China has been in the news more than usual lately as it continues to go after popular search engines for supposedly disseminating porn. This week, users of Google’s services experienced unexplained access problems in China. Meanwhile, sexual health sites are on the verge of being blocked, and Microsoft’s Bing has agreed to censor its Chinese search results.

Google has been under fire in China lately for not doing enough to block porn from entering the country over the Internet. Late last week, the government began blocking access to certain Google results in an attempt to remedy this problem, even as Google pledged to step up its efforts to fight porn in China. China is impatient, however, and Google is not perfect, leading to this week’s temporary blocks of Google’s services.

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The EFF’s recent amicus filing in the case of Warshak v. United States got quite a bit of mileage out of a nice quote from the Department of Justice’s surveillance manual, which contains language that appears to clearly forbid the kind of “back door wiretap” of the plaintiff’s e-mail that got the FBI in hot water with civil liberties groups over the course of this long-running and important case.

Now the EFF appears to be looking to get its hands on a copy of the equivalent manual for the FBI—the agency’s Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines, which details the rules of the road for FBI-run domestic surveillance. The only problem is that its contents are a secret. So, the EFF is filing suit to have the manual’s contents released to the public.

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A Swedish court ruled today that the judge overseeing The Pirate Bay trial earlier this year was not biased by belonging to various pro-copyright organizations. The unanimous decision (Swedish) means that there will be no retrial; the defendants must hope for a successful appeal instead.

Judge Tomas Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, as are several of the lawyers who represented the recording and movie industries during the trial. He also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an advocacy group that pushes stricter copyright laws.

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How does a lobby group manufacture consensus? As University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist points out, it does so very, very carefully.

Geist has unraveled a tangled skein of reports, polls, and lobbying on copyright issues in Canada, tracing a wide variety of this material back to two primary sources: the music and movie businesses. Pay enough groups to produce similar conclusions and—presto!—a “consensus forms” as later papers quote earlier papers, even though everything is funded from the same sources and often uses the same data.

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With the hope of accelerating the Internet, Google has launched a new website that aims to foster discussion about Web performance. The search giant is publishing its own best practices and is providing links, documentation, and other resources to help developers address performance challenges. Google hopes that the broader Internet community will participate in the effort and take part in the search for practical ways to shrink performance bottlenecks at every layer of the stack.

Ars discussed the matter with Richard Rabbat, the product manager who is coordinating this project. Rabbat, who gave a presentation on the issue this week at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference, believes that making the Web faster will require a multifaceted solution that includes devising improved protocols, a stronger emphasis in the Web development community on page-load efficiency, better browsers, and public policy solutions that make broadband accessible to everyone.

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Microsoft today announced Windows 7 retail pricing, upgrade information, launch details, and a preorder deal. The software giant has reduced the price on its most popular retail Windows product, the Home Premium upgrade version, by approximately 10 percent (this varies based on the market). In the US, this means a drop from $130 to $120, a savings of $10. For the Home Premium full version, the price drops from $240 to $200. Those are the only differences when comparing Windows Vista prices to Windows 7 prices after Microsoft made cuts in In February 2008 (compared to the ones announced in September 2006). The table below summarizes the slow drop in cost for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in the US:

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Those who use Twitter buy more music than those who don’t, making the Twitter-using demographic valuable to the music industry. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the NPD Group, which tracked the music buying habits of nearly 4,000 Internet users. The firm found that the crossover between music buyers and Twitter users is higher than the general Internet-using population, and that this segment spends more on music than the average user.

According to NPD, a third of Twitter users reported buying a CD in the last three months, while another third said they have purchased music downloads online in that time. Overall Web users came in at 23 and 16 percent, respectively. Twitter users also spend an average of 77 percent more on online music downloads than non-Twitter users.

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The Summer 2009 edition of the twice-yearly Top 500 Supercomputer List is out, and there are some notable changes in this latest version. In terms of the perennial Intel/AMD horse race, after a period of holding steady at roughly 12 percent, AMD’s Opteron has resumed its decline as a total share of the processor families represented. AMD dropped from 12.2 percent six months ago to 8.6 percent on the current list, while Intel’s Xeons climbed from 73.6 percent to 78.6 percent.

Part of AMD’s decline is probably due to the fact that Cray, which sells the Opteron-based XT5 line, saw its vendor share decline from 4.6 percent to 4 percent. But Intel has also benefited from the rapid uptake of its quad-core Xeons, with quad-core processors overall now present in 383 of the systems on the list.

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As netbook sales continue to escalate out of sight, models and
manufacturers proliferate, and new platforms battle for supremacy in
the marketplace and in the minds of consumers and OEMs, analysts
continue to debate the suitability of netbook hardware to consumer
needs.  NPD’s most recent report on netbooks purports
to show, using direct user surveys, that consumers are highly confused
about netbooks, frustrated with their low performance, and typically
underuse their superb mobility. There are reasons for skepticism about
these results.

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Today, Microsoft took the wraps off a new Web service dedicated to managing energy use. Called “Hohm” (presumably, a play on the combination of “home and “Ohm”), the product will take advantage of smart grid data on energy use when it’s available. Even when it’s not, however, Hohm will allow users to input their own details and share the results of their efficiency efforts, adding a bit of a Web 2.0 sheen to matters. The move comes after a number of other major IT powers, including Google and Cisco, have announced their own efforts in the area, suggesting that a lot of people think this market is about to take off.

The Hohm service itself is a bit of a hybrid of a number of services. From the smart grid perspective, a growing number of hardware makers are producing equipment that uses standardized methods of structuring and reporting data. That allows just about anyone to plug into the data, provided they’re willing to work with utilities to obtain it. At the moment, Microsoft has lined up four utilities that will work when the service starts up, but they’re certainly going to be working hard to bring more on before then. Two smart meter companies were also in on the announcement, indicating that Microsoft has already started validating the input from some of the existing hardware.

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A great big swath of cable television entertainment will soon be available over the Internet, Time-Warner and Comcast announced this morning. The two companies are working out a set of “broad principles,” they say, that will make it possible for consumers to access their fare “free online and on demand.”

Free, of course, if you are a Comcast or Time Warner customer. The “TV everywhere” concept is going to be tested in July, announced Jeff Bewkes, Chairman/CEO of Time Warner and Brian Roberts, Chairman/CEO of Comcast. The initial tryout will involve 5,000 couch potatoes nationwide and should lead to “a set of guiding concepts,” Bewkes told reporters, “>that we believe can be pretty good concepts that other network companies, broadband connection companies, and video service providers—whether they’re cable, satellite, or telephone—can all move in a similar direction.“

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MySpace continues to bleed employees as it slowly fades into Internet obscurity. The company announced this week that it’s considering chopping more than half its international staff and closing a number of offices that are outside the US. Talk of this plan comes only a week after MySpace laid off 30 percent of its US staff, another reminder of its fall from dominance.

According to the announcement, MySpace is “proposing” a plan that would cut international staff from 450 employees to a mere 150. MySpace also wants to close at least four non-US offices (possibly more), leaving offices in London, Berlin, and Sydney as the primary regional hubs for international operations. All offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain would be placed “under review for possible restructure.”

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The Eclipse project’s annual release extravaganza is occurring today. A multitude of projects that are part of the Eclipse ecosystem’s coordinated release cycle are rolling out new versions as part of the combined launch of Galileo, the latest version of the Eclipse platform.

The Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) is at the center of a growing universe of tooling projects that are transforming the way that software is written. The open source IDE is highly modular and can be adapted to fulfill almost any need. It serves as the underlying foundation for a multitude of third-party development toolkits—including many that are commercial—and it has rapidly ascended to dominance in the mobile Java market.

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Update: The initial version of this post said that RapidShare had been fined €24 million. Another look at GEMA’s press release says that the group won a case against RapidShare “worth €24 million,” but this appears to refer to the value of the songs in question, not to an actual damage award. We blame Google Translate and some really poor German classes for the confusion. Thanks to readers for pointing this out.

Story: German music trade group GEMA has won a court judgment against one-click file-sharing service RapidShare, and the Hamburg Regional Court has confirmed that services like RapidShare must implement proactive content filtering to avoid liability.

The decision has been building for more than a year. GEMA went after RapidShare after it became a popular hub for sharing albums online, and in relative safety. In January 2008, another regional court in Düsseldorf found that RapidShare was responsible for what its users uploaded to the service.

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In a somewhat surprise move today, Zenimax, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, has acquired id Software, famed developer of the Doom and Quake series of games. Both companies promise to maintain the status quo at id Software, with all the executives from the company signing long-term contracts to continue their roles with the studio.

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After considering Apple’s motion to lift the automatic stay that put its lawsuit against Mac cloner Psystar on hold, bankruptcy judge Robert Mark has ordered the stay lifted. This will allow the legal process to move forward towards the trial between Apple and Psystar, which is set to begin this November.

Apple sued Psystar last July for selling computers with unauthorized installations of Mac OS X. During the evidence-discovery phase, Psystar put up several roadblocks to prevent Apple from obtaining detailed financial information about the company, which resulted in Judge Alsup—who was presiding over that case—ordering Psystar to cough up the evidence or face sanctions from the court. Shortly thereafter, Psystar filed for bankruptcy, which resulted in an automatic stay on any legal proceedings against the company.

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Government spending and its role in the economy are once again major issues thanks to the financial market bailouts and President Obama’s health care initiative. Government funded scientific research has made an appearance in this debate, as work funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been called into question as wasteful and unnecessary. A paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) takes a look at these issues. Its authors show that increasing NIH funding decreased mortality rates in the US and they go on to attempt to quantify the economic impact of lives extended by NIH research.

Within the general debate on government spending, federally funded scientific research has been a frequent target of criticism. NIH funding has received new levels of scrutiny because the NIH received $8.2 billion as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. For example, Fox News recently ran this hit piece critical review of NIH-funded condom studies. Even NPR’s Marketplace questioned the stimulating effects of NIH funding stating, “and in this kind of funding it’s a little questionable as to how many jobs you’re really creating, because what you’re doing is giving money to university researchers who already have jobs at their universities.” A rebuttal of this misinformed claim was later aired.

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There was a time in my life during which I left Richard Marx’s “Paid Vacation” album in my stereo system for weeks at a time. This was not because I felt a spiritual craving for the music so strong that only repeated listenings would satisfy. No, it was the single worst CD I could dredge up out of my music collection, and I thought it might be effective as alarm-clock music. Hearing it, would I not have to rise at once to shut the disc off?

Turns out that it was just too inoffensive, too polished, too saccharine to yank me from my slumbers, but Richard Marx this week has partially redeemed himself for the album’s creation (and for the $11 I must have spent on it back in high school). Marx issued a strong statement against the “greedy actions of the major labels” after hearing about the $1.92 million Jammie Thomas-Rasset verdict.

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Government spending and its role in the economy are once again major issues thanks to the financial market bailouts and President Obama’s health care initiative. Government-funded scientific research has made an appearance in this debate, as work funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been called into question as wasteful and unnecessary. A paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) takes a look at these issues. Its authors show that increasing NIH funding decreased mortality rates in the US, and they go on to attempt to quantify the economic impact of lives extended by NIH research.

Within the general debate on government spending, federally funded scientific research has been a frequent target of criticism. NIH funding has gotten new levels of scrutiny because the NIH received $8.2 billion as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. For example, Fox News recently ran this hit piece critical review of NIH-funded condom studies. Even NPR’s Marketplace questioned the stimulating effects of NIH funding, stating, “[I]n this kind of funding it’s a little questionable as to how many jobs you’re really creating, because what you’re doing is giving money to university researchers who already have jobs at their universities.” A rebuttal of this misinformed claim was later aired.

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In Part I of our review of the Palm Pre and webOS, I attempted to place Palm’s new mobile phone within its proper context as a cloud messaging device. The focus of that installment was on showing how Palm plans to do for social networking and cloud-based messaging what the BlackBerry did for business email and what the iPhone did for portable media. In this respect, Palm is ultimately aiming at the business market, which is dominated by RIM.

But there’s no denying that, whatever Palm’s ultimate goals with their nascent line of webOS-based phones, consumers are still evaluating the Pre and the iPhone side-by-side. And this is appropriate, because the Pre is the first phone to actually take the iPhone as a starting point and build on it, as opposed to merely attempting to ape certain aspects of Apple’s groundbreaking interface.

So in this installment, I’ll shift from the Pre/BlackBerry discussion of the Part I to a more detailed contrast with Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone contrast is useful from a UI and usability perspective, because the webOS represents an attempt to take what worked in the iPhone’s interface and adapt it to a different information management paradigm (more on this below).

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In Part I of our review of the Palm Pre and webOS, I attempted to place Palm’s new mobile phone within its proper context as a cloud messaging device. The focus of that installment was on showing how Palm plans to do for social networking and cloud-based messaging what the BlackBerry did for business email and what the iPhone did for portable media. In this respect, Palm is ultimately aiming at the business market, which is dominated by RIM.

But there’s no denying that, whatever Palm’s ultimate goals with their nascent line of webOS-based phones, consumers are still evaluating the Pre and the iPhone side-by-side. And this is appropriate, because the Pre is the first phone to actually take the iPhone as a starting point and build on it, as opposed to merely attempting to ape certain aspects of Apple’s groundbreaking interface.

So in this installment, I’ll shift from the Pre/BlackBerry discussion of the Part I to a more detailed contrast with Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone contrast is useful from a UI and usability perspective, because the webOS represents an attempt to take what worked in the iPhone’s interface and adapt it to a different information management paradigm (more on this below).

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EA CEO John Riccitiello has a new message for people who want to pirate EA games: go ahead and do it. “By the way, if there are any pirates you’re writing for, please encourage them to pirate FIFA Online, NBA Street Online, Battleforge, Battlefield Heroes…” he told IndustryGamers. “If they would just pirate lots of it I’d love them. [laughs] Because what’s in the middle of the game is an opportunity to buy stuff.” Welcome to the new EA, where you’re not being sold a game, you’re being sold a store.

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In the US, ISPs and companies that provide hosting services have a degree of protection from being held legally responsible for the actions of their users. These “safe harbor” provisions don’t exist in the legal codes of other countries, however, leaving the local branches of US companies at risk of legal action. Google India found itself in precisely this situation, as it was the target of legal action by an Indian cardiologist who claims he was defamed by posts hosted on Google’s Blogger service. The Indian branch of the search giant is trying to defend itself from these charges by claiming that it has nothing to do with the US-based blogger service.

The trouble apparently started when someone used Blogger to post a number of inflammatory claims about Dr. Ashwin Mehta, who is a cardiologist at Mumbai’s Jaslok Hospital. These apparently included specific allegations that Dr. Mehta engaged in both professional and financial misconduct. Mehta responded by filing a suit in which, according to the Mumbai Mirror, he claimed he has suffered “incalculable harm and injury to my name, fame, standing and reputation.” Nevertheless, some sort of calculation was made, as Mehta sought financial damages in addition to having the posts removed.

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At one point last year, rumors swirled that the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) might be signed, sealed, and delivered by the end of 2008. That didn’t happen, of course, and now a group of consumer groups wants to make sure that 2009 isn’t any kinder to the treaty.

The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) has called for a total suspension of treaty negotiations “until the EU and the US publish the full text of all negotiating documents and agree to additional transparency measures.”

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The city of Bozeman, Montana has decided to back off on its requirement that job applicants hand over their logins and passwords for every social network they belong to. The city announced in a meeting (PDF) on Monday that it had suspended the practice as of Friday, June 19 and that it would update its hiring procedures within 30 days to determine a more appropriate level of screening for employees.

Bozeman made headlines last week when the media discovered the city’s curious background check procedures, which involved handing over logins to sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more. City employees would then be able to dig through any information applicants have put online, regardless of whether it’s accessible to the public. Needless to say, such a request caused an explosion of outrage, not only among Bozeman residents, but on the Internet in general.

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Intel and Nokia are joining forces in an effort to reshape the boundaries of mobile computing. The two companies announced plans on Tuesday to collaborate on software and hardware through a new long-term strategic relationship. Advancing the open source Linux operating system and encouraging industry-wide participation in mobile Linux development is one of the pillars of the deal.

The news was revealed during a press conference Tuesday that was conducted jointly by Intel ultra mobility group senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher and Nokia executive vice president of devices Kai Oistamo. They discussed the growing trend towards convergence of conventional computing and mobile communications.

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This is a reminder post for all the Windows 7 users still on the beta (build 7000) that was leaked in December 2008 and officially given out to the public in January 2009. Bi-hourly shutdowns of this build will begin on July 1, 2009. This means that the user will be told to install a released version of Windows and their PC will shut down automatically every two hours. On August 1, 2009 if you are still on the Windows 7 beta, your license will expire and the non-genuine experience will be triggered. Your wallpaper will be removed and “This copy of Windows is not genuine” will be displayed in the lower right corner above the taskbar.

If you want to continue testing Vista’s successor, we recommend moving over to the Windows 7 Release Candidate (build 7100) that was released to the public in May 2009. The RC will only be available to download until August 15, 2009. Those using the Windows 7 RC do not have to worry until March 1, 2010 and June 1, 2010, the dates for bi-hourly shutdowns and expiration, respectively. Considering Windows 7 will be generally available in October 2009, this will give users a lot of time to move over to the RTM code.

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China is filtering out criticism and diving in headfirst with its plan to roll out controversial filtering software on all PCs sold in China. The Chinese media quoted an unnamed source inside the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, saying that the software will still come with all computers as of July 1 despite the discovery of massive security holes and vulnerabilities by security researchers.

News came out about China’s plan to implement Internet access control software, called the “Green Dam Youth Escort” earlier this month. The Windows-only software provides a mix of features, including whitelists, blacklists, and on-the-fly content-based filtering. The blacklists can be updated remotely, however, making Green Dam quite an attractive option for a government that likes to keep tight control over what kind of content its citizens are exposed to.

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The major music labels are committed to the idea of graduated response, but they aren’t wedded to any particular method of implementation. In France, disconnecting repeated online copyright infringers has been pushed by legislation. In the US, the RIAA wants ISPs to sign up to a voluntary scheme. But in Ireland, the “sue-them-into-doing-what-we-want” school of thought has triumphed.

The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) has filed lawsuits against two of the country’s largest ISPs, seeking to force compliance with an Internet disconnection scheme. It worked well enough earlier this year, when Ireland’s largest ISP Eircom settled a similar case with the industry and agreed to implement a graduated response program. After a third accusation of online copyright infringement, Eircom will disconnect a user’s Internet connection.

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You know that there’s about to be a big rumble in telco-land when a bunch of companies and non-profits set up a website with a name like nochokepoints.org. Launched this week, the NoChokePoints Coalition is basically a gang of heavy broadband users and their allies who have one thing in common: they’re extra sick and tired of paying over-the-top dollar for “special access”—the dedicated lines companies need to connect their high-speed Internet circuits to the larger broadband economy.

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Only moments before a liquidation hearing earlier this month, SCO dodged the bullet by signing a deal to sell off a portion of its remaining UNIX assets. Some of the specific details of the deal have now been disclosed, including the buyer and the price.

Proprietary UNIX vendor SCO has been swirling around the proverbial toilet bowl on its way to extinction ever since a 2007 court ruling was issued which indicated that the company was not the rightful owner of the original SVRX UNIX copyrights and had no standing to bring copyright infringement lawsuits against Linux users and distributors. The company’s contention that Linux includes UNIX code was also never substantiated, and internal memos from the company have indicated that it was never able to find evidence of such infringement.

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Google is preparing to launch a new service called Google Voice that is built with technology obtained through its 2007 acquisition of Internet telephony company GrandCentral. The Google Voice service gives users a single phone number that can seamlessly route calls to their existing phones. It has its own built-in voicemail service that can be accessed from any phone or through a browser, with GMail-like archiving features for audio messages.

The Google Voice service launched in March for closed testing with a limited audience that consisted of existing GrandCentral users. Google introduced a number of highly impressive features such as automatic message transcription and free SMS delivery. The transcription feature will convert voicemails to text and make them searchable. The service can also automatically forward voicemail transcripts directly to your preferred e-mail account.

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When the National Academies of Science recently looked at the potential for renewable energy deployment in the states, its expert panel made some reasonable assumptions, such as limits imposed by manufacturing capacity and the current electric grid. This week, the NAS Proceedings will see the publication of a paper that considers what would happen if we dropped reasonableness from the analysis, and calculated what we might achieve if we pushed wind power to its maximal capacity. The paper is an odd mix of these unreasonable assumptions and conservative estimates, and is probably best viewed as a sort of thought experiment. Still, the numbers the come out of the analysis are quite impressive: maxing out deployment of current-generation technology could produce five times the total energy used in the world today, and 40 times the electricity.

To a certain extent, this shouldn’t be a complete shock. The amount of energy deposited on earth by the sun every year dwarfs any conceivable estimate of future energy use, and estimates are that as much as one percent of that winds up being converted to wind. The authors calculate that the fraction of wind energy that winds up on land is over 10¹⁴ watts, which is a lot to work with. The key question is how much of that to harvest.

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Right on schedule, Apple has introduced the third iteration of the iPhone to the public. The new model, called the iPhone 3GS, is much like the iPhone 3G introduced in 2008 but, as Apple says, the “S” stands for speed. There are a number of other improvements made to the iPhone 3GS that differentiate it from its less-speedy sibling, but the one thing that will stick out in any phone owner’s mind after playing with one will definitely be its zip.

We have already reviewed the large majority of iPhone OS 3.0 that comes with the iPhone 3GS (and is available for all past iPhone and iPod touch models), so this review will mostly focus on changes to the device that differentiate it from previous versions.

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After seeing Swedish voters send the Pirate Party to the European Parliament, the German branch of the group has now gotten a seat in the lower house of that nation’s parliament, the Bundestag. But the seat didn’t come about through an electoral triumph; instead a member of the Social Democrats, Jörg Trauss, changed allegiances, claiming his decision was driven by his former party’s support for a mandatory Internet filtering scheme. But the situation is complicated by the fact that the filtering would target child porn, and Trauss is under investigation for possession of that material (he claims it was for investigative purposes).

The legislation in question would implement a scheme that’s somewhat similar to the one under consideration in Australia. The system would rely on a blacklist of sites, maintained by the German Federal police force, the Bundeskriminalamt. Access to blacklisted sites would trigger the ISP to send the user to a warning page, indicating that the site contains illegal child porn. Users will, apparently, still have the option of clicking through.

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Verizon has just boosted speeds across its FiOS network, but the focus isn’t on downloads so much as it is on uploads. Verizon believes it can set itself apart by appealing to those customers who want to “fully participate in today’s interactive, multimedia Web.”

Download speeds are increasing today; the base-level 10Mbps package gets a bump to 15Mbps, and the 20Mbps plan jumps to 25Mbps.

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Semiconductor stocks have been on a tear recently, with a parade of semi makers revising their earnings expectations upwards. Marvell is the latest company to raise its revenue outlook—up 15 to 21 percent sequentially—citing improved demand. The EET has a good run-down of other big names that are also looking at less-bad-than-expected numbers, with Texas Instruments among the list of semi companies whose prospects are suddenly less grim than they were six months ago.

You’ll notice that all of these names are big in the mobile and wireless markets, in both infrastructure and handsets. Given all of our reporting on the carnage in the mobile business, you’re probably wondering where the demand is coming from for 3G. The answer, it appears, is China.

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Last Thursday, the Obama administration finally named its choice to head the Patent and Trademark Office: David J. Kappos, who is currently serving as IBM’s assistant general counsel. Kappos has a long history in the field of intellectual property law, and has been an advocate of patent reforms, having testified in favor of a reform bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Normally, a public record of that sort provides plenty of opportunities for people to identify problems with a candidate, but, so far at least, response to Kappos’ nomination has been generally positive.

The White House’s announcement of the nomination highlights the fact that Kappos has about as much inside knowledge of the functioning of the US patent system as anyone alive. With engineering and law degrees, Kappos wound up managing IBM’s intellectual property portfolio—for 16 straight years, the company has been the leading recipient of US patents. IBM’s strategic decisions, which include a heavy focus on consulting and technology integration and its embrace of open source, have undoubtedly made that position a challenging one in recent years.

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Undisclosed “sponsored” blogging may soon go the way of the dodo, the T. Rex, or the quagga under some strict new guidelines under consideration by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC says it is looking at bloggers who write about certain products or services in exchange for money or favors from the companies behind them, potentially misleading the Internet-reading public about an apparent conflict of interest. The Commission hopes to introduce new guidelines this summer to better define how bloggers can write about these products.

In case you’re not familiar with the practice of “sponsored blogging,” imagine that Your Favorite Blog written by Joe Schmoe of Little Rock, Arkansas often gives rave reviews of certain home appliances that he allegedly uses. Joe might have purchased those things himself, and he might really love them—but he might be getting paid by GE to push the company’s new washer and dryer. Or, if he’s not receiving money, Joe might be the recipient of paid trips to Hawaii or prepaid gift cards. All of these things can and do happen in the blogosphere, and there are no rules on disclosure.

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GameStop has a business model that might have a shorter half-life than the company’s executives would like to admit. The retailer makes the majority of its profits from used games and systems, and from selling high-margin items such as controllers and strategy guides. The large chain has a major question to answer in the next few years: what happens if/when the majority of games are sold online, directly to consumers? So far the answer isn’t encouraging: “don’t worry about it, digital distribution is a long way off.”

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If your cellphone has a musical ringtone, step back and appreciate it the next time a friend dials you—according to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, you’re listening to a performance. In the latest sign of just how confusing the music licensing system is, ASCAP is suing AT&T over the carrier’s sale of musical ringtones, looking for a cut of the revenue—even though the carrier is already paying for the download rights to these tunes. In a recent filing unearthed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ASCAP says that download payments aren’t enough because each ring constitutes a performance.

The brief came in response to a motion by AT&T to have the case dismissed. It was filed under seal on the 12th of June, but has only been made public after some of the figures, such as AT&T’s ringtone revenue numbers, were redacted.

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Hardware maker Nvidia is endorsing Windows CE as its platform of choice for Tegra-based netbooks. The company has rejected Google’s open source Android platform and is also unimpressed with conventional Linux-based options, such as Ubuntu.

Nvidia is making a play for the mobile market with its Tegra platform, an ARM11 SoC with an Nvidia GPU. Tegra’s main selling point is that can deliver high-definition video playback with minimal energy consumption, characteristics that could make it a strong contender in the portable media player market. In addition to targeting handheld devices, Nvidia is also tentatively pushing Tegra for small form-factor laptops.

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At the 46th North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) meeting in Philadelphia last week, cable operator Comcast announced it was making IPv6 available to wholesale customers that connect to its fiber network. The most remarkable part here is what they’re not doing: making IPv6 available to their cable Internet customers. The first steps in this area are slated for 2010. 

When speaking at the NANOG meeting, Comcast’s John Jason Brzozowski talked about the large number of issues with rolling out IPv6 over their broadband infrastructure. One is that, without content available through IPv6, consumer interest in IPv6 may atrophy, so the move to make IPv6 available to wholesale (web hosting) customers now makes a lot of sense. When it comes to wholesale users, Netflix didn’t see many issues with consumer IPv6 readiness, but is unhappy about the state of IPv6 in content distribution networks. That may come down to its choice of CDN; Limelight is already there.

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When a middle-aged New Hampshire woman was accused of sharing songs like “Jigga My Nigga” using BearShare, she initially thought that her federal lawsuit from the recording industry was some kind of “scam”—and she almost paid the price for not showing up in court.

But she fought back with the help of the Franklin Pierce Law Center, and has just settled with the recording industry. No money changed hands, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, and the deal releases her whole family from liability—the RIAA won’t be dropping that suit just to file another targeting the kids.

The woman, Mavis Roy, and the Franklin Pierce Law Clinic call the settlement a “victory,” but the recording industry takes a different view.

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Likely Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski has promised Senator John Kerry (D-MA) that he’ll give due attention to a petition asking the FCC to investigate exclusivity arrangements between handset manufacturers and wireless carriers. The most famous of these is AT&T’s deal with Apple for the iPhone. The White House’s pick to run the Commission also pledged to take action if the agency concludes that these arrangements hurt consumers.

The long standing request for action on this issue came from the Rural Cellular Association (RCA), which charges that they shortchange rural areas.

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After attending E3 this year, our grand plan was to write a detailed post comparing and contrasting DJ Hero with Scratch so our readers could take a look at where DJ-based games are headed, and whether either one will be worth a purchase. Unfortunately, events conspired to keep that from happening, even though we had a meeting scheduled with Activision to talk about DJ Hero and an invite to the Scratch party. The problem? These games just don’t seem ready, and that’s worrying when both releases are planned for this year.

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Now that Jammie Thomas-Rasset owed $1.92 million to the recording industry for sharing 24 songs on KaZaA back in 2005, the case might seem to be closed. In reality, though, Thomas-Rasset still has numerous options for dealing with the verdict. Let’s run them down.

Pay it

According to Thomas-Rasset, paying the $1.92 million damage award is simply impossible. As a brownfield development coordinator for the Mille Lacs band of the Ojibwe, Thomas-Rasset doesn’t bring the cash home in wheelbarrows. “Like squeezing blood from a turnip,” is how she described any attempt to collect on the judgment.

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Early one morning at E3, Mike and I were joined in our hotel room by two representatives from the toy company JAKKS Pacific. They were there to show off some of the company’s upcoming line of geek toys, and we were certainly game for a meeting at the show that didn’t require walking. Plus, they brought donuts. I’m sorry if you feel our ethics were violated.

We’re going to take a look at what JAKKS Pacific is bringing to market in the coming months, and what’s impressive is that these are toys that seem both fun and, more importantly, inexpensive. Who doesn’t love something under $100 that helps deal with the tech lust? Let’s take a look at what we were shown.

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If there’s one thing that many techies have in common, it’s some form of insomnia. Whether it’s because you can’t fall asleep easily, you wake up too early, or you keep waking up throughout the night, not getting a good night’s sleep can seriously affect your health and productivity.

From a personal perspective, staff members here at Ars (myself included) have had trouble sleeping for many years. We run the gamut from full-on CPAP machine users, to over-the-counter and prescription medicators, to new-agey meditators, and more. And now, some of us have become gadget experimenters.

Aside from the obvious advice—”go see a doctor, you freaking tool,” as forum-goers would say—we wouldn’t be geeks if we didn’t investigate the various technological solutions that claim to help improve our sleep cycles. Some only track the quality of your sleep, while others actually try to make it better, but we thought we’d give a rundown of what’s available to try and hack a good night’s sleep.

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Serving up giant sperm since the Cretaceous: Ostracodes are a fairly unassuming class of crustaceans that have been around since the Cambrian, and their shells provide an extensive fossil record that covers much of the history of animal life. Some of the modern species, however, have a rather distinct feature: giant sperm. We’re talking millimeters, longer than many of the ostracodes that create them. This phenomenon has been observed in a number of other species, including some Drosophila, but was assumed to be an odd, temporary byproduct of sexual selection run amuck. Not so, apparently. Intact fossils of ostracodes from 100 million years ago, combined synchrotron radiation and tomographic reconstructions, reveal that some ostracodes have been reproducing with giant sperm for a long time. This suggests that, despite the amount of energy required, giant sperm can be a successful reproductive strategy for the long term.

Some instincts are overrated: We’ve studied some species of fish to identify the precise neural mechanism of their startle response, which results from a race condition between two specific neurons. Present a stimulus to one side of the fish, and one of the neurons wins the race, sending the fish off in the opposite direction. Although the level of knowledge probably isn’t quite as detailed, it seems some snakes have figured this out, too. Using high-speed video, researchers were able to show that, just prior to striking at a fish with its mouth, a specific species of snake would lunge at it with a harmless part of its body. Appropriately startled, the fish quickly turned, sometimes swimming straight into the snake’s open mouth. Bonus weird science points awarded for the snake species: the tentacled snake, called that for some small fleshy extensions on either side of its head.

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