Wednesday, at an event in Santa Clara, Sun Microsystems and the Internet Archive announced a joint effort to move the Archive’s growing, three-petabyte (about 150 Libraries of Congress) data store into one of Sun’s Modular Datacenters—the famous datacenter in a shipping container, which we’ve covered previously.

The Archive, which also hosts the ever-popular Wayback Machine, currently runs on a custom storage architecture. But, in keeping with the group’s mission of open access to information, they opted to move it to a Sun MD that’s based on Sun Fire x4500 servers and ZFS.

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As Congress continues to struggle with legislative changes to the patent system, the US Patent Office last week won a partial reversal of a federal court ruling that had blocked implementation of a set of rule changes designed to streamline the patent application process.

The opinion in Tafas v. Doll, handed down by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, dealt with the question of whether a series of rule changes announced by the USPTO in 2006 constituted “procedural” regulations within the ambit of the agency’s stautory authority, or rather “substantive” changes that amounted to policy decisions properly within the purview of Congress. The appellate court held that the new rules were indeed procedural, overturning the conclusion reached by a lower court last year, but found that at least one was in conflict with the Patent Act, and left open the possibility that the lower court might find novel problems with the others on remand.

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Interim Federal Communications Commission chair Michael Copps donned his Grim Realist hat and told Congress on Thursday that even with the deadline extended to June 12, the DTV switch won’t be smooth.

“Some may say that we won’t be ready on June 12 either, and that there will still be consumers left behind. And that is true—this transition will not be seamless,” a decidedly grinchy Copps warned the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s tech subcommittee, chaired by Rick Boucher (D-VA). “The hard truth is that we won’t be able to make up for the inadequate policies of the past few years in just a few short months.”

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What’s the point of running a university computer lab when all the students bring laptops anyway? That’s a question that schools have been asking themselves as computer ownership rates among incoming freshmen routinely top 90 percent. Schools like the University of Virginia have concluded that the time has come to dismantle the community computer labs and put that money to more productive uses.

According to the school’s Information Technology & Communication department, 3,117 freshmen enrolled in 2007, and 3,113 of them owned their own computer. Nearly all of the machines were laptops, with 72 percent running Windows and 26 percent running Mac OS X (six hardy souls ran Linux).

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The Australian government agency charged with classifying movies and video games has reportedly been hacked in protest of the nation’s controversial ISP-level Internet filtering scheme. The culprits replaced the website’s introductory text with a comical message which characterizes the government’s censorship program as an attempt to “control and sheepify the nation.”

In the all-important war against pictures of boobies on the Internet, the government of Australia has spared no expense. In 2006, after conducting a study which determined that ISP-level filtering was not feasible, the nation blew a $116 million wad of cash to develop Internet filtering software that parents could install on computers. When this software was easily circumvented by children, the government decided to try again with an $89 million ISP-level filtering scheme based on a blacklist devised by the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA).

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The Australian government agency charged with classifying movies and video games has reportedly been hacked in protest of the nation’s controversial ISP-level Internet filtering scheme. The culprits replaced the website’s introductory text with a comical message which characterizes the government’s censorship program as an attempt to “control and sheepify the nation.”

In the all-important war against pictures of boobies on the Internet, the government of Australia has spared no expense. In 2006, after conducting a study which determined that ISP-level filtering was not feasible, the nation spent $116 million to develop Internet filtering software that parents could install on computers. When this software was easily circumvented by children, the government decided to try again with an $89 million ISP-level filtering scheme based on a blacklist devised by the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA).

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IT news might be bad in almost every corner of the industry, but one industry segment seems better fit to ride out the recession than most. Sales of security appliances to various business

sectors in Western Europe grew revenue a total of 14.4 percent in 2008 as compared to 2007, but that growth slacked off a bit in the fourth quarter; sales rose only 10.1 percent. Those are solid numbers in any economic climate, and particularly in this one.

The increase in total revenue was not spread evenly across the top five vendors. Fortinet reported 29.5

percent revenue growth from 2007-2008, followed by Cisco (20.5 percent) and “other” (18.7 percent). Nokia and Secure Computing eked out smaller gains of 6.6 percent and 2.3 percent,

respectively, while Juniper fell off a cliff. Company revenue dropped 17 percent year-on-year, which helps explain why everyone else grew at such a high rate.

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What if you could play all those great PC games that take full advantage of the latest hardware… without having the latest hardware? PC gaming can be an expensive hobby, especially if you play the latest and greatest games, but OnLive has the solution: allow them to do the computing for you—you just buy the games. Welcome to using the cloud for your gaming needs.

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The United States prides itself on being a staunch proponent of fair trade and is a prominent member of the WTO (World Trade Organization). When decisions by that body doesn’t go its way, the US has a tendency to turn as cranky as any other nation that’s been ordered to do something it doesn’t want to

do. In this case, the European Commission has confirmed that Uncle Sam’s gambling laws are in violation of WTO rules, and as such must be overhauled.

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Your browser may know exactly where you are, and tell everyone all about it.—with your permission, of course. Opera becomes the latest web browser platform and application to support site-requested geolocation, the conduit that lets a website ask a browser (typically via JavaScript) for its current coordinates. A user may allow or disallow these requests.

Opera, like Google and the Mozilla Foundation, is supporting the W3C’s geolocation API, which enables JavaScript requests to be embedded in pages. A geolocation-aware browser can provide information. (Google developed the W3C API, and one of its employees is the standard’s editor.)

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Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, says that an open Internet is “crucial” to Europe. But that doesn’t mean a little traffic shaping, service prioritization, and discrimination won’t be allowed.

In a September 2008 speech in Copenhagen, Reding told a network neutrality conference that “a cynical observer may note that in the end this whole Net Neutrality debate is about hard cash. Dollars and euros… This is just arm wrestling between big network providers and successful providers of Internet services.”

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As Ben Kuchera is gearing up to report at Opposable Thumbs, one of the themes for this year’s GDC is mobile gaming—and iPhone 3D gaming, in particular, is red-hot. And for good reason: some of the demos so far are amazing (I’ll let Ben tell you about them as the embargoes lift), and it’s nuts to think that this level of 3D performance is taking place on a tiny mobile device. But as I watch the mobile 3D action this week, one fact above all others bowls me over: this is a mass-market 3D revolution, with an installed base of millions—and it involves neither Intel nor Windows.

I’ve covered at some length the ARM offerings in this space, and why Intel won’t have a shot at a real mobile phone form factor until sometime after transitioning to 32nm, but I’ve paid less attention to the software side of this equation. At a GDC session yesterday by the Khronos Group, a broad industry consortium working on the OpenGL, OpenCL, and other GPU-related APIs, I was surprised at just how little sway Microsoft has in the mobile 3D arena.

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Google’s Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow, which aims to bring a major performance boost to the Python programming language by making runtime speed five times faster. The project is being implemented as a branch of the conventional CPython runtime and will be fully source-compatible with regular Python applications and native extensions. This will make it possible to eventually merge the improvements into Python trunk.

The goal of the Unladen Swallow project is to use LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure, to build a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that can replace Python’s own specialized virtual machine. This approach offers a number of significant advantages. As the developers describe in the project plan, the project will make it possible to transition Python to a register-based virtual machine and will pave the way for future optimizations.

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Emerging standards are bringing a growing number of rich media technologies to the web, ranging from programmable raster graphics to video playback. The next area that will be tackled by Internet innovators is support for interactive 3D graphics, a capability that would enable a whole new class of browser-based games and expressive data visualizations.

The Khronos Group, the organization behind OpenGL, has teamed up with Mozilla to define a new royalty-free web standard for bringing 3D graphics to the web. They are inviting other companies to participate in the effort and aim to have a functional specification ready for publication within a year.

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Look Ma, the system of checks and balances does work! After passing both the state House and Senate, Utah governor John Huntsman vetoed a bill that would make it a crime to sell mature-rated games to underage consumers. While the bill sounds
noble, the fine print imposed strict penalties on retailers, and as a concession, actually allowed them to opt-out from using ratings altogether. As such, the bill was largely viewed
as pointless legislation.

“While protecting children from inappropriate materials is a
laudable goal, the language of this bill is so broad that it likely
will be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional,” Huntsman said
after his decision. “The unintended consequence of the bill would be
that parents and children would have no labels to guide them in
determining the age appropriateness of the goods or service.”

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After three years, three rounds of funding, and a lot of speculation, Twitter has finally confirmed that it will introduce paid accounts that offer enhanced features. There is no word on when these accounts will arrive, but they will signify the first significant push from the startup to turn a profit from its wildly popular platform.

Twitter has not yet offered many details about what features paid accounts will offer. The company is quick to point out, however, that its service will always remain free, even for the power and business users that paid accounts are being designed for. Cofounder Biz Stone has hinted that some frequently requested features may be on their way, such as traffic analytics and “account verification” to confirm that celebrity users are indeed who they say they are. Regardless of the specifics, Twitter has made it abundantly clear that it intends to work with, and build upon, the wide variety of Twitter revenue streams that many others have already been experimenting with.

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The Sugar Learning Platform was originally designed to serve as the interactive software environment for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project’s XO laptop. The platform offers a unique child-friendly user interface and a growing number of software applications that are intended to facilitate self-directed learning. Sugar Labs, the organization behind the project, announced this week the official release of version 0.84.

Sugar Labs, which was founded last year by former OLPC software director Walter Bender, aims to bring Sugar to a broader audience and make it more accessible to students. The OLPC project recently discontinued its direct involvement with Sugar development and has left Sugar Labs to take over the responsibility of maintaining and improving the platform. Sugar Labs seems to have gotten off to a pretty good start. The organization has improved many areas of the platform and has added several features that will make it more practical and effective in a conventional classroom environment.

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Intel has announced the availability of the second Moblin 2 alpha release. This version delivers extremely impressive boot performance, broader hardware compatibility, updated software components, and a few other noteworthy enhancements.

Moblin is Intel’s Linux-based software platform for mobile devices. The platform is open source and is being aggressively optimized to deliver the best achievable performance on Atom-based hardware products. Intel publicly launched Moblin in 2007 and invited third-party developers to participate in the effort. The first Moblin-based devices, which are primarily MID products like the Gigabyte M528, began shipping last year.

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Young people have done a good job of integrating technology into their lives, but they are also the ones who are most concerned about being overconnected. This finding is part a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, The Mobile Difference, which discusses how different groups of American adults treat the latest trend in connectivity.

While 61 percent of the adult population is perfectly fine accessing the Internet through a stationary PC, the remaining 39 percent is active in adopting mobile connectivity. Pew breaks the latter chunk into five groups: Digital Collaborators, Ambivalent Networkers, Media Movers, Roving Nodes, and Mobile Newbies. There’s little variation in the percentage breakdown of these groups—Roving Nodes makes up the largest at nine percent of the adult population—though their favorite ways of using technology while on-the-go vary.

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As teen flirtation and sexual experimentation enter the digital age, dog-bites-man stories about adolescent exhibitionists being charged as kiddie pornographers may soon seem no more newsworthy than reports of cops breaking up a kegger. But one group of Pennsylvania parents is pretty sure their daughters aren’t sex offenders—and with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, they’re suing to force a zealous county district attorney to back off.

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Like Wayne and Garth, Facebook’s users have typically feared change. With each major feature addition and redesign, a subset of users have cried out in horror and formed various groups in protest (for all that those are worth). Facebook has typically forged ahead without looking back, but the foot stomping over its latest changes was loud enough to make the massive social network have a slight change of heart.

To make a long story short, Facebook obfuscated a lot of activity from the news feed—the main homepage column that contains updates from friends—with its latest redesign earlier this month (which, for those keeping count, followed less than a year after the previous redesign). Before, users saw everything their friends shared, such as photos, new friendships, and activity from third-party sites via Facebook Connect. With the redesign, much of this activity has either been removed from the news feed or left up to a popularity algorithm for the Highlights section, the column on the right. But that section only contains so many items and does not update very often, creating the fundamental problem that the redesign’s critics are kicking dust over.

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Rhomobile has announced the official 1.0 release of Rhodes, an open source Ruby-based framework for mobile application development that supports all of the mainstream smartphone operating systems. The framework, which is modeled after Ruby on Rails, has the potential to accelerate the development of data-driven mobile software while guaranteeing high portability.

Version 1.0, which was released Tuesday, adds support for Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system. Rhodes also supports the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. Rhodes applications are written with Ruby and with HTML, using the erb templating engine. The applications are compiled down into self-standing executables for each of the supported platforms.

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Here’s one Federal Communications Commission comment cycle that’s getting off to an interesting start. The agency’s Notice of Inquiry on the state of content filtering is being flooded by brief comments from boosters of TVGuardian, “The Foul Language Filter.” There were more than 300 when I started writing this article, and a few hours later there are over 1,000. And they all go pretty much like this:

“Please require media like TV, satellite Cable provide options like TVGuardian so that we can filter the unappropriate [sic] material that is pumped into our homes,” the latest reads. Here’s another: “I believe the TVGuardian software should be required. Raising children, vulgarity and expletives are out of control.” And one more: “Please implement the TVGuardian into electronic devices… Please mandate this technology in the electronics so that we as parents can decide to turn it on or not.”

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We now know the battlefield on which the fight will be engaged for the hearts, minds, and—most importantly—the wallets of those who would use faster, ubiquitous broadband wireless networks. These so-called fourth-generation (4G) cellular data networks employ competing technologies: WiMax and LTE (Long Term Evolution). Clearwire and Sprint Nextel (the majority owner of Clearwire) have confirmed their deployment plan for WiMax, setting the stage.

LTE has a vast amount of worldwide commitment from GSM carriers, and even long-time CDMA operator Verizon Wireless will switch over to LTE for its 4G future. WiMax’s biggest worldwide backer? Sprint Nextel, which is essentially pinning its future on WiMax.

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The RIAA announced late last year that it was moving away from mass lawsuits and towards a set of “graduated response” agreements with US Internet providers. None of the ISPs involved in those talks sounded proud of the fact, though—only Verizon would go on record to tell us that it was not participating. So what happened to the program?

The RIAA tells us that it’s going ahead, and that the group continues to work quietly with ISPs to find solutions that everyone can live with. However, the trade group isn’t yet willing to make some sort of major announcement about who’s involved. We do know that AT&T has signed on and begun forwarding notices, however, as CNET recently reported. And Cox and Comcast are also involved in forwarding infringement letters to customers. But there’s (a lot) less here than the RIAA would like.

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German police on Tuesday raided the homes of Theodor Reppe, owner of the German domain for the controversial whistleblower site Wikileaks. According to Wikileaks itself, police told Reppe he was targeted because of his links to the site, and official documents indicate the search was meant to uncover evidence of “distribution of pornographic material.” Though Wikileaks itself doesn’t host porn, site administrators believe the impetus for the raids may be their recent publication of a secret Australian blacklist of banned sites, which includes the URLs of numerous sites that host child pornography.

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The Federal Trade Commission kicked off its big DRM conference in Seattle Wednesday morning by saying that the goal was not to “take sides” over the question of whether DRM is good or bad—but the conference nevertheless opened with a warning.

Mary Engle, an FTC Acting Deputy Director, began her remarks by warning that those who use DRM had better get serious about disclosing it and the limits that it places on products. She referenced the Sony BMG rootkit debacle, saying that “sellers who use DRM technology to enforce the terms of bargains with consumers need to be particularly careful to disclose in advance” what those bargains are.

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Nintendo President Satoru Iwata gave a strong keynote at this year’s GDC, although the announcements dealt more with improving the user experience on the Wii—there were only a few game details sprinkled in. The speech isn’t going to set the world on fire, although Nintendo certainly improved on the lack of excitement it generated in its fans after the E3 press event. The good news began almost immediately: Nintendo has shipped 50 million pieces of Wii hardware worldwide, making it the fastest selling hardware in gaming history.

Iwata gave some insight into how Shigeru Miyamoto works, although his advice may not be applicable to many other companies: have a genius on the payroll, allow him to do whatever he wants, get the core concepts down first, and then don’t be afraid to throw it all out. If you have Shigeru Miyamoto on the team and Nintendo’s budget, it was great advice. If you don’t? I’m not sure what the takeaway would be.

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White hats nationwide have ramped up their efforts to create a defense against Conficker.C as the worm’s April 1 activation date approaches. This is not an easy task—as we’ve

previously described, Conficker.C sacrifices some of .B’s infection vectors but replaces them with code designed to make the worm harder to track, block, or remove.

If Conficker.A was an

annoying relative with an old house key that somehow still worked, and Conficker.B a family member who thought you were so nice that he needed to meet everyone in your entire

neighborhood, then Conficker.C is everyone’s nightmare house guest. He sleeps on the couch, can’t be bothered with minor details (like pants), sucks down cell phone minutes and

bandwidth caps like bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and has an absolutely uncanny ability to vanish every time you show up brandishing a fresh stack of bills and a “you have

to go” attitude.

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It’s a measure of success that the term “MP3″ is probably generally understood to mean “digital audio file.” But an MP3 file contains a very specific type of audio compression, and its success, in part, comes from its flexibility. As disk space (and, subsequently, flash memory space) has become less constrained, lighter compression could be used to produce better audio quality, even if it meant larger files. The inevitable end of the game will come when portable devices have the ability to hold complete music files in a lossless format. Thomson, one of the companies that developed the MP3 format, has prepared for that day, and is now releasing what it’s terming a backwards-compatible lossless format, mp3HD.

Thomson is somewhat vague on the details of the file format, but it appears to have separate streams or forks. One contains a lossless version of the music, which Thomson describes as “additional side information.” The other portion contains standard MP3 music data. The idea is that when a player that isn’t aware of mp3HD encounters the file, it will pick out and play the MP3 portion. Anything that has been updated to handle the new format will play the full, lossless glory encoded in the alternate data stream.

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It’s March again, the start of spring, and that means the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is meeting for one of its three yearly meetings. Last year in Philadelphia, the IETF “ate its own dogfood” by turning off IPv4 and depending exclusively on IPv6 for external connectivity for a while. This time, as the engineers descended upon San Francisco, there are no experiments, but the Internet Society (ISOC)—a group related to the IETF but with less engineering going on—took advantage of the event to hold a panel discussion about IPv6 for the benefit of the press.

As noted time and time again, we’re running out of IP addresses. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that without an IP address it’s impossible to communicate over the Internet. Panelist Richard Jimmerson of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which distributes IP addresses in North America, remarked that we’re using twelve “/8s” a year and that this rate is increasing.

An “/8″ is a block of addresses identified by its first 8 address bits. IPv4 uses 32 bits for each address, so each /8 has 24 other bits in it, allowing for 16,777,216 individual addresses per /8. With 32 /8s left in the global pool (and scraps adding up to another 22 lying around elsewhere), we’re scheduled to run out altogether in two or three years.

Fortunately, the IETF foresaw the problem a decade ago (even though they didn’t predict the timing correctly) and created a new version of the Internet Protocol that supports an insanely large number of addresses by making each one 128 bits long. By now, the new protocol is built into virtually all operating systems and high-end routers, so all we need to do is enable IPv6 and the Internet can continue to grow for decades—if not centuries—to come.

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Each year, as state legislatures return to work, there’s a steady flow of bills introduced that target the teaching of evolution in public schools. With a few exceptions, most of these don’t pass, and they fade quickly into obscurity. This year, however, the state of Texas has embarked on an extended fight over science education that has dragged in at least two state agencies and the legislature. By all appearances, the school board’s role in matters will be coming to a close during a meeting that is currently taking place.

There’s so much going on in Texas that it’s difficult to know where to start. Chronologically, the first item in the recent chain of events occurred last year, when the Institute for Creation Research applied for permission to grant degrees in “science,” despite the fact that its curriculum holds that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and species are not related by common descent. Texas’ higher education board turned the request down, saying the ICR would be unable to properly prepare its students to teach science.

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The past several years have provided a decent indication of the value of wireless spectrum blocks that are unused within the US. The FCC successfully auctioned off a chunk of the 700MHz area, providing wireless carriers with a chunk of prime airwaves, and the US Treasury with nearly $20 billion. The value of open wireless spectrum has also been driven home by the fight over white spaces in the TV spectrum, which is crowded both by existing broadcasts and a host of unlicensed devices. All of that has inspired a bipartisan group of Senators to call for a national spectrum inventory.

The bill, entitled the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act, was introduced last week by John Kerry (D-MA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Roger Wicker (R-MS). It amends part of the Communications Act by adding a requirement for a national survey of what’s being broadcast into our radio airwaves. The survey will cover everything from 200MHz to 3.5GHz, and will be run by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Federal Communications Commission, with input as needed from the Office of Science and Technology.

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Deep brain stimulation is one of those little-advertised, last-resort treatments. After therapy has failed, drugs have failed, and, (if it happens to be appropriate) electric shock therapy has failed, a doctor may recommend deep brain stimulation. Typically, deep brain stimulation is reserved for severe cases of Parkinson’s disease, serious depression, and a handful of other psychological disorders. But no one really knows how or why it works.

To perform deep brain stimulation, electrodes are implanted deep into the brain, located at the region where electrical signals pass among different neurons. Some researchers believe that the electrodes act to suppress neuronal activity, while other believe it activates neurons. These two groups generally spend a certain amount of time glaring at each other during academic conferences while trying to come up with a way to test their ideas. Now a team from Stanford has discovered a way to make the measurements, and it turns out that deep brain stimulation seems to activate particular sets of neurons.

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For a product whose success determines whether AMD lives or dies, there’s been surprisingly little said about Shanghai of late. Granted, there has been no shortage of semiconductor news,

economic blues, various lawsuits, and the company’s self-division to occupy the digital press, but when all is said and done, AMD’s future rests significantly on Shanghai’s ability to

compete in the server market. Server processors typically carry much higher premiums than their desktop counterparts; the revenue-per-CPU that AMD derives in this market is extremely

important to the company’s bottom line. With Nehalem-EP on the way, and Shanghai now established and available, what’s the consenus on the core?

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Despite popular perception, even those at the top of music business have a sense of humor, something captured repeatedly in Steve Knopper’s new book, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. In Knopper’s telling, the decline of the major labels isn’t just about technology or peer-to-peer programs—it’s about personalities, and his book is stuffed with stories of music execs in action.

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Back in 2007, the Songwriters Association of Canada floated a proposal for a monthly Internet music levy—pay CAN$5 and swap all the music you want. The plan attracted criticism from every side, but SAC is now back with a revised version of the plan that addresses the concerns. While the idea might be risky, SAC members argue that it’s the only viable way to make sure that artists, songwriters, and rightsholders get paid for the huge amount of illegal file-sharing that takes place.

One of the big concerns with SAC’s initial plan was its compulsory nature. Not only would all Canadian consumers with an Internet connection pay the fee, but all musicians and rightsholders would have their music included in the plan whether they liked it or not. While this has the great virtue of making it simple to know whether any particular tune would be legal to share (answer: it would!), it also created problems with Canada’s existing international copyright obligations.

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If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.

So far, the battle lines on open access have been drawn with publishers on one side, funding groups on the other. Funding groups, such as the NIH, Wellcome Trust, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, feel that the research they pay for will have a larger impact if more people have access to it. In the case of government agencies, there’s the added issue of allowing access by the tax payers that ultimately fund the work. This has led a number of them to adopt policies in which the researchers they fund retain the right to freely distribute their works some time after publication. This grace period, usually six months to a year, allows the publishers to extract some value out of their role in arranging for the review and formatting of the works.

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Call it a case of life imitating art imitating art: Shepard Fairey, who made his name via an iconic, glowering image bearing the caption “OBEY,” is now catching glowers of his own for failing to obey the name captions on an iconic image.

By now, the story of Fairey’s legal dispute with the Associated Press is nearly as familiar as the ubiquitous portrait of Barack Obama—based on an AP photographer’s original picture—that spawned the court battle. But earlier this week, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann pointed out an intriguing neglected detail of the case: In addition to garden variety copyright infringement, AP has charged the artist with violating the “copyright management information” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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A pair of Argentinean researchers has demonstrated a BIOS-level exploit that allowed the duo to potentially run a great deal of invisible code—which could remain installed even if the hard drive

was wiped. Much has been made of this last bit, but malware attacks against the Basic Input Output System are anything but new.

The CIH (Chernobyl) virus that first appeared in 1998 was

capable of bricking a system by rewriting critical boot information in the computer’s BIOS with garbage output. Even if you dodged this bullet, CIH’s primary payload rewrote the first 1MB

of the hard drive. If Chernoybl successfully activated on D-day, the best outcome a user could hope for was an apparently wiped hard drive. At worst, system repair involved physically

pulling the BIOS chip and installing another.

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Tuesday at GDC Microsoft announced a number of upcoming additions to Games for Windows, including stronger protection against piracy, as well as some nifty features to make playing your PC games simpler if you have multiple systems. There will also be storefront support added so publishers can add sales directly into their game. Drew Johnston, the product unit manager for the Windows Gaming Platform, and Dave Luehmann, GM for Microsoft Game Studios, described to Ars what these updates will entail.

You can call it whatever you want—as long as you don’t call it DRM. “What we have is anti-piracy measures we’ve put in place. I wouldn’t quite categorize it as DRM,” Johnston tells Ars. “We have zero-day piracy protection—this helps reduce the leakage of IP before release. The bits are encrypted, and there is a one-time activation that checks to see if the game has been released or not, and we’ll send out a decrypt code so the game can be played.” 

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This fight started out as a scrap on the blogosphere and in various Federal Communications Commission proceedings. But now that the White House has authorized $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus bucks, the question of who will map out the nation’s high speed Internet use has become an urgent public issue. On Monday over two dozen organizations very loudly identified one candidate who they don’t want for the job: Connected Nation.

“Connected Nation’s strategy is to accept public funds for collecting information from its sponsors which is then kept largely private, hidden behind strict non-disclosure agreements,” charges a new report spearheaded by Public Knowledge and backed by pretty much the whole media reform crowd. “This privatized data gathered with public money is a violation of the public trust.”

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They may be advertised as speeding deterrents to city councils and safety tools to worried parents, but according to another school of thought, red-light cameras are all about making

money. It’s not clear whether the systems are always pitched as profit generators from day one or if the city government, confronted with a sudden jump in ticket revenue, makes its own

decision to shorten yellow lights. The correlations, however, are there. There’s weak evidence that the red-light cameras reduce accidents at certain intersections (though the severity

of those accidents may actually rise), but there’s no doubt that they provide a major source of revenue at a time when cities are hurting for funds.

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Google’s search results pages are continually being refined to better fit people’s search habits. The latest updates come in the form of longer result descriptions and an expanded list of related searches, which Google says should “help guide users more effectively to the information they need.”

Those who use Google on a daily basis know that the handful of words thrown at you when you perform a query aren’t always enough to help you decide whether a link is worth clicking. That’s why Google has decide to expand the text descriptions offered with each result, with the keywords of the query highlighted in bold. The search giant says this works best with long, detailed queries.

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Skype might not be performing quite as well as parent company eBay would prefer a $2.6 billion acquisition to perform, but that hasn’t dampened worldwide enthusiasm for the VoIP service. Skype is so popular, in fact, that new numbers out from TeleGeography suggest that it has become the “largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world.” Take that, AT&T!

Actually, AT&T probably doesn’t care, since long distance has lost some of its revenue-generating luster, but the surging popularity of VoIP no doubt keeps future-thinking execs up at nights. Skype’s revenues are more modest than the big telcos, despite its usage numbers; at eBay’s annual meeting earlier this month, the company said that Skype pulled in $550 million in 2008.

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Google’s annual Summer of Code (SoC) program, which pays small grants to students who make substantial contributions to open source software projects during their Summer break from school, has officially launched. Google announced Monday that students can begin submitting their project proposals.

Originally established in 2005, SoC was conceived as a way to boost volunteerism and introduce students to the open source software development process. Almost a thousand students will be allowed to participate this year, and each will receive $4,500 if they complete their tasks. Google has paid out over $15 million since the program began. Major open source projects, ranging from Apache to Xorg, participate by coordinating development efforts and by providing mentors for students.

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Forget Nintendo’s stranglehold on gaming and this crap economy. Now is the perfect time to launch two new video game consoles. Or so say the makers of Zeebo and OnLive, two systems unveiled at the Game Developers Conference this week.

The Zeebo, with 3G technology built by Qualcomm, is not intended for American gamers, however. It’s designed for third world countries like Brazil and China, where companies like Sony and Nintendo do not sell games because of rampant piracy. For example, an imported Wii can cost upwards of R$1000 (about US$446) in Brazil, due to import costs and a less-than-desirable conversion rate.

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A UK privacy group has filed a formal complaint about Google’s Street View to the Office of the Information Commissioner (ICO). The group, Privacy International, believes that Google has not yet taken the appropriate steps to ensure citizens’ privacy and that the service has created “numerous instances of embarrassment and distress.” Because of this, PI argues that Google should remove all of its images until it’s clear that the service operates within the UK’s Data Protection Act.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Street View is a feature built into Google Maps that allows users to see an actual photograph of a particular street or address. These photos are taken by special Google cars that drive around with cameras on top, inevitably resulting in random people showing up in public Street View imagery. This has raised privacy concerns not just in the UK, but around the world, though Google agreed in May of 2008 to blur the faces of those who appear in Street View photos in order to render them unrecognizable.

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Portable navigation device maker TomTom announced Monday that it has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), a coalition of companies that have established a patent-sharing plan to help protect the Linux software ecosystem from hostile patent infringement litigation. TomTom likely joined to give itself more leverage in an ongoing intellectual property dispute against Microsoft.

Microsoft filed a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom last month, alleging that several of the company’s handheld navigation products—including a few that are built on the open source Linux operating system-—infringe an assortment of Microsoft’s patents. The patents in question cover navigation technologies, touchscreen interfaces, and filesystem implementations. TomTom has retaliated by filing a countersuit against Microsoft.

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I was prepared to let the launch of Intel’s Graphics Performance Analyzers (GPA) suite go uncommented upon, because it’s aimed at helping developers wring more gaming performance out of the chipmaker’s integrated graphics processors, and, as any tech person will tell you, Intel’s IGPs are just not as good as the competition. Given Intel clearly knows that their IGPs aren’t up to snuff, and game developers definitely know this, it seemed that there were only two possible reasons that Intel would invest any software effort in trying to improve the experience of gaming on their IGPs: 1) because so many users are stuck with Intel IGPs and the company wants to alleviate their suffering a bit, or 2) corporate insanity, of the “this subpar product isn’t selling, so the answer must be to promote it more heavily” variety. But then I thought of a third possibility, and one that’s more forward-looking and much more interesting: Intel is laying the groundwork for mobile gaming on Moorestown and its successors.

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