World Of Gadget

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)“

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.

Last week, the respected Jon Peddie Research Group released a major report on the history, technology, and future of multi-GPU computing that predicts the now-esoteric technology will experience a major renaissance by 2012, with two-thirds of new desktop systems multi-GPU capable, and fully 30 percent packing two GPUs (not 50 percent, as has been reported elsewhere).  This is a major surprise to Ars, and we’re skeptical of JPR’s reasoning.

The JPR story: 3D gaming and simulation drive demand for multi-GPU

The drive for multi-GPU, JPR reports, comes from performance. High performance is increasingly desirable and attainable in the related fields of gaming and simulation, and the workloads are both highly parallel and totally unsuited for CPU applications. GPUs are needed, and the parallel nature of the rendering workload makes it possible to use multiple GPUs, while escalating performance needs make it necessary.

Meanwhile, software advances will make the performance hits relative to linear scaling smaller and smaller. These forces, JPR asserts, will push multi-GPU computing into more and more systems over time. There are several problems with this line of reasoning.

Die-level integration and manufacturing realities

GPUs are composed of many parallel processing units, so any multi-GPU system involves simply ganging together still more of such small, simple processor cores. Because the cores are small and the workload is parallel, there is no limit on core count analogous to the limit on the number of processors that can profitably be used in a single x86 CPU. The limits on single-die GPU horsepower are manufacturing limits.

In general, the semiconductor industry trends encapsulated in Moore’s law predict that it’s cheaper to put multiple circuit blocks on the same die than to split them across multiple dies, and it’s cheaper to put multiple dies on one PCB than splitting them across multiple PCBs. The number of transistors for which it’s cheaper to do this grows exponentially, doubling roughly every two years with process transitions and yield maturity.

For this reason, single-GPU systems are always more economical except where yield and platter edge concerns make it infeasible (for reasons of yield or wafer edge losses) to place enough silicon on one die to provide the performance needed. The transistor count it’s economical to put on one GPU is probably, right now, somewhere between the 1.4 billion transistors on the die of an NVIDIA GTX295 and the 959 million transistors on the die of an AMD Radeon 4890.

In round terms, then, the current figure is one billion transistors, and the 2012 figure will be in the vicinity of four billion transistors (perhaps more, since Intel’s Larrabee will bring to the GPU market manufacturing prowess much in advance of TSMC’s foundries).

Demand realities: Most systems are satisfied by Moore’s law

Right now, the Moore’s law ceiling for single-GPU systems is more than adequate to meet the demands of all but a small percentage of gaming PCs. Last year, only two percent of all desktop PCs sold carried multiple GPUs. And, indeed, it has been this way through all of history; multi-GPU systems have never been the province of any but a tiny minority of users. In fact, most desktop PCs sold don’t even have discrete GPUs. In the fourth quarter of last year, for instance, 38.5 million desktops shipped, but only 15.2 million discrete GPUs were sold, meaning that less than 40 percent of desktops shipped with discrete GPUs, probably less than a third once multi-GPU systems and upgrades are accounted for. Most desktop users simply aren’t playing 3D games or running 3D simulations, and those that do don’t need multiple GPUs, and likely won’t.

There’s no good reason to believe that a huge percentage of desktop users will develop an intense need for mountains of GPU silicon over the next three years, and if a good reason were to be found, it would be considerably more structural and considerably more detailed than a hand-waving assertion that everybody likes realistic graphics.

Indeed, the trend of two decades in computing has been the exact opposite of JPR’s prediction: more and more functions are subsumed into fewer and fewer silicon dies as times goes on. Sound cards, storage, I/O and networking controllers, and memory controllers—all are onboard. Northbridge functions like memory controllers are migrating to the CPU die. Most desktops shipped now have GPUs in their northbridge dies. In fact, the GPU survives as the only add-in silicon chip of any marketshare significance, the lone survivor of a good half-dozen ISA cards from a typical 1980s workstation. Finally, both major CPU vendors plan to offer, well in advance of 2012, CPUs with onboard GPUs.

How could it happen? Desktop death, and an end to ConSKUsion

So, how could this prediction possibly come true? We’re still pessimistic about it, but there are some forces and possible developments that JPR doesn’t explicitly identify that could push the GPU market more in the direction of multiple GPUs per system.

JPR could be proven right if the desktop PC dies, but the gamers and workstation users die off much more slowly. In the first quarter of 2009, numbers from iSuppli indicate that desktop sales were down 23 percent year over year, while laptop sales grew ten percent. If this trend continues, with everyday home, education, and business users migrating to laptops while workstation users and a winnowing crop of ever-harder core PC gamers soldier on, the percentage of multi-GPU systems could rise somewhat prodigiously.

The other alternative which could bring the JPR prediction true is a miraculous technological advance in the performance scaling of multi-GPU systems. Currently, scaling on 2-GPU SLI and Crossfire systems is lucky to hit 80 percent, if that, while doubling the number of stream processors on one die gets close to 100 percent. If advances in drivers and hardware push that figure closer to one hundred percent for arbitrarily many dies, GPU vendors may design one GPU die in each process generation, with a transistor count much lower than the Moore’s law ceiling, and gang an appropriate number of them together on one PCB.

Something like this approach has already been taken with the Radeon 4870×2 and a number of other less successful projects. The GPU vendors would be able to further shrink their GPU SKU counts, while tailoring performance more precisely. Such a business model would be more sensible at the smaller volumes some predict, as design costs begin to overshadow manufacturing costs in the balance sheets of NVIDIA and AMD.

In the end, though, these possibilities don’t seem likely. It’s more probable that the future won’t hold a renaissance of multi-GPU desktops running free across users’ desks, monitors, and wallets. The decades-long trend will continue, and tomorrow’s desktop will be made up of fewer dies, not more.

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.

Asia has seen quite a bit of action on Internet censorship in the last week, with China and Malaysia scaling back their censorship plans while Vietnam increases its control. Although most of the news was good, the region still has some way to go before free speech advocates will feel comfortable.

The highest profile of the three countries is China with its once-mandatory client-side filtering software, “Green Dam Youth Escort.” China’s technology minister, Li Yizhong, claimed to the press this week that the whole alleged requirement was one big “misunderstanding,” and that the software would no longer be required to be installed either by PC makers or by home users. 

This claim is disingenuous at best, considering that Chinese officials emphasized for months that the software would be mandatory and must be preinstalled or included on disc with every new PC sold in China—a plan that was suspended on June 30 in order to supposedly give manufacturers more time to comply. The software, which researchers have discovered sports numerous security vulnerabilities, isn’t dead, though, and will still be required in schools and Internet cafes. Some PC vendors are also including it voluntarily with their products.

Malaysia also backed off this week on a controversial plan to begin filtering pornographic websites so they could no longer be accessed from within the country. Communication and Culture Minister Rais Yatim had announced last week that Malaysia was already in the process of selecting software to carry out the task, but the reaction by bloggers and various Internet groups was so strong that the government was forced to reconsider. 

“We will not filter the Internet but Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin (Tun Hussein), (Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department) Datuk Seri Nazri (Aziz) and I have been tasked to look for instances of sedition, fraud, and child pornography,” he told Malaysian newspaper The Star. “We will then provide the relevant law enforcement agencies with the necessary particulars for them to take action.”

The CCIA (a nonprofit US trade group representing tech companies that push for open networks) praised both China and Malaysia for their decisions this week. “We welcome the Malaysian government’s decision to sideline plans to implement an Internet filtering system. Such a broad attempt at censorship would have blocked the free flow of information and ideas on the Internet—a communication tool that has become an enabler of democracy and economic development,” said CCIA head Ed Black in a statement. “China’s decision to block enforcement of Green Dam for PCs breaks what would have been a logjam on the free flow of information. It’s a wise move and a win for free speech, access to information and trade.”

Not all the news is positive, though. Vietnamese Internet users began reporting that Catholic websites were being blocked by the government following a number of Catholic protests within the country. Although the Vietnam government claims it only filters the Internet for pornographic and obscene content, it’s an open secret among citizens and Internet-watchers that the filters are often used to regulate politically sensitive chatter while, ironically, porn can easily be accessed within Vietnam. Human Rights Watch, Writers Without Borders, Amnesty International, and other human rights groups are also blocked within Vietnam.

Indeed, Reporters without Borders identifies Vietnam (along with Burma, China, Cuba, North Korea, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) as the “Enemies of the Internet,” accusing them of “[transforming] their Internet into an Intranet in order to prevent their population from accessing ‘undesirable’ online information.” 

Even if countries like China have made subtle changes, such as backing off on Green Dam, they still remain top offenders when it comes to dreaming up new and creative ways of stifling the flow of speech and information online.

Everywhere you look (even here at Ars), there are articles about people making poor decisions about what kinds of info and how much to share on sites like Facebook. The Internet is no longer a place where you can hide out easily—friends, family, and employers are all lurking, reading your embarrassing status updates and checking up on those drunken pictures from last week. And that’s just the beginning—the world of social networking is a feeding ground for identity thieves and stalkers, too.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Many users are aware that Facebook has numerous privacy controls, for example, but even the most experienced Facebook users often don’t know just how much they can control who sees what. For instance, did you know that you can specify exactly who can see your status updates, down to different groups of friends (not just “friends” versus “everyone”)? What about controlling which groups of people can even find you in a Facebook search to begin with?

If you don’t want to be socially available at all, then the solution is right in front of you and you can stop reading! However, if you have been wondering how you can be socially available on Facebook while still keeping your privacy under control, this guide is for you.

Dividing up your friends

When Facebook first launched, it was easy to determine who was a friend and who wasn’t. These days, though, designations between “friends” and “not friends” aren’t so easy. Is your mom really on the same level of friendship as your roommate? Is your boss on the same level as your drinking buddies? Is your ex-girlfriend on the same level as your current girlfriend? 

You can organize your friends into different groups, which can later be used to divvy up permissions. To do this, go to the Friends menu and select All Friends. There’s a button at the top that says “Create New List.” Clicking it allows you to create a list of your choosing, then add any of your friends to it.

Once you have made your selections, click “Create List,” which adds the new group to the list of your lists (how’s that for confusing?) on the left-hand column of the page. Clicking on the list you just created will show you the people you added and how many different lists they belong to—you can add people to as many or as few lists as you’d like.

Once you’ve split up all your friends into different lists—what’s next?

Tweak access to your profile

Your profile on Facebook is not an all-or-nothing venture. Not only do you have the option to enter as much or as little info as you want, you can also enter it all and simply control who sees what, even if they are your friends. Some parts of your profile, such as Basic and Personal information, give you limited privacy options—Everyone, Friends of Friends, Networks, etc. However, there are other parts that let you designate specific lists, or even specific friends, who can or can’t see what you’re up to.

To do this, go to the Settings menu and then pick Privacy settings. Click on Profile and you are presented with drop-downs for every different part of your profile. Certain drop-downs let you customize your lists, but you can’t find out which ones until you click on the Customize option to find out. For example, “Photos Tagged of You” lets me choose only “Some Friends,” then choose which lists I allow to see these photos.

As you can see in the screenshot, you can exclude specific lists or specific people if you’d like. You can set this control on this page for Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, your list of friends, Wall posts, Education Info, and Work Info. (This is undoubtedly handy for people like teachers who want to post snarky one-offs to their wall without their students seeing what they’re saying, for example.)

If you click over to the “Contact Information” tab, you can then customize who can see what bits of info, down to the tiniest tidbit. Want only your closest friends to have access to your mobile phone number? Great. Give your current address to your work buddies, too? Fantastic!

Control who finds you via Search

Unfortunately, you can’t tweak who can find you via Search as specifically as you can with your various profile settings, but you can still hide out to some degree. Going back to the Settings menu > Privacy settings, click on Search. The drop-down for search visibility lets you set which networks can find you via Search, or no networks if you so choose. If you want, you can set it to only Friends of Friends, or just to Friends. Setting it to “Only Friends” means that no one on Facebook will be able to find you via search unless they are already friends with you (presumably this means you friended them first).

From here, you can also choose what strangers can see when they find you through the search.

But I didn’t want the entire world to know we broke up!

Through Settings > Privacy > News Feed and Wall, you can control what kinds of “automatic” wall items get shown to your friends. This includes stuff like the notorious Relationship Status marker, anytime you add a friend, and when you make comments on other people’s walls. This will apply across the board to all your friends—either everyone who follows your news feed sees that you just broke up with your boyfriend, or nobody does. Personally, I choose nobody.

Can they use me in ads?

No. Yes. Sort of. There are different kinds of ads on Facebook, some of which are sponsored by third parties and some of which are hybrids between Facebook “social actions” and third-party ads. 

If you click over to the “Facebook Ads” tab from Privacy > News Feed and Wall, you’ll see up at the top that Facebook has a disclaimer clarifying that it doesn’t currently give third-party apps or ad networks the right to use your name and picture. However, that could change in the future, and you have the option to participate or not in those ads shown to your friends.

The other type of ad often revolves around you becoming a fan of… anything. People, bands, foods, stores, whatever you can think of. Facebook might stick an ad on a page for that fan page and tell your friends that you have become a fan of that page. That is, unless you tell Facebook not to.

But wait, there’s more!

Remember Beacon, Facebook’s cross-promotional advertising system that lets certain partner sites post directly to your Facebook wall when you do things like buy gifts, purchase movie tickets, and rent movies? Almost two years ago, users were outraged when Beacon popped up out of nowhere and started telling the world about their off-Facebook Internet activities, all without asking permission first.

Now, Beacon asks permission—if a site wants to post something, it lets you choose whether or not it goes to your wall before it gets posted, but you can still opt out of it altogether if you find the constant requests annoying.

Go to Privacy > Applications, and then click on the Settings tab. Here, you can change what information gets shared with certain Facebook applications that you have chosen to install:

(The reason you can’t choose the “Do not share” radio button is because you agree to share some info when you install applications. If you don’t want to share that info, then you must uninstall all of your Facebook applications.)

If you scroll down a bit more, there’s a checkbox that lets you opt out of all Beacon-related updates.

Conclusion

Would it be easier if Facebook didn’t bury all these different options in different (and sometimes unintuitive) places? Yes. But at least the site offers these options in the first place—Facebook may not always make the best decisions up front about how to handle user privacy, but the company is sensitive to the desires of its users and is usually quick to add options when new situations arise. 

By tweaking which groups can find you in search, which can see your wall postings, and which can see your personal information, you can still enjoy the benefits of the popular social networking site without letting it all hang out.

Never ones to let a good deed go unpunished, scammers quickly learned to take advantage of a user-friendly policy that allowed a misregistered domain name—perhaps due to a typo—to be withdrawn at no cost. Scammers used this “Add Grace Period” to grab huge numbers of domains, throw up pages full of advertising, then withdraw the applications before the bill came due. 

It was a practice known as “domain tasting,” and it gave the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) a bad case of indigestion. ICANN, which manages domain name assignments, ultimately responded by imposing penalties that would ensure any group that performed an excessive number of these premature withdrawals wound up with a substantial bill. In a report on the results of the new policy, released yesterday, ICANN announced that its actions have essentially eliminated the delicious art of domain tasting.

Money for nothing

Domain tasters managed to make money with the practice, which essentially cost them nothing, in several ways. By registering variants of some domain name in bulk, it would be possible to direct them all to a simple webpage that harvested revenue from advertising services (Google, for example, acted to block the practice around the same time ICANN did). These could be used to quickly grab users looking for something related to a current event, or to sample a wide range of typos for a popular site; any names with staying power could be kept, while the rest could be discarded after a few days at no cost.

An alternate approach was to track users as they searched for the availability of different domain names, then register anything they considered. If the user ultimately tried to register one, the domain taster could offer to part with the one they’d registered at an inflated price; if nothing happened in a few days, the name was returned.

None of this was very seemly, and it created an added burden for the domain management system. Ultimately, the practice attracted a class action lawsuit.

In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009.

The results have been dramatic. Even under the low-cost budget provisions, domain withdrawals during the grace period dropped to 16 percent of what they had been prior to its adoption. Once the heavy penalties took hold, the withdrawal rate dropped to under half a percent. Essentially, as the report’s title states, we’ve seen “the end of domain tasting.”

One of the unfortunate aspects of networked computing is that the cost of antisocial behaviors is so small (especially if you have access to a botnet) that it’s easy to profit from activities that make the Internet a less pleasant place. It’s nice to see that ICANN has figured out how to make one of these behaviors unprofitable, but it will be difficult or impossible to apply this model to many other unpleasant scams… or spams.

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.