Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Consumer Watchdog is running a 540-square-foot video billboard advertisement in Times Square, New York that shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt as an ingratiating ice cream truck driver who knows everything about everyone and happily offers free ice cream in exchange for full body scans. The group says its goal is to push Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to create a Do Not Track Me list, similar to the Do Not Call list developed to prevent telemarketers from aggressively calling consumers. 'Do you want Google or any other online company looking over your shoulder and tracking your every move online just so it can increase its profits?' writes the group's president, Jamie Curtis, at the group's web site. 'Consumers have a right to privacy. They should control how their information is gathered and what it is used for.' The FTC's consumer affairs group had no comment on whether the agency is considering creating a Do Not Track Me list."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jamie writes "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent 'Restoring Honor' event. The would-be rally has been dubbed 'Restoring Truthiness' and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own Colbert Nation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "'Always bet on Duke.' It seems he was right about himself, at least. The longest, most storied in-development game in history seems like it's finally going to be released by Gearbox Software sometime within the next year. 'According to Pitchford, Gearbox began finishing Duke Nukem Forever in late 2009. "Clearly the game hadn't been finished at 3D Realms but a lot of content had been created," he says. "The approach and investment and process at 3D Realms didn't quite make it, and it cracked at the end. With Gearbox Software we brought all those pieces together. It's the game it was meant to be." The game is currently expected to ship in 2010 although given its history Pitchford is understandably reluctant to be more specific.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Contrary to popular belief, Google Wave is not quite dead. Google plans to expand upon the open source code it has already released to form a more complete, standalone application known as "Wave in a Box." Wave will work (or not work, depending on how you look at it) as it always has, but with the new app, developers can run their own wave servers and host waves from their own machines.

"Since the beginning, it has been our vision that the Google Wave protocols could support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools," wrote Wave software engineer Alex North on the Google Wave Developer Blog. "The response from the developer community to date has been amazing and rewarding. Even more so now, we believe that developers and other projects are a critical part of this story."

North says the project will include an app bundle with both a Wave server and client, a "fast and fully-featured" wave panel in the Web client, persistent wave store and search for the server, and the ability to import wave data from the Web. Additionally, it will have gadget, robot, and data API support, as well as the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances. Even more details are available in Google's Wave Protocol Forum.

Google announced earlier this week that the Web version of Wave would remain online through "at least" the end of the year, and that users would be able to export their waves during that time. It was a blip of good news to those few lamenting Wave's short lifespan, but Wave in a Box should be a major step toward helping the project live on.

Read the comments on this post

Jake writes with this excerpt from Ars: "Microsoft is warning about a new piece of malware, Rogue:MSIL/Zeven, that auto-detects a user's browser and then imitates the relevant malware warning pages from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. The fake warning pages are very similar to the real thing; you have to look closely to realize they aren't the real thing. The ploy is a basic social engineering scheme, but in this case the malware authors are relying on the user's trust in their browser, a tactic that hasn't been seen before. Beyond the warning pages, the actual malware looks like the real deal: it allows you to scan files, tells you when you're behind on your updates, and enables you to change your security and privacy settings. Performing a scan results in the product finding malicious files, but of course it cannot delete them unless you update, which requires paying for the full version. Attempting to buy the product will open an HTML window that provides a useless 'Safe Browsing Mode' with high-strength encryption. To top it all off, the rogue antivirus webpage looks awfully similar to the Microsoft Security Essentials webpage; even the awards received by MSE and a link to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center have been copied."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forgetful Facebook users and wannabe-burglars can now rest a little easier at night knowing that they can remotely log themselves out if they accidentally left logged-in sessions in other locations. Facebook users will soon be able to see where else they might be logged on, adding another layer of security to the social networking service.

Some of you may know the scenario all too well: you log into your Facebook account at your friend's place or your parents' house to check an event page or post a quick update. Then you forget to log out before you leave, which you realize after your friend has posted 30 penis photos to your profile wall. If you think this doesn't really happen, think again: members of the Ars staff are constantly finding logged-in Facebook accounts at places like the Apple Store, and we aren't always able to resist the temptation to post a (polite, but) embarrassing update to the user's profile, reminding them to log out next time.

You'll be able to go to Account > Account Settings > Account Security in order to see which devices are currently logged into Facebook as you. (The feature is slowly rolling out to all users, so it may not be available on every account just yet.) There, Facebook will provide a list of active sessions along with as much device and location info as it can gather.

You then get the choice to "end" each session by logging it out, and there are extra steps you can take if those sessions aren't your own doing. "In the unlikely case that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer," the Facebook team wrote on its blog.

This update follows one from earlier this year that allows Facebook users to authenticate each device they want to use to log into their accounts. When someone tries to log into a locked-down account on a new device, Facebook will ask a series of questions to ensure the user is who she says she is. And, Facebook says these features are just the beginning: "Stay tuned over the coming weeks and months for more improvements," says Facebook.

Read the comments on this post

Imagine that your name is Nathan Nabors and that you live in the sunny climes of Orlando, Florida. Imagine further that, back when Google announced its own Android phone and called it the Nexus One, you realized that your Orlando-based life would only be complete with the purchase of this shiny new gadget.

So you bought one, paying the full unlocked price of $563.38 from Google's online store. And, because you already had service with AT&T, you dropped a cool $230 to break that contract. Grand total: $793.38, and that doesn't even include a month-to-month service plan from T-Mobile.

Read the comments on this post

waderoush writes "On top of all the other features that it has crammed into iTunes, Apple this week added Ping, a Facebook-like social network for music discovery. It's all part of the company's plan to dominate the world of consumer media, but Xconomy argues that this time, Apple may have gone a bridge too far. iTunes, nearing its tenth birthday, started out merely as a program for ripping CDs, and has grown increasingly creaky and impenetrable as Apple has added more and more cruft, the article argues. The company won't have a stable base for its new media empire until it rebuilds iTunes from scratch — perhaps along the lines suggested by its other new product this week, the revamped Apple TV."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple this week launched Ping, a new social network that runs within the iTunes software.

By now, most iTunes users have already downloaded and installed iTunes 10. We've already given you the low-down on the biggest addition to the new version of iTunes—the Ping social network—but we also wanted to give our impressions on two "improvements" promised in the release notes: look-and-feel and performance. While we agree that iTunes is "faster and more responsive," we're not sold on the revised user interface.

Read the comments on this post

Facebook is apparently testing a new subscription feature that would allow users to receive alerts any time a specific friend takes certain actions on the social network.

Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson has been following HADOPI (France's three strikes law) a lot lately, and the latest developments are that the French ISPs and the French government are edging closer to a full-on war over compensation. The French government apparently requested that ISPs send an invoice of the bills after a certain period of time, but the French ISPs don't feel this is good enough — probably because of worries that the compensation the government will ultimately provide won't be enough. The ISPs are demanding adequate compensation, and if the government doesn't give it to them, they simply will not hand over evidence required to enforce HADOPI law. While HADOPI demands that ISPs cooperate, speculation suggests that if the government takes ISPs to court, the ISPs will simply rely on constitutional jurisprudence to shield them from liability (translation)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In May we discussed news that producers of the film The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 John Does, known only by their IP addresses at the time, for sharing the movie over peer-to-peer sites. Now, reader suraj.sun notes that subpoenas for the lawsuit are finally going out. "Qwest Communications on Monday notified a customer in Denver that the Internet service provider has received a subpoena from lawyers representing Voltage Pictures, the production company that made The Hurt Locker. ... In legal documents, Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing. As of March 21, the movie had grossed $16 million domestically, but took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million. The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut. ... For allegedly downloading The Hurt Locker, DGW told the Qwest customer from Denver that settling the case early would cost $2,900, according to documents reviewed by CNET."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ivy the Kiwi was created by Yuji Naka, the co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is a character that continues to enjoy a strong following, and the series gives any follow-up work a huge shadow to live under. Don't worry, this game is up to the challenge.

Read the comments on this post

neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC: "HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judging by the Federal Communications Commission's latest survey, we're still pretty far away from the FCC's National Broadband Plan goal of 4Mbps Internet download speeds for everyone. The agency's newest statistics indicate that out of 71 million wireline household connections, less than half (44 percent) matched or exceeded that benchmark, with its upload goal of 1Mbps.

Meanwhile, the number of consumers with full mobile wireless Internet accounts shot up by 40 percent from January through June of 2009, to 35 million subscribers. Twenty-five million had such access at the end of 2008.

But among those 35 million wireless connections, only 45 percent met the Department of Commerce and Agriculture's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus program's definition of "broadband"—advertised speeds of 768Kbps downloads and 200Kbps uploads.

Of the 113 million Internet connections out there all told (residential and business), 87 million or 76 percent reached that level. If you look just at fixed-location connections, 91 percent met that goal.

There were a few bright spots in the statistical picture. There are now four million fiber connections—a 23 percent jump, and the largest increase among fixed-location broadband services.

But cable modem connections only grew by three percent to 41 million and DSL by a mere one percent to 31 million (not that DSL is much of a measure of progress any more).

All-in-all, this latest survey offers the portrait of a nation whose consumers access the 'Net at relatively slow throughput rates. Keep in mind that another benchmark of the National Broadband Plan is 100Mbps to 100 million homes by 2020. We're a long way from that goal.

The data comes from information submitted to the FCC every six months by all ISPs.

Read the comments on this post

It's been two weeks since Facebook users took to blogs and message boards to voice their concerns about Places, a location-based service that allows people to check in to gathering spots via the social network.

Four years ago, Nintendo's gesture-tracking Wii system proved the power of motion controls to extend the mainstream appeal of video games.

judgecorp writes "Steady progress on inductive wireless charging. There are now certified prototypes of chargers for Blackberry and iPhone devices that meet the Qi specification of the Wireless Power Consortium, which was announced last year. The spec has advanced from version 0.95 to 1.0, too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.