Losses from Internet crime more than doubled in 2009
Back in the golden age of comic books, you always knew what was coming after the bad guy got a good dose of hot lead from the cops. "Remember boys and girls..." the last panel warned in 30 point type, "crime doesn't pay!"
Alas, it appears that Internet crime pays.
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Modern Warfare 2 map pack: $15, Xbox 360 exclusive launch
On March 30 the Xbox 360 will be receiving the first map pack for Modern Warfare 2 as a timed exclusive. Gamers will receive three new maps, as well as two reworked maps from Call of Duty 4. The price for all this gaming? 1,200 Microsoft points, or $15.
Here is the map list, as reported by Destructoid:
New maps:
- "Bailout," a multi-level apartment complex
- "Storm," an open industrial park littered with heavy machinery
- "Salvage," a snowy junkyard fortified by stacked debris and crushed cars
Modern Warfare maps:
- "Crash," a war-torn urban environment
- "Overgrown," which features a massive dry creek bed
The Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Variety Map Pack came in at $10, and featured four new maps. Ah, the good old days. Activision is betting that you'll buy the map pack even if you complain about the pricing. Meanwhile, the creative talent behind the maps are hoping you don't buy $1 billion worth, because then they'll be fired.
It's a simple gamble. If no one buys the maps, which is doubtful, the price can be lowered. If people do buy the maps, Activision profits mightily. If you're a regular online player who gets hours of enjoyment out of the maps, you could even argue that the price remains a good deal. If nothing else, other publishers will be watching the sales numbers and weighing the pros and cons of such aggressive pricing for their own content.
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Bethesda's new property: online co-op dungeon crawler a-hoy!
When Bethesda tells you it has a new IP to reveal at a show like GDC, you clear your schedule. During the show, the company camped out in a suite with small sign taped to the door, and we were asked to keep the very existence of the meeting under our hat until the embargo was up. Luckily, we're now able to tell about the publisher's newest game: it's coming to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, it will be out "when it's done," and it's a two-player co-op dungeon crawler called Hunted: The Demon's Forge.
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feature: A photo tour of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
Last week, Brookhaven National Lab hosted a press tour of their Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, one of only two active particle colliders in the US. The tour also included a briefing on the work that Brookhaven scientists are doing at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. We'll cover the information in more detail in the near future, but we wanted to share some of the great photos we were able to take during the tour.
Brookhaven's Peter Steinberg, whose session at last year's AAAS meeting received some coverage here, joined us for the bus ride out. He described how RHIC, although lower energy than the Tevatron or LHC, remains relevant because it specializes in colliding the nuclei of heavy atoms—in this case, gold ions. When they collide, the high density and energy creates a small area in which the components of the nuclei, the quarks and gluons, are liberated, forming a single high energy soup. (The LHC is also scheduled to spend part of its time colliding lead nuclei to similar effect.)
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Classmates.com settles suit over misleading e-mails
In 2008, the social networking site Classmates.com found itself on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit that focused on its membership recruitment tactics. The company has now settled the suit via the typical mechanism: trivial discounts to the affected parties, and some hefty legal fees. But, as part of the settlement, the company will have to abide by an agreement that's specific enough to dictate how it will set browser cookies on its members' computers.
Classmates.com was sued because it allegedly sent out e-mails to anyone registered for its free service, suggesting that their fellow graduates were looking to contact them—they could find out who that person was if they'd simply upgrade to one of the subscription tiers. At least two individuals did so and quickly discovered that the mystery classmate didn't exist—nobody they knew had been looking.
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Pew: readers prefer ad-supported news to pay walls
Advertising remains the primary means of support for online news outlets, and there's a long uphill battle facing anyone trying to forge new business models, at least according to a report produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The extensive report on the State of the Media examines numerous aspects of the media world, but emphasizes that, when it comes to online news, getting people to pay for content they otherwise value is "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons."
First things first: Pew notes that last year, online advertising saw its first decline since 2002. Numbers from eMarketer said that revenues fell by a total of $1 billion between 2008 and 2009. Still, a full 81 percent of Internet surfers say they're cool with online ads if it means the content remains free, although "much of that is because they find them easy to ignore."
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Cracking open five of the best open source easter eggs
A number of humorous yet undocumented features are hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. Although easter eggs are generally easy to spot when you can look at an application's source code, there are a few that aren't widely known.
Google's Goats
Unbeknownst to most users, Google's Chrome Web browser is powered by a distributed array of goats. In order to prevent the creatures from clogging the tubes, Google uses teleportation to move them between endpoints on the network. A hidden feature in Chrome's task manager allows users to see the total number of goats that are actively being teleported for each running browser tab. In Chrome's task manager, right-click the task table—check the "Goats Teleported" item in the context menu.
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Europe trashes ACTA as Obama praises it
Earlier this week, we noted that the major parties in the European Parliament had all agreed on a resolution trashing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the secret process that has been hashing it out. That resolution has passed Parliament by a huge margin—633 yes votes, 13 no votes, and 16 abstentions.
The Greens/EFA coalition praised the vote. Greens MEP Carl Schlyter of Sweden said that "ACTA risks becoming known as the Absence of Commission Transparency Agreement... The EU cannot continue to negotiate on ACTA if the people are not allowed to take part in the process. It is also a totally absurd and unacceptable situation if MEPs, behind closed doors, have to ask the Commission about the content of the agreements we are supposed to vote on."
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Marketing games: the art of the pole dance
Let's get one thing out of the way first: True Crime looks good. The game was demoed for me in a private suite, played live, and talked up by the developer. Mixing the best parts of Stranglehold and Grand Theft Auto IV, it was a game where we walked in with low expectations and walked out very excited about the story of an undercover cop in the wilds of Hong Kong.
Now, let's talk about the way games are marketed at events like GDC. Activision paid for an area in the W Hotel to look like a shady club from the game and decked it out with seedy characters. Two stripper poles were set up in the room, and beautiful women used them to demonstrate how long they could hold their own body weight upside down. Camera phones were out, free drinks were enjoyed by all, and camera crews worked the room fervently. This is video games.
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The Weird Science of toilet plants and rhythmless reindeer
Well, that's one way to get a balanced diet: We all know that carnivorous plants have evolved in regions where the soil isn't very nutrient-rich, and they use their prey to supplement what they don't get via roots. Apparently, however, there are alternatives to eating the victim. I'll let the authors of a recent paper explain matters: "Three Bornean pitcher plant species... produce modified pitchers that 'capture' tree shrew faeces for nutritional benefit. Tree shrews (Tupaia montana) feed on exudates produced by glands on the inner surfaces of the pitcher lids and defecate into the pitchers." Apparently, it's possible to identify feces-eaters based on the distinct morphology of their pitchers.
Reindeer got no rhythm: Circadian rhythm, that is. In the Arctic, light doesn't provide cues regarding daily activities; rather, it indicates seasonal changes. So it's no surprise that reindeer have somehow managed to unplug their biological clock, both at the cellular and whole-body level.
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A cheaper and more efficient solar-hydrogen system
As scientists continue to pursue alternative fuels that may enable us to break free of the fossil variety, a group of researchers has taken another step towards directly converting solar energy into fuel, in this case, hydrogen. A new system that converts light and water into hydrogen is less expensive than many others, and the photoelectrochemical platform it uses is more reactive, efficient, and has a much longer lifetime.
The device consists of indium phosphide crystals that act as quantum dots, harvesting light that's transferred to an iron-sulfur electrocalayst. That catalyst triggers reactions in an aqueous electrolyte solution, producing hydrogen. The iron-sulfur catalyst works best in the dark, but is able to extract the light that normally emanates from the luminescent crystals by pulling it out for use in converting the electrolyte to fuel.
Once combined and submerged in the electrolyte solution, a bias potential across the system allows it to separate hydrogen from oxygen. The assemby is able to sustain the reaction under the same potential for at least an hour at a time, and creates dihydrogen molecules at an efficiency of about 60 percent, a breakthrough for fuel systems of this kind.
While the indium phosphide and iron-sulfur are relatively abundant and inexpensive, the setup built the indium phosphide crystals on a gold cathode, and used a platinum anode to complete the circuit. While these materials could certainly be swapped out for others, it would probably result in a diminished efficiency. For this system to be viable in large-scale production, that's a change that might be worth serious consideration.
(This paper was published in February, but brought to our attention by a regular reader.)
Angewandte Chemie, 2010. DOI: 10.1002/anie.200906262 (About DOIs).
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