In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual—after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers.

If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear—or you may not, depending on the social network. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they’ve been deleted. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up.

We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

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There’s no denying that gaming publisher Midway has had a rough time in the past year. After an insane saga of strange twists, turns, accusations, and increasingly dire news, most of us weren’t entirely certain that the beleaguered publisher would actually survive to see 2010. Despite our doubts, it turns out that Midway is living to see another day, having just been acquired by Time Warner for $33 million.

For those of you new to the situation: after the company’s much-hyped Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe earned lukewarm reviews and reasonable (though not amazing) sales numbers, Sumner Redstone sold his controlling interest in Midway for $100,000, and the publisher wound up laying off roughly 25 percent of its workforce and killed many games that were currently in development. It was then revealed that, even though employees weren’t getting paid what was owed to them and the publisher was filing for bankruptcy, executives were still raking in a great deal of cash during all this.

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NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander, which spent the summer in Mars’ northern polar regions performing a variety of science experiments, caused quite a stir when rumors circulated that it had discovered signs of life on the Red Planet. NASA eventually held a press conference to dispel the rumors, promising that more details would eventually be revealed when scientists got around to publishing papers that would describe the experiments in detail. That day has finally arrived; today’s issue of Science contains four papers that describe various findings from the mission. There’s no sign of alien life, but the studies do reveal an active water cycle on Mars—including night-time snowfall.

The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings.

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It isn’t often that you find AT&T and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in agreement, but consensus has been reached on one matter: ASCAP’s demand that wireless companies pay it license fees for ringtones is, well, ridiculous.

On Wednesday EFF called the move “outlandish” and “a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies.” The advocacy group filed a friend of the court brief with the United States District Court for the Southern District New York this week, which is hearing the dispute between ASCAP, AT&T, and Verizon over whether the telcos have to pay the music licensing body royalties for wireless ringtones. Joining the amicus brief are Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Meanwhile CTIA - The Wireless Association, to which the big telcos belong, has also filed an amicus brief in the case.

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“MySpace mom” Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports. Violating a web site’s terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all.

Horrible things aren’t always crimes

The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an “overwhelming message” to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor. Drew was due to be sentenced today.

But the “message,” legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a Web site without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns.

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One of the recently leaked builds of Windows 7 (if you’re one to keep up with this sort of thing, the latest is build 7264) has more juice in it than just a new default wallpaper. In the Windows 7 Home Premium edition, the Microsoft Software License Terms has an additional clause that talks about a Family Pack licensing plan that would cover up to three computers in a household. This is no accident: other editions like Professional and Ultimate do not contain the Family Pack wording. 

Here’s the whole clause:

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Behavioral advertising, in which users are fed ads based on the interests revealed by their Web browsing habits, has an obvious appeal to advertisers, as it will ostensibly allow them to serve ads to the most relevant audiences. It also raises a host of privacy concerns—to work effectively, the Web surfing histories of consumers have to be aggregated and analyzed by those providing the ads. 

Both the Federal Trade Commission and Congress have asked questions about whether advertisers were doing enough to protect and inform consumers, raising the prospect that regulation of behavioral advertising was only a matter of time. In an attempt to head off the government, a coalition of advertising groups that includes Google has now issued a series of principles that will guide their self-regulation.

The industry didn’t need to look far to see the downsides of a failure to respond to public concerns. One of the more aggressive approaches to behavioral advertising, the deep packet inspection used by NebuAd, saw the company’s CEO dragged before Congress, and the resulting bad publicity turned the company into a pariah. It ultimately closed its doors last month.

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Social networks like MySpace still cannot be held responsible for assaults that happen offline, according to California’s Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. The court was asked to review the case of four underage girls (referred to as Julie Does) who, along with their parents, had sued MySpace for gross negligence and strict product liability after they were all sexually assaulted by older men whom they met on the service. 

Despite the scary circumstances in which these events took place, the judge said that MySpace was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and could not be held liable.

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Attention, all high speed Internet lovers—the government has released its first Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) and is asking for applications to spend that broadband stimulus money. This is phase one of the roll-out of that $7.2 billion worth of broadband stimulus cash contained in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. You can bet your best router that folks across the country are reading the NOFA backwards and forwards in preparation for the application window, which begins on July 14, 2009 at 8:00am eastern time and closes on August 14, 2009 at 5:00 pm.

Here’s the thumbnail version of what the key agencies are looking for—they being the Department of Commerce’s

Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and the Department of Agriculture’s

Rural Utility Service’s Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).

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Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday. The new version of the popular open source web browser has attracted considerable attention and is already seeing rapid adoption. It was downloaded over 5 million times during the first 24 hours. This falls short of the record-setting 8 million downloads that Firefox 3 had during its first day, but it still reflects the intense enthusiasm of the browser’s fans.

Firefoxr’s popularity has rapidly climbed over the past few years, bringing it up to between 20-30 percent of the global browser market, according to various Web analytics firms. Based on data collected from 850,000 web sites, tracking firm whos.amung.us says that Firefox 3.5 by itself now accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of the browser market, more than the total marketshare of rival Opera.

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On Tuesday, the US Department of the Interior announced plans that should radically streamline the process of building utility-scale solar facilities in the US Southwest. After having surveyed terrain administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the DOI has identified the best sites for solar facilities. It will now withdraw these areas from consideration for other uses and undertake a single environmental review for all of them. Assuming their use for solar power production is approved, the land may be able to produce roughly 30 percent of current US residential energy use.

The program, which was published in the Federal Register in order to solicit public comment, was jointly announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Senate leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, one of the states included in the program; the rest are Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. The move follows a general solicitation for comments on solar production using BLM lands that was initiated last year. Participants obviously thought it was a good idea, and the stimulus bill provided the DOI with $41 million specifically to promote the production of renewable energy on public land.

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Microsoft’s recent lawsuit against TomTom, alleging infringement of filesystem patents, has left many questions unanswered about the legal implications of distributing open source implementations of Microsoft’s FAT filesystem. A new Linux kernel patch that was published last week offers a workaround that might make it possible to continue including FAT in Linux without using methods that are covered by Microsoft’s patents.

The patent dispute erupted in February when Microsoft sued portable navigation device maker TomTom. Microsoft claimed that TomTom’s Linux-based GPS products infringe on several of its patents, including two that cover specific characteristics of FAT, a filesystem devised by Microsoft that is widely used on removable storage devices such as USB thumb drives and memory cards. The dispute escalated when TomTom retaliated with a counter-suit, but it was eventually settled in March when TomTom agreed to remove the relevant functionality.

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There are two competing ideas on the process that governs the formation and maintenance of beliefs: 1) people maintain a belief because they have limited access to opposing beliefs, or 2) because they actively filter information in a way that avoids conflicting views. A new meta-analysis of past studies confirms the existence of active avoidance; when people are offered an opposing viewpoint, they will ignore it in favor of a supportive viewpoint in two out of three instances.

The meta-analysis was performed by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida. They managed to identify a total of 91 relevant studies that included nearly 8,000 participants. The studies were all on the subject of selective exposure, or how people filter out incoming information based on how it jibes with their current beliefs. The studies attempted to determine whether people wanted to view or read something that either supported their point of view or challenged it.

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Microsoft’s recently relaunched search engine, Bing, has managed to win the company some market share during its first month of operation. According to numbers gathered by StatCounter, Microsoft gained a full percentage point during the month of June, stealing bits and pieces from both Yahoo and Google.

The firm says that Microsoft’s share of the search market increased from 7.21 percent in April of this year to 8.23 percent in June. Comparatively, Google’s share was at 79.07 percent in April and 78.48 percent in June—a drop of just over a half a percentage point. Yahoo had 11.04 percent of the market in June.

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Some black holes are too big. Some black holes are
too small.
A letter appearing in this week’s edition of Nature describes how astronomers may have found one that is just right.

The letter, written by a team of British and
French astronomers, does not state that they have found an intermediate
mass black hole—one that could be termed just
right—but that they have found an object where most other explanations fail to explain its behavior. 

The object, 2XMM J011028.1-460421 or (more conveniently) HLX-1, is a source of ultraluminous X-rays near the spiral galaxy ESO
243-49. These X-rays have been postulated to be the product of an intermediate mass black hole, one between 100 and 10,000 solar
masses, but to date no candidate object has been widely accepted.

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It’s not hard for Americans to work themselves into a lather over the state of broadband in this country, which is improving but still not on par with the 100Mbps fiber lines widely offered in countries like South Korea and Japan. But it’s worth taking a step back every once in a while to consider the global picture: much of the world has broadband penetration rates under 20 percent, and the largest single group of countries has penetration rates of between 0 and 5 percent.

The consultants at TeleGeography track broadband deployment in 127 countries and have released a chart that shows world broadband deployments by percentage of households that have service. Out of the 127, only 10 countries are above 80 percent—mostly small places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Denmark, and South Korea. Together, the ten countries in this bracket account for only two percent of the world population.

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Joost, the P2P online video service once hailed as the new way to watch TV, has announced that it’s ditching its consumer video offerings. Instead, the company plans to offer services to other media companies—such as cable and satellite providers—as a “white label video platform.” The company will be doing quite a bit of restructuring in order to accommodate its new role by shedding employees and replacing its CEO.

Joost originally sprang forth from the minds of Skype’s Janus Friis and Kazaa’s Niklas Zennström in 2006, dubbed originally as The Venice Project. The service was launched with the goal of offering ad-supported television content over the Internet, but through a distributed streaming model like that of BitTorrent—instead of pulling video content from a central server, it would instead stream it from multiple users around the ‘Net.

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The Obama administration came to office with promises of greater openness about government activities and improved technical capabilities. On Tuesday, the US CTO, Vivek Kundra, announced a new Web resource that promises to allow citizens to track IT spending across all government agencies. Although this undoubtedly represents a positive step towards more useful public disclosure, on some levels it’s simply the latest example of an ongoing trend in the US government’s approach to public information.

The new site is called the IT Dashboard. (In a sign that the government truly gets the latest trends in Web services, it bears a prominent beta label.) The Flash-based application allows you to select any one of ten government agencies (or an “Other” category), and get a glimpse into what they’re spending on IT projects, as well as whether the projects are considered on track. So, for example, Health and Human Services is spending $2.3 billion on IT, spread over 65 major projects. Although only one of these is rated as being of significant concern when it comes to cost, 15 are apparently behind schedule.

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A federal judge yesterday found Usenet.com liable for just about every copyright infringement claim on the books: direct infringement, inducement of infringement, contributory infringement, and (just for good measure) vicarious infringement. Not content to be loud and proud about its pro-pirate agenda, Usenet.com also resorted to stonewalling legal questionnaires, sending employees to Europe to avoid depositions, wiping hard drives, and failing to turn over e-mail after being sued in 2007 by the music labels.

The recording industry’s high-octane litigation campaign has on many occasions suffered from “poor targeting,” but it’s hard to see any complexities in this case. When Usenet.com employees privately suggested that the service’s tag line should be “piracy, porno, and pictures —Usenet,” “Usenet is full of music and movies so get your pirate on!,” or “Bless the Usenet and all that it steals!,” it’s clear they knew why people were paying $4.95 to $18.95 a month for the privilege of accessing the newsgroups. And not only did they know, they allegedly took steps to encourage the infringement.

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Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski gave his first pep talk to the whole Commission staff on Tuesday. He promised to “green the agency, and improve overall operations of the FCC—running efficiently, communicating effectively, and opening the agency to participation from everyone affected by the FCC’s actions.”

“And, stay tuned,” he added, “we will have a new FCC website.” It is not immediately clear what any of these things mean, but a day earlier Genachowski announced his own staff. That is something that an FCC watcher can work with.

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There are many reasons for Chicagoans to poke fun at the northwest suburb of Schaumburg, but the existence of red light cameras soon won’t be one of them. Officials expect to get rid of Schaumburg’s sole red light camera in July after the local police department has determined that it provides no appreciable safety benefits.

The city originally installed the camera at a busy intersection near the ever-popular Woodfield Mall sometime last year as a testing ground before the city installed more cameras. According to Schaumburg Mayor Al Larson, the city had been sold on pitches from red light camera companies claiming that the devices would help prevent serious accidents.

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If you’re a parent, or a soon-to-be parent, the noise about gaming and children can be deafening. Video games turn kids into killers. Video games are addictive. Video games get in the way of learning. There is nothing good to be gained from playing games.

If you don’t play games yourself, it can be an intimidating thing to have a child who is into video games. You don’t understand the hardware. The controller looks complicated. You don’t get the games. At the same time, isn’t it a little drastic to simply not allow video games in the house?

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the issues that surround video games and the family, and we’ll give you some real-world advice on what to look for, what the dangers are, and what you can do to have gaming be a safe and fun part of your household. What we hope you’ll find is that most of this advice is common sense, and that by using your head and doing a bit of research you’ll eliminate most of the problems that can pop up with children and gaming. In fact…

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Kodak last week announced that it was discontinuing its venerable Kodachrome film, sending it gently into that good night after 74 long years. Like Polaroid’s discontinuation last year of all instant films, Kodachrome’s demise makes it the latest victim in the transition from chemical, film-based photography to digital sensors, Photoshop, and archival inkjet printers. Though it may seem like an anachronism that has lived far past its prime, the oldest color film was a mind-blowing revolution when it was first introduced in 1935.

I don’t mean to suggest that color photography didn’t exist before Kodachrome—not by a long shot. The first known color photographs were taken in 1861 by James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell’s process, the foundation upon which later commercial processes were developed in the early 1900s, involved exposing three plates, each filtered by red, green, or blue. The resulting plates could then be projected simultaneously using the same red, green and blue filters, creating what was at the time the most accurate reproduction of color available. Photographic plates in those days weren’t fully sensitive to the full visible spectrum, so this method wasn’t fully exploited until the photographic documentation of Russia by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky between 1909 and 1918.

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Even at the best of times, Internet traffic in Iran is subject to extensive filtering. But in the wake of the disputed election and the civil unrest that has followed, the government appears to have taken more aggressive steps to police online communications. Nevertheless, news and images continue to make their way out of Iran, and a limited amount of organization by groups within the country appears to be continuing despite both online and real-world crackdowns. This can be ascribed in part to a number of volunteer efforts to provide Iranian citizens with secure ways of accessing the ‘Net through secure proxies.

According to the OpenNet Initiative, Iran is ranked up with places like China and Burma as having pervasive filtering of online content. The ONI completed a report on the nation immediately before the election that suggested the country was following a trajectory similar to China’s. Internet use is booming, having grown roughly 25-fold in this decade alone. The government had initially relied on off-the-shelf software to block sites deemed offensive for political or cultural reasons, but has developed an expertise and sophistication that matches the growth in the number of users it must police.

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The settlement between Google and book copyright holders has been examined by everyone from librarians to the US Department of Justice. Most of the issues identified by outside parties have focused on two issues: the market power it cedes to Google, and the ability of the public to access the knowledge that is contained in out-of-print works. The latest organization to weigh on the settlement is Oxford University Press, which occupies an interesting position, as it’s both a publisher of copyrighted works and has a mission of disseminating knowledge. As such, the position taken by the head of its US division is quite nuanced: the deal is flawed, but may be essential for maintaining the public’s access to knowledge.

Tim Barton, the head of OUP USA, discussed his views on the settlement in an essay that appeared at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He starts it off with a telling anecdote: a professor at Columbia, when grading an essay assignment, found that most of the class cited a work that had been published in 1900, which had largely been forgotten since. Why so many citations? It was in Google Book Search. More recent and relevant work isn’t.

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Verizon’s fiber to the home system is wicked fast and fires lasers through tiny glass tubes—undeniably cool stuff. But Verizon claims far more than the mantle of “cool;” the company says that its FiOS system is now the “leading real estate development amenity.”

“Home shoppers use to scan the prospect for a Jacuzzi or an intercom,” says Verizon vice president of corporate marketing Bill Heilig. “Now, not so much. They look for the Verizon Optical Network Terminal and the Verizon broadband home router so they know they’ll have the best Internet and TV service over the best home network available today.”

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The Chinese government has decided to delay the implementation of its controversial client-side filtering software, Green Dam Youth Escort. The deadline for PC makers to preinstall or package the software was originally set for July 1, but it has now been pushed back to an unspecified date.

A representative from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) confirmed to Xinhua that the deadline had been moved at the request of some computer makers. As a result, the deadline of July 1 won’t be enforced for PC makers, though the ministry still plans to provide free downloads of Green Dam for schools and Internet cafes as of that date. “The ministry would also keep on soliciting opinions to perfect the preinstallation plan,” wrote Xinhua.

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In a world of increasingly virtual human interactions, the idea of money is becoming more fluid than authorities find comfortable. China has officially outlawed the practice of exchanging virtual currency for real goods, and minors are no longer able to buy the virtual cash. These rules will help the government control trade in China, but they could also impact the huge gold-farming industry that exists in the country.

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Mozilla has announced the official release of Firefox 3.5, the next major version of its popular open source Web browser. The new version boosts performance, introduces useful new features, and delivers strong support for emerging Web standards.

Mozilla aims to “upgrade the Web” by improving the Firefox user experience and expanding the range of tools that are available to Web developers. The company boasts that Firefox 3.5 includes over 5,000 enhancements that span nearly every aspect of the browser’s functionality and behavior. Among the most compelling advancements in this release is support for the HTML 5 video element, which enables native video playback in the browser without requiring proprietary plugins such as Flash.

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The Pirate Bay has been sold—and the new owners plan to make it a legal service that allows “content providers and copyright owners [to] get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”

Global Gaming Factory X AB, a Swedish firm that runs Internet cafes and game centers, plans to buy The Pirate Bay for 60 million kronor, twice the fine that was slapped on The Pirate Bay defendants by a Stockholm court earlier this year.

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Battlefield Heroes is EA’s big foray into the world of “free” gaming. Free as in, you don’t have to pay to play the game; anyone with a PC can download the client and get to playing. Reviewing such a game is a little bit different from our usual routine of helping you to spend money well: if you’d like to try it, go right ahead. I can, however, save you from wasting some time. Right now, it seems, things are almost completely broken.

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Behavioral studies of specific populations are extremely challenging things, as recruiting a set of participants that represent a true cross-section of the larger population is never easy. The mere willingness to participate in a study involves a necessary degree of self-selection within this population, which can seriously complicate behavioral studies—after all, it’s entirely possible that a willingness to take surveys is the product of one of the behavioral traits under examination. That’s why, even though a small survey can produce results with a high statistical confidence, it still may represent nothing more than a robust result within a non-representative group. All of that should serve as a precautionary background on a new survey of Wikipedia participants.

The short publication that describes these results is entitled, “Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members,” and the news isn’t especially good. Those contributing online feel that their true personality comes across better in the virtual environment; they also scored lower on a measure of agreeableness, and aren’t especially open to new ideas.

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Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps has been promising to do it for months: clean up the process by which incumbent carriers are allowed to raise the prices they charge smaller telcos for access to their networks. Now it’s done—his last action as the agency’s interim boss. Among other requirements, a “forbearance” petition must now be “complete as filed” from the get-go, the FCC ruled on Monday. The reform responds to charges that Verizon, AT&T, and Qwest finesse the procedure by revising their petitions over the course of a year, or withdrawing them if it looks like they won’t be granted.

“While I don’t expect that these rules will end the Commission’s consideration of forbearance petitions,” Copps declared on Monday. “I am hopeful that they will inject some rationality into the process and greatly reduce the procedural gamesmanship that we’ve too often seen in the forbearance proceedings of the past.”

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There’s a ton of spam on the Internet—we all are painfully aware of this already. However, what once required an actual person to send is increasingly being taken over by botnets. A new report (PDF) from Symantec’s MessageLabs says that more than 80 percent of all spam sent today comes from botnets, despite several recent shut-downs.

According to MessageLabs’ June report, spam accounted for 90.4 percent of all e-mail sent in the month of June—this was roughly unchanged since May. Botnets, however, sent about 83.2 percent of that spam, with the largest spam-wielding botnet being Cutwail. Cutwail is described as “one of the largest and most active botnets” and has doubled its size and output per bot since March of this year. As a result, it is now responsible for 45 percent of all spam, with others like Mega-D, Xarvester, Donbot, Grum, and Rustock making up much of the difference.

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Say you have some bright idea for the “next WiFi” and you just need a tiny little smidgen of open spectrum in which to deploy the invention that will bring cheap, easy, ubiquitous communications nirvana to everyone. Can you get it?

Generally, no. The US government squats on huge swaths of spectrum, while paid-up license holders (like cell phone service providers) control much of the rest. Slivers of spectrum are left open for unlicensed use, and those tiny bands have produced great big social benefits: wireless baby monitors, wireless phones, and WiFi.

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Game theory has provided researchers in a variety of fields, from psychology to economics, an opportunity to test human behaviors under controlled conditions. It allows big questions—are humans rational actors when money’s on the line, for example—to be tested in situations where behaviors that deviate from expectations are easy to detect. The Ultimatum Game is one example of these experiments, and it has been used to show that humans aren’t purely rational when it comes to monetary decisions, as they appear willing to make financial sacrifices in order to punish others in the name of fairness. A paper that will appear at PNAS this week takes things a step further and shows that people will still reject unfair monetary offers, even when the only one they punish is themselves.

The basic rules of the Ultimatum Game are simple. One person is given a stack of cash, and told to divide it between themselves and a second party. That second party is then given the chance to accept or reject the offer; if it’s rejected, neither of them get any money. Clearly, any of this free money should be better than nothing, so under assumptions of strictly rational behavior, you might expect all offers to be accepted.

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Move over YouTube—the folks behind The Pirate Bay are working on their own video streaming site with no restrictions. The site will be called The Video Bay and it is now on the Web as a “Beta Extreme,” though currently there is no functionality as everything is still under development. There is no indication of when it will be ready for public consumption, either, though when it goes live, it will supposedly host videos without any kind of censorship or copyright restrictions.

The Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde spoke via videoconference to the Open Video Conference in New York this week, discussing the details behind The Video Bay. He noted that the site would use a number of HTML 5 features, including tags using the ogg/theora video and audio formats. There are demos for both of these tags on The Video Bay already (one for video and one for audio).

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Blizzard is on full publicity mode today, with a number of sites posting preview stories and interviews with the people behind the game. StarCraft 2 is one of the most anticipated games of the year, and with Blizzard promising a new version of Battle.net launching alongside the game and three single-player full-game releases instead of one game with three campaigns, there are many questions gamers have about the product. We’ve scoured everyone’s coverage to try to pick out the surprising, the odd, and the downright cool details from each one, bringing you a gaggle of StarCraft news. Let’s get started.

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The US Supreme Court this morning refused to hear a final appeal in the Cablevision remote DVR case, thereby bringing the years-long litigation to a close. Despite the continued objections of broadcasters, video providers like Cablevision will be allowed to offer “box less” DVR service to customers.

The central question in the case might seem an arcane one: does it matter where a hard drive lives? Cablevision said no, and prepared to launch a service in which all of the digital video recorder’s hardware lived in the cable company’s central office. Subscribers would still have to choose which shows to record, how long to keep them for, and when to view them, using their television sets and cable boxes as a front-end to the system. Cable companies would no longer need to service and distribute hundreds of thousands of DVRs to customer homes.

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Palm emerged in the 1990s as one of the innovative champions of mobile computing. The company practically defined the handheld computer form-factor and contributed many technical concepts and user interface paradigms that are still found in some of the most popular mobile devices. The Palm of today may be a mere shadow of its former glory, but the company could be poised for a surprising comeback.

Palm’s newest creation, the Pre smartphone, has the potential to restore the once-mighty gadget maker’s reputation as a leader in innovation. The device’s unique operating system, called webOS, allows third-party developers to use Web technologies—such as HTML and JavaScript—to create native applications that can integrate tightly with the platform. This lowers the barriers to entry for software development and provides an elegant portability glide path for bringing Web applications and Adobe AIR programs to the Pre.

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Guitar Hero: Smash Hits arrived at the office and I set about writing the review for it. But there wasn’t much to say; if you want to play the included tracks with a full band, using the master tracks, this is a good buy. If you don’t, skip this and spend $60 on something else.

Which got everyone at Ars thinking: what makes a great rhythm game? So we took some time to ponder the question. We laughed, we cried, we watched in awe as Managing Editor Eric Bangeman blistered his way through some onscreen speed metal—and at the end of the day, we returned from the mountaintop with a tablet (computer) on which were inscribed the Five Commandments that successful rhythm games must follow. 

Unfortunately, we are unable to smite developers who do not heed the principles, but we’re working on that.

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It didn’t work in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset file-sharing case, but the lawyers for accused seven-song-swapper Joel Tenenbaum are trying the same trick: asking for all investigative evidence from MediaSentry to be tossed. 

Oh, and they’re (again) accusing the RIAA lawyers of violating “the ethical rules governing our profession on an unprecedented scale.”

We’re not sure this is the best approach coming from Charlie Nesson, the Harvard Law professor who has already been accused of breaking the law by the federal judge overseeing the case, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned from covering the case, it’s that Nesson plays from his own rulebook… and call witnesses from his own family.

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For most, the traditional combination of mouse and keyboard is not just a mode of computer input, but a way of life. While it has been decades since both technologies were first welcomed to the mainstream, little about their core functionality has changed; side-by-side, the aesthetics may be different, but a 486 and modern-day Mac effectively use the same basic interface paradigm.

It is perhaps for this reason then, that in recent years, both users and developers alike have approached the wide-scale adoption of touchscreen technology with more of a walk than a run. While the technology has increased in use, it has usually done so as an augment to the traditional mouse and keyboard, proving that the force of habit is hard to break.

Yet, about a year ago, Microsoft promised something new, with the launch of its multi-touch computing table, Surface. No keyboard, no mouse—just a table with a screen. Developers quickly realized that designing for Surface is more than an exercise in coding—serious consideration has to be given to constructing a coherent user interface for a device that completely forgoes the standard mode of input that has been in use for almost half a century.

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Intel’s Linux-based Moblin platform for netbook devices has much in common with conventional Linux distributions. Intel has adopted many standard components of the Linux desktop stack and has made modifications where necessary in order to boost mobile performance and usability. Moblin’s extensive use of standard Linux components helps third-party developers because it guarantees a certain degree of portability between Moblin and regular Linux distributions.

But there are some major areas where Intel deviated substantially from the standard components and invented its own replacements. Moblin’s highly innovative top-level user interface shell is one of the most evident cases, but there are other unique pieces of desktop infrastructure not immediately visible on the surface that are equally interesting.

One of Moblin’s custom software components that has recently attracted considerable interest is its network management and configuration system. Instead of adopting NetworkManager, which is widely used by mainstream Linux distributions, Intel created its own framework called ConnMan… but not everyone is pleased with the decision.

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Avast, me hearties! Eyepatches and peg legs have swept ashore in Prague and Paris as new political pirates hope to drink grog and make scurvy copyright landlubbers walk the plank.

(Editor’s note: apologies for the embarrassing pirate prose. We have tossed the Orbiting HQ copy of Treasure Island out an airlock and hope that solves the problem.)

New pirate parties began in both France and the Czech Republic this month after Sweden’s original Piratpartiet scored a major victory in European elections and saw one of its members shuffle off to Strasbourg to join the European Parliament.

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A few years ago, Tim O’Reilly kicked off a bit of a firestorm when he suggested that there should be a blogger code of conduct and offered some helpful suggestions for items that might appear in that code. Not everyone agreed that blogging needed anything of the sort, and each of the proposed items attracted its own bit of criticism. The lack of agreement on a formal code (or even on whether such a thing should exist), however, doesn’t necessarily mean that bloggers haven’t adopted some form of informal behavioral standards. A survey of over 1,000 bloggers performed by researchers from Singapore suggests that informal codes do exist, despite the fact that bloggers themselves don’t see accountability as a major goal.

The primary hurdle for the authors was simply obtaining a survey population. Blogs tend to get abandoned with disturbing regularity, so the authors relied on blog aggregators to limit themselves to a blogger population with regular output. They did, however, exclude contributors to multiauthor blogs, which may have limited the influence of some of the most popular blogs out there. The authors also performed separate analyses on blogs that focused on personal matters (they had about 900 of these) and those that focused on issues like politics or news (another 330 blogs). To an extent, this bias might have been self-selected: if someone got into blogging to talk about themselves, it seems you might expect them to be more likely to take a survey about themselves, as well.

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Geoff Taylor, head of UK major label trade group BPI, wrote an op-ed piece for the BBC today in which he called Napster the “Rosetta Stone of digital music,” said it was “simple to understand and use,” and said that the music industry should have “embraced Napster rather than fighting it.”

While this might sound radical, it’s not actually a controversial position among major label executives anymore—a top RIAA executive said the same things to me last week at the Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial in Minnesota.

More interesting is the rationale for why such a deal never got done. If Napster was truly the “Rosetta Stone” that unlocked the mysteries of digital online distribution, why was it sued out of existence?

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The news coverage of autism is unfortunately dominated by ill-informed attempts to connect it to childhood vaccinations. Behind the hype, however, is a serious issue: diagnoses of the disorder have risen rapidly, while the biology has turned out to be complicated enough to confound early attempts to pin the underlying causes down. Still, progress is being made, and a paper published last week by PLoS Genetics provides a nice opportunity to review the consensus that appears to be emerging within the field. Recent data is reinforcing earlier findings that suggest autism is not a single disorder and doesn’t have a single underlying cause, but instead is the product of a large number of individually minor genetic contributions.

Twin studies have suggested that there is a very significant genetic contribution to autism, with monozygotic (identical) twins sharing the disorder 92 percent of the time, compared to only 10 percent of other twins. The difference in rates also suggests that more than a single gene is responsible; otherwise, the 10 percent figure would be much higher. Indeed, a variety of studies have now identified individual genes that are associated with a tendency to autism. The new study expanded on this work, using a collection of over 900 families in which more than one child has been diagnosed with autism, provided by the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange. Results were also validated against an independent collection of 859 autistic individuals, and about 2,500 healthy controls.

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Stoned wallabies blamed for crop circles: That’s one introduction that really doesn’t need any embellishment. I’ve been aware of birds getting drunk from eating partly fermented berries (with sometimes tragic results), but I’d not come across stories of animals that had moved past recreational drugs and onto the hard stuff. According to news reports, wallabies have discovered poppies, grown Down Under for medicinal purposes, and happily munch them to the point of intoxication. I’m a bit skeptical of the suggestion that their subsequent aimless wanderings create a circle in nearby crops, but I would love to see someone turn this anecdote into science by determining whether the animals deliberately seek out the poppies, or if the wallabies are just getting an incidental high.

You seem familiar—can I give you money?: The Journal of Consumer Research provides us with this fine bit of jargon: “The Persuasive Role of Incidental Similarity on Attitudes and Purchase Intentions in a Sales Context.” The focus of the paper isn’t actually on physical similarity, but trivial things such as a shared birthdate. These shared items apparently increase the probability that a consumer will purchase from the salesperson. Apparently, the effect is mediated in part by the expectation that having something shared will provide the consumer with a solid basis for a long-term service relationship. Still, it makes me wonder which similarities will work, and which won’t. Shared piercings, maybe?

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