Thanks to the new site organization, all of the science news can now be had in one place. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to check in with Nobel Intent this week, these are some of the biggest stories we covered. The world seems to be inching closer to taking concrete steps to slow and reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide that are contributing to climate change and ocean acidification. But a study explored what would happen if carbon emissions stopped. Unfortunately, it turns out the oceans have been absorbing much of the temperature increases and CO₂ emissions, and will slowly release them over the coming centuries, preventing our return to preindustrial conditions indefinitely.

While we’re on the subject of climate, a period of cold temperatures called the Little Ice Age was often credited for slowing tree growth and providing Stradivarius with excellent raw materials for his instruments. Not so, says new research; it turns out that the wood was treated with a chemical soup that was most likely intended to act as a preservative.

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This past week has been nothing but a jolly ball of fun for all concerned as the Orbital HQ underwent major renovation. Not only did we install new

shields, armor, and big honkin’ space guns, we found the time to cover a bit of hardware news as well. Here’s what you might have missed, especially if

you were digging out from under the snow and ice that hit Louisville, KY this week.

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A lot can happen on the Internet in a day, let alone seven, so we rounded up our most popular articles about the Web from the past week. CliffsNotes include the cannibalization of DVDs and Blu-ray by streaming video, Muxtape returning as a legit music showcase, and Wikipedia’s founder facing opposition for flagged revisions, but click away at the rest of our coverage to catch up.

Hands on: Jinni, a polished movie recommendation service – Semantic recommendation engines are being applied to music, movie, and TV show catalogs at an increasing rate, and Jinni is the latest entry in the space. With a unique approach to building its database, a broad catalog, and a polished site, Jinni is the most impressive offering yet. We spoke with the company and scored 500 beta invites for Ars readers.

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The recording industry is clearly not amused that the target of one of their remaining file-sharing lawsuits has not only decided to fight back, but gotten Harvard law prof Charles Nesson to defend him. While they attempt to persuade an appeals court to prevent a hearing in the case from being webcast, RIAA attorneys are also seeking sanctions against Nesson himself for a variety of alleged procedural errors they say constitute “frivolous legal action.” Can you copyright the sound of a thousand Ars readers’ irony detectors simultaneously overloading?

You’ve probably seen those seat-belt promoting highway signs that remind you to “Click it or Ticket.” Now one congressman wants to apply the same rule to cell phone cameras. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has introduced legislation that would require device makers to make it impossible to silence the sound a phone makes when a photo is taken, in hopes of deterring the sneaky, geeky, and creepy from engaging in illicit digital voyeurism.

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Users of that search engine known as Google, gate-keeper of the Universe and master of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, experienced the inconvenience of Google’s apparently fritzed Malware detector this morning. Around 9AM ET, it started labeling everything as malware, except YouTube videos which appears in search results. It didn’t last long, however. By 9:16 the problem appeared to resolve itself.

Users who attempted to click through the sites shown in the search results were met with an error page that advised the following:

Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!

Suggestions:
Return to the previous page and pick another result.
Try another search to find what you’re looking for.
Or you can continue to http://www.nytimes.com at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Google has now given an account of what happened:

Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

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Let’s look back at the week that was in Microsoft news:

Too Zune to pass judgment: a review of the Zune Marketplace. When Microsoft announced that its flagship digital media player had posted a stunning 54 percent year-over-year drop in holiday revenue, Zune-bashing officially became an Olympic sport. But, unlike us, most of the bashers haven’t spent any real time with Zune Marketplace, Microsoft’s online answer to the iTunes Store.

Antitrust clouds loom over Windows 7 at home and abroad. After a federal judge extended provisions of 2002 antitrust sanctions against Microsoft, the software giant has made efforts to comply with documentation regulations. In anticipation of Windows 7’s release, though, the Technical Committee charged with poring over Microsoft’s US submissions has promised to be even more thorough in its review.

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Even though all Apple-related content now lives under Infinite Loop in our new site design (no more “front page” and Infinite Loop split!), we know that not everyone reads every single post that pops up. Here, we’ll highlight the most popular Apple-related stories for the week for you to catch up on in case you missed them.

iPhone 2.2.1 offers improved Safari stability, Camera Roll fix: Apple’s just-released iPhone 2.2.1 update doesn’t fix a lot, but what it does fix is at least somewhat handy. Mobile Safari and the Camera Roll both get a little bit of love.

iTunes Plus drops all-or-nothing upgrades, goes a la carte: iTunes users who want to upgrade their DRMed library to iTunes Plus can now do so on a song-by-song or album-by-album basis. Apple has dropped its restriction that forced users to upgrade their entire libraries at once, but if you’re feeling lazy, you might still want to hold off.

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It’s the end of the week, and although we’re still getting used to how things work with the new site, gaming coverage is going strong. It’s time to take a look back to see what stories hit big, and what stories continue to live on via linkbacks and continual traffic.

Gaming shows record sales, but the numbers hide a dark side The gaming industry as a whole continues to enjoy immense sales, even in the face of the economic problems of the US. The problem is that these sales are localized around a few big hits, and innovation could suffer as a result.

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This was an exciting week for the KDE project, which officially launched its 4.2 release. We also got our first glimpse of Moblin 2, and Mozilla launched a new campaign in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation to improve Ogg.

Intel releases Linux-based Moblin 2 Alpha for Netbooks: The first alpha release of Intel’s Linux-based Moblin 2 platform is now available for download. It’s designed to work on Atom-based netbook devices and it offers fast boot times and a unique Internet connection manager.

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What’s this? A gadget-centric week in review? Why yes, dear readers, the new Ars Technica 5.0 redesign has brought us the dedicated coverage that gadgetry has always rightfully deserved. Our new gadget-devoted journal, Gear & Gadgets, has already had a busy inaugural week with some hot news on the latest must-have gizmos. Let’s take a look at the highlights in gadgetry from the week.

The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life.
From the moment the device was unveiled, our own Jon Stokes has been
following Palm’s robust new Pre phone intently. With CES
over and the dust settled on the surprise announcement, Jon addresses the one area of the phone
that’s likely to mar it: the battery life.

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Both Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android G1 have been out for a while now. We’ve given you our own takes on each of the devices and how they stack up in an increasingly-competitive marketplace. But we’re not the only ones with some strong opinions.

Our great community members in the Mobile Computing Outpust have been pooling their collective thoughts on the devices, and so we thought now would be a good time to bring back Perspectives. In Perspectives, we let the forum community do the talking to see how our knowledgeable readers are responding to today’s tech. Let’s take a look at what our community members had to say about the iPhone and the G1.

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Thursday, we checked in on the case of Avery Doninger, the former Connecticut high school student who was barred from seeking reelection to her student council seat after calling school administrators “douchebags” in a LiveJournal post. As we noted, a federal court has ruled that, given the fuzzy state of the law concerning the scope of school authority over online student speech, Doninger can’t press her First Amendment claim for damages against those who punished her. She plans to appeal that decision, but one state legislator has already declared his intention to introduce a bill establishing separation of blog and state.

According to the Journal-Inquirer, a local paper, former high school teacher Gary LeBeau, who sits on the state’s General Assembly, will seek to create a “bright line” between speech produced on school computers or sent over school networks—which falls within the school’s disciplinary purview—and private speech merely concerning the school. The court had found such a line lacking because “[o]ff-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse.”

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The scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) has provided scientists and engineers with the ability to directly manipulate individual atoms. That ability has famously allowed engineers to produce the smallest writing that was thought to be possible: individual atoms lined up to spell out, among other things, the name IBM. Now, researchers from Stanford University have one-upped their peers in private industry by manipulating molecules so that they created a hologram based on interference of electron energy states. Using this technique, they created a single hologram that projects Stanford’s S and U in the smallest letters ever written.

Holograms are based on interference patterns—when anything that travels as a wave interacts with a similar wave, the two create areas of where the peaks and troughs enhance or cancel each other. In a standard optical hologram, the waves are light, and an appropriately prepared medium will direct the interference so that it projects brighter and darker areas into a three-dimensional space. But, as we noted, it’s the ability to undergo interference that matters, meaning similar techniques would work with something other than light.

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The only thing better than setting up red light cameras and watching the cash flow in is doing so without collecting the required data to prove that the cameras are useful and accurate. Right? Okay, maybe not so much. This is, however, the situation unfolding in Denver, Colorado, where a local newspaper’s detective work has revealed that the contractor hired by the city to manage the cameras has failed to submit contractually-required documentation. What’s more, the city wasn’t even asking for it.

Redflex Traffic Systems of Scottsdale, Arizona is the contractor responsible for installing the red light cameras in Denver, which went into use during the summer of 2008. At the time of the contract, the city of Denver mandated that Redflex maintain and submit data on how well the cameras work at catching red light runners, and said that Redflex would have to reimburse the city if the system operated below 98 percent accuracy.

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If Google results are any indication, there are a lot of folks out there calling their teachers “douchebags” on LiveJournal. If any of them live in Connecticut, though, they may want to consider taking those journals private in light of a federal court ruling issued earlier this month, which upheld the right of public school administrators to discipline a student for speech on her personal blog.

Ars first covered the case of Avery Doninger—at the time a recent graduate of Lewis S. Mills High School—this past summer. Following a dust-up with school administrators about the possible cancellation of a repeatedly-postponed student concert, Doninger fumed on her LiveJournal about the “douchebags in central office” and urged her fellow students to call or e-mail said douchebags in order to express their displeasure. (The post asserted that the concert had, in fact, been canceled, though school officials say Doninger was wrong about this.) When the school retaliated by barring Doninger from running for reelection to her seat on the student council, Doninger sought to force a rerun, claiming violation of her First Amendment rights. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declined to do so, however, noting that schools enjoy greater discretion in limiting participation in extracurricular activities than in (say) inflicting punishments like expulsion, and ruling that the post was subject to school authority because it had “a reasonably foreseeable risk [of coming] to the attention of school authorities.”

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The economy is tanking. The United States is well over a dozen notches down the global scale when it comes to broadband penetration. What does Republican Commissioner Robert M. McDowell want to talk about? The Fairness Doctrine. The commish acknowledges that, during Obama’s presidential campaign, the candidate said that he would not enforce this deservedly dead rule, but apparently that promise is not enough.

As President, the Obama administration now has “a terrific opportunity to enunciate its strong opposition to anything resembling the Doctrine,” McDowell advised during his address before the Media Institute on Wednesday.

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With Killzone 2 on the horizon, Sony is gearing up for a strong first quarter with at least one killer app. Fittingly, Microsoft intends to answer back with a new Halo title in the first big blockbuster battle of the new year. But that Halo title is decidedly different than what fans of the series might be expecting: it is, after all, Halo Wars, an real-time strategy (RTS) game based on the famed first-person shooter (FPS) franchise.

The transition in genres sounds awkward at first blush, but we’ve spent the night playing through an early taste test of the title—the first stretch of true hands-on time with the game that we’ve gotten—and, surprisingly, it holds up pretty well. As far as staying true to the Halo source material, fans of the series will likely eat up this title as they have the previous ones. But the question is this: can Microsoft repeat the success of the series’ titles with an RTS?

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Media organizations and public interest groups Thursday filed “friend of the court” briefs in the Joel Tenenbaum file-swapping case, supporting a judge’s earlier decision to allow some video from the case to be streamed live over the Internet.

Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student, is represented by Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson and a group of law students. Nesson has pushed for the entire trial to be streamed online, though Judge Nancy Gertner initially agreed only to broadcast a single hearing. The feed would come from cameras already installed in the courtroom and would be available to anyone from the Harvard’s Berkman Center. (Other sites would also be free to host the stream.)

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The US is beginning to lose its scientific dominance. That’s
the message from Thomson Reuters, the people behind EndNote and impact factors.
According to a report in their publication ScienceWatch, the US’ science
output is in a shallow decline at the same time that Asia is in the ascendancy.

If it sounds like you’ve heard that before, you’ve been
paying attention. Back in 2006 the National Science Foundation’s biennial
Science and Engineering Indicators report said the same thing, only to be
repeated again last year. The Thomson Reuters data builds on the numbers in the
NSF report, showing that the US research base is shrinking relative to an Asia
that’s steadily investing in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as a way to modernize.

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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which produces low-cost education laptops to sell to governments in developing countries, is facing some major financial challenges. The group recently downsized half of its staff in an effort to reorganize and increase operating efficiency. Project founder Nicholas Negroponte revealed on Thursday that the move was partly necessitated by the failure of OLPC’s Give 1 Get 1 (G1G1) initiative. He has also shed some light on a new strategy that could help the organization make a turnaround.

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With the many institutional problems in the US, including underfunded schools, huge deficits in major cities, and a growing unemployment rate, you’d think legislators would have better things to do than try to regulate video games. Again. In New York, Assemblyman Brian Kolb has introduced a bill to add new warning tags to video games. He also wants to force every store to demo games rated 18+ by the state, not to mention keep those games in a locked container in the store.

“Concern about violent video games is based upon the assumption that they contribute to aggression and violence among young players,” the bill claims. “The legislature finds that scientific evidence shows a cause-effect relationship between television violence and aggression among children who watch such violence and aggression. Based upon this research, similar findings are expected concerning video games.”

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MIDs, or Mobile Internet Devices, have never been hotter, and there are two open-source handhelds slated to land this year that could very well win over quite a few consumers. GamePark’s GP2X Wiz, which will be hitting stores soon, looks to be a capable gaming unit as well as an open source machine, but it’s OpenPandora’s Pandora handheld that has most gadget-lovers salivating. Though it once seemed to be potential vaporware, the Pandora team has let word slip that the product is edging closer to release.

Claiming that 2009 “will surely be the year of the Pandora,” the design team behind the desirable open-source device has posted a new video of the now-fabricated and assembled unit. Though the current build is still missing its internal components, the team ensures those awaiting the device that the project is coming together and has posted an “unofficial estimated” launch date of April 7.

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Blizzard notched another victory in its legal campaign against World of Warcraft bots when a judge on Wednesday ruled that a leading bot violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. MDY Industries LLC, the firm that develops and sells the Glider bot, already suffered a major setback last summer when the judge granted Blizzard summary judgment on several key issues. This week’s decision deals with the issues the judge believed could not be decided until the conclusion of this month’s trial. The judge ruled that Glider violated the DMCA’s ban on “circumvention devices,” and he also found that MDY’s founder, Michael Donnelly, was personally liable for the actions of his firm.

As we’ve noted before, Blizzard’s legal arguments, which Judge David G. Campbell largely accepted, could have far-reaching and troubling implications for the software industry. Donnelly is not the most sympathetic defendant, and some users may cheer the demise of a software vendor that helps users break the rules of Blizzard’s wildly popular role playing game. But the sweeping language of Judge Campbell’s decision, combined with his equally troubling decision last summer, creates a lot of new uncertainty for software vendors seeking to enter software markets dominated by entrenched incumbents and achieve interoperability with legacy platforms.

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Gamers who tried to play Gears of War on the PC Thursday ran into a slight snag: it seems that the digital certificate that allows the game to run expired on January 28, 2009. Basically that means if you keep your PC’s clock up to date, you can no longer play the game. The official Epic forum is ablaze with complaints about this issue, as the still-kicking community becomes enraged.

“I had this problem this evening, I had to change the date and time (from PM to AM) and I am able to get in just fine,” one frustrated gamer posted. “I also changed it back to the current date and time and it didn’t work. Change it back to yesterday AM and it works fine… EPIC games won’t be on my list anytime soon….”

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After Microsoft had difficulty complying with some antitrust sanctions imposed in 2002, a federal court judge extended some provisions into 2009. The software giant is making good on providing more thorough documentation, but the Technical Committee (TC) charged with reviewing it is scrutinizing it more closely in anticipation of Windows 7’s release.

Federal court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly decided last year to extend the documentation provisions of the 2002 antitrust consent decree agreement placed on Microsoft. Through the years, Microsoft has either not provided sufficient documentation, not met deadlines, or made changes to reporting schedules before discussing them with the committee, so Kollar-Kotelly’s extension keeps the TC in place into 2009.

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Microsoft has announced plans to release the code of its Web Sandbox project under the open source Apache Software License. This move reflects Microsoft’s growing interest in contributing to interoperable standards-based Web technologies and also demonstrates the company’s willingness to adopt well-established open source licenses for its own projects.

The Web Sandbox project aims to mitigate some of the security risks that are associated with building Web mashups that mix in untrusted content from third-party sources. The task of isolating untrusted code poses some complex technical challenges. Web Sandbox is one of several ongoing research projects that are implementing experimental solutions. It is similar in function to Google’s Caja project.

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Cable operator Charter Communications has just thrown down the gauntlet in the US Internet speed wars, offering a new 60Mbps download tier that makes it the fastest mainstream offering in the country. But users who want this sort of speed had better be prepared to pay up—Charter wants $140 a month for it.

The company is rolling out the DOCSIS 3.0 speed upgrades only in St. Louis at the moment, though it is also bumping other Charter subscribers with 16Mbps connections up to a new 20Mbps tier.

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Generation Y enjoys the widespread stereotype as being the official Internet Generation, but it turns out those stinking kids don’t own everything online. Generation Xers, Baby Boomers, and even “G.I.” folks dominate their own niches when it comes to the online world, according to a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Gen Y (also known as Millennials) make up the largest single group in the Internet-using population—30 percent—and more than half of the adult Internet population is between the ages of 18 and 44. However, Pew notes that surveys taken in 2006 and 2008 indicate that other groups are growing rapidly, with the largest increase in Internet use coming from the 70 to 75-year-old age group.

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The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has released three final specifications for hardware-level data encryption, and virtually all the major storage

manufacturers have declared that they intend to adopt the new standards in the near future. Self-encrypted disks are already available on the market—

Seagate has been actively pushing its DriveTrust technology for several years—but there was no central standard for drive encryption developers to

refer to. The two new encryption standards provide a blueprint for desktop, laptops, and enterprise-level protection, while the third (dubbed the

Storage Interface Interactions Specification) details how self-encrypted drives should interact with various communication protocols.

These new encryption methods do not require the presence of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), but it’s hard to imagine why an OEM would bother to build

a system using self-encrypting hard drives and not include one. The TCG expects self-encrypting drives (and presumably TPM modules) to become

ubiquitous across the enterprise/business market over the next few years. “With 48 states and many countries enforcing data protection laws, it has

become crucial for enterprises to protect all data to avoid fines, lawsuits or even being put out of business. Encryption with authentication directly

in the drive or enterprise storage devices as outlined in the Trusted Computing Group specifications is one of the most effective ways to ensure data

is secure against virtual and physical attacks,” noted Jon Oltsik, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

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Recently, Sony gave a preview of its third quarter earnings that set the stage for a grim set of final figures. Those figures were released Thursday, on the same day that Nintendo unveiled the results of its sales during the third quarter. Although both companies are facing the same problems when it comes to general economic conditions, Nintendo seems set to stay in the black regardless, and it’s worth taking a look at why.

The most fundamental problem that both companies face is that much of their income comes from overseas sales, and the Yen has strengthened considerably against many currencies as people flock to its relative stability. That means that all of the overseas revenue is diluted in value when it’s converted to Yen on its return to the company.

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Google Earth has proven useful for a plethora of things—finding your house from space, checking out islands in the Pacific Ocean, and now, finding massive fields of weed. At least that’s what happened in Switzerland, when Swiss police managed to come across a “large marijuana plantation” while using Google’s popular software.

(We’ll pause while fans of Mary Jane fire up Google Earth.)

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The UK has officially announced its intention to legislate a “graduated response” system for P2P copyright infringement, though it sounds remarkably balanced compared to some proposals; the government insists that the “availability of legal content in the forms that consumers want” is actually the most important step content owners can take to address the problem. Disconnection of users without a court order appears not to be on the table, either.

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Few games of this entire console generation are has highly-anticipated as Final Fantasy XIII. As one of the biggest entries in the series and the first multi-platform one (not counting the online-only Final Fantasy XI), Final Fantasy XIII has an almost incalculable amount of hype to live up to. While the game still remains largely shrouded in mystery, Square-Enix has released some clear gameplay footage from the game which showcases the new battle system.

Wednesday, Square-Enix released a new trailer for the much-anticipated game on the game’s official website, showcasing for the first time actual, watchable gameplay footage. The company’s fans will note that this typically marks a significant milestone for the development of a Final Fantasy game, as Square-Enix has long been protective of its games’ battle systems.

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It hasn’t even been a month since Apple told the world that DRM on music sold in the iTunes Store would be going the way of the dodo and that all DRM-restricted music that we had purchased up until now could be upgraded to iTunes Plus—for a fee. And not just the $0.30 per track fee it costs to upgrade each song.

As our own Erica Sadun pointed out after the announcement, upgrading your iTunes DRMed tracks was an all or nothing deal; either you upgrade everything in your library, including those embarrassing Katy Perry songs that you bought while on a regrettable cough syrup bender, or none of your music at all.

Erica wasn’t the only one who brought up that concern, and thankfully, it seems as if Apple has listened to the feedback. As of today, users can upgrade their songs to iTunes Plus on a song-by-song basis.

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Back at the start of the month, when most of us were presumably focused on recovering from New Years festivities, Science released a perspective that discussed the role of games and other media in the development of cognitive skills. There is little doubt that the majority of kids are now immersed in an environment that’s rich in visual media, from television to online content, which represents a major shift from the developmental environment experienced by earlier generations. The perspective points out that this is clearly going to impact the skills people develop as they mature, and argues that we should be making adjustments for that.

The perspective was authored by Patricia Greenfield of UCLA, and she begins by emphasizing the role of what she terms “informal education.” Although this will include basic language and social skills, as well as factual information, Greenfield emphasizes that informal learning often involves the development of learning skills themselves. With the frequent use of educational DVDs and television programs, children are becoming adept at processing visual media and incorporating it into their educational process. Not surprisingly, this change has consequences for intellectual development.

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It has always been easy to beat up on Microsoft’s Zune, but when the company announced last week that sales of the media player plummeted 54 percent year-over-year during the holiday shopping season, the entire internet piled on. The Zune-bashing reached epic proportions, as pundit after pundit called for Microsoft to axe the entire Zune division.

Given its poor sales numbers, we can safely say that most of Zune’s critics have never used the device, and even fewer of them have really spent any serious time with Zune’s online music store. But we have used it, and, what’s more, we like it. iTunes Music Store could learn a thing or two from Zune Marketplace, and if Microsoft does end up dropping Zune then the digital music ecosystem will be worse off for it.

We reviewed the original Zune in 2006, the Zune Flash in 2007, and the 3G Zune released last September, and in this review, we’ll take a look at the software side of the Zune experience. By the end of the review, we hope you’ll agree that there’s more at stake in the survival of Zune than just another Microsoft vs. Apple platform war.

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In an attempt to steer Internet users’ attention away from P2P and toward legal movie options, the UK Film Council has launched a new site called FindAnyFilm.com. The website searches across all kinds of media—from theater showings to DVD to online streams to digital downloads—in order to present users with as many legal ways to watch a particular movie as possible. And, although the Film Council is dripping with overly-positive praise for its own product, the site is actually pretty useful, as long as the movies are actually available in any of those formats.

"Film fans’ lives have just been revolutionised," says the UK Film Council, with the launch of the "ground-breaking" FindAnyFilm.com. The site contains film records for some 30,000 movies—approximately seven years’ worth of films—and is apparently expanding on a daily basis. The site allows users to search by various genres, moods, locations, or keywords, and can even find films in 60 different languages.

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European chipmaker STMicroelectronics released its fourth quarter numbers today, and, of course, they were very grim. Unfortunately, at this point, even very grim Q4 numbers aren’t news, nor are the 4,500 jobs that the company announced it would cut. But what does still make headlines are credible predictions of a massive contraction in the global semiconductor market, and that’s exactly what STMicro’s CEO delivered.

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One of Ireland’s largest ISPs, Eircom, has capitulated to the major music labels and agreed to implement a full “graduated response” program—complete with disconnections. Users get two warnings regarding file-sharing, and a third violation brings down the banhammer. The music industry has already said that it intends to pursue the same agreement with Ireland’s other ISPs.

The dispute began some time ago when the Irish branches of EMI, Warner, Universal, and Sony filed suit against Eircom. They charged that the ISP was essentially aiding and abetting piracy by doing things like advertising its services on The Pirate Bay, and the labels believed they could get a judge to force the ISP to install network monitoring equipment.

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It’s nice to see that someone at the White House is reading the work of privacy maven Chris Soghoian. Less than a day after Chris drew attention to a special YouTube exemption in the privacy policy for WhiteHouse.gov—permitting YouTube to plant tracking cookies on visitors’ machines—the president’s virtual home made some rapid changes. 

First, they implemented what amounts to a homegrown version of EFF’s MyTube tool, so that only those who actually click on the video, rather than all who visit the page, get cookified. Soon thereafter, they amended the posted privacy policy to refer to “third party providers” generically, rather than signaling a special status for YouTube. Still, the fuss prompted the Electronic Frontier Foundation to write to White House lawyers seeking more information about how an administration fond of touting the transformative power of tech would work to protect the privacy of visitors to government sites.

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When the Palm Pre hits the streets sometime this year, geeks and ordinary mobile users alike will finally get to touch the magic, which is great, because we certainly weren’t touching any magic at CES. We got to look, but Palm was pretty adamant about not letting anyone who wasn’t a Palm employee get their mitts on it. This is understandable, because the demo units were clearly more “mock-up” than true “demo.”

A lot—perhaps even the majority—of the Pre’s functionality was missing or not working reliably, and many features were only “working” in the sense of “if I press these three buttons at once it triggers a fake incoming SMS from ‘Jim Coworker’ about that party on Friday.” But we all went along with it, because those mockups were so great to look at. Nonetheless, the whole experience left me wondering, “so when this comes out, what are we going to realize is wrong with it?”

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It is now nearly five months after Apple originally said it would release push notifications for the iPhone, a service that would allow third parties to send instant SMS-style alerts to their applications on the device. A few iPhone OS updates and many scratched heads later, this feature’s utility and Apple’s silence on its whereabouts are once again in the limelight. But to discuss iPhone push notifications, we should recap what they actually are and what they mean for the iPhone as a platform.

Announced at WWDC 2008 with the iPhone 3G, push notifications were sold by Steve Jobs as a compromise between allowing third-party apps to run in the background and conserving battery life and performance. While the iPhone is very much a powerful and pocketable phone, it is still a far cry from being a multi-tasking monster that many modern notebook-slinging power users wish it was. Push notifications are indeed a major step towards meeting in the middle, but Apple may need to spend more time to chew all that it bit off.

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Intel has announced the availability of the first Moblin 2 alpha release. Moblin is an open source Linux-based platform that Intel is developing for Atom-based mobile devices. The company hopes to attract a community of third-party developers to contribute to the platform and target it with their applications. Moblin has already been adopted by several Linux distributors, including Linpus, GoS, and Mandriva. These distributors plan to build custom derivatives on top of the Moblin core.

The new alpha release is primarily intended for netbooks, and it is being provided to facilitate broader testing of some of Intel’s enhancements. It is still at a very early stage of development, however, and its final user interface is still far from complete.

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“Measure twice, cut once,” says the old carpenter’s adage, and what’s good for framing a house turns out to be important for tech policy as well. Without better knowledge of what’s actually happening on the collection of networks we call the Internet, researchers and policy makers are operating from a position of ignorance. But getting that sort of network data has, to date, been tough to do.

Google’s Vint Cerf, one of the men behind TCP/IP, hopes to make it easier. Cerf Wednesday will announce at a Washington, DC event a new project launched by Google, the New America Foundation (which Google supports), and PlanetLab (which Google also helps support) designed to make distributed network management easy to do, and the data from such projects easy to share. Ars spoke with Google and the New America Foundation about the effort.

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The joint venture involving Viacom, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM), and Lions Gate Entertainment will be launching online as “epix” before it arranges a TV distribution deal, the companies have revealed. The venture, called Studio 3 Networks, said that the online service will provide original TV programming as well as on-demand movies over the Internet, with a distribution deal on cable networks expected to come later in the year.

Studio 3 Networks president Mark Greenberg said that the name epix embodies the “depth and breath of entertainment content” that the companies will deliver, and is also meant to evoke the different ways customers will eventually interact with the content on multiple platforms. “With epix, we are creating an entirely new category of entertainment service for consumers that is unlike anything that currently exists,” Greenberg said in a statement. “epix is the first brand to hold exclusive exhibition rights to movie content that can be delivered anywhere, anytime.”

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Broadcasters and viewers have had February 17, 2009 circled on their calendars for some time. That’s the day analog television broadcasts are supposed to become a thing of the past in the US. Earlier this week, the Senate approved a delay of the DTV transition to June, but what’s going to happen now is anyone’s guess after the House rejected the delay Wednesday.

The delay was actually supported by 258 congressmen, but House rules require a two-thirds majority for an expedited vote with no debate.

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Last November, Intel filed an appeal with the European Union’s Court of First Instance arguing that the Directorate General for Competition (DG-COMP)

had improperly and prejudicially pursued its ongoing investigation into allegations that the company had abused its dominant market position to the

detriment of its competitor, AMD. That court has now returned a lengthy decision rejecting all of Intel’s arguments, annulment requests, and pleas for

financial relief.

We covered Intel’s request and the difference between the legal system of the EU and that of the US in some detail last month; anyone with questions

about how the EU conducts its investigations or the framework under which AMD’s antitrust complaint is being investigated across the pond should start

there. The Court of First Instance’s response today clarifies the timing of and details of certain events, as discussed below.

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When finances get tough, people tend to stay inside. An NPR report claimed that restaurant receipts are down, but sales of alcohol in liquor stores has gone up. The lesson? A recession makes people more likely to drink at home instead of going out, and 2008 video game sales seem to suggest consumers are having a game with their cocktail; gaming enjoyed record sales in 2008.

While people are traveling less and holding off on large purchases, games are proving to be a popular pass-time. Game sales, including both games and systems, reached $22 billion in 2008, a 22.9 percent jump over 2007. These numbers show a number of trends, as well as a rapidly growing industry: in December sales reached $5 billion for the first time in a single month. In 1997, the industry barely sold over $5 billion in the entire year.

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Michael Copps is only the interim chair of the Federal Communications Commission, to be replaced by White House pick Julius Genachowski if everything goes according to plan. But, judging by the comments made to the agency’s staff on Monday, the FCC’s senior Democrat clearly has no interest in playing bench warmer until then. Copps’ remarks should be read as a call for the Commission to begin reforming itself, becoming more open and useful to the public, or the “stakeholders,” as he calls the public.

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These days it seems like developers are taking the addition of co-op content in their games seriously. We’re not just talking about some thrown-together levels, either—when Valve released Left 4 Dead to the world, the game was designed from the ground up to be played with three friends.

Even the venerable Resident Evil series has taken a turn for the co-op. The Xbox Live demo of Resident Evil 5 plays best when you have a good friend shooting the zombies with you, and Capcom told us directly at CES 2009 that co-op was the “recommended” way to play the game. A large part of the success of Gears of War 2 can be found online, as gamers team up to play the campaign and kill wave after wave of the Locust in Horde mode.

The problem is that some gamers claim they don’t have friends they can play with, or they simply can’t get a game together. That excuse holds no water with the tools available today.

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