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With the gaming world constantly evolving and with the ever so popular Wii system by Nintendo the other gaming companies are looking for the new next thing.  I really thought the next thing will come from Nintendo again with their success, but after seeing what Microsoft has coming - I think Microsoft might have it!

Yesterday Microsoft revealed their Project Natal for the XBox 360 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).  Instead of trying to just copy or enhance the new popular controllers of the Nintendo Wii like Playstation is looking to do – Microsoft is going even farther.  Getting rid of controllers all together!  Using a combination of cameras the Natal box can model you and your movement in 3D.  It also includes a microphone so that it can use it’s speech recognition to enhance the experience.  Here is a video Microsoft made to demo the new technology – it feels very Wii-like in the way they are marketing it with having “family fun”.

As you can see – Microsoft is also might be looking at getting into the movie rental market to take some share away from the iTV.  Microsoft already announced that they will be able to offerstreaming music service by Last.fm and give XBox users access to social networking sites Facebook and Twitter sometime this fall.  These sites will be integrated into the Xbox Live interface. 

After looking into presentation at E3 a little more – I found this video that shows off some even more exciting technology that uses Natal with a boy character called “Milo”.

I am not a “extreme gamer” by any stretch of the imagination.  I do enjoy the more easy laid back games like the Wii offers since I don’t have a lot of time to play games, and learn the controls for each game.  I love the idea of this Natal project, and even more of what it can do to enhance new experiences in games.  With the ability to stream my Netflix movies already to the XBox – I am starting to think I need to add this console to my living room.

Brent Games, Microsoft Microsoft, Natal, Xbox

I’ve had a lot of people ask me, “So, conficker wasn’t as big a deal as they thought?”.  I too expected to see something happen on April 1st once these bots got their instruction.  But when we didn’t see any big actions by the instruction, that wasn’t a good sign.   I thought the Gizmodo blog did a great post on this:

What the April 1 update did was simple: It provided instructions for linking up with the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of new nodes registered by Conficker.c over the last few weeks, effectively growing the size of the p2p botnet to a point where it can not be stopped.

“It’s not about ownage, it’s about continued ownage,” says Kaminsky, citing a favorite quotation of one of his hacker buddies. “It’s not about how you get into the network, it’s about, ‘How do you be [there] a year from now?’” And the answer is: “You do a lot of the things the Conficker developers are doing.”

“This is not something where the guys wrote it, it’s out, then they’re going to go out and play Nintendo. They’re frankly trying to build something that is a sustainable network for months or years to come,” Kaminsky says.

Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response, raises another good point: “The first [of April] would have been a pretty bad day to choose [to do something with Conficker], because everyone was watching to see what was going to happen. Whoever’s behind this is as lot more patient than we are.”

So, I agree – I think the creator(s) are doing this very well.  They are going to use this worm for something a little more than a prank.  So, please people – update your windows & run the cleaner utility to make sure you don’t have this on your system.

Brent Microsoft, TechNews Conficker, Microsoft, Windows