Volume 11, Issue 06 Atari Online News, Etc. February 6, 2009 Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2008 All Rights Reserved Atari Online News, Etc. A-ONE Online Magazine Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor Atari Online News, Etc. Staff Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking" Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile" Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips" Rob Mahlert -- Web site Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame" With Contributions by: To subscribe to A-ONE, change e-mail addresses, or unsubscribe, log on to our website at: www.atarinews.org and click on "Subscriptions". OR subscribe to A-ONE by sending a message to: dpj@atarinews.org and your address will be added to the distribution list. To unsubscribe from A-ONE, send the following: Unsubscribe A-ONE Please make sure that you include the same address that you used to subscribe from. To download A-ONE, set your browser bookmarks to one of the following sites: http://people.delphiforums.com/dpj/a-one.htm Now available: http://www.atarinews.org Visit the Atari Advantage Forum on Delphi! http://forums.delphiforums.com/atari/ =~=~=~= A-ONE #1106 02/06/09 ~ Firefox and Security! ~ People Are Talking! ~ Google's E-mail War! ~ Mac OS X Is Climbing! ~ Nintendo Wins Over Old ~ Ask Joins Symantec! ~ Stimulus Payment Scam! ~ IE Slips Even Further! ~ India's $10 Laptop! ~ JuicyCampus Dries Up! ~ Valentines Spam Rise! ~ Porn Site Feuding! -* StopBadware: Place To Appeal! *- -* Internet Companies Vy for Stimulus! *- -* IBM To Send Blazingly Fast Computers to DoE *- =~=~=~= ->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!" """""""""""""""""""""""""" Well, the weather just continues to bring snow and extremely cold temps to this area - getting really sick of it...still. Supposedly we'll see some warmer weather over this weekend, but I'm not holding my breath. Like the weather, the current political climate continues to chill. The pols continue to debate what type of "stimulus" package to put forth, and no one can seem to agree on what is needed to get the economy on track. Personally, it makes sense to me to make it easier for people to earn money so they can spend money. If people don't have jobs, they can't make a living, they can't spend money - the economy suffers. Oh, that's where we're currently in the midst. Forget about tax cuts and "stimulus" checks. While either or both of these would be a nice thing, it would be like throwing a few morsels of food to a starving family. Sure, you might quench our hunger, but we'd be hungry again in a short period of time. Provide me with the means to buy food whenever I needed it and I'd be nourished for a much longer time. And of course we have a bi-partisan government, each digging in their heels trying to determine which direction to go in this mess. The direction that I don't like seeing is bailing out companies and then hear about expensive travel junkets and huge bonus checks. Makes me sick. Until next time... =~=~=~= PEOPLE ARE TALKING compiled by Joe Mirando joe@atarinews.org Heidi ho friends and neighbors. Looks like we're going to have enough messages to make a decent column this week... perhaps not a fantastic column, but a good one. But before we get to that, I want to burden you some more with that most dreaded of all topics: Politics. I know, I know, you're sick of politics. You're sick of this sucky economy and of all the arguing over the stimulus package and about these greedy Ess-Oh-Bee executives making multi-millions while they ask Congress for billions in bail-outs. I'm sick of all of that too. But those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and, while our current situation may not be as bad as the Great Depression (yet), there are lessons from the 30's and 40's that we could/should apply to our current predicament. Now, I'd love to think that simply pointing a finger would get us out of this mess, but it's simply not true. If you've read this column with any frequency, you know that I'm not bashful about giving my opinion, and while it would give me great pleasure to point fingers, it's really not going to help. So okay, here it is: The government needs to spend. Period. Giving people tax rebates makes them feel good for a bit but, by the very nature of this 'incentive', you make the overall problem worse. Heh heh... I can see several of you out there right now, scratching your heads and saying, "huh??" Think about it for a minute. The smart thing for people (and governments, for that matter) to do is to pay down their debt, to squirrel some money away if possible, and to plan for the future. Makes sense, right? But if people do that with government rebates and stimulus checks, the net effect on the economy is a negative because this money had to come from somewhere. It had to be siphoned from the government's funds and it now is out of circulation, whether because it went to pay off the balance on a credit card or got put into junior's college fund. It's not stimulating the economy. And tax rebates that favor the top earners... 'The Rich'? Well that's money totally wasted. Rich people aren't going to go out and buy a new washing machine or a car because they got a $600.00 tax rebate. They could go out and buy whatever they need without the tax rebate... that's sort of the definition of rich in the first place... being able to spend what you want to when you want to. So what the government hopes will happen is that people will forget about the $4,000.00 credit card balance and go spend $600.00 on a washing machine or snow-blower or something. And they'd be over-the-top happy if it was used as a down payment on a new car, since not only does that put people in Detroit to work for a little while, it gives the banks and other lenders instant business. The problem with this is that people are really really dumb and will get themselves into more trouble than they'll get themselves out of. Accruing more debt is not a sign of solvency just as curtailing Constitutional Rights is not a way of preserving Constitutional Rights. (sorry, I couldn't resist) Now, there are a lot of people shaking their heads at the width and breadth of this stimulus package and saying that it's just too much. They're saying that we can't spend our way out of our problems and that tax breaks are what we should be concentrating on. Well tax breaks are great, and I would like one just as much as anyone else. But I also want quality schools, national parks and well-maintained roadways. Those things require money. The government gets its money from taxes. Now for the "history" part. Let's do a little compare and contrast, okay? To get us out of the Great Depression, the government spent a lot of money. They spent it on public works projects. hydro-electric plants, bridges, roads, buildings, you name it... just about anything they could think of that would put people to work. And back then, just as now, many people were fussing and fuming about the huge cost of the programs. But what people don't often think about is the 'legacy effect'; the usefulness of these projects after they're completed. We weren't building things that were just built and left to stand there and rot, we built roads (which let us travel), we built those hydro-electric plants (which gave us electricity... a billable commodity.. and employed people), we built public buildings for our local governments, for our kids' schools, for the less fortunate. We, in short, built things that would continue to provide some value to us. Now those same couple of people who were scratching their heads before are now jumping up and down yelling "Condoms! Condoms! Condoms!" Yeah, there's money in the plan for condoms.. and look at it this way: The availability of condoms might just keep your obnoxious little honor student DARE graduate from popping out a kid (and at that point about half of you hard-liners would suddenly be in favor of abortion... but only in YOUR special circumstance... you've ALWAYS got some reason why your rules shouldn't apply to you) and allow her to go to college and get a good job to stimulate the economy instead of stimulating the captain of the football team. Now, I've heard the President say that these 'things' comprised about 1 percent of the overall package. That may (or may not) be true, but I think that's the wrong way to look at it... WILL this particular item help, either now or in the future? That's all we really need to think about. Okay, now comes the part that really gets to me: The people who say the whole thing just costs too much. Umm.. too much as opposed to what? As opposed to making sure that the gulf between rich and poor widens and the middle gets dragged down as a matter of course? As opposed to throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into an armed invasion and occupation of a sovereign country? There are those historians and pundits who say that Roosevelt 'allowed' Japan to attack Pearl Harbor so that we would finally enter the war. War, as we all know, is a great economic stimulator. Whether or not FDR 'let' the attack happen, once we entered the war, the economy made the final advances necessary to finally shake off the last vestiges of the Great Depression. Wars require armies. Armies require equipment and ammunition and food and textiles and even scientific and technological advances if they're within reach. But wait a minute. Aren't we at war right now? Aren't we spending billions of dollars every month (by most estimates, more than ten billion per month) on the war effort? So how did we get here? The answer may seem counter-intuitive, but the war is actually working OPPOSITE of what you'd expect. The fact is that, first of all, ten billion dollars a month isn't enough to stimulate the economy. Second, that ten billion certainly isn't filtering down. Remember when people worked for companies that did "government work"? They were all around us. Today, you hear about Haliburton and KBR, but all of the little companies of yesteryear are 'out of the loop'. Honestly now, how many people can you think of today who are working for companies that supply the government in general or the military in particular? Ask your older friends and relatives what it was like in the early 40's. EVERYONE knew someone who was doing something war-related. The work was there, the jobs were there. The bottom line? Not only can you not fight a war on the cheap, but you cannot pull your country out of a nose-dive that way either. Paul Krugman (Princeton Economist) was right... there's nothing special about a war. There's nothing magical about the money spent fighting a war as opposed to spending it on social or public works projects. The only difference is that people tend to 'give it up' more easily for a war than they do for a national park. What we're lacking isn't the wallet, it's the will. Fighting a war on the cheap is a part of what's gotten us into this situation, along with the mistaken idea that financial industries could be trusted to police themselves. It's foolish to believe that doing more of the same would have the opposite effect and, personally, I take umbrage at those politicians who wave a ream of paper in front of the camera and shout that spending is what got us into this mess. It's not. Spending and getting no value for it is what got us into this mess. And, by the way Senator Cracker, YOU were a big part of that spending. So sit down and shuddup and let us fix your mess. On a purely personal note, a close family friend lost her battle with cancer this past week. Loretta, you'll be dearly missed. Your smile, and the humor and comfort you brought to everyone you encountered, was always welcomed and will be sorely missed. Thank you. Okay, enough of that. Let's get to the news, hints, tips and info available from the UseNet. From the comp.sys.atari.st NewsGroup ==================================== 'Phantom' asks about some of the upgrades/add-ons that are available for the Falcon030: "I've just rebuilt a Falcon 030 and have been looking over some of the Modifications and Upgrades that one could get for it. I left the motherboard in the factory condition. It has a FPU, 14megs, TOS 4.04, Expose' Digitiser, 2.5 IDE Hard Disk. The motherboard has no past modifications. I'm looking at increasing the BUS Speed if possible without doing a major upgrade involving a lot of wires or replacing the CPU. Have some Questions, for the most part they have to do with a Stock Factory Falcon with TOS 4.04. No other Software involved/installed except for the original Disk Software from Atari. Such as the Control Panel, GDOS and etc. What hardware on the motherboard is considered the actual Bus? Where does it actually start and to what parts/chips does it branch out to if it does branch out? The AES ---------- On a Stock Falcon using TOS 4.04 what does the AES actually mean/do? NVRAM ---------- I remember a lot of discussion over the NVRAM. To my knowledge, the clock which keeps the date/time is located in the NVRAM Chip. If so, can one remove the Top of the Chip and replace the battery? And what does the Battery look like, is it the Top part of the chip or some type of watch battery?? Does this battery also keep the NVRAM settings when the machine is OFF? Does the NVRAM have anything to do with the Factory Control Panel software or the Newdesk.INF file? Are there any other things that the NVRAM does that could cause trouble if the battery is bad/weak? I remember a collection of Falcon modifications and fixes that were in a .ZIP format. Really well done. I think it created by someone in Germany and may have been called DOITF030. Anyone know if this is still available? Any help with the above is much appreciated. Any suggestions on a good solid BUS Upgrade or other modifications for a Stock Falcon?" Derryck Croker tells Phantom: "Correct. The clock is on the NVRAM chip. It also holds some other settings. Only certain variants of the chip can be 'opened' for battery replacement. [It's] Some type of watch battery. Chips where you can lift the top can have an external battery fitted, commonly a CR3023 in an external holder. It'll be fairly obvious if you can lift the top, but be careful if you're just prodding about due to the oscillator crystal just inside. Usually it's the failure to hold time settings that give you the clue [about the battery failure]. Replacing the chip is a fairly easy job, but there is one pin that is hard to unsolder because it's connected to what seems like a large copper plane on an inner PCB layer. You will probably want to cut the chip free from its pins, as close to the chip as possible so that you have something to grip as you unsolder each pin. " Phantom tells Derryck: "Looks like I have a NVRAM chip or battery to replace. I have a couple of motherboards for parts, not sure if the NVRAMs on them are any better. They are rather Tall, and look like they have a long rectangle block on top with a line between it and the bottom part of the Chip. Would this be the one with the replaceable battery? Doesn't it require cutting with something like a Dremel tool or sharp knife to get it apart? I'd like to do the battery fix, if this can be done on this type." Michael Schwingen adds: "The battery is replaceable on all variants - the amount of cutting and the layout of the wires in the potting material may differ. Note that both the lithium battery and the crystal for the RTC are in the upper part of the module - you need to disconnect the old battery (at least one wire), but keep the crystal connected. On the modules where the "backpack" is only connected at the two short sides, with a gap between the RTC case and the backpack, you can cut the backpack in half and remove the half with the battery - an example (MK48T02 from a SUN SparcStation, not the exact type used in the Falcon): http://www.ccac.rwth-aachen.de/~michaels/images/nvram1.jpg http://www.ccac.rwth-aachen.de/~michaels/images/nvram2.jpg http://www.ccac.rwth-aachen.de/~michaels/images/nvram3.jpg As far as I can remember, on the fully potted Dallas variants, the missing bottom pins are bend up to connect to the crystal and battery - comparing the pinouts of the original MC146818A and the DS1287 should give a clue. Hm - googling for the pinouts, it seems the MCA PS/2-PC guys had the same problem and Peter Wendt documented the procedure: http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm Dremel might work, knife probably not, the plastic is quite hard. When working with a Dremel, be careful not to leave metal dust inside the machine." Derryck tells Michael: "Fascinating. I've used the technique of milling away the potting material in the past, to repair a broken-off pin. Broke it whilst installing a mod which involved cutting said pin and soldering a wire to it. Well folks, that's it for this week. Tune in again next week, same time, same station, and be ready to listen to what they are saying when... PEOPLE ARE TALKING =~=~=~= ->In This Week's Gaming Section - Nintendo Wins Graying Gamers! """"""""""""""""""""""""""""" Killzone 2: Slaughterhouse! Electronic Arts! And much more! =~=~=~= ->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News! """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Killzone 2: Slaughterhouse High Five Killzone 2 is finally here, and the PS3's breathlessly awaited exclusive first-person shooter looks spectacularly depressing, a heliographing bandolier buckled round a nuclear missile pointed at an everlasting free-fire zone. Think exquisitely grim, then grimly rust-colored tortured landscapes swirled with blinding sand and clots of dirt that geyser as artillery shells arc and plummet like shooting stars. Think meshes of destructible rack and ruin structures and neo-classical complexes festooned with Futura-styled aphorisms, policed by red-eyed shock troops reminiscent of Nazi Germany's sturmtruppen. Yes, Killzone 2 looks good. Startlingly good. As good as you've heard, and then some. But is it the shot in the arm the PS3 needs? A chance for Sony's punditry-pummeled console to kick-start 2009 with its best foot forward? Exhale. The answer is yes, so long as you're willing to treat its conventional campaign as just a warm-up for its superior skirmish and online components. But first some background on the game's two mortally opposed factions, even if it's more than you'll glean from the game itself. Think bad guys versus good guys devoid of moral ambiguities, Axis and Allies, the International Strategic Alliance (or ISA that's you) versus the fascist Helghast Empire, battling over planetary resources in some far-flung future. The original Killzone for PS2 saw the Helghast launch an interplanetary war by invading the ISA colony planet Vekta, which the ISA eventually repelled. In Killzone: Liberation for the PSP, the ISA managed to boot the Helghast off Vekta altogether. In Killzone 2, then, turnabout's fair play: The ISA opt to invade the Helghast home world, whooping and fist-bumping all the way. At the outset, you're treated to a propaganda clip from Helghast overlord Scolar Visari, a Marlon Brando lookalike whose pallid head emerges from shadow like a fist through chocolate. It's Apocalypse Now for Dummies, without the river, patrol boat, or Dennis Hopper's space-time fractions. "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever," or something similarly Orwellian. Itching for revenge, the ISA assemble in towering drop-ships above Pyrrhus, the Helghan capital. It's a Normandy beach invasion moment you wouldn't put on a postcard. In fact you huddle on floating platforms that look resemble hovering "Higgins" LCVPs. That they lack armor-plated siding makes as much sense as cutting gaping holes in shields (who needs logic when style pays dividends). Moments later you're spraying bullets and double-timing for cover, and that's when you realize... Well not quite, but after popping your first few Helghast Assault Troops in Killzone 2, you'll notice they're hardly your average tenpins. For starters, they'll keep their bodies effectively concealed and only peek judiciously. They're as quick as you to employ blind-fire (firing from behind cover without looking) and they'll lay curtains of bullets across the battlefield to keep you hunkered and unnerved. They'll even lob grenades to flush you out of hidey-holes instead of charging headlong, and fire through complex geometry to prevent you from settling in a corner. The design team clearly wanted to make the AI one of Killzone 2's most compelling features, and they've hands-down succeeded. There's more. The game utilizes a first-person cover system that homages Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Vegas hold down a shoulder trigger to stick to walls, wiggle the joystick to poke your weapons around objects, release to unlimber. The kicker? Killzone 2's enemy's use it every bit as ably as you on your best day. Lay down suppressive fire and the opposition responds in kind, flanking and skewering you with enfilade fire. Enemies know how to move effectively and do so swiftly, whether mantling along walls or darting between swathes of cover. They're tough to confuse, and only rarely peel away from safe zones to stand unprotected while unloading a clip or two. Head-shots are dear, because bodies can absorb up to six or seven. The Helghast are altered humans tougher than you so they take more than a few pops to drop. Bullets spin enemies off-center, making even stunned targets volatile. Uncontrolled fire compounded by weapons recoil will draw your aim off target and give the enemy critical seconds to recover and return the favor. Nothing's perfect, and in this case it's the friendly AI that's suffers in certain instances. Despite promises that your squad mates will stay out of your way, they'll occasionally wander into your line of fire, then gallingly chastise you for it. In open terrain, they'll reliably stay behind you, but when you're changing directions rapidly in narrow areas like tunnels or stairways, they get too easily confused, often impeding your progress or compromising your line of sight. It's a minor defect, but present and annoying. Perhaps the triumphs of Killzone 2's AI explain its inversely mediocre solo campaign, which while tactically compelling during its set piece battles offers only conventional objectives. Fight from one end of a linear level to another. Push some buttons in a room. Take out an RPG team. Pilot a tank for a couple moments. Cruise the battlefield in an agile exoskeletal suit for a couple more. A game with Killzone 2's MO could (and should) have offered better. The campaign's also packing a few non sequiturs. Why can you heal your squad mates, but they'll never lift a finger to help you? Why give players the best weapon in the game for half a level, then inexplicably yank it forever when the next one loads? And occasionally you're teased with the promise of toys, e.g. "We've got buggies man!" only to be dragged through a cutscene and dropped at the tail end without laying a finger on the steering column. Enemies that spawn when you pass a hidden threshold are also irritatingly deterministic (the taint of heavy-handed scripting). In certain areas, they're disgorged relentlessly through inaccessible cracks or from behind ledges you can't climb up to. Die a couple times and you'll spot these seams. Even brilliant AI can't hide the sense that you've stumbled into a glorified shooting gallery when enemies backfill endlessly behind corrugated nubs of cover. Still, once they're in position, those enemies flow across the battlefields with eerie dexterity and assault with breathtaking efficacy. It's something to behold when you eventually encounter mass fields of fire in which both sides oscillate back and forth like water poured between cups, retreating only to advance again with the momentum of an effective forward thrust. Moments like those almost make up for the rest of the campaign's shortcomings. Almost, but not quite, which is where multiplayer steps in and earns Killzone 2 its stars. There's an offline Skirmish mode that lets you practice against insidiously clever AI "bots," but the real money's online against other players. That mode's called Warzone, and it offers an evolving class-driven experience for up to 32 players, built around five game types that cycle as you play and swap win states on the fly. "Search and Retrieve," which entails nabbing a tiny speaker spouting propaganda reflective of the carrier's faction, is basically Capture the Flag, while "Search and Destroy" has you deploying explosive charges at the opposition's base (or preventing them from doing the same to yours). "Bodycount" is team deathmatch, "Capture and Hold," is king of the hill, and "Assassination" designates random players on both sides as temporary point-based execution targets. So there's variety, with dynamism besides. But the really clever part involves Warzone's six classes, which run the gamut from support to sabotage. Everyone starts with the basics: an assault rifle, a pistol, and a grenade. As you take out enemies and accomplish tasks, you accrue points, which buff your score and yield special badges and ribbons. The higher your score, the more stuff you can carry. With enough points, you can create squads that enhance your ability to communicate with squad mates even spawn near your squad leader. The badges and ribbons add to the overall role-playing vibe with upgradeable class perks. Engineers, for example, can gain the ability to set automated turrets that target enemies, then rank up to add the option to repair ammunition dispensers, automated turrets, and mounted guns. Saboteurs, at the other end of the class schema, can acquire the ability to look like one of their opponents, then rank up and add the option to throw sticky proximity-detonated C4 charges. Still not deep enough for you? Classes aren't just static columns, they can overlap. If you toil long enough and tally up the requisite essentials, you'll have the option to couple one class's abilities with another. Want a Medic who uses the Tactician's air support sentry bots to cover his curative ministrations? How about a (virtually) invisible Scout who employs the Saboteur's C4-laying ability to sneak behind enemy lines and plant incendiary surprises? The combinative role-playing possibilities are countless, the outcomes (which also iterate dependent on play styles) highly unpredictable, and the organic process itself completely fascinating to watch. Which, speaking of watching, brings us full circle to Killzone 2's looks. Make no mistake, it's a looker. But so what? At some point the visual novelty wears off and you're left for posterity with a game that either worked, or didn't...or fell somewhere in limbo-land between. Which makes it fortunate that Killzone 2 not only works, but in most cases excels. Even its mediocre campaign improves if you treat it as I suspect its developer's intended a series of pitched battles designed to showcase an AI that's at worst entirely competent, and at best, entirely remarkable. *PCW Score: 90%* Electronic Arts Playing Spy Games with Ludlum Books Electronic Arts has won an exclusive worldwide license from Ludlum Entertainment to create video games based on the works of author Robert Ludlum, including the popular Jason Bourne franchise. The first game set to be released under the arrangement is based on the Bourne series and is in development at Uppsala, Sweden-based Starbreeze Studios, which worked on the "Chronicles of Riddick" games. Financial details of the multiyear deal were not disclosed. A previous Bourne game was published by Sierra Entertainment. Video game veteran Matt Wolf, the Ludlum estate's interactive creative adviser, will work with EA to oversee development of Ludlum games. He played similar roles with Gracie Films on a "Simpsons" game and with the Roald Dahl estate on a "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" game. Try Your Skill at Landing A Plane on Hudson River First came the heroics of landing a crippled passenger jet on the Hudson River in New York City. Now there are the video games. "Hero on the Hudson" challenges players to steady a plane nosediving toward the busy river. In "Double Bird Strike," the goal is to evade flocks of birds - a suspected cause of the US Airways jet's near disaster on January 15. Both are free online games created by units of MTV Networks, a division of Viacom Inc. Free games, which make money by selling advertising, are seen as a promising segment of the $22 billion U.S. video game industry. Players can try to emulate the skill of pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who won acclaim for his smooth emergency landing on the Hudson River that saved all 155 people aboard. "Hero on the Hudson" has been played more than 1.4 million times since it was launched on January 21, said Kate Connally, spokeswoman for its creator AddictingGames. Average success takes three tries. "If you land it correctly like the pilot did, then the passengers come out and cheer on the wing," she said. "The payoff is the joy of having saved all the passengers." The plane sinks with burbling sounds if you fail. "Double Bird Strike," which launched on January 18, may be trickier. Scott Roesch, general manager of creator atom.com, said it took him at least a dozen tries to succeed. "The decision to launch the project was made within 24 hours. It really is a story of heroism," Roesch said. "The more we started to think about, the thing that the plane was hit by birds was amazing." Among those conducting 147,000 tries on "Double Bird Strike," he said, are mothers at home. Before playing the game, viewers must watch a laundry detergent commercial featuring models on a catwalk. In the 2008 election year, politics mixed with online gaming. Several of the most popular games, Roesch and Connally said, featured Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the outdoorsy governor of Alaska. "Hunting with Palin" by atom.com drew more than 1.6 million tries. Nintendo Wins The Graying Gamers Among video game manufacturers, Nintendo has arguably done the most to recruit older gamers. Its Wii system is a minor hit in retirement homes, and Brain Age, a program for the company?s DS system, is marketed in part to graying users worried about losing their mental sharpness. A recent report from Packaged Facts, a market research firm, suggests that this strategy has paid off: almost twice as many older gamers use Nintendo systems as use PlayStation, the runner-up. ?Over the last few years, the driving force behind the increasing diversity and the mass appeal of gaming had been Nintendo,? said Bob Brown, the report?s author. ?My wife?s mother lives in a retirement community, and the last time we were there, everyone was excited because they were getting a Wii in there.? The report also found that women were more prevalent than men among older video gamers. They make up 46 percent of 18-to-24-year-old gamers, but 55 percent of those 65 and older. Playing Violent Video Games Has Risks Among young college students, the frequency and type of video games played appears to parallel risky drug and alcohol use, poorer personal relationships, and low levels of self-esteem, researchers report. "This does not mean that every person who plays video games has low self-worth, or that playing video games will lead to drug use," Laura M. Padilla-Walker told Reuters Health. Rather, these findings simply indicate video gaming may cluster with a number of negative outcomes, "at least for some segment of the population," said Padilla-Walker, an associate professor at the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She and colleagues examined the previous 12-months' frequency and type of video game and Internet use reported by 500 female and 313 male undergraduate college students in the United States. The students, who were 20 years old on average and mostly received course credit for their study participation, also recounted their drug and alcohol use, perceptions of self-worth and social acceptance, and the quality of their relationships with friends and family. The findings, reported in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, showed "stark gender differences in video game and Internet use," Padilla-Walker said. For example, compared with young women, young men reported video gaming three times as often and reported playing violent video games nearly eight times as often. Young men were also more likely to use the Internet for entertainment, daily headline news, and pornography, while young women more often used the Internet for email and schoolwork. However, regardless of gender, clear correlations were seen between frequent gaming and more frequent alcohol and drug use and lower quality personal relationships, as well as more frequent violent gaming and a greater number of sexual partners and low quality personal relationships. The investigators linked similar negative outcomes with Internet use for chat rooms, shopping, entertainment, and pornography, but a contrasting "plethora of positive outcomes" with Internet use for schoolwork. Padilla-Walker sees these findings as a starting point for future research. Continued analyses of video game and Internet use should improve the overall understanding of health and development among emerging young adults, she and colleagues note. =~=~=~= A-ONE's Headline News The Latest in Computer Technology News Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson IBM To Send Blazing Fast Supercomputer to Energy Department IBM plans to announce on Tuesday that it will supply the world's fastest supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy in the next few years, according to numerous reports. Not only will the machine, called Sequoia, be the fastest supercomputer to date, it will blow the current record-holder out of the water. IBM's Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (a petaflop is equal to a quadrillion calculations per second; the "flops" stands for floating point operations per second). But only seven months after the Roadrunner took top honors on a twice-yearly list of the world's fastest supercomputers, IBM is announcing that its successor will outdo it by an order of magnitude. Sequoia will be able to work at a staggering 20 petaflops, the equivalent of the compute power of 2 million laptops according to Reuters. IBM says it plans to deliver the Sequoia to the Energy Department for use at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The supercomputer will run simulations to test the soundness of the nation's stockpile of nuclear weaponry, according to the IDG News Service. Like Roadrunner, IBM says Sequoia will be energy-efficient. It will draw 6 megawatts of power in a year, which is roughly what 500 American homes would use, according to Wired. Internet Companies Vying for Stimulus Wireless and Internet service companies are looking to cash in as U.S. lawmakers hash out a $900 billion stimulus plan aimed at jump-starting the souring economy. Nearly $10 billion in federal grants and loans and $100 million in tax credits could be spent extending high-speed Internet access to rural areas and poor neighborhoods, a goal outlined by President Barack Obama during his campaign. Public interest groups say it is laudable the government is trying to help the poor while creating jobs but that a poorly implemented program could smack of corporate welfare. "Even though we support tax credits, we don't want them to 'incentivize' investments that would have taken place otherwise," said Derek Turner, research director at the public interest group Free Press. "We won't be creating new jobs and we'll just be paying for current investment." In determining which companies benefit most from the stimulus incentives, much will depend on interpretations of words like "open access," "underserved" and "unserved." The language in the stimulus bill is vague in some cases and fails to define key terms. For example, the House of Representatives version of the stimulus gives the Federal Communications Commission the power to define "openness": the idea that Internet providers should not discriminate based on the size of the content - say movie downloads versus email - or applications as it routes traffic. Internet service providers like Verizon ardently oppose this, saying it will discourage investment. But public interest groups and content providers like Google Inc say it is essential for innovation to flourish on the Internet. "The commission will have to open rulemakings on these issues and we expect they will be contentious and difficult," Medley Advisors analyst Jessica Zufolo said in an investor note this week. Big providers like AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications prefer tax credits rather than grants and loans, while the smaller rural carriers favor direct grants, in large part because they are more likely to have liabilities. Many Wall Street analysts say smaller, mid-sized and rural-focused carriers are most likely to benefit from the incentives, as the dollars would be too small to pack much punch for giants with tens of billions in revenues. The Rural Cellular Association, with members including United States Cellular Corp and Cellular South, is pushing for provisions to prevent the big carriers from dominating the process. "The tax credits are of no use to smaller carriers," said Eric Peterson, a spokesman for the trade group, which says its members serve about 25 million Americans. "Tax credits would not provide instant capital and thereby be stimulative in terms of the administration and the Congress's objectives." The Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance, which represents mid-sized carriers including CenturyTel Inc. and Embarq Corp and Windstream Corp, wrote to key lawmakers this week to push grants and a focus on subsidizing access to unserved areas, currently unprofitable to the companies. "The reason our folks are at 90 percent deployment and not 100 percent is that is where the numbers stop working," said Curt Stamp, president of the group. The tax credits proposed - currently 10 to 20 percent of investments, depending on connection speeds - are not big enough "to move the needle" on investment, Stamp said. The Wireless Communications Association International, which represents giants like AT&T but also smaller companies like privately held Xanadoo, wants flexibility in accounting for net operating losses. The group's president, Fred Campbell, said, "The reason it's relevant is it's harder to raise money in a very volatile stock market, especially when you have a sudden stock drop." IE Slips Further As Firefox, Safari, Chrome Gain The amount of market share commanded by Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has dropped for the seventh consecutive month. Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of over seven percentage points in a year, according to figures from Web metrics company Net Applications, released Monday. Mozilla's Firefox browser, meanwhile, has gained market share in the same time frame, climbing over three percentage points to 21.53 percent. Microsoft's browser has steadily lost ground to its competitors in the past year. Its share dropped sharply in both October and November 2008, when it lost over one percentage point in each month. Apple's Safari browser now stands at 8.29 percent, up from 7.13 percent in November, when IE dipped. Safari has gained share more quickly than Firefox in that period: Mozilla's browser accounted for 20.78 percent of browser use three months ago, and now has 21.53 percent. Google's Chrome browser, launched in September 2008, now has 1.12 percent of the market, having overtaken Opera in November. Opera's share of the market now stands at 0.7 percent. Internet Explorer's drop of seven percentage point since February last year is a continuing trend. Microsoft lost over nine percent of browser market share in the preceding two years. Most of IE's drop in the past year has been in Internet Explorer 6, which fell from 30.63 percent last February to 19.21 percent this January. Internet Explorer 7 has gained market share overall over the same time period, rising from 44.03 percent to 47.32 percent. Microsoft launched the first release candidate for Internet Explorer 8 last week. It hopes to regain lost ground by adding features such as private browsing and a cross-site scripting filter. Google Quietly Declares Email War on Yahoo Many people have sent an email while angry, exhausted, inebriated or just by mistake that they later regretted. Now, Google has a way to help protect you (and others) from such a faux pas. As part of its quest to attract users to its Gmail service, the Internet search company has introduced dozens of features, including one that, after a certain time, makes a user solve a math problem before sending an email, giving them time to rethink it. Because Google makes money every time email users click on ads, it is enhancing its email service to increase advertising and take market share away from Yahoo. Unique visitors to Google's sites increased 32 percent worldwide to more than 775 million last year, according to comScore, which tracks such data. Yahoo had a 16 percent gain to 562.6 million visitors and Microsoft had a 20 percent increase to about 647 million visitors. Analysts have attributed part of Google's visitor growth to email features that are being turned out at a dizzying rate by the company's Gmail Labs. This month, Google introduced a feature to automatically download mail so users can read Gmail offline in a Web browser. That matches an existing feature in the client version of Microsoft's Outlook but when Outlook is accessed from the Internet it does not have that feature. The off-line mail feature was announced in a press statement, but most other features to Gmail have been introduced more quietly. Engineers created and posted 34 experimental features in the seven months since Gmail Labs launched in June. "They're able to improve the products much faster than anyone else," said Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler. Google said those features are for adventurous Gmail users because the rapid addition of them means they may not work smoothly or that they will last. "Mail Goggles" helps users avoid sending regrettable email or Gchat messages, an instant messaging system, by making them pass a simple math test before sending. Another feature alerts users who forget to upload promised attachments. And another lets users send free SMS (short message service) messages to friends via Gchat. The new features can be found in "Labs" on the main Gmail account page in the upper right corner under "Settings". Google engineer Dave Cohen took half a day to code an experiment that lets users add a photo next to a friend's conversation in a chat window. It was available for users to try out a few weeks later. Cohen said it used to be "hard to take an idea you had and get it out there." Now, he said, Gmail Labs "has increased our freedom and flexibility, and we can do more at a whim when there's something you really want to add." Analysts said the quick roll out of experimental features puts pressure on Yahoo, Time Warner and Microsoft. Helping to speed development is a "Send Feedback" link in each experimental feature that allows users to make suggestions directly to the developer on how to improve it. "We didn't ... have that kind of direct feedback between engineers and users," said Keith Coleman, product manager. "Now, we have engineers looking at the raw feedback that they are getting." Firefox 3.0.6 Targets Security Issues Mozilla on Tuesday released an update to Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux that its developers said addresses several security and stability issues in the Web browser. Version 3.0.6 fixes six bugs, the worst of which is a JavaScript issue affecting the browser's layout engine that developers labeled as critical. The vulnerability, which also affects Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client and SeaMonkey Internet Suite, could allow an attacker to run unauthorized code on exploited machines, Mozilla said. The update improves how scripted commands, such as those included with Adblock Plus, work with plug-ins. It also addresses display issues, Mozilla said. The update comes as Firefox continues to chip away at Internet Explorer's market dominance. Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of more than 7 percentage points in a year, according to figures from Web metrics company Net Applications released Monday. Mozilla's Firefox browser, meanwhile, has gained market share in the same time frame, climbing more than 3 percentage points to 21.53 percent. Mac OS X Nears 10 Percent of Market as Windows Slips While Microsoft's Windows 7 has been making tech news, Apple's Mac OS X has moved up the market-share ladder. Apple's operating system continued climbing for the third consecutive month, closing in on 10 percent of the operating-system market, according to Net Applications. Apple now claims 9.9 percent of the market. At the same time, Microsoft's Windows operating system saw three consecutive months of decline. As of January, Microsoft Windows had 88.3 percent of the market, a .42 percent drop from December and a 2.2 percent decline in the last 90 days. That's the largest slump in a three-month period in the four years Net Applications has been gathering operating-system data - and it doubles the previous record, set from December 2006 to February 2007. During that 2006-2007 period, Windows fell 1.1 percent. Windows XP caused most of the loss. After a dismal showing with Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft has much riding on the launch of Windows 7. Microsoft launched a beta version of Windows 7 in mid-January and it now has one-tenth of one percent of the operating-system market, according to Net Applications. Net Applications gathers its data on operating-system usage from its Web analytics program. "Similar to Windows Vista, Windows 7 usage share is showing a pattern of being much higher on weekends than on weekdays," the company said in a note on its Web site. "Beta users are taking the time and effort to install it on their home computers, since corporations generally prohibit beta operating systems to be used in production environments." Microsoft has said it will put out a release candidate of Windows 7 as its next step - there will be no second beta version - but the company has not offered a release date. According to Microsoft, Windows 7 was built around consumer feedback. Some of the new features include a taskbar at the bottom of the screen that lets users switch between open applications. In Windows 7, users can set the order in which the icons appear. A Jump List feature aims to make it easy to find recent files. Right-clicking on a Word icon, for example, will show the most recent Word documents. Apple's operating system isn't coming close to eclipsing Microsoft Windows, just as Mozilla's Firefox browser isn't close to beating Internet Explorer. But Apple's influence on the PC market is becoming increasingly visible. According to Stephen Baker, director of industry analysis at the NPD Group, that influence isn't just because of the Apple iPod's popularity. Baker said the iPod halo effect is played out, and iMac and MacBook sales are growing on their own merits. "Apple has been selling a lot of PCs over the past few years. I don't know that there's a milestone or a number that people ought to hang their hat on. It's a continuing process right now," Baker said. "Mac has been outperforming the rest of the PC industry in the consumer segment, so it shouldn't be a surprise." Ask Partners with Symantec on Security Ratings for Web Searches Search engine Ask is partnering with Symantec to offer Web surfers ratings on the safety level of sites in search results, the companies were set to announce on Tuesday. Sites will be rated with a color-coded icon in one of four colors - green for safe, yellow for risky, red for unsafe, and gray for unknown, said Andrew Moers, president of Ask Partner Network. Moving the cursor over the icon will display more information about the rating. Unsafe sites are ones that pretend to be something they are not and shopping sites that lack security or where the merchants aren't reputable, according to Moers. Safe Search offers the ratings directly in the search experience so users can conduct searches from the toolbar of Symantec's Norton Safe Web software, which is part of Norton 360. The Web site rating service was introduced in beta by Symantec last August. Ask also is working on having a beta site open up to the public this week, but the site will not have all the functions that the Norton Safe Web rating service does, Moers said. The service is similar to an alert system that Google uses, however Google merely displays several warning messages saying that the site "may be harmful to the computer" but does not assign a safety rating. An error last Saturday led to Google warning temporarily that all sites on the Internet were potentially unsafe. Ask offers adult filtering and re-launched its Ask Kids white list service for children last year. StopBadware.org, The Place To Appeal A Google Malware Warning If your Web site is one of the more than 170,000 sites on the Internet that Google has tagged as hosting malware, you have a place to turn--StopBadware.org. On Saturday, an error at Google changed the display of search results so that every site on the Internet was listed as having malware for about an hour. After that happened, StopBadware.org's site was hit with so much traffic - 67,000 or 13 times the normal daily number - that it led to a denial of service that had the site offline for nearly an hour and a half. After initially saying StopBadware.org had contributed to the problem, Google retracted that and said it was solely the fault of the search engine. Meanwhile, StopBadware.org got 150 malware review requests over the weekend from people whose sites were tagged as harmful during the glitch. "It was an unfortunate event, but it helps raise awareness of this real problem" of sites hosting malware, Maxim Weinstein, manager of the nonprofit StopBadware.org, said in an interview on Monday with CNET News. An appeals body From a five-person office on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass., the organization serves as a sort of appeals body for people who argue that their sites shouldn't be flagged as dangerous. In the high stakes game of e-commerce, getting tagged as dangerous can cost a Web site visitors and money. The organization gets anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 requests per month from Web site owners who think Google has unfairly tagged them as harmful to the Web surfing public, according to Weinstein. For sites that host spyware, adware, or other software that interferes with peoples' ability to control their computer, Google includes a warning along with the results that says: "This site may harm your computer." If the searcher clicks on the result, a window pops up with a second warning that suggests trying a different search and offers direct links to StopBadware.org and related Google sites. To get to the flagged Web site a searcher has to type in the URL in the Web address bar. Google offers an automated process for review requests, while StopBadware.org does the review manually. Outside of the anomaly that occurred over the weekend, Google rarely has false positives, according to Weinstein. Many of the sites are indeed malicious, such as phishing sites hoping to steal sensitive data an unsuspecting visitor may type in thinking that the site is a legitimate bank site, for instance. But most of the people who ask StopBadware.org for help are legitimate sites whose servers have been compromised, often because they are running Web server software with a vulnerability that has not been patched, he said. Sometimes the malware is contained in the comments on a blog, and in other cases some people just aren't using strong enough passwords to protect their Web hosting accounts. A lot of bloggers use WordPress, which has a fair share of security weaknesses, and people don't know they need to update the software, Weinstein said. "Attackers run software scanning for WordPress blogs that are running vulnerable versions of the server software and then they run an attack that gets access to the site," he said. In the dog-eat-dog world of Web search, StopBadware.org shares a special status. The organization, launched in 2006 as a "neighborhood watch for the Internet," was coordinated by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It gets data from Google, AOL, PayPal, Trend Micro, Lenovo and VeriSign, and Consumer Reports WebWatch. "We're independent but with friends in high places," Weinstein said. "We get access to data from Google and other companies and...this allows for data analysis and research that no one else is able to do." In addition to offering a second opinion to aggrieved Web sites, StopBadware.org works on developing new approaches to addressing malware and offers the BadwareBusters.org forum where Web site owners can exchange information. The organization has been focusing on identifying what it calls "borderline applications," badware that isn't obviously malicious but which exhibits behavior that malware does, such as installing extra software on the PC without informing the user and software that doesn't uninstall when the user tries to get rid of it. Representatives from Google, StopBadware.org's closest partner, declined an opportunity to be interviewed about the organization following the weekend search snafu. "We have a good ongoing relationship with StopBadware.org," a Google spokesman said in an e-mail. Valentine Spam Part of a Junk-mail Resurgence It's a time for romance, for Cupid's arrow, and perhaps a male enhancement drug from a fake online pharmacy. Valentine's day spam and scams are showing up in inboxes in anticipation of the upcoming holiday. The messages, with timely sales pitches like "Increase your length, the best valentine's gift," join a flood of other crap mail that has spam levels back up to where they were prior to the McColo shutdown success in November. In addition to listing other eye-rolling Valentine's spam subjects like "Great watches for your Valentine," Symantec's State of Spam report for the month (pdf) adds to evidence that, as expected, junkmail spreaders have found other ways to spread their spam after McColo, a company that provided Internet homes for many spam spreaders, was cut off. It was a major victory, but one all the experts predicted would be short-lived. Sadly, the experts were right. According to Symantec's report, spam levels are back up to around 79 percent of all e-mail, just about the levels prior to the McColo takedown. But that doesn't detract from the major, and relatively rare, victory against the spammer infrastructure. And according to a story from Brian Krebs at Security Fix, the Washing Post writer who was instrumental in getting McColo nailed, there's potential for other wins. Krebs covers work done by a group called Knujon that shows how most of the Web sites advertised by all this junk mail are registered with only a small handful of domain name registrars (out of 900 or so total, Krebs writes). His post doesn't explicitly come out and say so, but I'd say identifying outfits central to helping spammers is the first step towards cleaning up - or shutting down - those outfits and perhaps scoring another victory against Internet crime. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed. Latest Scam: Bogus Emails Offering Stimulus Payments The US Department of Homeland Security warned Friday that scammers were sending out bogus emails offering economic stimulus payments in an attempt to retrieve personal information. US-CERT, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team, said it had received reports of a "phishing" scam involving "fraudulent US Internal Revenue Service emails offering users stimulus package payments." "These emails include text that attempts to convince users to follow a link to a website or to complete an attached document," US-CERT said. "The website and document request the user to provide personal information." In a statement on its website, us-cert.gov, US-CERT urged anyone who received one of the fraudulent emails to alert the authorities. US-CERT was created in 2003 to defend the Internet infrastructure against cyberattack. It is a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the public and private sectors. Phishing is a common Internet fraud in which perpetrators attempt to steal IDs, passwords and other personal information in an attempt to swindle money. The fraudsters behind the latest scam would appear to be a bit premature. The US House of Representatives passed a giant economic stimulus package last week but it has yet to clear the Senate. India Plans '10 Dollar' Laptop To Promote Computer Skills India has unveiled plans to produce a laptop computer costing just 10 dollars in a bid to improve the skills of millions of students across the country. The laptops will be mass-produced as part of a government-sponsored education scheme launched on Tuesday in the southern city of Tirupati. Details about the computer remained scarce, but Higher Education Secretary R.P. Agrawal said last week that it would be available within six months. "Once the testing is over, the computers will be made available on commercial basis," he told the Press Trust of India news agency. "Its cost will be 10 US dollars. If the parents want to give something to their kids, they can easily purchase this item." The laptop will reportedly have a two gigabyte memory and wireless Internet capability, but officials have not publicly demonstrated a prototype - or yet explained how it can be produced at such a low cost. The government has earmarked more than 46 billion rupees (939 million dollars) to develop the low-power gadget to work in rural areas with unreliable power supply and poor Internet connectivity. The planned laptop is part of a push to increase the number of students in higher education and give them the technological skills needed to further boost India's economic growth. New Delhi rebuffed a previous attempt to bring cheap laptops to India, led by MIT computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child programme. The government cited hidden costs for its rejection of that computer, which was dubbed the 100-dollar laptop. Porn Site Feud Spawns New DNS Attack A scrap between two pornographic Web sites turned nasty when one figured out how to take down the other by exploiting a previously unknown quirk in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). The attack is known as DNS Amplification. It has been used sporadically since December, but it started getting talked about last month when ISPrime, a small New York Internet service provider, started getting hit hard with what's known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. The attack was launched by the operator of a pornographic Web site who was trying to shut down a competitor, hosted on ISPrime's network, according to Phil Rosenthal, the company's chief technology officer. The attack on ISPrime started on the morning of Sunday, Jan. 18. It lasted about a day, but what was remarkable was that a relatively small number of PCs were able to generate a very large amount of traffic on the network. One day later, a similar attack followed, lasting three days. Before ISPrime was able to filter the unwanted traffic, attackers were able to use up about 5GB/second of the company's bandwidth, With a bit of work, Rosenthal's staff was able to filter out the hostile traffic, but in an e-mail interview he said that the attack "represents a disturbing trend in the sophistication of denial of service attacks." According to Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at security vendor SecureWorks, we may soon see a lot more of these DNS Amplification attacks. Late last week, the botnet operators, who rent out their networks of hacked computers to the highest bidder, started adding custom DNS Amplification tools to their networks. "Everyone's picked it up now," he said. "The next big DDOS on some former Soviet republic, you'll see this mentioned, I'm sure." One of the things that makes a DNS amplification attack particularly nasty is the fact that by sending a very small packet to a legitimate DNS server, say 17 bytes, the attacker can then trick the server into sending a much larger packet - about 500 bytes - to the victim of the attack. By spoofing the source of the packet, the attacker can direct it at specific parts of his victim's network. Jackson estimates that the 5GB/second attack against ISPrime was achieved with just 2,000 computers, which sent out spoofed packets to thousands of legitimate nameservers, all of which started flooding the ISPrime network. ISPrime's Rosenthal says that about 750,000 legitimate DNS servers were used in the attack on his network. Earlier this week, SecureWorks produced a technical analysis of the DNS Amplification attack. The attack is generating a lot of discussion amongst DNS experts, according to Duane Wessels, program manager with DNS-OARC (Operations Analysis and Research Center), based in Redwood City, California. "The worry is that this kind of attack could be used on more high-profile targets," he said. One of the things that makes the attack particularly nasty is that it's very hard to protect against. "As far as I know, the only real defense you have is to ask your upstream provider to filter [the malicious traffic]," he said. "It's not something the victim can do by themselves. They need cooperation from the provider." The DNS system, a kind of directory assistance service for the Internet, has come under increased scrutiny over the past year, when hacker Dan Kaminsky discovered a serious flaw in the system. That flaw, which has now been patched by makers of DNS software, could be exploited to silently redirect Internet traffic to malicious computers without the victim's knowledge. DNS-OARC has here. JuicyCampus, Home to Nasty School Gossip, Dries Up Critics hoped the better angels of human nature would kill off the popular campus gossip site JuicyCampus.com. Some prosecutors were trying to use the law to do the trick. In the end, the site's much-criticized founder insisted he was merely the latest victim of the economic downturn. In any case, the site one college official recently called a "virtual bathroom wall" of hateful and degrading speech was offline Thursday - much to the relief of administrators and many students nationwide. "We're very happy," said Erika Lowe, vice president of the student government at Western Illinois University, which had been working with administrators to block the site from campus computers there. "While we support free speech, there was nothing positive coming out of this Web site. It only served to dampen spirits and ruin friendships." But JuicyCampus was popular. Following its launch on seven campuses in 2007, it spread nationwide, and founder Matt Ivester said the site was getting more than 1 million unique visitors monthly. He said it was all in good fun, but the anonymity the site granted its gossip-posters seemed to bring out the worst in people. Fraternities and sororities cruelly attacked each other. Typical discussion threads included "Biggest slut on campus" and "easiest freshmen." Others identified women who had gained weight and one post named a rape victim and said she "deserved it." Several student government associations asked their colleges to block access to the site from campus networks, and a handful - including Tennessee State and Hampton - did so. New Jersey prosecutors, meanwhile, were investigating whether the company was violating the state's Consumer Fraud Act. No charges were filed. The site appeared to be protected by a federal law absolving Web sites of responsibility for what their users post. And most colleges decided they couldn't get into the business of picking and choosing sites to block. So they urged students to stay away and quietly hoped this day would come. "To be tactful, I'm not disappointed," said David Maxwell, president of Drake University in Iowa. He had received complaints from parents and students, but declined to block the site when student leaders asked him to consider doing so. "We certainly value the university environment as a safe haven for expression," Maxwell said. But academic freedom "also requires you to be held responsible for what you say. The anonymity of JuicyCampus was really a concern for us." Ivester did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment Thursday. The site was already offline, but in a farewell note on a separate blog site, Ivester wrote that "in these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved." He denied that legal troubles were to blame, or that advertisers were avoiding JuicyCampus because of its content. Most notably, Ivester said posts would no longer be publicly available, and the site's privacy policy would continue - it would not release IP addresses without a subpoena. The site has said it blocks its discussion board from being indexed by search sites like Google. He did acknowledge some users had gone overboard. "While there are parts of JuicyCampus that none of us will miss - the mean-spirited posts and personal attacks - it has also been a place for the fun, lighthearted gossip of college life. I hope that is how it is remembered," he wrote, before signing off: "Keep it juicy." =~=~=~= Atari Online News, Etc. is a weekly publication covering the entire Atari community. Reprint permission is granted, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of any article, to Atari user groups and not for profit publications only under the following terms: articles must remain unedited and include the issue number and author at the top of each article reprinted. Other reprints granted upon approval of request. Send requests to: dpj@atarinews.org No issue of Atari Online News, Etc. may be included on any commercial media, nor uploaded or transmitted to any commercial online service or internet site, in whole or in part, by any agent or means, without the expressed consent or permission from the Publisher or Editor of Atari Online News, Etc. Opinions presented herein are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the staff, or of the publishers. All material herein is believed to be accurate at the time of publishing.