Out of nowhere, one of the biggest announcements this week was the news that the PSP is getting three new high-profile games. They could end up being ports—something that has plagued the system for years, but it’s a start to reviving the handheld as a gaming system first, instead of just a portable movie player.

What you might have missed.

• Microsoft responds to Xbox Live denial-of-service attack. Microsoft says Xbox 360 owners affected by denial-of-service attacks should contact their Internet provider, although they promise to ban any and all hackers. 
• Microsoft defends banning Lesbian Xbox Live user. Company tells Ars that gay or straight, discussion of your sexual orientation in your profile is verboten, but is “don’t ask, don’t tell” the answer?
• A Spartan strategy: Ars reviews Halo Wars. Halo Wars brings the world of Halo into the RTS genre, with better-than-expected results. But with a short campaign that features only the Marine faction, this isn’t all that it could have been. 
• GameStop defends used game sales. GameStop wants the game industry to see it as a powerful ally, but used games simply make more money than new ones. Will it ever be welcome by the industry?
• Sony puts PSP on comeback trail with LittleBigPlanet, more. New Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, and LittleBigPlanet announcements are more than enough to get gamers excited about the system again. 

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This week’s top Apple news was, unsurprisingly, highlighted by Apple’s release of the Safari 4 beta. But even though people can’t seem to get enough talk about the new browser, that’s not all this week was about. Read on if you need to catch up:

Hands on: Safari 4 beta fast, mixes polish, rough UI edges: Apple on Tuesday released Safari 4 beta, a new version of its browser for Mac OS X and Windows. This update brings a bunch of new features, including a flashy new Top Sites view, a completely redesigned Windows UI, and support for some impressive emerging Web standards. Ars separates the style from the substance.

Opening the package and peeking under the hood of Safari 4: Ars took a look at the Safari 4 application bundle and discovered several interesting (if not groundshaking) components. Here’s what’s going on under Safari’s hood.

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We brought you lots of coverage this week from the Southern California Linux Expo. We took a look at some of the impressive features in Firefox 3.1, examined how patents and cloud computing impact software freedom, and gave you a detailed overview of the Android mobile platform.

Mozilla demos impressive Firefox 3.1 features at SCALE: Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard demonstrated the latest innovations in standards-based Web development technology during a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo.

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Hardware news was surprisingly lively this last week of February. If you were focused on the run-up to Obama’s State of the Union address or Governor Bobby

Jindal’s “response,” you just might’ve missed some interesting back-and-forth. At Ars we aim to please, so here’s a snapshot of the hot topics of the past

seven days.

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The music discovery market is heating up, and Web-based service Mufin has just unveiled a standalone music player to better compete with iTunes’ Genius feature, Pandora, and the rest of its opposition. The Mufin Player wraps the company’s self-professed unique music discovery tools into a typical desktop media player, so Ars donned some headphones to compare Mufin’s engine to the current kings of music exploration.

Currently only available for Windows XP and Vista, the Mufin Player does exactly what one would expect on first run—it begins scanning the local drive for music to import (an iTunes import tool can bring along your playlists as well). Once the process is done, you are then presented with a fairly standard music player UI, and Mufin’s discovery tools—based on what are now fairly common criteria like rhythm, tempo, sound density, and instrumentation—get to discovering. Start playing a track, and a “Similar Music” bar above the player controls will present similar tracks either from Mufin’s database or from your own library. Throwing a bit of a wrench into the experience, however, is that clicking to find out more about an artist or purchase a track (if that is even possible) opens up a window of your default browser—not a different area of the Mufin Player.

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Two UK mobile operators are reportedly fuming at Nokia for including a mobile version of Skype on its N97 handset. Both Orange and O2 are so terrified that the popular VoIP service will siphon away profitable cell minutes by allowing users to make free calls that they are supposedly threatening not to carry the device unless Skype is removed.

The outrage is going on behind closed doors for the time being, though it’s hardly surprising, given the power that carriers have traditionally had over handset manufacturers. They don’t like customers having options that the handset maker wants to offer when they believe it might threaten their bottom line—even if they ultimately benefit consumers.

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Canada’s telecoms regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is in the midst of a network neutrality proceeding, and the responses that rolled in this week were vociferous. Several ISPs and music groups objected to any such rules, arguing that they might stop ISPs from implementing all sorts of wonderful policies such as P2P upload throttling, website blocking, and graduated response rules.

One of the more interesting responses came from an ISP called Videotron, which told the CRTC that controlling access to content “peut être bénéfique non seulement pour les utilisateurs de services Internet mais pour la société en général”—that is, “could be beneficial not only to users of Internet services but to society in general.”

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Earlier this year, an aging, defunct Russian Space Forces satellite,
Kosmos 2251, collided over Siberia with the US-based Iridium
Satellite, LLC‘s Iridium 33. The collision happened around noon Eastern time on February 11th. It destroyed the two satellites and left a new cloud of space debris in
an already overcrowded orbital neighborhood. This area is already thoroughly
littered, thanks, in part, to China’s decision to target one of its own
weather satellites with an anti-satellite weapon. Within a day
of the collision, the US space tracking systems had identified hundreds of individual pieces of debris.

When the two satellites collided, they were each traveling at a speed
of around 17,000mph relative to the Earth, and nearly 22,000mph relative to one another. The collision occurred over
northern Siberia (72.52 ^oN, 97.39 ^oE) at an altitude of 490 miles. Given
the limitations of the US space tracking system—it can only
reliably track debris particles greater than 5 to 10cm (2 to 4 inches)—it is hard to know exactly how much debris this
collision
has generated. To date, there have been 352 items identified
as coming from this collision.

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Creative Commons has officially launched a Web tool to aid content creators who want to publish material under the highly permissive CC0 license. The tool, which has been under development for over a year, has now reached 1.0 status and is accessible from the Creative Commons website.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by legal scholar and intellectual property reform advocate Lawrence Lessig to provide a legal framework for the free culture movement. Creative Commons offers a spectrum of copyright licenses that enable content creators to concede intellectual property rights to varying degrees in order to encourage third-party use of creative works. The organization has also developed technical tools that can be used to apply licensing metadata to digital content and to find material that is available under Creative Commons licenses.

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Nokia’s Comes With Music subscription plan that offers “millions of tracks for free” with the purchase of a handset will soon branch out across various oceans this year. Originally launched in the UK, Australia will see compatible handsets arrive in March, while Nokia now tells Ars that it will hit US shores “sometime in 2009.”

Nokia turned some heads way back in December 2007 when it first announced Comes With Music, a new kind of subscription model that ties music and the subscription itself to a cell phone. “Unlimited” downloads for a year from Nokia’s 4 million-strong music store catalog are offered “for free,” with the cost of the subscription being worked into the price of the phone.

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The Federal Communications Commission has launched a comment cycle on a petition asking for reform of the DTV receiver patent license sharing system. The Coalition United to Terminate Financial Abuses of the Television Transition (that’s right: CUT FATT), charges that American digital television makers are getting gouged by unmonitored patent licensing. That means higher DTV prices at the retail level.

“Licensors in the United States operate freely in an un-regulated ‘Wild West’ without supervision or accountability,” the January 2 petition charges. “As a result, American consumers pay $20 to $30 per television for intellectual property rights that cost about $1 elsewhere in the world.”

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At this week’s VMworld Europe 2009 conference in Cannes, VMware execs took the stage to demonstrate how the company’s mobile hypervisor technology can let users run Windows CE 6.0 and Android on the same mobile device. In this case, the device was a Nokia N800 internet tablet, and it took advantage of the company’s Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), announced in early November, to squeeze the two competing mobile OSes onto the same ARM-based device.

UK-based IT PRO Magazine was there and captured some video of the device in action, and from a performance perspective the OSes look usable but not exactly spectacular. My guess is that a combination of software tweaking and better hardware would turn this from a single into a triple, and possibly even a home run.

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While the bizarre antics and odd courtroom proceedings of The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden have dominated news recently, another high-profile file-sharing case on this side of the Atlantic has generated plenty of recent craziness, too. And this is craziness of a special breed—how many federal trials involve a defense attorney who previously represented the judge, appeals to the Department of Justice to intervene, a lengthy hearing about whether a trial can be webcast to the world, and a judicial admonition to lawyers about taping each other’s conversations?

Graduate student Joel Tenenbaum faces nearly a million dollars in possible fines after being sued by the RIAA. After first defending himself, federal judge Nancy Gertner hooked Tenenbaum up with Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School. Nesson then deputized his law students to do most of the work in the case (see our in-depth profile of them). This was all atypical enough, but the case quickly got much weirder.

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Amazon’s first-generation Kindle e-book reader was a frustrating
device. The promise of an always-on connection to a vast e-book library
and a decent book reading experience was ultimately diminished by
design and interface decisions that were mystifying, and the whole
package came with a set of additional features that performed so poorly
that they detracted from any warm feelings generated by the central
book-reading experience. In the time since Kindle’s launch, Amazon has
been as forthcoming about its plans for the reader as the NSA is about
its monitoring capabilities, leaving lots of open questions about
whether it even agreed with reviewers that there were problems with the
device.

But actions speak louder than words, and now that the Kindle 2 is
out, it’s clear that Amazon was listening. We’ve had a chance to spend
some time with Amazon’s next-generation book reader, and nearly
every aspect of the device is a big step up from the first version.
There’s little that’s truly new about Kindle 2, but the result of the
evolutionary changes is far more than the sum of its parts: Amazon has
made a good device, and in the process, shown that it has what it takes
to make an even better one.

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This whole netbook thing is rapidly getting out of hand, and we’re fast approaching a situation where every last company (including ODMs) in any corner of the PC or mobile space will have jumped on the netbook bandwagon. A case in point is Nokia, which, faced with tanking revenues in its high-margin handset business, is making ever-louder noises about getting into laptops.

In an interview with Finnish TV summarized by Reuters, Nokia didn’t appear to use the n-word (we haven’t seen a full transcript, though), but there was plenty of talk of PCs and mobiles converging, and how Nokia is “looking very actively” at this convergence. The question that the report leaves open is “what kind of ‘laptop’ is Nokia considering?”

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The fact that the increasingly social Internet allows “the conversation” to spread across comments, Twitter posts, and news aggregators is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it is a wonderful thing to be able to enjoy and discuss content with a community in just about any way you can imagine. Publishers and enthusiasts, however, are still scrambling to keep up with and follow what others are saying about their content across all these services. uberVU, a new service in private beta, may finally be what we have all been looking for, so Ars sat down to track some conversations and have one of our own with cofounder Vladimir OANE.

UberVU’s concept is simple: give it a URL for a story you like (or one you have published), and it will chomp through a broad selection of services like Twitter, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, and WordPress to find what people are saying about the story. UberVU follows through most URL-shortening services to make sure it is tracking the right comments, and you can label and sort the stories that you follow. In short, UberVU is a bit like an RSS reader, except in the inverse: instead of tracking multiple news stories from a single source (or searching them), it tracks what the rest of the world is saying about a particular story.

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The commercialization of the malware industry is a major trend we at Ars have followed, but the Web Hacking Incident Database (WHID)’s 2008 annual

report indicates that economics remains but one factor among many. Unlike most security reports, WHID samples a very small group of real-world, nonrandom

attacks. There were 57 such incidents in 2008, 49 in 2007, and a total of 294 from 1999-2008. The organization changed its inclusion criteria in 2006; the

current report only includes data from 2007 as reference material.

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The Authors Guild has come in for a fair amount of ridicule since their executive director, Paul Aiken, claimed that the speech-to-text feature of Amazon’s new Kindle 2 violated copyright law, telling the Wall Street Journal: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud.” On Wednesday, Guild president Roy Blount Jr. took to the pages of The New York Times to defend his group’s much-mocked position, arguing that the device would “swindle” penurious writers out of precious audiobook revenue. Whether or not you think that’s likely, however, probing the Guild’s objections reveals one more way that advancing technology may blur traditional categories in copyright law.

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The Senate today adopted a ban on the Fairness Doctrine—a much-maligned FCC policy from the 1940s through the 1980s that forced broadcasters using public airwaves to offer multiple points of view on controversial topics.

The ban passed 87-11 as an amendment to a voting rights bill for the District of Columbia. The amendment in question was introduced by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and would have done two things: banned the Fairness Doctrine and also prevented the FCC from passing any “public interest” rules of programming quotas.

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Fighting harassment in the online world is a tricky problem, as is dealing with a diverse community. Sony found this out firsthand when there was a backlash against Home, its free online service, when it was discovered that the very words “gay” and “Jew” were deemed too offensive to be uttered. Now Xbox Live is in the spotlight, as a woman was banned, and harassed, simply for noting she was a lesbian in her profile.

“I had a similar incident,” the woman wrote to the Consumerist, after reading about a man banned for having the word “gay” in his profile. “Only my account was suspended because I had said in my profile that I was a lesbian. I was harassed by several players, ‘chased’ to different maps/games to get away from their harassment. They followed me into the games and told all the other players to turn me in because they didn’t want to see that crap or their kids to see that crap.”

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Today’s Digital Music Forum East conference in New York started off with a talk by Jim Griffin, who is working with Warner Music to launch a new project that goes by the name Choruss. Choruss is designed to provide campuses with blanket licenses to music based on the model of current collecting societies. Details on the system have been a bit vague, and Griffin’s talk made it clear why: there will be no single system. Choruss will act as an incubator and testbed in the same way that the Isle of Man hopes its government-sanctioned program will.

Speaking to an audience composed largely of members of the music industry, Griffin wasted no time in hammering home why that business really needed to be experimenting. “Music is awash in Tarzan economics—we’re barely hanging on to the frayed line that keeps us off the jungle floor,” he said, arguing that music needed to find a new vine, and quick. The music industry is still focused on products but, in Griffin’s view, “the market for music products has fallen and can’t get up.”

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Evolution has enabled us to walk upright in a locomotive form known as
bipedalism. While this form of motion is quite energy-efficient, it is not what our muscular-skeletal system
is best suited for—something that many people with back
and/or knee
problems can attest to. Bipedalism evolved in human
predecessors somewhere around 6 million years ago, and there
are a number of theories as to why bipedalism became the dominant mode of
locomotion. The shift to walking upright occurred before our ancestors’
brains started to grow to anywhere near the size of modern humans, and
before they had begun to use rudimentary stone tools.

This change in locomotive methodology
brought with it a host of anatomical changes; our feet, knees,
hip, spine, and even our skull all had to change to accommodate this
mode of moving. This
week’s edition of Science features a cover article describing the find of some very old hominid footprints.
Dating to around 1.5 million years ago, the series of footprints found at
Ileret, Kenya gives anthropologists a clear view of what our ancestors
feet looked like at that time, and it turns out they looked
quite…
human.

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If you’re a Time Warner Cable subscriber who has been having trouble with your Internet service lately, the company wants you to know why. In a letter to Ars, Jeff Simmermon,

the director for Digital Communications at TWC, told us “We’ve been having serious service problems in SoCal related to hacker activity.” The company has posted

an official statement on the issue with a few more details, but the culprits’ identities are as yet unknown (or being kept out of the public while the situation

is under investigation.)

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Australia’s controversial plan to implement a mandatory ISP filtering system may crash into a big brick wall after a backer effectively changed teams. Senator Nick Xenophon was previously in favor of a system that would run all citizens’ Internet connections through a filter for “illegal” content because it might have also blocked access to online gambling sites. As more and more concerns about the workability of the ambitious plan have been raised, however, he has decided that there are too many unanswered questions and now says he will move to block any legislation that comes through.

The Australian government first revealed its filtering initiative in 2007, which was met with widespread public outcry. Despite this, Australia moved forward with its plans and began testing the system in Tasmania in February of 2008. At the time, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said that the filters would be enabled by default and that consumers would have to request unfiltered connectivity if they wished to opt-out of the program.

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The Pirate Bay trial settled into something (sort of) approaching normality today as two professors took the stand. One explained more about how BitTorrent functions; the other got into a fight with prosecutors, suggested that file-sharing wasn’t bad for the music business in general and that it has led to a huge transfer of wealth to artists, and sarcastically asked the court to send flowers to his wife.

Up first (and speaking by telephone) was Kristoffer Schollin, a professor at Göteborgs Universitet (Gothenburg University). Schollin’s expertise, according to his bio, lies in “Copyright law, Trademark law, Internet Domain Name regulation, Digital Rights Management and Open Source/Free Software dynamics,” but he spent much of his testimony describing how BitTorrent functions.

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In an effort to cut costs and use taxpayer money more efficiently, the government of the UK intends to increase its adoption of open source software. A report issued Wednesday by the Chief Information Officer Council outlines the benefits of using open source in government IT and establishes a roadmap for improving procurement policies so that they are more conducive to open source adoption.

In the report, digital engagement minister Tom Watson says that the collaborative development model and the high potential for code reuse inherent in open source software deliver real value. Since the UK government’s initial push for internal open source adoption in 2004, Linux and open source technology have become a critical part of the government’s IT infrastructure.

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The Supreme Court has unanimously rejected a lawsuit against AT&T charging that the telco engaged in “price squeezing” against smaller Internet providers. A group of carriers led by Linkline Communications complained that the DSL giant charges high rates for wholesale access and low rates to consumers, effectively pushing competitors out of the market.

But the Supremes ruled on Wednesday that AT&T had “no duty to deal” with these carriers, at least as far as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act is concerned. The key to this logic is that while the Sherman Act forbids a company from monopolizing trade or commerce, it doesn’t force the business to sell its services to other firms.

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Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman made headlines last year when he argued that cloud computing is “worse than stupidity” and called for users to abandon popular Web applications such as Facebook and GMail. We disagreed with Stallman and pointed out that cloud computing is here to stay and that numerous emerging community-driven initiatives have the potential to bring the values of software freedom to the cloud.

This issue was the primary topic of a presentation made by Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) technical director and community liaison Bradley Kuhn at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). Kuhn has worked closely with Stallman over the years and previously served as the executive director of the Free Software Foundation before participating in the founding of the SFLC. He is best known for his role in authoring GNU’s Affero General Public License (AGPL).

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On Wednesday, online file storage and collaboration company Box.net unveiled Web Documents, a Web-based text editor that allows users to, well, edit text. More of a basic collaboration tool for businesses and less a Google Docs killer, Web Documents walks the fine line between an in-house document tool and not stepping on the toes of Box.net’s partners. Ars drafted a few documents and spoke with Sean Lindo, Box.net’s Community Manager.

Web Documents is available to all users, from free accounts to the recently refreshed business plans, and a document can quickly be created in any folder from the slightly renamed “Web Doc” menu. The Web Documents editing tool itself provides a fairly typical set of features, including basic text formatting, links, bullet points, photo embedding, and font tools. Web Docs can be previewed without the editing tools, shared publicly, and collaborated on with co-workers that you grant explicit permission to.

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Intel has joined the legal fight over Psion’s trademark on the term “netbook” with a strongly worded broadside filed in the US District Court in the Northern District of California. Intel purports to decisively refute Psion’s claim to an exclusive right to the term, and demands an immediate judgment canceling the trademark and enjoining Psion from starting trouble again.

Psion trademarked the term in 1996, around the time they began developing the Psion 7, marketed as the netBook, to replace their Psion 5 palmtop. Both devices used ARM processors, ran Psion’s EPOC operating system (the forerunner of Symbian), and were discussed extensively in a recent Ars feature published shortly before the fracas began. There, I pointed out that the netBook “was a netbook in a very real, modern sense, and Psion, appropriately enough, named it exactly that.”

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<img vspace=”4″ hspace=”4″ border=”0″ align=”right” src=”http://www.slashfeed.com/media/02-26-09/canada_net-thumb-230×130-2459-f.jpg” alt=”companion photo for Big Canadian websites want neutral wireless networks too” />

The company behind some of Canada’s most popular websites has waded deep into the network neutrality waters, demanding that regulators not only adopt network neutrality, but extend it to wireless networks. “If the traffic management practices employed by wireless carriers with regard to matters such as Internet access and influencing content were utilized by wireline ISPs,” says Pelmorex Media, “the public would be outraged.”

Pelmorex operates The Weather Network and MétéoMédia, two of the country’s “speciality television services.” More importantly for Internet users, each channel operates a website, and the sites are “two of the most viewed mobile services available in this country.” But wireless carriers haven’t even been subtle in their attempts to control (and profit from) the sites, according to the company.

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The problem with releasing an arcade-quality stick for $150 is that you don’t want to be sitting on inventory… but the demand is also going to be high, with one of the biggest fighting game releases of the year coinciding with your launch. Mad Catz is struggling with making more Arcade Fightstick: Tournament Edition sticks, but the company claims things are getting better. We caught up with Chris Carroll, the Senior Product Development Manager and Mark Julio, the Product Manager, to talk about the shortages and the thought that went into designing the sticks.

“The first run was around 3,000 units per platform and there has been some misconception that this is all that we would make,” Carroll explained when asked about the shortages. “We continued with production and while I don’t know the exact the number, as of the time you are reading this we should be shipping at least the second run.” Julio assured me that everyone who preordered will get a stick, although it may take some time.

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Rick Falkvinge is the face and voice of the Swedish Pirate Party, the party that he founded in 2006, but being a pirate isn’t all gold doubloons and chests of booty. Falkvinge is a principled pirate—and that means working for the sake of the cause even when the pay is low, or nonexistent. He currently takes no salary for his work, but he gets along by finding supporters willing to donate toward the costs of his food and rent.

Limited resources don’t mean he’s thinking small, though. Indeed, he wants to (democratically) take over the world, and he has a plan.

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Listening to podcasted versions of university lectures seems to be better for students than simply going to class, according to new research by State University of New York (SUNY) Fredonia psychologist Dani McKinney. Her study, titled “iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?” suggests that students who download the podcast version of a class tend to achieve better academic performance than those who don’t, though it’s more about what the students do when they download the podcast than the existence of the podcast itself.

In order to study how students soaked up information, McKinney and her team gave a psychology lecture to 64 students. The students were then split into groups after the lecture, one group receiving printed slides and the other being instructed to download the podcast, which was synchronized with video of the slides. The students were instructed to keep notes, as they were to be tested on the material a week later.

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Microsoft has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against navigation device maker TomTom. The suit alleges that several of TomTom’s products, including some that are Linux-based, infringe on a handful of Microsoft’s patents. Several of the patents in question relate to car computing systems and navigation, but there are also two that cover Microsoft’s FAT32 filesystem. If Microsoft begins to systematically enforce its FAT32 patents, it could have broad ramifications for the Linux platform and for mobile device makers.

The lawsuit, which was reported today at Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog, is thought to be the first time that Microsoft has directly targeted Linux with patent litigation. In an interview with Bishop, Microsoft deputy general counsel for intellectual property Horacio Gutierrez claims that this is not the beginning of a broader intellectual property campaign against Linux. Gutierrez characterizes the lawsuit as a last resort option that Microsoft is pursuing after attempting to negotiate a private settlement with TomTom for over a year.

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In a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters discussed the differences between companies and communities and how to bridge the gap. This issue is becoming increasingly important for open source software projects that are trying to build close ties with corporate adopters and contributors.

Peters developed extensive expertise in this area during her time at HP, where she played a central role in establishing the company’s open source program. In her current position as the head honcho of the GNOME Foundation—the non-profit organization behind the open source GNOME desktop environment—she works to build bridges between the development community and the growing roster of companies that participate in the vibrant GNOME ecosystem.

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Puzzle Quest was an interesting beast, mixing the match-three gameplay that can be found in many casual titles with a storyline and spells that seemed more at home in a game of Dungeon and Dragons. The title quickly became an addiction to gamers as it spread across the platforms, and now Puzzle Quest: Galactrix hopes to do the same thing. We’re happy to report that this time the play has been refined even further, making this the oddest of games: a hardcore title that even casual fans will enjoy.

The game still centers around lining up three, four, or five tiles of the same color, but now play takes place in a hex, meaning you can move the tiles in any direction. Since the “battles” take place in space, the tiles also move onto the board from every direction, depending on your moves. This causes the board to feel more natural, and gives you many more options for play.

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Last month, the Isle of Man announced that it was going to try its governmental hand at addressing rampant music piracy. At today’s Digital Music Forum East, Ron Berry, the government’s e-Commerce Advisor, detailed how the government came to be a pioneer in a field where many larger nations are struggling, and provided some details about how they expect the system to work.

Two things became clear during the conversation. The first is that, for Berry and the government of Man, the dive into digital music is simply part of a larger plan to carve a niche into the global digital economy. For its citizens, however, it will mean that they will be facing an extra fee in their bills for everything from high-speed Internet to basic cell phone service—whether they’re interested in music or not.

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Just last month, we covered how the payment processor Heartland Payment Systems had inadvertently exposed up to 100 million credit cards in the largest known data breach to date. In that case, the thieves were able to obtain customers’ magnetic strip information; the thefts themselves were likely responsible for a surge in credit card fraud we saw last year. The Heartland problem should have been a wakeup call to all credit card payment processors, but an as-yet-unidentified company must have been asleep at the wheel. There’s a growing body of evidence indicating that a second data breach has already occurred.

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It’s always interesting to spend time poking through the application bundle for newly released Mac OS X software. Inside the bundle are all sorts of files and resources that can sometimes give you insight as to what is going on with development. Today, Ars had a chance to dive into Safari 4 and explore some features that were hidden away from surface inspection.

To look inside any Macintosh application bundle, select it in the Applications folder, right click and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up. A new Finder browser window will open, revealing the bundle contents. Choose View > as Columns (Command-3) for the easiest browsing experience.

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If there’s an economic, social, or political event happening in the world, you can bet spammers will leap upon it as an attack vector. It therefore comes as no surprise

that January’s grim harvest of corporate Q4 results led to a surge in recession-themed e-mails in February. The overall volume of spam sent in February actually

decreased slightly (1.3 percent) compared to January, but topics such as “Affordable brand name watches,” “Get 15 percent off these,” and “Cheaper than you can

imagine” dominated subject fields.

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Google has released a beta of Google Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer. The modest new version brings Google features both old and new to Internet Explorer, and also brings Google’s increasingly thorough search to Toolbar users’ desktops.

The most significant new feature of Toolbar 6 beta is the Quick Search Box (QSB), a search dialog that ironically has nothing to do with the toolbar itself. You may recognize QSB from Google Desktop for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, or even the scaled down, Mac-only product of the same name released in January. Like a college-bound teenager, QSB lives separately from its IE toolbar brethren in the Windows taskbar. A mouse click or a control-space shortcut invokes its popup dialog for searching the web (with suggestions), local bookmarks, and even applications. As with its other implementations, QSB learns as you use it in an effort to (in theory) identify what you are searching for more quickly. In our brief experience, QSB is fairly smart, able to identify applications by abbreviations (WMP) and clearly present suggestions.

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Our brains—or worse, children’s brains—could be rewired from the fast pace of modern social networking sites, TV shows, and video games, says Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield. The researcher said this week that kids seem to have more trouble understanding each other (in real life, that is) and focusing in school, and that it could be due to the proliferation of short, bite-sized clips of information in the online world that is causing their brains to physically change.

Greenfield said that sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Twitter may be forcing kids’ brains back into an infant-like state, as infants need constant stimulation to remind them that they exist. She added that she worries that “real” conversation will eventually give way to these little snippets of text dialogue, indicating that our normal language might eventually turn into pokes, wall shout-outs, and 140-character snark fests.

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Since it began last week, the trial of the Pirate Bay in Sweden has truly been a “spectrial”—and not just because of juvenile Pirate Bay antics such as last night’s open letter to IFPI boss John Kennedy. The spectacle kicked back into high gear Wednesday as Kennedy traveled from London to Sweden to give testimony in the trial on behalf of the worldwide major-label music industry.

One of the curious aspects of the trial has been the way that both sides have focused on nonlegal questions, such as exactly how much money the global music industry has lost since 2001 (answer: $11 billion, a 30 percent loss). Kennedy’s testimony fit the pattern perfectly as he spoke almost exclusively about how bad the music industry’s revenues are now and how file-sharing was largely to blame. Absent was any real talk of Swedish law, BitTorrent (Kennedy admitted that he has only a general idea of how the whole system works), The Pirate Bay’s specific actions, or even contributory copyright infringement. Instead, Kennedy spent much of his time making clear that he really, really didn’t like The Pirate Bay. “It’s impossible to compete with free,” he said.

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Jon Lech Johansen, best known for his work on reverse-engineering the CSS encryption on DVDs, is no fan of the technical and DRM barriers that stand between us, our content, and our devices. Pursuing the goal of tearing down these walls, Johansen’s new company has released doubleTwist, an ambitious media organizer and service that can sync content between a wide variety of gadgets; it also helps you share files with friends. It’s iTunes meets YouTube, and the iPod is no longer the only VIP.

When Johansen announced doubleTwist as an extremely early Windows beta a year ago, it was a media manager that could organize music, photos, and video, but it also did DRM-stripping and Facebook file sharing. “Our goal is to provide a simple and well integrated solution,” said co-founder Monique Monique Farantzos at the time, “that the average consumer can use to eliminate the headaches associated with their expanding digital universe.” When we looked at doubleTwist in February 2008, it could recognize files like DRMed iTunes media on an iPod, clean MPEG4 video from your cell phone, and everything in between. It could then sync that media back to your desktop or another device, performing any conversions or DRM-stripping as required. “One media library manager to rule them all” was the idea, and while doubleTwist scaled back somewhat for this public Mac OS X beta, it’s still quite an interesting product.

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If you don’t look too closely, many of the companies in the IT industry appear to be on friendly terms with each other. Every time Company A releases a new

product, other companies chime in with positive-sounding rhetoric meant to imply enthusiastic support. This rule holds true even in situations where two

companies might compete with each other—The ATI team at AMD may not be excited when NVIDIA launches a new video card, but AMD the CPU manufacturer is happy to

talk about how the new GeForce series performs best when paired with Phenom II.

The message? We’re really one big happy family. Problem is, that’s not true—a fact that slammed home with a

vengeance today when a confidential Intel briefing on NVIDIA’s Atom-based Ion platform was made public. This, ladies and gentlemen, is where we put the “fun” in

dysfunctional.

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For months, Republican pundits, legislators, and even Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell have warned that the Fairness Doctrine—an equal time regulation repealed in the ’80s, and long a bête noire of talk jocks on the right side of the dial—is threatening to stage a triumphant, Mickey Rourke-style comeback. In a briefing paper released Tuesday, the Internet advocacy group Free Press dismisses these worries as a “distraction,” arguing that the doomsayers are improperly conflating the politically moribund rule with unrelated “localism” and media consolidation rules. Ironically, Free Press itself can claim a healthy chunk of the credit for that.

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It turns out that the Federal Communications Commission actually meant it when the agency warned that phone companies must regularly inform the Commission how they keep the calling records of consumers secure. On Tuesday the FCC proposed fining over 600 of them $20,000 apiece for not filing an annual report on their efforts to protect Customer Proprietary Network Information. CPNI includes the numbers subscribers call, when they call them,and the particular services they use, such as voice mail or call forwarding.

“I have long stressed the importance of protecting the sensitive information that telecommunications carriers collect about their customers,” interim FCC Chair Michael Copps declared with the announcement. “The broad nature of this enforcement action hopefully will ensure substantial compliance with our CPNI rules going forward as the Commission continues to make consumer privacy protection a top priority.”

The agency also says that this week it will propose smaller fines against carriers that filed these CPNI reports, but not to the Commission’s satisfaction.

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Over the last few years, the popularity of peer-to-peer filesharing has exploded, leaving widespread filesharing lawsuits and traffic management policies in its wake. But the same features that allow P2P applications to provide lots of bandwidth also make these clients less-than-ideal for maintaining a degree of anonymity and limiting the sharing of documents to a specific set of users. Some computer scientists at the University of Washington think they’ve overcome that in their new software, called OneSwarm, but they may have opened up a can of worms in the process.

The basics of OneSwarm are pretty simple. The software consists of a server app that appears to be written in Java, allowing it to run on Linux, the Mac, and Windows. All interactions with the OneSwarm system beyond that, however, take place in a browser—the app’s authors say all the major players other than IE are capable of handling the system. The software is back-compatible with BitTorrent, meaning it functions fine as a generic P2P client.

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