Last week, we ran an op-ed from Charles Nesson, the Harvard Law professor waging war on the RIAA “Goliath” and its army of lawyers. Here to respond to Nesson’s accusations is Steven Marks, general counsel for the RIAA. To Marks, Nesson is playing the part of a circus ringmaster, not a downtrodden “David.” The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Ars Technica.

Yes, we “get it”

It is a fascinating and challenging time to work in the music business. The record industry is swept up in a sea of change and we have embraced it. It’s a new day for the business and a new day for fans—25 years ago, it was just radio and records, but today’s music marketplace is dramatically different, with hundreds of different fully licensed digital music services and models.

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While E3 may not officially begin until Tuesday this week, the action has already begun. Trailers of big-name games are being released or leaked, the PSP Go has been a hot topic of conversation, and of course Microsoft will try to begin the whole mess tomorrow with a bang, as the company hosts the show’s first press conference. What do we expect from E3 this year?

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It didn’t take long before one of the biggest E3 rumors was confirmed. GamingConsoleNetwork noticed that the PSP Go made an appearance in an early release of the Sony video series Qore. And then it was described in detail. And then shown some more. Soon after that, Eurogamer got ahold of a series of pictures of the hardware, which reveal everything in beautiful detail. The system is real, it is small, and it has no UMD drive. 

The video is being pulled from YouTube just as soon as it’s being uploaded, but a quick search or two should turn up a copy of the video if you’d like to see the hardware in action. Here’s what we know about the hardware so far… it seems like the Mole was right about many of the details.

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A new plagiarism detection service says that it can help track down copied text on the Internet—but it is any better than a search engine? We put it to the test with some of our own content.

Plagium is simple to use: enter text into a box and hit the “track plagiarisms” button. Site operator Septet Systems says that Plagium uses “Septet’s proprietary TX Miner engine, which employs advanced search technology for deep mining of documents on the public World Wide Web or within private repositories,” but the actual search results are generated with the Yahoo Search API.

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Video games are harmful to children: But not how you think. The paper’s title suggests it’s bad news, starting with the phrase “Dying to Play Video Games.” But the harm turns out to be pretty indirect, as it comes from carbon monoxide poisoning. It turns out that, during the power outages caused by Hurricane Ike’s landfall in Texas, the use of faulty generators sent about 20 children to the ER. In 75 percent of those cases, it turns out their parents started up the generator in order to allow their kids to play video games in order to while away the time in the dark.

This wine tastes of Mount Shasta National Forest: It’s a scene that’s made its way to a number of movies and TV shows I’ve watched: the wine snob carefully sniffs and sips a glass of wine and, after a moment of contemplation, names the region and year of origin of the wine. Well, the snob’s got nothing on a mass spec. Given enough samples to work with, the folks who study wines (oenologists, if you must know) can actually figure out where the barrels it was aged in came from. Or, as the authors put it, “the statistical analysis of a series of barrel-aged wines revealed that 10-year-old wines still express a metabologeographic signature of the forest location where oaks of the barrel in which they were aged have grown.” And, showing that the study of wines is subject to the same sort of buzzwords that afflicts other fields, the authors have tagged their paper “systems oenology” and called their methods an “oenolomic approach.”

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The expressive power of the Web is largely made possible by open standards. HTML, the vendor-neutral markup language that serves as the underlying foundation of the open Web, helped to foster the culture of interoperability and inclusiveness that have made the Internet a success. HTML 5, the next iteration of that standard, could bring the same degree of empowerment and interoperability to rich media and other kinds of Web content.

Although HTML 5 is still in the draft process and has not yet been ratified by W3C, the nascent standard is gaining significant traction. Browser makers are implementing key features of HTML 5 and bringing robust support for some of its most advanced capabilities to end users. A growing number of prominent companies that deliver content and services on the Web are putting their weight behind HTML 5 and touting it as the way forward for building interactive Web applications and deploying rich media in the
browser.

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It’s all but guaranteed that new iPhones are coming soon, given the endless flow of rumors about the device (or devices). That, plus Apple’s newest back-to-school promotion, more lawsuit developments, and Mac clone maker Psystar filing for bankruptcy all rounded out this week’s top Apple news.

Knockoff iPod shuffle giveaway ruffles some feathers: One man’s gift is another man’s lawsuit. Some iPod knockoffs given away at the Swiss Economic Forum were not universally enjoyed, and one recipient has even sued the company giving them away.

Icons surface for next-gen iPhone in most recent SDK beta: Icons labeled as iPhone2,1 are included in the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK beta 5, and appear to confirm speculation that next-gen iPhone hardware will differ little in appearance from current models.

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Just as the northern hemisphere is heating up as we move towards the summer solstice, so is the rhetoric between the RIAA and its legal adversaries.

Harvard law professor Charles Nesson has gotten involved in another file-sharing lawsuit, and he’s making another demand of the recording industry. Nesson says that the RIAA will need to cough up over $100 million that he believes it has obtained from the 30,000+ lawsuits it’s filed, should the cases he’s currently involved in succeed.

The developers over at Canonical have been busy lately. Not only are they working on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but they are also building an execution environment for Android applications. Android apps will be able to run on Ubuntu, opening the door for a whole new ecosystem of third-party software to come to the Linux desktop.

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This week we have the mole giving us some solid information about what to expect in Sony’s future with both the PS3 and PSP, the cracks in GameStop’s armor, and we present a few tips on how to be an effective PR professional in the world of gaming. Also, we talk about the challenges of dealing with the gay and lesbian community in online gaming, in the same week Rockstar announced the Ballad of Gay Tony. Let’s see what the world of gaming was talking about this week.

Mole: PSP-Go details confirmed, smaller PS3 is on the way: Our trusty inside source spills the beans about Sony’s long-term strategy. The PSP-Go! is real, and should be announced at E3. The more surprising news? A slimmed-down PS3 is in fact coming, but not until Sony sells the PS3s sitting on retail shelves. The full report inside.

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It was a busy week in the world of Microsoft. Let’s recap the top stories.

Wondering how the Windows 7 release candidate UI compares to some of the earlier builds? Ars breaks down the differences in detail. And by detail, we mean extreme, OCD-like detail. If you’re wondering how the right-click menus differ, this is the article for you.

Microsoft has been a search laggard for years, consistently coming in a distant third to Google and Yahoo. The software giant has unveiled Bing, its Live Search rebrand. Ars took a close hands-on look at Bing and found much to like—and some stuff that we didn’t like so much.

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The Obama administration has sent a number of signals that it takes the information infrastructure of the nation seriously, having approved stimulus money for broadband and established a post for a national CTO. In parallel with these actions, the administration authorized a review of the national cybersecurity policy, and that review is now complete. Depending on how you read the resulting report, it concluded either that we don’t have a cybersecurity policy, or that we have too many of them; in either case, its authors have made a number of very specific suggestions as to how to improve the situation.

The report is fairly blunt, stating early on that “the architecture of the Nation’s digital infrastructure, based largely upon the Internet, is not secure or resilient.” As our network infrastructure has developed, the focus has been on things like performance, ease-of-use, and compatibility, and security consciousness was pretty low for much of its history. So, it’s not a surprise that both government and private computer systems have been victimized, and evidence suggests that both private parties and foreign governments have been behind these attacks.

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There may only be a couple Android-capable phones on the market right now, but by the end of the year, there could be as many as 20. Google discussed the company’s plans this week to work with eight or nine unnamed manufacturers in order to roll out the devices, which may be available overseas earlier than here in the US.

Google’s senior director for mobile platforms Andy Rubin indicated at the Google I/O conference that there would be at least 18 Android devices by the end of 2009 and possibly up to 20, according to the New York Times. That includes two that are already on the market—the G1 in the US, and the HTC Magic in Europe—but does not include however many manufacturers may make use of the open source OS without working with Google.

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Tiger Woods has become one of EA’s more popular franchises. It might not rival the yearly payday that Madden provides, but the series of golfing titles enjoys a steady fanbase and has even found success on the Nintendo Wii, where the Wiimote is wielded like a golf club. This year’s update provides MotionPlus support for added accuracy, in fact. The series has been successful at adapting to differing platforms, and now we’ll see a similar adaptation for the PC: the next iteration of the series for home computers may bypass retail stores entirely, instead depending on a subscription-based pricing model.

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The Eclipse Foundation, the organization behind the development of the popular Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), has published the results of its 2009 developer survey. This survey mirrors a similar one conducted in 2007, making it possible to evaluate statistical changes in the Eclipse user community that have transpired over the past two years.

The survey included a number of questions about demographics, technology preferences, perceptions of Eclipse, and other related issues. The results of the survey were summarized in a report which includes some graphs and an overview of the results. Eclipse marketing director Ian Skerrett also published a blog entry which identifies some of the most striking insights that were gleaned from the study. One of the most intriguing discoveries relates to a shift in operating system preferences among survey respondents. The survey shows strong growth of the Linux operating system in the Eclipse developer community.

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What is going on in Canada? This week, a prestigious research group recalled a series of intellectual property reports that were highly favorable to copyright holders—and appear to have been plagiarized. And the Business Software Alliance admitted that its Canadian software piracy numbers were “estimates”—no surveying had been done in the country.

Irony alert

Both discoveries were made by law professor Michael Geist, a one-man IP wrecking ball. First up was a report from the Conference Board of Canada, a nonpartisan research group that was asked to produce a report on the digital economy. When the report in question came out, the press release trumpeted, “Canada seen as the file-swapping capital of the world.”

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SourceForge, the company behind the popular code hosting service, has announced plans to acquire Ohloh. The acquisition is part of a broader effort to renew the relevance of SourceForge and bring greater value to the website’s users.

Ohloh is a social network for open source software communities. It analyzes the source code in remote version control systems in order to collect data about software and programmers. Users can set up profiles at the site which will aggregate all of the information collected by Ohloh about their participation in open source software projects. The site aims to provide useful metrics about a multitude of open source software projects and makes it easier for participants to find each other and interact.

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If you buy items on the Web, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a popup screen after making a purchase that offers you a cash back reward on future purchases. “Cash back! On future purchases! Awesome!” you think, clicking the “yes” button and entering an e-mail address. “After all, companies can’t sign me up for any kind of mysterious recurring charges with an e-mail address, right?”

Wrong—thousands of people have seen charges of $9-12 show up on credit cards every month after clicking on such links. That’s because they have actually enrolled in a Web loyalty program, in many cases without knowing it.

Companies like Webloyalty have affiliations with merchants—big names like Orbitz, Petco, Fandango, Priceline, and FTD. When customers sign up for their “cash back” offer, Webloyalty simply gets the billing information from the merchant. Problem solved—except for consumers.

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Hulu dropped a surprise on TV fans Thursday by introducing public beta of Hulu Desktop—desktop software for the Mac and Windows that works with the popular TV streaming site. The software finally removes Hulu from the web browser in an official, Hulu-approved way and puts it into a very media-center-like format for browsing and watching your favorite shows. Though Hulu Desktop still keeps Hulu’s offerings largely on the computer, it offers some flexibility in the watching experience.

This is all part of the opening of Hulu Labs which, according to the Hulu Blog, will offer sneak peeks at things the developers are working on. This includes recommendation algorithms, custom widgets, and more. The first Hulu Labs offering, however, is Hulu Desktop, which was designed as a “lean-back viewing experience” for use with either Apple’s standard remote or the Windows Media Center remote (the menus can be navigated with a mouse and keyboard as well).

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It’s a common complaint from gamers when they look at release lists: there are just too many games to play during the holiday season. Wouldn’t it be better if game releases were spread out throughout the year? Research firm EEDAR has taken the time and effort to crunch the numbers, and the data it dug up is interesting… and won’t lead to many changes in the behavior of publishers.

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HDMI Licensing has announced that the improved HDMI 1.4 specification has been finalized. The new specification, slated to be published by the end of June, includes a number of additions to the High Definition Multimedia Interface standard that is becoming more commonplace with the proliferation of high-def flat panel TVs, Blu-ray players, and a number of other devices. Unfortunately, the spec comes with no less than five different cable types, and defines an additional “micro” port and an automotive-specific connection system, which joins the standard and “mini” HDMI port variants.

The new 1.4 spec adds an optional Ethernet-compatible data channel to HDMI. This data channel will allow bidirectional data transmission up to 100Mbps. The data transmission capabilities will allow one Internet-connected device to share the connection, as well as enable content sharing among HDMI connected devices.

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Google is looking to change the way we use the Internet to communicate with a new service that it calls Google Wave. Wave was previewed Thursday during the Google I/O conference as a way to combine e-mail, chat, photos, feeds from around the Web, and more in a collaborative environment. The project is not only cool-sounding, it’s also quite ambitious, and Google hopes it will eventually replace some of our uses for e-mail.

In a post to the Official Google Blog, Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen discussed the evolution of Wave after he and his brother Jens joined Google. According to Rasmussen, too much of our Internet communication was created out of imitation of a real-life form (e-mail, live chat, document sharing), and as a result, it had become too segmented when it didn’t have to be. “What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”

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Teaching copyright to schoolkids is a recent innovation, one spurred in large part by the fantastical growth and amazing ease of digital copying—both legal and illegal. Most such programs have been drawn up by rightsholders in a not-so-subtle attempt to bolster their business models. For instance, “Think First, Copy Later: Respecting Creative Ownership” may have some educational value, but the title makes clear that this is not the kind of dispassionate material that belongs in our nation’s classrooms.

Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a curriculum of its own in an effort to “give students the real story about their digital rights and responsibilities on the Internet and beyond.” But if the rightsholder-produced material stresses the “responsibilities” side of the equation a bit too heavily, the EFF leans predictably the other way.

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The SATA International Organization, the industry consortium governing Serial ATA interfaces, yesterday released a finalized version of the SATA 3.0 specification, which features 6.0Gbps data transfers and a number of improved features while remaining completely backwards-compatible with existing drives, controllers, connectors, and cables. While current hard disk drives can’t saturate SATA 2.0′s 3Gbps data rate, SSDs can, and the new features are moderately compelling.

SATA launched in 2001, and has been through one prior speed bump, from 1.5Gbps to 3.0Gbps. The IDE-SATA transition and prior bump were both timed to give the industry about three years to adopt the new standard, making for a smooth transition, unlike, for instance, the 4GB file limit on FAT32 file systems, the 4GB memory limit on 32-bit x86 operating systems, or the 640k memory limit and extended/expanded memory misery of the 1980s.

This new transition is significantly more urgent than the others, because SSDs are already saturating SATA 2.0.

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Throughout the history of the planet, there have been a number of mass
extinction events. The largest was the “Great Dying,” which occurred at
the border of the Permian and Triassic periods—during this event, over
half of the species on Earth at the time went extinct. Thanks to a recent find
in southwestern China, researchers have been able to nearly pinpoint
the events that appear to have precipitated the Great Dying.

Major volcanic activity is often a leading candidate for causing mass extinctions, but pinpointing a specific eruption or
sequence of eruptions that caused a mass die-off of marine life is difficult.
Typically, indirect geochronological methods must be employed, and they have known timing inaccuracies that complicate the analysis. In the case of the Great Dying, it appears that there may have been several pulses of extinctions.

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To some people, jokes about Google’s perpetual beta status on its services will never get old. But for business users considering paying for Google Apps, the beta tag can be kind of off-putting. It’s for this reason that Google may end up graduating some of its most well-loved Web applications from beta to… not-beta sometime in the near future.

Google acknowledged the discrepancy during a roundtable discussion about the company’s business offerings at Google’s I/O conference this week. Though Google product management director for enterprise products Matt Glotzbach pointed out that Google Apps Premier Edition does not have a beta tag, many of the apps included in the package do. Indeed, Gmail is the most prominent example of this, followed by Google Calendar and Google Docs—all of which have been in fairly widespread use for some time.

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The marriage between AOL and Time Warner has generally not been a happy one. The original vision was that AOL would provide an outlet for the material that Time Warner’s other divisions produced, giving the combined company a whole-widget approach to content. That never worked out, and the division was often a drag on its parent company’s earnings. As a result, rumors that AOL was for sale have circulated for years (Ars’ coverage of them dates back to at least 2005), and played a prominent role in the awkward ballet performed by Microsoft and Yahoo last year. None of the deals ever came to fruition, and now it appears that Time Warner has given up: AOL will be spun off as an independently traded company.

There are still a couple of hurdles the spinoff will have to clear. Google owns a five percent stake in AOL, and Time Warner will have to buy that off the search giant before it can complete the transaction. There will also be a lot of internal bookkeeping maneuvers needed to surgically remove AOL from its parent, and the SEC will have to approve all of them. Still, there’s no reason to expect that either of these represent an insurmountable barrier to the separation. When the process is complete, Time Warner shareholders will own all of the outstanding shares of AOL, and can trade them on public exchanges.

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Microsoft has finally taken the wraps off the new branding for Live Search, and the final name is Bing. We’ve known since March that a rebrand was coming, and we’ve been saying for even longer that Live Search is in dire need of one (among other improvements of course), but only recently did it become clear that Kumo was just the codename. The final name was only recently revealed to Ars; previously we were using Kumo internally along with Microsoft employees. 

The new search will be reachable at bing.com, but will not be fully available worldwide until Wednesday, June 3, according to Microsoft. If you can’t get your Bing on yet, Microsoft has a site up with some behind-the-scenes video as well as an interactive product guide.

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The first thing that stands out as you peruse the Federal Communications Commission’s latest report on rural broadband is that it reads like it was actually written by somebody.

“As long as a grade-school child living on a farm cannot research a science project, or a high school student living on a remote Indian reservation cannot submit a college application,” the 78 page document begins, “or an entrepreneur in a rural hamlet cannot order spare parts, or a local law enforcement officer cannot download pictures of a missing child without traveling to a city or town that has broadband Internet access, we cannot turn back from these challenges.”

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Wednesday Intel took the wraps off the next iteration of its Xeon server line, the Nehalem EX, which will debut in the second half of this year. Nehalem EX has up to 8 cores, which gives a total of 16 threads per socket (with hyperthreading). That’s a lot of threads in one socket, so it’s good that Intel outfitted the chip with plenty of I/O and memory bandwidth in the form of four QPI links and two integrated memory controllers. Also helping to keep the cores fed is a 24MB cache.

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With E3 only a few days away, the rumors and speculation have begun to filter around the Internet; all eyes will be on Los Angeles to see what Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft have up their respective sleeves. Luckily, we don’t have to guess, as we have the support of our very well-informed mole. His information? Not only is the PSP Go real, but we’ll be seeing a slimmed-down PS3 in August or September. However, this news likely won’t be announced during E3.

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Why is the issue of sexual orientation so explosive that the very act of saying the word “gay” or “lesbian” is sometimes against the rules? Bioware found itself on the wrong end of this controversy when a community manager gracelessly began locking threads that discussed the issue, and then claimed that there simply were no gay or lesbian characters in Star Wars. Maybe those words don’t exist in galaxies far, far, away, but the characters often do: Bioware themselves created a game with a character who laid down with another woman as with a man.

Sony was a part of a similar controversy after the words “gay” and “Jew” were edited out of Home, the company’s social online service for PS3 owners. And Microsoft made headlines when the company banned a player who self-identified as a lesbian, claiming any notice of sexual orientation was against the terms of service.

In some ways it’s unfair to take the world of gaming to task for its immature handling of gay and lesbian issues. After all, it’s hard to find a game that takes any kind of relationship seriously. This is an art form that knows how to show two people killing each other nearly perfectly, but seems to turn into a bunch of fifth-graders when dealing with a kiss, much less when that kiss is between two men or two women. It’s clear that something has to give, although companies only seem to pay attention after receiving the wrong kind of attention for their policies.

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When Google’s Chrome web browser debuted with much fanfare last year, it was not Windows-only and cross-platform compatible. The developers soon began working on Linux and Mac OS X ports of the browser’s underlying open source Chromium code base. These ports are beginning to mature and could soon be ready for regular users.

We took a look at the Mac OS X port of Chromium a few months ago, but the Linux port was still barely functional at the time. A lot of progress has been made since then and the Linux version is now in the alpha stage. We tested it on Ubuntu 9.04 to see how it compares with the latest release of Chrome for Windows. There are still missing features and lots of rendering bugs, but it is clearly moving in the right direction.

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It’s a well-known story by now: Europe, the US, and plenty of other countries have made it generally illegal to circumvent DRM, even when users want to do something legal with the content. Sure, it sounds bad and Ars complains about it all the time, but come on—do anticircumvention laws really prevent real people in the real world from doing real things with their content? Or are the complaints largely dreamed up by copyleft activists who would like nothing more than to see the term “intellectual property” disappear into the tentacled maw of Cthulhu?

According to the first empirical study of its kind in the UK, by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester, it’s the former. DRM is so rage-inducing, even to ordinary, legal users of content, that it can even drive the blind to download illegal electronic Bibles.

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As scientists improve on our ability to detect extrasolar planets and launch new observatories like the Kepler, the collection of exoplanets continues to rise. But, so far, we haven’t been able to say a whole lot about them, other than their apparent mass and distance from the host star. That’s slowly beginning to change, as today’s issue of Nature contains a report of the first observation of phases in an extrasolar planet. And although this discovery could be expected, other research suggests that the techniques involved may ultimately help future instruments identify oceans on distant planets.

The recent discovery was made using the European Space Agency’s orbiting CoRoT observatory, which couples a small telescope to a wide-field camera. That camera can observe thousands of stars at once, and CoRoT began picking up transiting planets very shortly after it became operational back in 2007. The new data is based on continual observation of one of its own discoveries, CoRoT-1b, which belongs to a class of planets called “hot Jupiters.” These are gas giants that orbit close in to their host star, and tend to be one of the easiest things to detect. In this case, researchers performed 55 days of near-continuous observations, enough to follow 36 orbits of CoRoT-1b. (For anyone concerned that we were wasting time staring at something we already knew was there, rest assured that CoRoT was able to keep a digital eye on 12,000 or so other stars at the same time.)

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Spam levels have risen over the past month to more than 90 percent of all corporate e-mail, according to Symantec’s May 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report (PDF). The latest report effectively communicates the concept of “spam, boy there sure is a lot of it,” but goes into detail about the latest trends in spamming activity like botnet activity and the use of social networks.

In May, spam rose by 5.1 percent over April, with 57.6 of it coming from known botnets. One particular botnet called Donbot was named as the most active, and is responsible for 18.2 percent of all spam. Symantec wrote that much of the remainder (42.4 percent) of spam originated out of smaller or unclassified botnets.

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In the span of less than a decade, the public went from being blissfully unaware of thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative that was used in a number of vaccines, to a place where death threats against vaccine advocates are now issued with frightening regularity. How exactly did this happen? PLoS Biology has produced an article that attempts to provide a historical perspective on these developments and fit them into the wider issue of how scientific information is communicated with the public. The story turns out to be one of historic accidents and missed opportunities, but one that could provide some valuable lessons to both public health authorities and the scientific community at large.

The article is well written, should be accessible to nonscientists, and is open access, so I’ll only recap its outlines, while focusing on aspects of the story that the author didn’t develop.

In the US, the vaccine scare can apparently be traced back to an apparently unrelated event in 1997, when a funding bill included a rider that called for the FDA to conduct an inventory of all possible sources of mercury exposure from the products it regulated. The inventory came at a time when the vaccination programs were benefitting from increased productivity—boosters were scheduled based on a better understanding of epidemiology, vaccines were becoming available for more illnesses, etc.—that had increased the number of injections children were receiving. The result was that the FDA found that children were exposed to unexpected levels of thimerosal, a preservative used in some vaccines that contains ethyl mercury.

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Microsoft last night announced (officially) the Zune HD, even though the device won’t be available for several months. While the product itself looks nice, it’s the “platform” behind it that is finally coming to fruition and may be Microsoft’s best chance at capturing a bigger slice of those home entertainment dollars.

We spoke with Brian Seitz, the group marketing manager for Zune, about the new product and Microsoft’s larger strategic ambitions. Here’s everything you need to know:

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An appeals court decided to back consumers on Tuesday, unanimously upholding a Federal Communications Commission order banning exclusive cable video contracts in apartment buildings and other multiple dwelling units (MDUs).

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The European Commission has moved to sue Sweden after the Nordic state failed to implement the EU’s Data Retention Directive in a timely fashion.

The Directive was passed back in 2006 and requires all EU member states to implement some form of data retention legislation, with terms of six month to two years. National laws were to be in place by March of this year, but Sweden still has yet to introduce a bill of its own.

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A firehose of real-time FAA radar data might not sound like the best way to have divined John McCain’s vice presidential pick during last year’s US presidential campaign; better to just cast lots, read the tea leaves, and make a wildly overconfident guess like the rest of the DC punditocracy. But thanks to an innovative website called FlightAware and a bit of digital sleuthing, plane data did in fact identify the VP pick as Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

When McCain went to Ohio to announce his choice of a running mate, Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic noted the “journey of a sturdy Gulfstream 5 with the tail number of N22GY. Anchorage, Alaska to Hook Municipal Field in Ohio. Nearby Dayton. 30 miles away. And the plane was in Flagstaff, AZ recently.” The plane was also registered to a big Republican donor.

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Craigslist may have officially shut down its Erotic Services section in favor of a less prostitution-friendly “Adult” area, but what prostitution did exist on the site is still alive and well. Not only that, but the changes may have made the world’s oldest profession a little more dangerous for working girls, at least according to those who do business on the site.

The Erotic Services section used to be rife with listings containing nude or semi-nude pics and explicit descriptions of the available services. To those who have ever seen it—or the back of practically any local magazine over the last several decades—it’s obvious that these listings ultimately amount to the exchange of money for sexual gratification. The new “adult” section (link NSFW) barely changes this. Instead of $5 to make an Erotic Services listing, those who provide adult “services” now must pay $10 and have each post reviewed by a Craigslist moderator before it’s posted to the site.

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Earlier this month, Microsoft made the Windows 7 Release Candidate build publically available. The flood of e-mails began: “Emil, what’s new in the RC? What changed? What is different?” That question can be answered in many ways. Some of my peers have already reviewed the RC build, and while I commend them on their effort, reviewing beta software is not something I personally like to do. If you want the short answer to the question, I will tell you this: there are thousands of bugs fixed, the build is much faster all around, and most importantly, the biggest feature changes have been completed. If you want the long answer, and I mean the really long answer, read on.

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The advent of digital technology is slowly bringing change to traffic safety enforcement. Digital cameras and radar guns, combined with software that can recognize license numbers, can remove the need for having officers on the roads to enforce speed limits—as well as limit the instances where said officers get talked out of issuing a summons or fail to show up in court. Red light cameras provide an equally reliable addition to the revenue streams for municipal governments, but they have a far more complex relationship to public safety, which has led a number of states to ban them. Now, some cities in Texas, where a ban of this sort included a grandfather clause, are committing themselves to long-term contracts with the camera provider in order to escape the ban.

Ostensibly, traffic laws are all about public safety, as they prohibit drivers from a variety of behaviors that correlate with increased risk of accidents. And, in the case of speed cameras, the relationship should be pretty straightforward. Assuming that the speed limit on a given road is set based on the road’s layout and prevailing traffic conditions, anything that keeps drivers from driving too far above the speed limit should benefit public safety. The fact that they bring in a steady stream of fines is just an added bonus.

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It’s easy to picture the Vatican as a medieval anachronism—a theme park built by Michelangelo and protected by the Swiss Guard (who really are Swiss, by the way). Heck, its press office even closes at 2:30pm.

But this impression isn’t wholly accurate. The Vatican has taken plenty of small steps into the Internet age over the last decade and has repeatedly urged the faithful to take the euangelion of Jesus to the furthest corners of the “so-called cyberspace”—lo, even unto Facebook and beyond.

This last week, the head of the Vatican press office went even further, saying that he need to “work even harder so that every day it will be more true to say, and so that we might be able to say with greater and greater conviction: the Internet is truly blessed!”

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If you played the original Boom Blox on the Nintendo Wii, you’ll be forgiven if you’re slightly deflated by the first play session of Bash Party. The game doesn’t make any radical leaps in control, or graphics, or design, but the more you play, the more you’ll realize that the tweaks and additions scattered around the game make this sequel a much more robust experience… with longer legs to match. Bash Party gives fans more of what they want, while not breaking what they enjoy. That’s a strategy that remains hard to argue with.

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After a lengthy development cycle that included delays and furious testing, Microsoft has finally given the public Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (final build is 6.0.6002.18005). You can download the installer from the Microsoft Download Center: 32-bit (348.3MB), 64-bit (577.4MB), and IA64 (450.4MB). There’s also an ISO image (1376.8MB) that contains these installers. The installers will work on English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish versions of either Vista or Server 2008. Other language versions will arrive later. Those interested in slipstreamed versions of Vista and Server 2008 with SP2 will need to get an MSDN or TechNet subscription.

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Nokia’s Ovi Store is officially open for business, bringing Nokia users an App Store-like interface to download third-party software. The available applications range from fun to practical, and while some cost money, many others are available for free. With Nokia’s extensive reach across the globe, the company has the potential to grow the Ovi Store to Apple App Store proportions—as long as it fixes some UI quirks and appeals to the developer community.

Though the Ovi Store is technically available on a wide variety of Nokia devices, not every available app works on every device—the selection for less-capable devices will undoubtedly get better as more developers release software for the store. You can find out which apps work with which phones by selecting a specific Nokia device on the main Ovi Store page.

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There’s a certain irony to the developing story of Michael Lynton’s battle against the Internet. The CEO of Sony Pictures had told an audience attending a discussion of the future of filmmaking that he “doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet.” Those remarks were, naturally, widely criticized on various corners of the Internet, and Lynton has now turned to an Internet-only outlet, The Huffington Post, in order to respond to those critiques. Given the above, it’s no surprise to find that Lynton actually is perfectly fine with the Internet; he just (surprise!) doesn’t like piracy.

Reading his response suggests that the Internet has a specific value for Lynton, as his essay, which would have caused the person who taught my freshman year writing class fits, probably wouldn’t have made the cut at media outlets that have stronger editorial standards. He spends the first eight paragraphs more or less implicitly disavowing his initial comments, saying that the ‘Net is a good thing for humanity in general, and has even helped the content industry by helping to identify new talents and providing exciting prospects for new distribution models.

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Last year, European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes raised questions about the strange state of the European music market. “Why is it possible to buy a CD from an online retailer and have it shipped to anywhere in Europe, but it is not possible to buy the same music, by the same artist, as an electronic download with similar ease?” she asked. “Why do pan-European services find it so difficult to get a pan-European license? Why do new, innovative services find licensing to be such a hurdle?”

This year, she intends to do something about the problem, which has resulted in low growth rates for digital content sales. Kroes, who has already taken on Microsoft and Intel, wants to move Europe’s digital music business toward a common market that crosses country borders. If a company like Apple wants to launch an online music store, it shouldn’t need to open dozens of separate shops that can each serve only one country. Instead, a single set of licenses ought to be good enough to provide service across Europe.

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Do not adjust your monitors: a Chinese government critic has won a court case against his ISP in Beijing for taking his website offline. Economics professor Hu Xingdou’s website was shut down by Beijing Xin Net for containing “illegal” content earlier this year, but a Daxing district court ruled last week that the ISP could not provide proof for its claims and ordered Xin Net to repay Hu’s service fees from the past two years.

Hu was apparently known for discussing government corruption and police brutality on his website—sensitive topics that have historically gotten the attention of Chinese Internet censors pretty quickly. When Hu wrote about China’s reeducation through labor system in March, however, Xin Net was apparently ordered from on high to close down Hu’s website.

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