Digital Media

These days, everyone's a gamer. If not a traditionalist firing away at bad guys through a high-end video game console and large TV, he or she might just be in an ongoing Scrabble duel with a Facebook friend or hooked on an addictive iPhone game like ReMovem.

Nowhere was this notion of the mainstreaming of gaming more pronounced than at this week's Game Developers Conference, the massive gathering of which some consider all the more critical to the industry this year, given market forces. Sure, the video game industry is growing and some say it's even recession-resistant, but it hasn't escaped the wrath of the downturn entirely, with a series of recent studio closings, and layoffs and killed projects at even the strongest console manufacturers and biggest game publishers.

While Nintendo's Wii continues to outpace expectations, and certain games are making fortunes for their publishers, a strong argument can be made that the hottest segment of the video games industry is one that is still in its infancy: social games.

Scenes from GDC 2009

These titles, which are popping up by the bushelful on platforms like Facebook and MySpace, as well as on Apple's iPhone, are garnering user numbers that would previously have been thought impossible.

At GDC on Thursday, Kristian Segerstrale, the CEO and co-founder of PlayFish, one of the most successful publishers of social games stated his case for how the mainstream video games industry can learn from his side of the business.

Among other assertions, Segerstrale argued that while the nature of the social games business differs significantly from that followed for many years by the more traditional, retail-oriented publishers, times are changing, customers' behaviors and expectations are shifting rapidly, and the winning model may well be the new one.

The monetization comes when a social game publisher figures out how to attract a sizable audience and convince many of those people to engage in relatively cheap microtransactions for any number of things: level-ups, game gear, music, or whatever is on offer. Advertising is also a possible revenue producer.

In another threat to the likes of the Xbox, PS3, and Wii, a start-up called OnLive announced a brand-new game distribution system Monday night that, if it works as planned, could change the games industry forever.

OnLive, which was started by WebTV founder Steve Perlman and former Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey, is aiming to launch a system--seven years in the works--that will digitally distribute first-run, AAA games from publishers like Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Atari, and others at the same time that those titles are released into retail channels. The system is designed to allow players to stream on-demand games at the highest quality onto any Intel-based Mac or PC running XP or Vista, regardless of how powerful the computer is.

The system will also stream games directly to a TV via a small plug-in device, and players can use a custom wireless controller as well as VoIP headsets in conjunction with it.

Meanwhile, EA Mobile is making a big bet on the iPhone and iPod Touch, announcing plans this week to port more than a dozen of its most popular games to Apple's gadgets.

EA Mobile's Travis Boatman--who's appeared onstage at Apple's last two iPhone software events--announced this news during a keynote address at GDC. At some point this year, EA Mobile will release versions of franchises like Madden NFL, Wolfenstein, Command and Conquer, and NBA Live, according to PocketGamer.

Gaming continues to be one of the most active areas of Apple's App Store, and game developers at GDC flocked to sessions regarding the iPhone--conference organizers were forced to turn away late-arriving attendees to some sessions.

Also at GDC, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revved up a packed house at his opening keynote address, but his revelations were limited to three new games and a new storage infrastructure for the Wii virtual console.

The games included Rhythm Heaven, an American version of a rhythm game for the Nintendo DS that Iwata said had already sold 1.7 million copies in Japan; a new Wii Ware game called Rock 'n Roll Climber that lets players use their Wii controllers and a Wii Balance Board to simulate the motions of climbing a rock wall; and a new Zelda title for the DS called The Legend of Zelda: Spirit.

Google also got in on the GDC action by unveiling the latest addition to its iGoogle start page service: a collection of themes designed by video game publishers.

The search giant has partnered with nine publishers to come up with about two dozen themes from recent games such as Electronic Arts' Spore to arcade classics such as Galaga.

And finally, at GDC Friday, engineers spelled out the inner workings and target markets for Larrabee, Intel's first graphics chip in over a decade.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, announced the new set of themes at a GDC event, then hosted a panel of gaming personalities, including Capcom producer Yoshinori Ono, and Charles Huang, co-founder of RedOctane, which makes Guitar Hero.

Among the topics discussed was how the Web had changed gaming development. The general answer was that game developers and publishers alike are getting much more feedback during the development process, in part from increasingly simpler ways to aggregate information from blogs and message boards, as well as public beta programs.

Huang also noted that user-generated content created inside of games has been on a sharp rise, as witnessed by the number of user-designed tracks that have been created and downloaded in the latest Guitar Hero title; the figure now tops 10 million.

Getting social
Social networks, for their part, also managed to grab quite a few of the week's headlines. Facebook, for example, after being deluged with mostly negative feedback about its new layout, announced it's making a handful of changes to appease the outraged masses.

"Over time, we'll continue to give you more control over what's in your main stream and how you consume it, wrote Product Director Christopher Cox in a blog post Tuesday. "We have the eventual goal of building filters that summarize this activity so you can see a more condensed view of what's been going on. We're also thinking about ways of filtering out some of the Wall posts and content directed to specific people to focus more on posts shared with everyone."

Among the changes already in the works is live updating, which gives users the ability to turn on auto-updating so they don't have to refresh the page to see what's new.

And on the security front, Facebook has changed the way its password reset tool works so that it does not easily verify e-mail addresses to potential spammers, after CNET News contacted it with concerns from an Israeli security expert.

A company representative also says that Facebook has been "looking at" the possibility of building in a virtual currency, but his language was about as ambiguous as it gets.

Later in the week, during a Q&A session at the Global Technology Symposium held Thursday at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company's still not sure why the recent redesign process irked so many of the Web site's users.

"In terms of what went wrong with the redesign, we don't know yet." But she added that the percentage of users giving the redesign a thumbs-down was smaller than previous changes to the site.

"As a percentage of our users, this one is much less than before," she said. She also offered a backhanded compliment to Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook considered buying last year.

"What's interesting about Twitter is that they are a very good company doing one thing very well, which is real-time update," she said. "We are, by far, the largest photo-sharing site on the Web...Similarly, we are larger at doing what Twitter does. We think what they're doing is good. Our redesign is not in reference to them--nor was our redesign in reference to Flickr."

Speaking of which, Twitter and online advertising company Federated Media earlier this week rolled out ExecTweets, a Microsoft-sponsored site featuring Twitter feeds from "top business execs."

But CNET's Rafe Needleman quickly pointed out that this is not the mythical revenue model we're waiting to see from Twitter. It can't be. It's just one of those oddball content partnership sites that will look interesting for a while but probably fade away as the Microsoft contract to sponsor it runs down.

Twitter still has not announced a business model, Needleman later continued. There are no Pro Twitter accounts. There is no TwitterWords advertising program. You still can't buy plush toy Fail Whales from Twitter. But that's OK, he says. "There is rich value inside Twitter, and I do believe the company can afford to take its time to find the good ways to extract it."

Net news
Internet service providers this week started coming forward about agreeing to work with the recording industry to battle illegal file sharing.

Joe Waz, a senior vice president at Comcast, the nation's second largest ISP, told a gathering of music industry executives that the company has issued 2 million notices on behalf of copyright owners, according to multiple people who were in attendance.

Comcast said Wednesday afternoon that the notices Waz referred to were part of the company's standard practice and not a new policy.

"Comcast, like other major ISPs, forwards notices of alleged infringement that we receive from music, movie, videogame, and other content owners to our customers," Comcast said in a statement. "This is the same process we've had in place for years--nothing has changed. While we have always supported copyright holders in their efforts to reduce piracy under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and continue to do so, we have no plans to test a so-called 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' policy."

Tesla S electric sedan unveiled--photos

Waz made the comments Tuesday while part of a panel at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville. This was the same event where an AT&T executive told the gathering that it was cooperating with the Recording Industry Association of America by sending notices to customers accused of illegal filing sharing. The letters are part of a trial program, the executive told the audience. That exec, Jim Cicconi, later clarified that there will never be disruptions of service as a result.

In addition, sources confirmed that Cox Communications is also assisting the RIAA in the group's new campaign to use ISPs to help discourage consumers from pirating songs.

In other Internet-related news, Google now believes there's a financial incentive for companies to support the next-gen Internet standard, IPv6. And Google itself could profit.

The big advantage IPv6 has over IPv4 is the number of unique addresses it can accommodate--4.3 billion for IPv4 compared to about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for IPv6. Although 4.3 billion may sound like a lot, addresses are often allocated in large blocks that mean many aren't generally available, and expert estimates forecast an end to new IPv4 addresses in 2011.

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Internet leaders Facebook and Google made big headlines this week by officially rolling out, within minutes of one another, their universal log-in systems--Facebook Connect and Friend Connect, respectively.

Both promising users an easy way to sign in to multiple Web sites using just a single name and password, the news came amid the backdrop of better-than-expected Cyber Monday sales results and yet continual layoff announcements as the now officially declared recession deepens.

The week kicked off with lots of buzz about Facebook Connect, which was announced last spring, but wasn't officially rolled out until Thursday. It lets members connect their Facebook identity across the Web, including profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information.

Similarly, Google Friend Connect lets users register with a log-in that they're comfortable with and probably use every day--their Google or Gmail ID and password. Friend Connect is linked to OpenSocial, the Google-led set of common APIs for building social applications across multiple Web sites.

Both Facebook Connect and Friend Connect are simple and bring the concept of data portability--something standard created in 2005--into the mainstream.

All of the universal log-in services have their merits, but many are betting on Facebook's because, in addition to boosting involvement, what users do on these sites can get reflected back to their activity stream on Facebook. In other words, it's not just a registration system, but also a marketing channel with a built-in audience of 130 million monthly active users (according to Facebook).

The services will likely make life easier for users. Sites get more users. Central registration authorities get more valuable user behavior data. With all that, however, comes more potential for abuse on the part of sites and identity providers--or even cyberscoundrels.

Facebook users this week had to deal with Koobface, a nasty virus triggered by an e-mail lure and a fake Adobe Flash update request. Once infected, searches performed on the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Live.com were hijacked to other, lesser-known search sites.

And also amid all the "Connect" news, Google detailed extension plans for its Chrome browsers. Among the most requested features for the open-source browser are plug-in customization, and yes, an ad-blocking extension would be allowed.

And in the realm of Web pioneers, reports surfaced again this week that AOL's former CEO, Jonathan Miller, might be interested in buying some or all of Yahoo. This sent Yahoo's beleaguered stock rising, and triggered billionaire investor-activist Carl Icahn to publicly oppose selling just a portion of Yahoo.

Faces of recession
It's nice to know we'll all be easily connected on the Web, even if we're cash-strapped with no credit and no job. That is to say, the gloomy recession news just kept coming in this week, with AT&T laying off 12,000 employees and other reductions reported at RealNetworks, Viacom, Adobe Systems, Carlyle Group, and Gawker Media. (See our layoff scorecard for more details.)

Meanwhile, tech companies are reducing revenue forecasts and cutting back on planned projects.

We've gone one step deeper this week, however, and started telling stories about not just the numbers and the dollars, but the real people dealing with the recession.

The Erickson family, one of a growing number dealing with realities of layoffs.

(Credit: Andy Erickson)

LogLogic's Patricia Sueltz, for example, heard a clear message about the economy from investors, but she already knows a thing or two about navigating through tough times.

And we also heard a confession from a CEO who actually has to hand out the pink slips. It's easy to vilify him, but contrary to popular notions, these aren't decisions that are taken lightly, at least with the executive we interviewed.

Meanwhile, the downturn in the economy has meant start-ups like green-tech Mascoma have had to slow expectations. Just six months ago, Mascoma had the wind in its sails, as did the rest of the clean-tech sector. Now, the company is treading carefully and scaling back.

And we also learned about how the Erickson family has learned to cope with a layoff, a story becoming less and less unique. Balancing the checkbook is a tense chore for this unemployed IT consultant and his wife.

Consumers still buying
Despite all the bad economic news, Cyber Monday turned out to be a welcome relief for an industry that had been bracing itself for the worst. Visitors to e-commerce sites spent $846 million on Monday, an increase of 15 percent over the same day a year ago, according to ComScore.

It also ranked as the second-biggest day of online shopping ever and capped off a successful Thanksgiving holiday weekend for the industry, which overall saw spending jump 13 percent.

Google also saw double-digit jumps for paid click results on Cyber Monday.

Nokia N97

(Credit: Mark Licea/CNET)

But consumers were wooed mostly by amazing deals and aggressive promotions--they certainly aren't buying the likes of Nokia's much buzzed about mystery device, the fancy N97, which was unveiled this week to much fanfare at the Nokia World 2008 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Part of the company's high-end N series of multimedia computers, the N97 trumps all previous models with a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and a tilting 3.5-inch touch screen. It's expected to ship in Europe during the first half of 2009, with an estimated price of 550 euros ($695). No official word on when we'll see the N97 stateside.

It takes a jab at other popular touch-screen smartphones like the Apple iPhone 3G, T-Mobile G1, and Research In Motion BlackBerry Storm. But it remains to be seen whether it will succeed. CNET News' Maggie Reardon, who got a live demo of the N97, offers more details and claims "it's no iPhone."

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The unveiling of the first cell phone with Google's Android operating system made the most noise this week. But news about new and improved online music services also played loudly in the background (as did the ongoing U.S. economic crisis).

T-Mobile USA and Google on Tuesday unveiled the first phone powered by Google's open platform to much New York fanfare. The phone, previously code-named the HTC Dream, is now called the T-Mobile G1. It goes on sale in the U.S. on T-Mobile's network starting October 22 for $179 with a two-year service contract.

T-Mobile USA's parent company Deutsche Telekom will also be selling the device starting in November in the United Kingdom through its T-Mobile service. And the phone will be available throughout the rest of Europe via T-Mobile starting in the first quarter of 2009.

By most accounts, the G1, from a hardware perspective isn't a game changer. The device, which has a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from a touch-screen exterior, looks similar to other devices on the market, such as the T-Mobile Sidekick or Verizon's LG Voyager.

But inside, the Google Android software offers an improved mobile Web experience, making it a viable rival to Apple's popular iPhone (click here for comparisons between the iPhone and the G1) and a winner over other smartphones. Of course, until other partners in the Google-spawned, 34-member Open Handset Alliance bring their Android products to market, the G1 is shouldering a lot of ambitions.

Incidentally, Google has since released the software developer kit that will allow programmers to create applications that will run on Android phones. Click here for more details on the G1's offerings, or here for a roundup of all of the week's Android news.

The music plays
One feature in the G1 that got a bit overshadowed in the launch hype is the inclusion of Amazon.com's DRM-free MP3 store, which comes preloaded on each Android phone. That's bound to catch on once users start to realize that--unlike with iTunes--you can put songs downloaded from the store on any mobile device.

Also big news for online music aficionados this week was MySpace's much-anticipated debut of MySpace Music, which many see as the official stand-off between media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

MySpace Music, backed by all four of the largest recording companies, represents the most significant challenge to Apple--at least in terms of firepower--in some time. This is the first time the top labels have all joined in taking a stake in an iTunes competitor.

As with the Android phone, MySpace Music songs come from Amazon in the DRM-free MP3 format.

But among the many challenges the service faces is that it offers no hardware solution. Apple can provide everything a music listener needs--hardware and software. Also, while MySpace has long been an Internet concert hall, where bands went to market their wares to the Web, neither MySpace nor its owner News Corp. have much experience in music retail; consider that Apple has zoomed past Wal-Mart to music retail's top spot. Some critics have said that something like MySpace Music should have been in place on the site years ago.

Also in music news this week, mobile phone company Sony Ericsson announced Tuesday that it will launch a music service called PlayNow Plus, which will feature unlimited music downloads, also from all four of the major labels.

PlayNow Plus will compete with Comes with Music, the music service launched by Sony Ericsson rival Nokia earlier this year. And out of the gate, PlayNow can offer a more complete music library than Nokia's offering. EMI has yet to join Comes with Music.

Later in the week we also learned that Universal Music Group, the largest of the major recording companies, plans to launch a "Hulu-like" video portal.

The new venture would offer professionally produced music videos as well as other original programming that features the label's artists. The Killers, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, and Amy Winehouse are just a few of the company's acts.

The effort, sources say, allows the the label to squeeze more revenue out of music videos and offer artists a new and more polished platform to display their talents than what's available online now. And it could help draw larger numbers of premium advertisers to music videos. Right now, YouTube has become the most prominent online venue for music videos, and all four of the major labels have licensed music to the video-sharing site; YouTube's troubles at attracting top-tier advertisers are well chronicled.

And for those with an eye for indies, Muxtape founder Justin Ouelette this week explained that the bureaucracy of the music industry was just too much for him to deal with, which is why he took down the playlist creation Web site that became a hipster craze earlier this year. The site will be relaunching soon, he said, but strictly as a service for independent bands to share their own music.

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Google made its long-rumored foray into Web browsers with the introduction of its open-source Chrome, but in the process, it ruffled some privacy feathers.

Word of the browser first accidentally leaked on the Web in the form of a detailed 38-page comic book that appeared on Google Blogoscoped, an unofficial Google blog.

The browser was written with WebKit, the open-source engine at the core of Apple's Safari and Google's Android. The browser is also getting a new JavaScript virtual machine, V8. It's said to be a better solution for complex and rich Web applications, yielding better performance and "smoother drag and drops" in interactive applications.

The project should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies just entered the battlefield.

Even before Google's browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company's agenda of Web-based applications.

Chrome, Google said during its launch event, is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Google's hope is that performance will open up the bottleneck that chokes the speed and abilities of today's Web-based applications.

In short, Chrome is more of a long-term competitive threat to Microsoft Office and Windows than it is to Internet Explorer. That may sound a little grand, but the evidence is on display in Google's own lobby, where the search company's computer kiosks present a browser only--no start menu, no desktop shortcuts, no operating system.

So how does Chrome actually stack up? Google was eager to toot its horn about Chrome's performance running JavaScript, a programming language used to power many sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs, Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail site, and Zoho's online application suite. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition.

However, Mozilla fought back with some performance results to show a forthcoming version of Firefox outpacing Chrome in a different test called SunSpider.

Firefox 3.1, which Mozilla hopes to release by the end of the year, comes with JavaScript acceleration technology called TraceMonkey. In Mozilla's test that pitted TraceMonkey-enhanced Firefox against the Chrome beta, Google's browser was 28 percent slower on Windows XP and 16 percent slower on Windows Vista.

Privacy advocates objected to Chrome's End User License agreement, which appeared to give Google a perpetual right to use anything one entered into the browser. Section 11 stated that although users retain copyright to their works, "by submitting, posting, or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute any content which you submit, post, or display on or through the services."

However, Google backtracked, saying it plans to alter those contract terms. Google said the change, once made, will apply retroactively to anyone who has downloaded the browser.

Privacy concerns were also raised over the issues of what information Google plans to store on its servers. Provided that users leave on the auto-suggest feature in Chrome and have Google as their default search provider, Google has the right to store any information typed into Chrome's Ominibox, which serves as both search bar and address bar. Google told CNET News that it plans to store about 2 percent of all such data, along with the IP address of the computer that entered the information.

Going mobile
Google co-founder Sergey Brin expects the Chrome technology to make its way to Android, the company's mobile-phone operating system and software suite. Chrome and Android were developed largely separately, Brin said in an interview at the Chrome launch event.

"We have not wanted to bind one's hands to the other's," Brin said. But you can expect that to change, now that both projects are public and nearing their first final releases.

"Probably a subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack," Brin said, pointing to JavaScript improvements as one area.

When and if that happens, Google will have to contend with Apple, which has seen a large increase in the iPhone's global Web share, according to new figures. The figures, collected by Web analytics company Net Applications, show that in June 2008, before the launch of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone had 0.16 percent share of the operating-system market, as measured by OS detection during Web browsing; and in July, it had 0.19 percent.

However, as of September 1, the iPhone had 0.3 percent of global market share, an increase of 58 percent in one month. According to Net Applications, this was due to the July launch of the iPhone 3G. The figures also showed Microsoft's dominance steadily, if slowly, decreasing.

Meanwhile, AT&T said it had fixed a problem that caused many iPhone users in the northeastern United States to complain that they couldn't access the mobile Web. The problem, which caused some users to not be able to surf the Web on their phones, did not affect phone calls, text messages, or mobile e-mail from devices such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry.

And it looks as though Microsoft is joining Apple and Google in the mobile "application store" market. The software giant expects to launch "Skymarket" this fall for its Windows Mobile platform, if a recent job posting spotted by Long Zheng at Istartedsomething.com is accurate. According to the ad, posted on Computerjob.com, the Skymarket senior product manager will head a team that will "drive the launch of a v1 marketplace service for Windows Mobile."

Tech goes to the Republican convention
While John McCain saw a flood of online donations last week, thanks to his newly announced vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin, his campaign was steering Web donors to a site that helps victims of Hurricane Gustav.

The Republican Party canceled nearly all scheduled events for the Republican National Convention on Monday, save official business, out of respect for those impacted by the hurricane. However, a few special guests remained on the docket of speakers at the St. Paul Xcel Energy Center, including Cindy McCain and First Lady Laura Bush.

"I would ask that each one of us commit to join together to aid those in need as quickly as possible," Cindy McCain said. "As John has been saying for the last several days, this is a time when we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats."

Republican National Convention leaders also asked convention attendees to pledge donations to hurricane relief funds via text to the code 2HELP, using the keyword GIVE.

Hurricane Gustav's unexpected interference with the four-day event highlighted the deft communications needed to direct nearly 5,000 delegates and alternate delegates through the formal presidential nomination process. The RNC turned to cloud computing for the most efficient means of registering the delegates, and when the clouds of Hurricane Gustav threatened to throw the event off course, the RNC stepped up their communications with the delegates.

Early in the week, before the storm subsided, Republican leaders were reviewing the convention schedule on a day-to-day basis to determine whether to proceed with planned events. The party maintained a text message alert system for the delegates "to keep them fully informed not only of delegate activities but also to get them information about the storm," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said.

McCain got the enthusiastic endorsements of two of Silicon Valley's best-known female executives, who said he was a far more attractive candidate than his Democratic rival on economic and tax grounds.

The pro-McCain pair were Meg Whitman, who stepped down as eBay's chief executive officer in March, and Carly Fiorina, the chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005. Both are active in the McCain campaign; both have been talked about as receiving high-level appointments, if McCain is elected.

Also of note
Comcast is appealing a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that found the broadband provider had illegally blocked some customers' Web traffic...Silicon Valley start-up NebuAd has suspended plans to deploy a controversial program that displays ads based on the monitoring of Web activity while Congress reviews privacy concerns...Intel is expected to announce the "Dunnington" processor later this month, the first six-core processor and last of its Penryn chips...Apple sent out invitations for a music-related event next week, and the smart money is on new iPods.

The browser battles are heating up, with Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple all releasing offerings to entice Web surfers into their respective camps.

Microsoft released the second public beta for Internet Explorer 8, bringing it up to par with alternative browsers such as Opera, Apple's Safari, and Mozilla's Firefox in terms of security and features.

IE 8 adds a Security pull-down menu between Page and Tools on the main toolbar. In addition to blocking phishing sites, IE 8 now highlights the main domain of any Web site you visit. IE 8 also contains a cross-site scripting filter, one of the first in a mainstream browser. Cross-site scripting allows an attacker to execute script on users' browsers without them knowing.

In another feature, known as InPrivate, Microsoft allows the user to suspend caching functions while you surf. The scenarios for using InPrivate include when you're using someone else's computer, for instance, when you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise, or when you're at an Internet kiosk and don't want the next person to know which Web site you visited.

Mozilla released an experimental browser plug-in that aims to connect the Web with language to help users perform common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Ubiquity is a command-line interface that enables users to use plain language to manipulate Web tasks, such as mapping, translation, shopping, or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp, or Twitter.

Ubiquity grew out of Firefox's new Smart Location Bar, or "awesome bar," which helps resolve incomplete URL entries into browser address bars. Ubiquity doesn't replace the awesome bar, but a separate command line is generated by typing Ctrl-Space for Windows or Command-Space for Macs.

The free Firefox plug-in enables the creation of "user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs," according to a post on Mozilla's site. "In other words, allowing everyone--not just Web developers--to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing."

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have released an extension for Firefox 3 that can protect wireless network users from so-called man-in-the-middle attacks. The software, dubbed "Perspectives," is available for download for free.

Perspectives also protects against attacks that exploit a recently exposed flaw in the DNS (Domain Name System), which translates Web addresses into numerical IP addresses.

Meanwhile, Google brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple's Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline. Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn't connected to a network. It also can speed up use of the WordPress blogging software and some operations at MySpace, and Google is expanding its scope to geolocation services and other areas, too.

Copyrights in court
Video-sharing site Veoh defeated a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in 2006 by the Io Group, an adult entertainment company. Veoh defended its actions by citing provisions within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that call for a party to remove copyrighted material from its Web site, when notified by the copyright holder.

A U.S. District Court judge found that Veoh was not liable for hosting copyrighted videos that its users uploaded to its site because the company used an automated process to post videos and did not play an active role in getting the material onto its site. The court also found that Veoh removed the material when informed by the copyright holder, putting it in compliance with a "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA law.

The unprecedented decision is definitely favorable to Google, YouTube, and all user-generated sites, but it doesn't mean that Google will necessarily prevail in the $1 billion copyright suit filed against it by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures.

What's different about Io and Viacom is that Io didn't notify Veoh of the copyright infringement on the site before filing suit. In contrast, Viacom sent more than 100,000 "take-down notices" to YouTube prior to filing its $1 billion copyright complaint.

However, a copyright attorney said Viacom can still prevail provided that it proves YouTube is a business built on pirated material and that parent company Google has knowledge of the unauthorized clips on the site.

Another closely watched copyright infringement case seems to have been resolved over charges of evidence tampering by the defendant. Judge Neil Wake reportedly ruled that Jeffery Howell, a defendant in Atlantic v. Howell, had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it "therefore warrants appropriate sanctions."

In April, the judge seemed to agree with the defendants' arguments that the RIAA's "making available" position "amounts to suing someone for attempted distribution, something the Copyright Act has never recognized." However, the RIAA accused Howell of uninstalling Kazaa and reformatting his hard drive after being served with the lawsuit.

Politics go tech
On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Barack Obama announced that he had selected Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate. Obama was expected to announce his selection via text messages and e-mails to supporters on Saturday. While supporters who signed up for the announcement still received them, the Associated Press reported the selection of Biden late Friday.

According to Nielsen's numbers, the SMS campaign tactic reached 2.9 million people. However, Keynote Systems, which measures and monitors e-business performance, estimates that 40 percent to 50 percent of people who signed up to receive the text either received it late or not at all.

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders. Biden, whose antiprivacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP, ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide.

However, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that Obama had actually chosen his former archrival, Hillary Clinton, to be his vice presidential candidate. And Bill Richardson. And Kathleen Sebelius. And four other Democrats, too.

That's according to a set of articles that appeared on the paper's Web site early Saturday. The articles were published in error, of course, and they disappeared from the newspaper's Web site a few hours later. While they were live, the list of prepared-in-advance headlines said Obama had variously chosen Biden, Clinton, Evan Bayh, Chet Edwards, Sebelius, Tim Kaine, and Richardson.

Technology companies were at the Democratic convention in Denver this week to highlight more than just their new products--they're pushing an agenda as well. The Consumer Electronics Association, a lobbying firm that represents 2,200 technology companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Hitachi, brought its 28-state "America Wins with Trade" bus tour to Denver this week to convince Democrats that free trade benefits the tech industry, as well as consumers. Groups with opposing views are taking a high profile at the convention, however, and the conflicting interests in the party are apparent from its mixed messages on trade.

Also of note
Hundreds of flights were delayed in cities across the country due to a computer failure in the Federal Aviation Administration's system for processing flight plans...An electronic gaffe at news outlet Bloomberg mistakenly sent an incomplete obituary for Apple CEO Steve Jobs over the wire on Wednesday afternoon...Amazon.com is buying Shelfari, the social-networking site for book lovers.

The Olympic Games officially begin on Friday in Beijing--and on the Web.

Citizens of Ethiopia and Thailand are among the international Web users who will be able to view online content from the Beijing Olympics via YouTube. While NBC holds the Olympics digital video-on-demand rights in the U.S., rights have not been sold on an exclusive basis in more than 70 countries. In those countries, people can access the specialized YouTube Olympics channel.

The International Olympic Committee said the Olympic Broadcasting Services will produce the YouTube channel content and will include highlights, news clips, and daily videos of the international games. YouTube and parent company Google will also help remove videos that violate the IOC copyrights on Olympics content. YouTube said it would not disclose exact terms of the deal, but that the IOC "is using our industry-leading VideoID technology to manage and protect its content on the site."

The Olympics are a media feeding frenzy, as everyone tries to capitalize on the huge audience for the global sporting event, and now Yahoo and Google are trying to get in on the action. The Internet pioneers have launched a number of shortcuts to present Olympics-related information through Yahoo's search engine. The shortcuts package up information such as the overall medal count, a country's specific medal count, and information for individual athletes.

The customized results present content including video on the search results, blurring the lines between an Internet portal and a search engine. The results also include a link that can take users to various related Yahoo Sports Olympics coverage pages, which at least at present feature a lot of advertisements by Visa.

Also, Google's DoubleClick technology will be used to deliver video advertising shown with Microsoft's Silverlight technology, and it will be used for that purpose with the Olympics video that NBC Universal plans to show online using a player based on Silverlight 2.

Google's Silverlight ad capability, called DoubleClick In-Stream, can be used to deliver video ads using Flash, RealMedia, and Windows Media technology. In-Stream also can show static ads within video, which Microsoft and NBC concluded was the best approach for live video.

Meanwhile, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft say they are close to an agreement on a code of conduct for doing business in China and other countries that censor the Internet. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) released separate letters from the companies, stating they have "reached agreement on the core components of the principles" of the code, as Google put it.

Those components, the letters say, include principles for promoting freedom of expression and privacy, implementation guidelines, and an accountability framework. The specifics of the code are now being reviewed by the individual organizations involved. Google said the companies are working toward a "set of clear and rigorous principles, such that restrictive governments would be unable to ignore or reject these best practices on freedom of expression and the protection of individual privacy."

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

Yahoo--one big happy family?
Now the fireworks and fractiousness can officially move inside Yahoo: activist investor Carl Icahn is now part of the Internet company's board.

Icahn, who owns about 5 percent of Yahoo's shares, had tried to take over the entire board in July, but settled for seats for himself and two allies. One of Icahn's first roles on the board will be to help pick the two allies who will join him. The new appointments are set to be announced by August 15, increasing Yahoo's board from 9 to 11 members.

But the dysfunctional family love doesn't end there. The shareholder approval ratings plunged for Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock after Yahoo released new results that corrected a vote transmission error.

Shareholders unhappy with board members withheld their votes in the August 1 election. In Yahoo's official voting tally, 14.6 percent of votes for Yang and 20.5 percent for Bostock were withheld. But in the corrected results, Yang's withhold percentage rose to 33.7 percent and Bostock's to 39.6 percent, Yahoo said.

Quantitatively, the change means nothing: "These errors did not affect the outcome of the election of directors," Yahoo said. But qualitatively, it's a different story, because withhold votes do send a message even if the board were still re-elected.

Search engine marketers also aren't so crazy about how the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft power struggle has played out. It's not that they disapprove of Yahoo remaining independent of Microsoft. It's just that Google's search market share, at nearly 70 percent in June, has only grown stronger during its rivals' kerfuffle.

To be sure, Internet marketing executives were hopeful about the performance of Google rivals, even while they downplayed their importance. Marketers said that Yahoo, Ask.com, and others are performing well for search ad campaigns.

Hacks at Black Hat
Three journalists for a French security magazine were kicked out of the Black Hat security conference after they allegedly sniffed the press room computer network. Organizers required the men to leave the conference, confiscated their badges, and barred them from Defcon, a sister security conference that runs over the weekend, and from all future events.

The men were seen huddled over a table in the two press rooms for much of the day and took their computer to the Wall of Sheep (a project that monitors wireless network activity), asking them to display the alleged usernames and passwords of journalists. The Wall of Sheep organizers refused to do that, saying that they do not monitor the traffic of the press room.

One of the men later tried to lay the entire blame for the incident with another of the accused, but said, "For us, it was like a joke."

The Wall of Sheep board has long been a fixture at Defcon, Black Hat's sister conference. The board displays the names (with some identifying information obscured) of those connecting to the Internet in insecure ways. The idea is both meant to shame and educate users on best practices.

To see what's going across the Black Hat network, there are seats where you can plug in your own laptop and use whatever sniffer you have to see what they see. If they can see your network, they can see the clear text contents of your e-mail.

At least within the Wall of Sheep room you can get help on how not be posted on the display wall. For example, use encryption on your wireless connection such as WPA2. That will encrypt the signal from your mobile device to the access point. From there, the network itself should run Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

At the conference, in one of the most anticipated talks, researcher Dan Kaminsky explained the urgency in having everyone patch their systems: virtually everything done on the Internet involves a Domain Name System request and therefore is vulnerable.

Expectations were running high as Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for IOActive, had revealed little about his DNS vulnerability up till then. That didn't stop others from trying to figure it out. But that actually helped Kaminsky in the end; it meant during his speech, he was able to skip the what and go directly to the why.

Security researchers always thought it was hard to poison DNS records, but Kaminsky said to think of the process as a race, with a good guy and bad guy each trying to get a secret number transaction ID. "You can get there first," he said, "but you can't cross the finish line unless you have the secret number."

Also of note
A laptop with information on prescreened travelers that was reported stolen at the San Francisco airport was found in the office from which it was reported missing, and the incident may be relabeled the case of the misplaced laptop...Google has launched a free music search service in China that will give people access to free downloads of licensed songs...Delta Air Lines passengers will get Wi-Fi access on all domestic flights by the middle of next year...Facebook is reportedly ready to let current employees unload a fifth of their stock options, at the company's internal valuation of $4 billion...A privately funded rocket suffered a launch failure, the third in as many attempts for an Internet entrepreneur who is hoping to develop private space delivery and transportation.