a couple of important factors. First, under international copyright laws it’s the responsibility of the copyright owner (Viacom) to notify YouTube of infractions—not YouTube’s responsibility to remove videos of its own volition. And second, as it turns out, Viacom filed this suit all the while uploading its own videos to YouTube surreptitiously.

Here’s what YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine had to say,

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom.

And as if that wasn’t enough, YouTube alleges that some of the videos included in Viacom’s lawsuit against them were actually uploaded by the company itself,

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

The waters get exceptionally muddied at this point and you really have to wonder what Viacom was thinking. Remember, this was a company that tried several times to buy YouTube.

As clear as the result may seem, from the outset, it’ll be an interesting case to follow.

The brief goes on to explain that now, in the 21st century, most media corporations are working with YouTube and even finding monetary value in putting their clips up online. Of course. I guess, ever the evolution of technology marches on. But there’s a big difference between fighting against an emerging media platform and sneaking your videos up on there, and then suing over them.

This is a video from Leo Laporte. A very popular, well-respected, and friendly “tech guy” from down in the States. This caller has a particularly hilarious problem to which Leo offers a rather flat solution.

My website, and blog, recently turned seven years old. The anniversary passed quietly, but not altogether unnoticed.

For the past week I’ve been working hard, behind the scenes, to bring back thecorch.com to it’s former glory, and then some. After wrestling with the purpose of having a blog, what I should and shouldn’t be writing about, and deep theological questions surrounding the meaning of life, I’m back.

Having a blog can be tricky. First of all, it’s a time commitment. Most blogs, according to the statistics, fall into disuse shortly after being created. Others last a bit longer before petering out. Mine was a on-again, off-again affair that was updated so sporadically its readership eventually fell to zero. In most of its previous incarnations, I lacked not necessarily the time, but the motivation: the drive to dedicate time to it. When my close friend Andrew recently launched a new, and innovative blog, he committed from the get-go to post a certain number of times—to commit to writing.

The second thing about a blog is figuring out what to write about, and what not to write about. As a teacher, and a public figure (in that way), I spent a lot of time thinking about my website. Sometimes I went to write something and thought, “Nah, that’s not something I want to share with the whole world.” Other times I didn’t know. Still, I even wondered about writing at all: who cares what I think about films I see, or music I listen to—who’s reading it anyway?

And that is to say that: We’re back in business.

Welcome to the new incarnation of thecorch.com. I’ve solved the first conundrum by deciding to write, and write often, and to commit wholeheartedly to it. And in terms of what I plan to write about I’ve decided, “Who cares!” and that my opinion on films, television, music, books and my mundane commentaries on life might not be interesting to everyone but if you’re reading them, then they’re interesting to you. After all, it’s good writing practice and that’s important too.

So here we go, on our own again. I hope y’all come along, too.