World Of Gadget

A Florida man may have busted the world record for consumer data theft after allegedly stealing 130 million credit and debit card numbers. The US Department of Justice announced Monday afternoon that 28-year-old Albert Gonzales and two co-conspirators had been indicted for conspiracy. If true, Gonzales and gang may have beaten the credit card theft high score of 45 million accounts nearly three times over.

Gonzales, going by the online name of “segvec,” and his two buddies (soupnazi and j4guar17, in case you were wondering) allegedly began researching the credit card systems used by various companies in October of 2006 and devised the attack to steal the data in question. The team chose an SQL injection exploit to get around corporate firewalls to steal credit and debit information. Their success had led to charges of conspiracy to hack into certain retail and financial organizations, as well as conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

It appears that, in many cases, they succeeded—according to the DoJ, the team successfully jacked 130 million card numbers and transmitted them to servers in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. Some of the companies affected by the attack include convenience store chain 7-Eleven, Heartland Payment Systems (a credit card processor), and Hannaford Brothers Co. (a supermarket chain). 

The DoJ describes the incident as “the largest alleged credit and debit card data breach ever charged in the United States.” Indeed, before today, the former high score was represented by the scarlet letter on TJX’s forehead, parent company of retailer T.J. Maxx. That data breach involved “at least” 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers that occurred between mid-2005 and early 2007, as well as various points in 2003 and 2004. The theft of such a massive amount of data occurred, unsurprisingly, due to glaring security holes in the computer systems that process and store payment information.

Gonzales’ success came for similarly stupid reasons. Heartland Payment Systems, one of the companies victimized, revealed earlier this year that it may have leaked up to 100 million credit and debit accounts onto the black market due to malware in its system. It turns out that one of the systems in the payment processing chain had been infected with an unidentified bit of malware designed to track and report the magnetic information stored on the back of a credit card as that data was sent through the system. Though Heartland said that no personally identifiable information was transmitted, that magnetic data could easily be transferred to a new physical card.

Gonzales is facing up to 20 years in prison, and isn’t likely to win over any sympathy points on this one, either. As it turns out, he is already in federal custody thanks to a previous incident wherein he supposedly hacked the network for a major restaurant chain in May of 2008. Additionally, in August of 2008, Gonzales was indicted for a series of other retail hacks that affected eight major retailers and the theft of 40 million more credit card numbers. “The charges announced today relate to a different pattern of hacking activity that targeted different corporate victims and involved different co-conspirators,” explained the DoJ. Given Gonzales’ history, it seems that 130 million credit and debit cards may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Feel like checking your credit report yet?

On July 20, Blizzard held an event for the press to allow game writers to get their first taste of StarCraft 2 single-player. Ars Technica received what amounted to a golden ticket for the event, but I was unfortunately busy attending to a personal issue and had to politely decline… no matter how great the temptation. What Blizzard revealed was a completely rethought single-player experience that goes beyond what was attempted in the first game. While some are still hung up on the lack of LAN play, what is offered to those playing alone is substantial.

The single-player game is no longer a linear, mission-to-mission affair. You’ll be given different hubs that allow you to click on people and items in order to gain understanding about the game world, and pick and choose which missions you would like to tackle. “These hubs operate in a similar fashion to briefing rooms from games like Wing Commander or X-Wing, but with an even greater degree of interaction,” Shacknews explains. “You can talk to characters, interact with and examine various items in the environments, upgrade your units, and start up missions.” Successfully completing these missions allows you to unlock new units, as well as cash to hire your own mercenaries to aid you in battle.

“The mercenaries function kind of like Hero Units from the Warcraft games. For a large fee, you can contract with various groups of mercenaries,” Destructoid reports. “Once you’ve contracted them, you can then use them in battle by constructing a Merc Compound and then buying them like any normal unit.”

Single-player gameplay is given some unique twists

The missions described include a race to grab an artifact, and a lava-infused map that includes unique environmental challenges. There was also a mission on display that incorporated a day and night cycle into the strategy. “During the day, it’s build, research and destroy every Zerg infested structure. At night, the player must retreat, as hundreds of infested humans emerge from their hidden burrows, swarming the camp,” Kotaku reveals.

Missions will also include unique units that almost sound like something out of the world of Diablo. “When trying to secure the relic, Raynor’s forces are attacked by a quartet of Stone Zealots, gargantuan statues brought to life to protect the prized artifact,” Kotaku describes from its playthrough. There will also be achievements to unlock during each mission, giving you a reason to go back and improve your performance.

Single-player is no longer just a mutliplayer trainer

These sweeping changes to how single-player missions are organized and how you unlock units and items should make the solo experience a much more fulfilling experience. No longer just a way to learn how to use your units, now it seems as if the single-player will be an almost fully unique experience. If you’re a fan of the world and lore of StarCraft, expect it to be explored in a much deeper-than-expected way.

This also raises some interesting questions about the Zerg and Protoss releases. While Terrans drink in bars and organize their attacks from ships, what will the Zerg hubs be like? It will likely take a while to find out, but it’s a question that should be fun to answer.

While I don’t regret skipping out on Blizzard to take care of my family, this is the one invitation that tempted me to leave the hospital and hop on a plane. A new son… or single-player StarCraft 2? No man should ever have to make that choice. Be sure to read the previews that are scattered around the Internet, there are many interesting tidbits in each one.

Further reading

• Shacknews “First StarCraft 2 Singleplayer Hands-on Preview“
• Destructoid “Preview: StarCraft II single-player“
• Kotaku “First StarCraft II Single Player Campaign Hands-On (With Spoilers)“

Almost a year ago, Comcast pledged that it would sue the Federal Communications Commission over its Order sanctioning the cable ISP for peer-to-peer throttling. Now, the company has filed its case with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Although Comcast’s legal arguments are complex, the crux is simple: there were and still are no statutes or credible regulations that support the Commission’s authority to act on this matter, the company says.

“For the FCC to conclude that an entity has acted in violation of federal law and to take enforcement action for such a violation, there must have been ‘law’ to violate,” Comcast’s Opening Brief to the court contends. “Here, no such law existed.”

Undoubtedly, many parties will soon file with the court in opposition to and agreement with Comcast’s legal claims. But Comcast had to file first. Here’s a summary of what they say the FCC did wrong in punishing the company.

Doing so 24/7

First, let’s recap: After months of proceedings, hearings, and investigations, the FCC concluded on August 1, 2008 that Comcast was discriminating against certain P2P applications using deep packet inspection techniques. These methods thwarted the ability of users to share video and other files via BitTorrent. “Comcast was delaying subscribers’ downloads and blocking their uploads,” declared then FCC Chair Kevin Martin. “It was doing so 24/7, regardless of the amount of congestion on the network or how small the file might be. Even worse, Comcast was hiding that fact by making effected users think there was a problem with their Internet connection or the application.”

Comcast had an anti-competitive motive for this behavior, the Commission argued, as P2P apps offer consumers a video sharing alternative to cable television. The agency told the company to stop its current practices, disclose what it was actually doing, come up with a new, non-discriminatory system by the end of the year, and let consumers know how the new system will work. The company quickly complied with these orders, and announced the deployment of a new “protocol agnostic” network management system in mid-September.

But months earlier, Comcast Vice President David Cohen had warned the FCC that, in the ISP’s opinion, there was no statutory basis for the actions the agency eventually took. What the company has sent to the DC Circuit Court is an extended version of that letter: no law backs the FCC ruling about Comcast.

“If the Commission truly believed that any statutory provision was directly enforceable against Comcast’s conduct, it would not have premised the Order entirely on ancillary authority,” Comcast writes. “Ancillary authority”—what the hell does that mean?

Ancillary madness

As this legal debate heats up again, you can expect to see the following narcoleptic-coma-inducing question repeatedly asked and debated. Does Title I of the Communications Act gives the FCC “ancillary authority” or “ancillary jurisdiction” over network management issues?

People get thrown by the word “ancillary” here. It essentially means an additional, supplementary, or implied power. Title I outlines the FCC’s job. It’s there “for the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio,” Title I says. And section 230(b) of Title I adds that it is the policy of the United States “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet” and “to promote the continued development of the Internet.”

This Title I authority played a large part when the FCC invoked its famous Internet Policy Statement, which plays a big role in the Comcast drama. That’s the 2005 declaration that consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice and are entitled to competition among network providers. In its Comcast Order, the Commission explained that it created the statement in recognition of “its responsibility for overseeing and enforcing the ‘national Internet policy’ Congress had established in section 230(b) of the Communications Act.” The agency was now committed to integrating the Policy Statement into its ongoing policy-making work, it declared.

Show us the rules

So the obsessive-compulsive question for legal beagles is whether Title I gives the FCC the legal cajones to stomp ISPs if they block your efforts to download the movie trailer for District 9 via BitTorrent, Vuze, or some other P2P app. The consumer groups that petitioned the FCC to do something about Comcast’s behavior say that Title I granted the FCC all the authority it needed to act in this situation. Free market groups like the Progress and Freedom Foundation contend this ancillary authority business is way too vague to be used in something as crucial as regulating network management. PFF calls it a “standardless discretion” contrary to “the foundational principle that agencies only have that authority conferred by Congress, which ensures accountability.”

Defenders of the FCC push back, saying that even the Supreme Court recognized ancillary authority in the Brand X decision, a crucial ISP access case, and that Title I has been used repeatedly. Critics say yeah, sure, but only under certain strict circumstances. We leave it to you to follow the rabbit hole down as far as you’d like on this question. The bottom line is that Comcast, as you’ve probably already guessed, argues that Title I doesn’t give the FCC diddley when it comes to overseeing ISPs.

“Section 230(b) does no more than set forth ‘the policy of the United States,’” Comcast notes. “It does not even remotely establish mandatory standards of conduct” for regulating network management. That means, Comcast charges, that the FCC pretty much cracked down on the company’s behavior based on a Policy Statement that was not created by Congress, and which, well, was basically just a policy statement.

Where is this going?

Comcast’s filing even denies that it did anything wrong in the first place, network management-wise. “To prevent P2P usage from degrading all of its customers’ Internet experiences,” the company says for the umpteenth time, “Comcast managed, in limited circumstances and in a limited manner, those P2P protocols that had an objectively demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on its network. Specifically, it temporarily delayed certain P2P uploads (but not downloads), on a content-agnostic basis.”

But it’s unclear what the cable giant and its supporters think they will accomplish by this aggressive effort to overthrow the FCC’s decision. As veteran telecom attorneys like Andrew Lipman have noted, if the courts do shut down the FCC’s order on Comcast, “expect Congress to move very quickly” on some kind of net neutrality legislation. The usual suspects on Capitol Hill have already got yet another bill in the hopper, and this time they’re in control of all the key committees in the House and Senate. One wonders whether, in the not too distant future, the big ISPs will look nostalgically back on the happy days when the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement was all they had to obey.

Over the course of the weekend, it took me 5 hours and 15 minutes to see the credits of Shadow Complex—the 3D throwback to Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night from Epic Games that was announced at this year’s E3—and in many ways I feel like I have just begun. I haven’t found all the items, I haven’t seen the entire map, and I’ve barely mastered all the powers the game grants you in my first playthrough. If you’re a completist, if you have a hanking for some classic 2D game play, or if you just want to see how far downloadable titles have come since the launch of the Xbox 360, come Wednesday, you need to put down your $15 and play a very energetic action title that wants you to explore its every shadowy corner.

For someone just looking for a camping trip, our hero is surprisingly well-trained

The game stars Jason Fleming, a man who will actually call himself an everyman at one point in the game. He also has a past with some fairly intense weapons training, but he decided against military service. His father—in one of those epic bits of foreshadowing—hints that Jason simply may not have anything to fight for quite yet. When he goes on what should be a fun weekend with his girlfriend and they discover a hole in the ground, the adventure begins.

There is something delicious about the setup. You begin with a regular man in a tough spot, and by the end of the game you’ve turned into a powered-up, insanely powerful killing machine. The way the game segues from brightly colored nature scenes into a high-tech military facility (and back again) is magical, giving the area you’re exploring the feel of a real place that makes a sort of crazy sense. Wait until you swim across the surface of the lake for the first time, and then see what’s under it a few hours later. I don’t want to spoil things for you, but that cabin isn’t merely the abandoned home of some unseen fisherman.

The game takes place in two-dimensional space… mostly. You’ll also be asked to shoot into the background, and the controls for aiming away from yourself can be awkward at first, but you’ll quickly get used to it. The turret sequences are likewise refreshingly short and to the point. The real fun is finding new weapons and powers and using them to unlock new areas of the base as you find out what’s going down. Again, talking about the story isn’t something I’d like to do, but we find out through background conversations that after the revolution, the Cubs will be the first with their backs to the wall.

What do I need to blow up a purple door again?

In a fun twist, you shine your flashlight onto doors and hidden hatches to reveal their color, showing you what weapon you need to access that part of the base. You’ll need your foam gun for some sections, missiles for another, and of course you’ll find some underwater gear to explore the underground lakes and rivers. The animation is worthy of a full-priced game, and killing the somewhat bland henchmen is kept fresh with a variety of both weapons-based and hand-to-hand killing animations. You’ll level up quicker by killing people in interesting ways, so be sure to keep an eye on your surroundings.

The story offers some twists and turns—some more expected than others—but the voice acting and characters are well above average, especially for a $15 release. There are some corners cut here and there, as the enemies are very similar throughout the entirety of the game, and boss fights tend toward now-familiar walking mech designs, but the real star here is the expertly designed world; it opens like a flower, urging you to explore just one more corner before turning in for the night. You’ll have to track down save points, but there are also auto-saves sprinkled around the world, so dying is rarely a frustration.

The end is the beginning is the end

The game falters in its final act, where you’re stuck running around a mostly unlocked map trying to track down a series of weapons. When you finally have your super-powerful character unleashed on the world, the credits come sooner than expected. My advice? Avoid the final conflict for a while in order to enjoy your now god-like powers; you’ll be glad you did. Even if you do beat the game, and my barely five-hour first try felt leisurely to me, you can try again at a higher level keeping your experience, but losing your items and weapons.

No matter, you’ll want to play again to see everything you missed.

There is also a set of training missions to practice using all the equipment you gain throughout the course of the game, as well as a series of challenge maps to test your skills against the clock and the rest of Xbox Live. Don’t let my five-hour play time fool you; the game is filled with replay value. How many hours will you get out of it? That’s completely up to you and your playing style, but if you had to find every inch of the map when you played past Castlevania/Metroid games, you won’t be putting this down any time soon.

This doesn’t feel like a downloadable title in quality or presentation; everything from the graphics to the voice acting and the somewhat pulpy story impresses on multiple levels. I can think of many moments and details and asides that stick out in my mind, but it’s better for everyone if you simply play for yourself on Wednesday, August 19. I’m watching online videos and peeping screenshots, and I’m finding ways to tackle situations and use weapons that I completely missed the first time through.

It seems odd that an Xbox Live Arcade title may be one of the best games this season, but there it is: this is a must-play for those looking for a classic twist on a fresh challenge.

Verdict: Buy

Citizens living in China, Vietnam, Iran, and other countries may soon have another option for bypassing Internet filters, courtesy of a US-based agency. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) announced on Friday that it was working on a new system that would use e-mail to carry encrypted data to and from the recipient, including information that would otherwise be blocked.

The system, called “feed over e-mail” (FOE), is not yet ready for primetime, but BBG IT head Ken Berman said that it will be tested in China and Iran when it goes into beta. “China is the benchmark, the gold standard, of Internet censorship,” Berman told the AFP. “We try things. The idea is to extend freedom of the Internet, freedom of the press, freedom of inquiry to those that want to know more.”

Because the BBG would like to avoid tipping off the two governments before the software even gets to be tested, there are few details on how FOE currently works. It does, however, appear to be taking a different approach to filter circumvention by using e-mail instead of the traditional Web proxies used by some of the more prominent systems. Berman said that FOE uses encryption that comes with most e-mail systems, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and even Hotmail, to transmit news. One individual who helped develop FOE, Sho Ho, told Reuters that it could easily be tweaked to work with mobile phones, as well.

The announcement about FOE comes just as Internet censorship seems to be all over the news—China and Malaysia recently scaled back their plans to mandate more filtering, while Vietnam added an additional layer. These three are just the beginning, though; Reporters Without Borders also points the finger at Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan for being “Enemies of the Internet,” and numerous others engage in some level of blocking or filtering.

FOE is making headlines because of its different approach to delivering content, not to mention that it’s essentially being funded by taxpayer dollars (BBG is responsible for Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and all other non-military broadcasting for the US government). For many of the people behind the filters, however, FOE will just offer yet another option for getting around the government’s restrictions.

“Chinese netizens have been using proxy servers to access the information blocked by the government for a long time, FOE is just a more convenient tool,” China New Media Communication Association director Hu Yong told the China Daily. Indeed, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab even released a guide to bypassing Internet filters in 2007 that contains a list of proxy and tunneling software, so if FOE makes it to a final release, it will likely be added to the list of possible choices for those looking for forbidden information.

Late last week, analyst Ilya Grozovsky at Morgan Joseph downgraded Palm from “hold” to “sell” because he now estimates that Palm has shipped 50,000 fewer units than he had previously estimated they should have. His note was followed by a similar one from Ashok Kumar at Collins Stewart, who alleges that Palm has cut production of Pres because of weakening demand, and who is also bearish on the smartphone maker. Palm’s stock dipped a bit on the earlier report’s release, but the rest of the market saw the dip as a buying opportunity and rushed back in, driving the stock even higher. Clearly, this was vote of “no confidence”—not in Palm, but in Grozovsky and Kumar.

Analyst estimates of a device’s shipping volume are notoriously unreliable, and the market obviously didn’t put much stock in Grozovsky’s numbers. But the fact that the downgrade was so widely reported is yet another datapoint on a trend that I’ve informally observed of late. Based on gadget press commentary on Palm, my discussions with others in the tech industry, and my own feelings on the Pre, it seems that Palm has lost momentum over the summer. Some of this momentum loss is Apple’s fault, but most of it is Palm’s.

The Pre came out of the gate with a solid design and an OS and interface combination that was quite innovative. All of these factors, when combined with a clever PR campaign, resulted in a lot of buzz around the handset. 

But, since launch, nothing has really happened on the Pre front. In the meantime, Apple has sucked up all the oxygen in the smartphone space with the iPhone 3GS launch—when the sales numbers came out, it showed that the reigning champ had just returned its perceived rival’s blow and then some.

Palm’s major mistake was that it delayed the launch of the webOS SDK until April, allowing its new phone go the entire summer without a real ecosystem. Sure, Apple was able to launch the iPhone without any real developer support, and the company took its sweet time in releasing the iPhone SDK. But Apple wasn’t going up against competitors with software distribution platforms that were high volume or high profile. When the iPhone SDK was ready, it came with an app store that’s every bit as revolutionary as its music distribution platform was.

When the Pre launched, it was competing with the iPhone ecosystem from day one, but you wouldn’t guess it from the way Palm has handled things. The initial app store catalog was small and lackluster, but it could’ve been ramped up quickly with a range of apps showing what the Pre hardware can do. But here we are in August, and no one’s Pre has gained any new capabilities. There’s nothing new for the press to write about, nothing for any Pre owners to show off to their iPhone-using friends, and generally no reason to get excited all over again about Palm.

Palm is supposedly set to take the “beta” tag off of its App Catalog in the fall, though, so we may see a new wave of Pre mania once the first round of apps is approved. I for one am not willing to write off Palm until I can gauge the level of developer commitment to the platform by surfing a newly stocked app store. But it had better be good, or else the negative sentiment will grow and Palm’s goose could be cooked.

And another warning to Palm: the company has repeatedly stressed that its app store will be more “open” than Apple’s, which implies that we won’t be reading regular news stories about how this or that silly app was unfairly rejected. 

But these goofy App Store stories—about baby shakers and dictionaries and sundry other completely pointless apps that no one should ever care about—routinely put the iPhone on the front page of Google News. They remind everyone that the iPhone has an App Store, and people are talking about it, and it’s a big deal, and if they don’t have an iPhone then they’re missing out on the action. If I were Palm CEO Rubenstein, I’d be seriously thinking about having my App Catalog approval team take a page from Apple’s playbook and gin up some controversy now and again.

The US Department of Justice has weighed in on Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s $1.92 million liability for damages, calling the amount perfectly constitutional. In fact, Congress intended for such massive damages to fall like a stone upon even noncommercial P2P users.

Thomas-Rasset was the first defendant in the RIAA’s 18,000-person war on file-sharing to take her case all the way to trial. After two trials, she ended up owing $80,000 per song, for a total of $1.92 million, an amount promptly challenged as “unconstitutional” by the defense.

But the DOJ says that the range for statutory damages was clearly laid out by Congress to apply precisely to such cases. The amounts involved were last increased in 1999 as part of the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act, which “improved” statutory damages by raising the maximum to $150,000 per infringement.

According to Congressional thinking at the time, these amounts were not intended solely to apply to massive corporations; the DOJ quotes an explanation from the negotiations that says higher damages are necessary because “many computer users are either ignorant that copyright laws apply to Internet activity, or they simply believe that they will not be caught or prosecuted…”

The DOJ adds that Congress also wanted to “deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights” by setting the awards this high, and that there is nothing problematic about this unless the amounts are “so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable.” $1.92 million for downloading and uploading 24 songs does not reach this threshold, says the government.

“We are pleased the Administration has filed a brief supporting our position,” an RIAA spokesperson told us. “Its views are consistent with the views of every previous Administration that has weighed in on this issue.”

Statutory damages are certainly a useful tool; as the DOJ points out, the actual damages can be tough to quantify in many copyright cases, and so statutory damages provide a relatively straightforward system for taking claims to court. But the damage awards in this case and in the recent Joel Tenenbaum P2P case have been life-altering, bankrupting judgments when applied to young, noncommercial infringers. Given the publicly stated antipathy toward this litigation from both federal judges overseeing the cases, the post-trial damages ruling should be worth waiting for.

Not helping Joel Tenenbaum’s case, however, is the front page of The Pirate Bay—which is now displaying a graphic of Tenenbaum labeled “DJ Joel: The $675,000 mixtape.” Naturally, it provides a link to all of the songs Tenenbaum was sued over.

(For the record, Team Tenenbaum says it had absolutely nothing to do with this.)

Although the US and other nations currently produce ethanol from the sugars and starches of crops like sugar cane and corn, ethanol isn’t a good match for our existing fuel infrastructure—and this form of production runs the risk of putting energy in competition with food production for resources like land and water. As a result, attention has shifted to figuring out how to produce a new generation of biofuels from different sources that more closely approximate the diesel and gasoline in use today.

Yesterday’s edition of Science contained a perspective on the prospects for these next-generation biofuels. Although it’s very short, only a page long, it contains an excellent list of references to very current publications. The diversity of approaches it covers highlights how many options there are to produce different fuels, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. In the following sections, we’ll discuss different methods of producing biofuels; although the text presents them as alternatives, it’s important to emphasize that there are significant overlaps among them, and more than one technology might emerge for widespread use.

Cellulose or lipids: The first question is what you want the initial fuel stock to be. Cellulose, a polymerized sugar, is found in combination with proteins and other compounds; together, they provide plants with their structure. It’s available in abundance, and all sources of cellulose are more or less functionally equivalent, so a cellulose processing facility could work with a huge range of sources: agricultural waste, wood waste from lumber processing, leftover construction material, and dedicated biofuel crops like switchgrass. A recent USDA report suggests that the US has an annual supply of a billion tons of cellulose to work with.

The problem is that cellulose doesn’t break down easily or quickly, and its component parts—sugars and proteins—lend themselves most readily to the production of ethanol. The alternative is to go with something like lipids, which are long-chained hydrocarbons that are chemically more similar to fuels. 

As with cellulose, a lipid is a lipid, regardless of the source. Unfortunately, there are far fewer sources, since plants don’t generally contain an excess of them. In a few cases, lipid-processing facilities have been built to operate using the waste from meat packing plants, but a larger source of lipids would require the development of an algae that grows well in waste or salt water.

Industrial or biological: Once the material itself is isolated, it generally needs processing before it’s ready for use as fuel. Here, working with lipids has huge advantages, as they can generally be fed into the same sort of reactions that are used during oil refining. 

Cellulose is another matter. Several industrial processes can quickly break it down into more chemically-flexible components, but all of them require elevated temperatures and pressures, and thus a substantial energy input.

Once broken down, catalysts can rearrange the simpler components into usable fuels. But there are significant barriers to using the processes which we’ve already developed, designed to handle relatively pure mixtures. It’s difficult to fully eliminate water from cellulose, the plant material contains an unwanted mix of nitrogen and sulfur compounds, and the pH of the reaction material can be difficult to control. Any one of these issues can interfere with the action of an essential catalyst, so finding a combination that provides high energy payback and works well with cellulose isn’t a simple thing.

The alternative is to go biological, as there are organisms that make their living by digesting cellulose. Unfortunately, as anyone knows who has ever seen downed trees rot, the process is extremely slow. There are ways to speed it up, of course, but there’s a very clear trade-off between speed and energy input. Once it’s digested, researchers still face the challenge of finding a way to convert its component sugars to something more useful than ethanol.

Existing or engineered organisms: The ideal situation, of course, would be to have an organism that does everything for us, from digesting ethanol to spitting out some sort of lipid derivative that can be fed directly into fuel tanks. Life, however, is rarely that simple; evolution tends to frown upon organisms that release energetically valuable chemicals into their environments, and we’d be growing any biofuel organisms in the sorts of numbers that allow evolution plenty of opportunity.

That said, there are some organisms that happen to do some very convenient things on their own, like a bacterial strain that stores energy in lipids to such a degree that nearly 80 percent of its dry mass is in lipids. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing else about the strain, including the details of metabolism and whether they can be engineered in the same way we handle more common bacteria, like E. coli. And some form of engineering would almost certainly be needed if we’re going to have them growing on cellulose.

The alternative approach would be to take an organism we do know well, like E. coli, and engineer it so that it could digest cellulose and directly produce a chemical that could be easily converted to fuel. (A review of microbial fuels lists a variety of intermediate-chain hydrocarbons and alcohols that might work.) A sufficiently hydrophobic liquid, once outside the cell, should separate from the liquid the bacteria are growing in, allowing easy harvesting. But, at the moment, we only have limited experience with re-engineering an organism’s metabolism to do something that might not do said organism much good.

Because of all the complex trade-offs, it’s likely that there won’t be a one-size-fits-all biofuel solution, but the energy available to us (based on the USDA report) is substantial and could dramatically cut our imports of fossil fuels—up to 30 percent, based on a report that predates the recently tightened fuel economy standards. 

Fortunately, it appears that the market is taking the advice of the National Academies and developing a portfolio of approaches. The Science perspective notes that a handful of companies already claim they’re on track to begin producing non-ethanol biofuels on the scale of millions of gallons within the next five years, and more will join them within the next decade. Although none of them are giving away the precise details of what they’re up to, it’s clear that they are taking a variety of different approaches to producing that fuel. Gas has never looked greener.

Video game sales date for July has come in from the NPD Group, and the industry continues to sink. “The US video games industry declined for the fifth consecutive month, bringing year-to-date sales to $8.16 billion, down 14 percent from the same time period last year,” wrote NPD analyst Anita Frazier. “In order for the industry to come in flat or slightly up for the total year, the back five months of the year have to come in 11 percent (or more) higher than the last five months of last year.”

She points out that we do have surefire hits like Halo: ODST and The Beatles: Rock Band coming later this year, but for now, the industry is treading water. Let’s see who’s doing it most efficiently.

Nintendo

Sales of Nintendo hardware are slowing down, but with both the Wii and the Nintendo DS enjoying such a huge lead, the company has plenty of time until it feels Microsoft or Sony hardware breathing down its neck. The Wii sold 252,500 units in July and the Nintendo DS sold 538,900 units. In July 2008, the Wii sold almost 300,000 more units than it did this July; has the momentum finally slowed?

Not when it comes to software… even if that software often comes bundled with hardware. Wii Sports Resort came in first place with 508,200 units sold, along with the MotionPlus. Wii Fit with the Balance Board came in fourth place with 164,300 units sold, and then Mario Kart with the wheel on the Wii, Mario Kart on the DS, and Pokemon Platinum version took the fifth, sixth, and seventh places. New Super Mario Bros. came in at ninth place with 101,800 units sold, and the EA Sports Active Bundle took the tenth place with 96,800 sold.

Nintendo hardware may see slipping sales year over year, but that just means the company is coming in at number one by a slimmer margin. Taking seven of the top ten slots with mostly catalog titles and first-party games also shows that Nintendo continues to enjoy massive success.

Microsoft

Microsoft just about matched 2008’s sales, with 202,900 Xbox 360 units sold in July. The second-best-selling game was also on the 360 as NCAA Football 10 sold 376,500 units. (That’s 139,100 more units than the game sold on the PS3.) The only other 360 game in the top ten was Fight Night Round 4, which took the number eight slot with 116,400 units sold.

“The Xbox 360 is the only console system showing a unit sales increase year-to-date,” Frazier pointed out, and in fact the 360 came within 50,000 units of catching up to the Wii.

Sony

Sony has very little to brag about in the NPD report. The PS3 sold 121,800 units, the PSP sold 122,800 units, and the PS2 sold 108,000 units. Each piece of hardware is well behind its competitors. The only game that Sony charted in the top ten was the PS3 version of NCAA Football 10, which took the number three slot with 237,400 sold.

That’s relatively good news, if you don’t notice how easily the 360 trounced those sales with its own port of the game.

Not much good news for July

Sales are down, the software chart is dominated by Wii and DS titles that have been out for years or that continue existing franchises, and Sony needs to do something to energize gamers. Perhaps… and we’re just throwing out ideas here… a redesigned PS3 along with a price drop?

It’s going to be quite a challenge to get these numbers out of the gutter, but the end of 2009 still has some heavy-hitters coming, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

GameStop is an amazingly profitable company, and those profits are due largely to the margins the company enjoys on used game sales. When GameStop gives you $15 to $20 for a game that has been out a mere week, then sells the same game for $45, they’re making money that no retailer selling new games can match; new games have a very thin profit margin for retailers. Which is why it is surprising to see Best Buy make its new game prices competitive with GameStop’s used game prices.

In West Jordan, Utah, an eagle-eye Cheapassgamer reader snapped a picture of a sign at a local Best Buy. It said that Best Buy would price-match any used game from GameStop or GameCrazy with a new copy. So instead of going to GameStop for a $45 used game that has been opened—and of course, used—you can go to Best Buy and pay the same price for a brand-new, sealed copy. All evidence is pointing to this promotion being a small test run in a very few locations, but it didn’t take long for GameStop to fire back.

GameStop has the margins to make this fight ugly

Soon after the Best Buy story hit the Internet, Kotaku was given a copy of a flier from GameStop that showed some amazing price cuts on a wide selection of used games. Don’t be confused if you haven’t seen this sale at your local store; it seems to be localized around… wait for it… West Jordan, Utah.

The games on sale are newer titles, with an additional $10 or $15 knocked off GameStop’s normal prices for used games. It doesn’t take a cynic to realize that Game Stop is hoping customers flood Best Buy locations with the flier, demanding price-matched new copies of these games. And if gamers go into GameStop locations to take advantage of the sale, the company still wins; the margins on GameStop’s used games are so high that it can afford to run this sale and turn a profit, while forcing Best Buy to lose money on each game it sells at these prices.

The thought process going on at both companies has been opaque when it comes to the competing promotions—we contacted both Best Buy and GameStop and have yet to hear a comment from either—but the economics of the situation are clear. GameStop can fight the good fight on used game pricing and still come out the victor, because new games purchased from distributors, even with the scale of large retailers, leave only a few dollars of profit when the game is sold.

GameStop doesn’t have to buy its games from a distributor; the retailer has a huge base of loyal customers who are more than happy to turn over games for low trade-in amounts, giving GameStop a margin that can be as high as $30. Best Buy has to be wondering if the buzz is worth selling games below cost.

Will this skirmish turn into a war?

It’s doubtful, since both companies are fighting in such a way that their bottom lines are compromised. Best Buy may not be ready to turn its entire new game inventory into a loss-leader, and GameStop loves its high-margin used games. The gaming retailer is likely hoping that its counter-attack will make Best Buy skittish about trying this tactic in other markets, and there may be room to dump used prices further in case the message wasn’t strong enough. Once Best Buy kills its promotion, GameStop kills its sale.

It’s a cat and mouse game between two giants in the gaming world, with only one clear winner: gamers looking for a bargain in West Jordan, Utah.