NBA puts highlights in archive
The National Basketball Association has embarked on a digital archival project that will eventually make nearly 60 years of game footage available for fans to watch or mix into their own highlights packages.
Since 1996, courtside statisticians have been assigning time codes to plays so they can be matched to taped broadcast footage. That coding will make it easy for computers to search for, say, all the 3-point attempts by Michael Jordan with less than 2 minutes of play in a game where a team leads by five points or less.
Only recently have prices for equipment and tapes come down enough for the NBA to turn that data into a useable archive, said Steve Hellmuth, senior vice president of operations and technology for the NBA’s broadcast and licensing arm.
The archive is being built primarily for league use, such as the creation of highlights packages for the Internet or cable video-on-demand services. The NBA can save money and space by converting its bulky library of video tapes into digital format, Hellmuth said.
AOL releases spam top 10
Remember this scam? In the 1990s, e-mail hoaxers commonly claimed to be passing along a method for getting easy money from Bill Gates. While that particular fraud has faded, the spam-fighting team at America Online says celebrity-based variations continue, even as spammers get more sophisticated.
According to AOL, one of the most prevalent spam subject lines in 2005 was “Donald Trump Wants You — Please Respond.” Another frequent pitch played on the belief that the tech world just gives stuff away to people in the know: “Get an Apple iPod Nano, PS3 or Xbox360 for Free.”
AOL’s list of the top ten spam subject lines, admittedly nonscientific and not ranked in any order, was released last week to offer a snapshot of the kinds of unsolicited commercial e-mail that still floods many of our inboxes.
Stock scams, phony transaction records and cheap offers for everything from pharmaceuticals to mortgages were among the other most common brands of spam in 2005.
Indictments coming to phones
South Korea will begin sending legal notices — including indictments — to people through mobile phones instead of ordinary mail next year.
Jun Dae-jin, an official at the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office, said trials of legal notices via text and voice messages will begin in January, and full service by midyear.
Jun said prosecutors decided to shift to the electronic service because regular mail takes time and can get overlooked or lost when people change addresses. He also cited privacy concerns with ordinary mail, saying family members and relatives of recipients could potentially see embarrassing legal notices.