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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week in gaming we have EA moving away from selling you games, and towards selling you the ability to buy more things from EA. EGM may be in the grave, but now you get to check out nearly naked ladies! Also, DJ games had something of a sickly E3 showing. This is what people were talking about this week in the world of gaming.

EA’s new motto: please pirate our games… er, storefronts: EA doesn’t mind piracy of Sims 3, as retail customers get the whole experience. In fact, please pirate the company’s future games. Why? EA is selling a service, not a game. Consider everything that comes on the disc a demo; the real value is online.

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The summer solstice has arrived, along with some hot temperatures at Ars HQ in Chicago. Here’s some hot news from the past seven days:

In the second installment of our Palm Pre review, we go in-depth on the software side of the device. Does Palm’s webOS really live up to its promise as a “cloud” messaging mobile? Read the review for more on this topic, as well as the calendar, browser, contacts, alerts, dialer, and other features.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset was held liable to sharing 24 songs, including one by pop crooner Richard Marx. But the lawsuit wasn’t done in Marx’s name—this week, he called out the recording industry’s “greedy actions.”

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The iPhone 3GS is finally out, along with its teardowns and first weekend sales numbers. Also, Steve Jobs seems to be back on campus after what is now confirmed was a liver transplant earlier this year. Need more to entice you to read our weekly roundup of Apple news? There’s a new build of Mac OS X 10.5.8, and security updates to iPhone OS 3.0. Read on:

Review: iPhone 3GS lives up to its speedy claims: The iPhone 3GS has launched and Apple claims that it’s faster than ever. Ars Technica put the device through its paces and found that, while the camera could still use some work, its other new features are useful and the phone’s speed definitely lives up to its name.

Hospital confirms Steve Jobs liver transplant: A hospital in Tennessee has announced that it did, in fact, treat Steve Jobs and that the Apple CEO did receive a liver transplant. He was apparently the sickest patient on the list at the time of transplant, but is now making a good recovery.

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

Windows 7 pricing announced: cheaper than Vista Microsoft has revealed almost all the remaining information about Windows 7. The biggest announcement is pricing: Home Premium and Ultimate editions have slightly dropped in cost.

Windows 7 preorders begin in the US, Canada, and Japan Windows 7 preorders are now available for residents in the US, Canada, and Japan. The deal lasts until July 11 in the US and Canada, and until July 5 in Japan.

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it hasn’t been a very good week for Perez Hilton, the screen name for flamboyant “blogger” Mario Lavandeira. First off, he gets into a scuffle in Toronto with Members of the Black Eyed Peas, calls one of them a “f-ggot”, and get whacked upside the head and gets a black eye as a result. Then on Thursday, as news broke that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack, this guy has the balls to post the picture above with “heart attack or cold feet” written on it, and the text:

Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance from his Holmby Hills home to a nearby Los Angeles hospital on Thursday afternoon!! Supposedly, the singer went into cardiac arrest and the paramedics had to administer CPR!!!
His mother is even on the way to visit him!!!…
We are dubious!!
Jacko pulled a similar stunt when he was getting ready for his big HBO special in ‘95 when he “collapsed” at rehearsal! He was dragging his heels on that just like his upcoming 50 date London residency at the 02 Arena, of which he already postponed the first few dates!!! Either he’s lying or making himself sick, but we’re curious to see if he’s able to go on!!! Get your money back, ticket holders!!!!

The reaction has been swift. Perez’s own blog is packed full of comments calling him out and really giving it to him. Online petitions have started. Fox news ran the story, which apparently Perez declined to comment on when reached for a comment. Considering this guy seems to have something to say about everything, well.

There is a pretty big move out there for people to boycott or stay away from his blog, the anger is running deep as the senselessness of his comments are sinking in.

RIP Michael Jackson!

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Google’s open source Android operating system is maturing and beginning to attract a more diverse audience of third-party developers. To accommodate the growing need for more power and flexibility, Google is opening up the platform to additional programming languages and new kinds of development.

The Android userspace is largely dominated by Java technologies that run on top of Google’s custom Dalvik Java virtual machine. At launch, Java was the only officially supported programming language for building distributable third-party Android software. That’s starting to change as Google introduces new options. On Thursday, the company announced the availability of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) which will allow developers to build Android software components with C and C++.

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It’s good to be the king. Well, in most cases. Sometimes it’s not so fun when someone is gunning for the crown. In this scenario, Team Ars Technica is
the King of the DC Project Genetic
Life (GenLife), and L’Alliance Francophone
(LAF) is trying to stage a coup d’état in order to dethrone Ars and grab first place.

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The September 11 attacks caused a general reassessment of the major threats to the United States, and the general conclusion was that the primary nuclear risk has shifted from major nations to rogue states and terrorist cells. The splintered and hardline nature of these organizations eliminates both diplomacy and brinksmanship as effective deterrents. Further, rogue states and terrorist cells are most likely to deliver nuclear payloads by smuggling them into the country, so the US military’s missile- and laser-based defense systems are effectively useless against these threats.

Today’s primary defense is centered on preventing nuclear materials from entering the US. According to US Customs and Border Patrol, 98 percent of the shipping containers entering US maritime ports, 96 percent of trucks at Northern land border crossings, and 100 percent of those at Southern border crossings are scanned for nuclear materials using radiation portal monitors (RPMs). Congress recently asked the the National Academies of Sciences to review the efforts of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (part of the Department of Homeland Security) in the area of upgrading the nation’s RPMs, and the NAS’ interim findings were, well, unflattering.

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Julius Genachowski will very soon be Chair of the Federal Communications Commission. The White House’s pick for the job received confirmation from the United States Senate late on Thursday. On Friday the FCC sent out a statement on his behalf.

“I want to thank the members of the US Senate for this enormous honor, first presented to me by President Obama to whom I am also deeply grateful,” Genachowski declared. “The FCC has the inspiring mission of ensuring that our communications networks and technologies serve the nation’s needs and improve the lives of all Americans.” The Senate also approved Republican Robert M. McDowell for a new term.

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The news of pop icon Michael Jackson’s collapse and subsequent death sent ripples across the Web on Thursday afternoon, affecting numerous services and sparking yet another spam campaign. Twitter, Google, Facebook, various news sites, and even iTunes were practically crushed under the weight of the sudden spike in Internet traffic. The phenomenon may not be new on an individual level, but combined across services, it was truly one of the most significant in recent memory.

When news first broke that the Jackson had collapsed in his home, Twitter was immediately abuzz. There were several points when the Ars staff observed between 6,000 and 13,000 new tweets per minute mentioning Michael Jackson before Twitter began to melt down—all before anyone other than TMZ.com was reporting his death. Of course, most of us are intimately familiar with the famed Fail Whale at this point, though Twitter’s meltdown was mostly reflected in a major slowing of the service and the inability to send new tweets.

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Our favorite inside source has given us a heads-up on what to expect from both Sony and Microsoft this year in hardware packages and pricing. The path to the holidays is a rosy one, with more hard drive space inside the systems at a lower price. Here’s what we can expect.

Since we can’t name the source, we’re treating all this information as rumor, but the Mole’s reputation in the industry for breaking large stories, a long history of being first out of the gate with big announcements, and an outstanding track record for accuracy speak for themselves.

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Sugar Labs, a nonprofit organization that builds open source educational software, has announced the official release of Sugar on a Stick, a Linux-based platform that includes a suite of child-friendly learning tools. The software is available for download and is designed to be run entirely from a USB memory stick or similar removable media.

Sugar Labs was founded last year by Walter Bender, the former software president of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Bender split from OLPC along with several other key figures following organizational changes that raised serious questions about OLPC’s long-term viability and commitment to the open source philosophy. Sugar Labs has taken on the role of maintaining OLPC’s Sugar learning environment and seeks to make it accessible to a significantly broader audience.

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Your enjoyment of The Conduit is going to depend directly upon whether or not you’re picking up what the Wii is dropping. It’s a good-looking Wii game, which to some people on the Internet is still like calling I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here the least obnoxious reality show on TV. The mouse and the keyboard, and even the controllers of the other two systems, may be more precise. But what those games are missing is the Wii’s motion-control functions, and yes, they certainly add much to a standard first-person shooter.

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In our last bit of World Science Festival coverage, we discussed how inflation has produced an expanding, inhabitable universe. That still leaves the question of why that universe seems to be filled with strange stuff like virtual particles and dark energy. A different panel tackled that question and, in true quantum fashion, the session that described the contents of the universe came before the one that described its creation.

The session, which was moderated by radio host John Hockenberry, started out with a historical perspective on the fabric of the universe from Cambridge’s John Barrow. Barrow described various views of whether it might be possible for a space to exist that was devoid of the sorts of matter we’re familiar with. Reactions to the prospects, from the time of Aristotle onwards, were mixed, but they were primarily based on philosophical grounds. Things really didn’t get close to our modern conception of a vacuum—one with states that could change over time—until the time of James Clerk Maxwell. The advent of quantum mechanics finally made the description and study of vacuum states a quantitative science.

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When the FBI uses a national security letter (NSL) to force the cooperation of an ISP or phone company in the surveillance of a suspect, the agency typically slaps a gag order on the service provider to prevent it from revealing the existence of the NSL. Civil liberties groups have successfully challenged the DOJ on these gag orders in the ongoing Doe v. Holder, and last month the Obama administration decided not to appeal a federal court ruling that the FBI must justify these gag orders by meeting a relatively high First Amendment standard.

The implication of the court’s ruling was that the FBI would finally have to justify the gag order that it had placed on the John Doe in the Doe v. Holder case, so that the plaintiff could talk about the NSL. The FBI has now cooperated, and has given the court a justification of the gag order, in secret.

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The Federal Trade Commission has settled a case involving two scareware scammers. The settlement will relieve the two defendants of having to fork over almost $1.9 million as part of a judgment made against them, but will still require them to forfeit $116,697 in assets to the FTC.

The two defendants, James Reno and ByteHosting Internet Services, LLC, were based out of Cincinnati when they began their “massive deceptive advertising scheme.” The two supposedly conned over a million customers into buying computer security software (such as WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner, XP Antivirus, and more) that ended up falsely claiming that they had found viruses, spyware, and porn on people’s machines. The software would then ask for money in order to rid the computers of these fake viruses.

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To lend some context to this review, I was a big fan of the first Transformers film. Sure, it was loud and the camera shook too much, but it was a great summer film and a solid take on the idea that alien robots wanted nothing more than to turn into Earth vehicles and fight each other. Peter Cullen came back to voice Optimus Prime, and just when the human characters became intolerable, there was another battle scene. I went into Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with high hopes that this film would offer more of the same, and thinking the critics were merely being snobs when they panned it.

Boy, was I wrong. This is what happens when the first film in a series becomes a monstrous hit, and no one at the studio dares to say no to you.

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Quite simply, I am shocked and dismays. As many of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I didn’t really like Michael Jackson’s music (rock guy here) but still had respect for this work. We all watched as he went through his creepy, reclusive stage, and deep down we cheered as he announced his 50 concert event for the UK, scheduled for later this year.

Well, some people, like annoying gossip blogger Perez Hilton, could only seem to joke and jibe about it. In his typical fashion, he made crude comments. The Perez style includes writing rude comments on images, adding genitalia, and other childish things. Anyway, when the news broke of Michael Jackson’s heart attack, this fool ran the picture above – “heart attack or cold feet”.

How crude. Perez, I know why you got slugged the other night. You are a creep. I hope every one of your advertisers drops your site like a rock, and I hope that every intelligent celeb in the world no longer wants anything to do with your rude, crude blog. Go away, your time is up.

RIP Michael Jackson!

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Intel’s China-based Fab 68 will produce 65nm silicon exclusively when it goes online early next year, Intel has announced. The announcement is something of a surprise, since Intel had been restricted by US government export regulations from exporting high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, and when Fab 68 goes online, 65nm will be only two nodes behind the cutting edge.

We last covered Fab 68 two years ago, when a widespread rumor culminated in Intel’s announcement that it would construct a 90nm fab in China. Prior to this, government rules had prohibited any manufacturing in China on any process lower than .18 micron by any American firm, to protect American supremacy in semiconductor manufacturing for both economic and military purposes. Taiwan, whose TSMC and UMC are the world’s largest and most advanced foundries, enforced the same rule. As a result, competition within China was restricted to China’s own domestic fabs, which, with one exception, were unable to achieve less than .18 micron feature sizes. Lifting the restriction was a major step for the US in allowing semiconductor proliferation.

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Quick, name the country that plans to impose a mandatory Internet censoring regime that will, among other things, block access to all video games intended for anyone over the age of 15?

Answer: Australia.

The Australian government has pressed ahead with a trial of its proposed Internet filtering system, this despite the fact that—by its own admission—”there are no success criteria as such.”

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One of Steve Chu’s first actions when he took over the Department of Energy was to appoint Matt Rogers as a senior advisor. Rogers had previously worked on energy issues at a consulting firm and brought a wealth of industry experience to the DOE. Yesterday, at a meeting hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy, Rogers provided a high-level view of the DOE’s current position on energy policy and the Department’s view of where it stands in terms of fostering a transition to renewable energy in the middle of a financial crisis. The talk provided an interesting glimpse into how a government agency viewed its newly enhanced role as a director of investments.

Rogers had the unenviable task of selling Obama administration policy to a room filled with Wall Street investment bankers—precisely those individuals who have received bonuses that have been criticized by Obama himself. He also acknowledged that there are large segments of the public that believe the US government is incapable of doing any large-scale development work well. As a result, there appeared to be a degree of cheerleading in his talk, such as when he claimed, “energy and environmental policy are aligned for perhaps the first time ever, and has the resources for the first time ever.”

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