Xbox modding trial on hold after judge berates prosecution - msnbc.com

By Winda Benedetti

The criminal trial against a man accused of modifying, or "modding" Xbox game machines was put on hold Wednesday after the federal judge overseeing the case berated the prosecution and questioned their use of witnesses who may have, themselves, broken the law.

U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez told the prosecuting attorneys that he had “serious concerns about the government’s case,” according to a report from Wired.

As we reported earlier, opening statements were scheduled to begin Wednesday morning in the criminal trial of 28-year-old Matthew Crippen of Los Angeles. Crippen — who is accused of modifying Microsoft-made Xbox 360 game consoles for money so the machines could play pirated games and other content — faces time in prison if convicted. (msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Authorities arrested Crippen last year on accusations that he violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He was ultimately charged with two counts of trying to circumvent anti-piracy measures. This trial marks the first time a federal prosecution for console-modding has reached a jury trial.

Wired writer David Kravets has been in the courtroom and reports:

Among the judge’s host of complaints against the government was his alarm that prosecutors would put on two witnesses who may have broken the law.

One is Entertainment Software Association investigator Tony Rosario, who secretly video-recorded defendant Matthew Crippen allegedly performing the Xbox mod in Crippen’s Los Angeles suburban house. The defense argues that making the recording violates California privacy law. The other witness is Microsoft security employee Ken McGrail, who analyzed the two consoles Crippen allegedly altered. McGrail admitted that he himself had modded Xboxes in college.

“Maybe two of the four government witnesses committed crimes,” the judge said from the bench. “I think it is relevant and the jury is going to hear about it — both crimes.”

Wired reports that opening arguments were put on hold and, after the berating was over, federal prosecutors asked for a recess to determine whether they would offer the defendant a deal, seek dismissal of the case or move forward with it.

Fore related stories, check out:
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Winda Benedetti writes the Citizen Gamer column for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things right here on Twitter.

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A Dim US View of Russia and Putin - New York Times

The embassy titled the cable “Questioning Putin’s Work Ethic.”

“There are consistent reports that Putin resents or resists the workload he carries,” it said, citing Mr. Putin’s “fatigue,” “hands-off behavior” and “isolation” to the point that he was “working from home.”

The cable, approved by the American ambassador, John R. Beyrle, assessed the Kremlin rumors not as indicators of Mr. Putin’s weakness, but of the limits of his position in a period of falling commodity prices and tightening credit. Russia’s most powerful man sat atop Russia’s spoils. The recession left him with less to dole out, eroding “some of his Teflon persona.”

“His disengagement reflects,” the cable concluded, “his recognition that a sharp reduction in resources limits his ability to find workable compromises among the Kremlin elite.” Officially, the United States has sought since last year what President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev, have called a “reset” in relations.

But scores of secret American cables from recent years, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, show that beneath the public efforts at warmer ties, the United States harbors a dim view of the post-Soviet Kremlin and its leadership, and little hope that Russia will become more democratic or reliable.

The cables portray Mr. Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build.

Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr. Putin’s Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.

Throughout the internal correspondence between the American Embassy and Washington, the American diplomats in Moscow painted a Russia in which public stewardship was barely tended to and history was distorted. The Kremlin displays scant ability or inclination to reform what one cable characterized as a “modern brand of authoritarianism” accepted with resignation by the ruled.

Moreover, the cables reveal the limits of American influence within Russia and an evident dearth of diplomatic sources. The internal correspondence repeatedly reflected the analyses of an embassy whose staff was narrowly contained and had almost no access to Mr. Putin’s inner circle.

In reporting to Washington, diplomats often summarized impressions from meetings not with Russian officials, but with Western colleagues or business executives. The impressions of a largely well-known cadre of Russian journalists, opposition politicians and research institute regulars rounded out many cables, with insights resembling what was published in liberal Russian newspapers and on Web sites.

The cables sketched life almost 20 years after the Soviet Union’s disintegration, a period, as the cables noted, when Mr. Medvedev, the prime minister’s understudy, is the lesser part of a strange “tandemocracy” and “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.” All the while, another cable noted, “Stalin’s ghost haunts the Metro.”

Government Corruption

In the secret American description, official malfeasance and corruption infect all elements of Russian public life — from rigging elections, to persecuting rivals or citizens who pose a threat, to extorting businesses.

The corruption was described as a drag on the nation of sufficient significance to merit the attention of Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin, who, paradoxically, benefited from cronies who orchestrate graft but support the Kremlin.

A cable describing the government and style of Yuri M. Luzhkov, then the mayor of Moscow, presented the puzzle.

Since 2008, Mr. Medvedev has been the face and cheerleader for the nation’s supposed anti-corruption campaign. Yet a veritable kaleidoscope of corruption thrived in Moscow, much of it under the protection of a mayor who served at the president’s pleasure.

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting.

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SAP's HANA will speed real-time data analytics - Computerworld

Computerworld - SAP's High-Performance Analytic Appliance, or HANA, which started shipping on Wednesday, should give its customers a much faster, more flexible way to analyze large volumes of data in real-time, analysts said.

Much of the performance gains come from HANA's use of an in-memory computing technology which allows data to be processed in a system's RAM as opposed to reading it off I/O disks. The in-memory approach enables much faster data processing and should allow companies to run far more sophisticated data analytics applications compared to conventional relational databases.

"Any enterprise that is a user of large data sets for data analytics," will find HANA interesting said Frank Scavo, manging partner of the IT consulting firm Strativa. "HANA represents a large improvement not only in processing speed but in flexibility and cost of data analytics."

HANA's ability to let large data sets be manipulated in memory will enable enterprises to run more ad hoc queries against business data, and reduce the need for pre-define cubes and queries, he said.

Companies will be able to take a large dataset and decide what questions they want to run against it, in real time. "It adds a lot of flexibility to the whole process of data analysis," Scavo said.

In contrast, with most conventional data warehouses where data is stored in static tables "you have to predict the sort of questions you will ask about the data so you can architect it accordingly," Scavo said.

SAP said that during pilot tests with a consumer goods company, HANA's in-memory computing engine enabled the company to run arbitrary, complex queries on over 450 billion records in a matter of seconds, compared with the hours it would have taken previously.

Such capabilities are becoming increasingly useful, especially in industries such as the retail sector, health care, scientific analysis and financial services, Scavo said. "There has been an explosion in the amount of structured and unstructured data that organizations have been able to collect," and are looking to mine, he said.

SAP is not the first one with such technology, said David Menninger, an analyst with Ventana Research. Vendor interest in in-memory technologies has been growing over the past few years, at least in part because of the widespread availability of relatively low cost 64-bit hardware and operating systems, as well as low cost storage, he said.

Other vendors with in-memory technologies include QlikView, Tibco, Tableau, TM1 which IBM acquired through its purchase of Cognos, and Quantrix, he said.

HANA's difference lies in its scalability and the fact that it is being offered by a vendor that also owns a lot of the ERP, CRM and other data that companies are looking to analyze, Menninger said. "SAP has an advantage the others don't have," Menninger said. "They have access to the data from the sources systems."

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