Sun announced this week the availability of VirtualBox 3, the latest version of its open source virtualization solution. The new version introduces experimental 3D graphics support and the ability to expose multiple CPUs to guest operating systems.

VirtualBox was originally developed by InnoTek, which was acquired by Sun last year. InnoTek launched an open source edition of VirtualBox in 2007, releasing most of the program's code under the GPL. Alongside the open source version, the company has continued to sell a commercial version that has additional features, such as a built-in RDP server and full USB support. VirtualBox is cross-platform compatible and is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Gaming news this week began with a bang—our famed Mole revealed that price drops on both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles are coming this fall, along with some tasty new bundles.

A huge rush of news about StarCraft 2 has hit the gaming blogs this week. We break down the news reports and bring you the surprises, the oddities, and the pleasant surprises. The takeaway? The game looks great.

It's now a holiday weekend here in the US, but that doesn't mean last week wasn't exciting. Here's a recap of the Week That Was.

The big news, of course, was the long-awaited release of Firefox 3.5. With support for HTML 5 tags like <video> and a high-performance JavaScript engine, 3.5 is lightning fast and ready for the future.

While Firefox was busy showing us the possibilities of the future, science was busy showing us just how petty we can be. Turns out that people will even reject free money if they think that they can screw over a rival by doing so.

July is finally here, proving that the world of Apple can in fact keep turning while Steve Jobs is away. This week's top Apple news examined the adoption rate of iPhone OS 3.0, a Newton bug, fraudulent iTunes gift cards, the disappearance of .Mac HomeSites, and more. Catch up here on the week that was with our news roundup—between throwing brats on the grill and checking out fireworks, of course.

What's the uptake on iPhone OS 3.0? How quickly are users of Apple's mobile devices jumping on the 3.0 bandwagon? Conflicting data points from multiple sources give us anything but a clear answer. If you want to participate in our own poll on the matter, though, let us know whether you have upgraded yet and why (or why not).

Impending Newton Y2K10 apocalypse narrowly averted: A dedicated Newton fan and hacker has developed a patch for Apple's long-since-discontinued PDAs that will keep them humming along just fine after this New Year's Eve. The patch isn't for the faint of heart, but then again, neither is using a 20-year-old PDA.

SonyInsider dug up an FCC filing that indicates that the forthcoming PSP Go will have a significantly faster top processor speed than than current PSP models. Specifically, the Go's CPU can clock up to 480MHz, compared to the 333MHz speed of the existing models.

The site ends the post by asking the obvious question: "What will a 480MHz PSP Go bring to the table?" I suspect the answer to this is, "Nothing that hasn't already been announced." Let me explain.

In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual—after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers.

If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear—or you may not, depending on the social network. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they've been deleted. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up.

We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

There's no denying that gaming publisher Midway has had a rough time in the past year. After an insane saga of strange twists, turns, accusations, and increasingly dire news, most of us weren't entirely certain that the beleaguered publisher would actually survive to see 2010. Despite our doubts, it turns out that Midway is living to see another day, having just been acquired by Time Warner for $33 million.

For those of you new to the situation: after the company's much-hyped Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe earned lukewarm reviews and reasonable (though not amazing) sales numbers, Sumner Redstone sold his controlling interest in Midway for $100,000, and the publisher wound up laying off roughly 25 percent of its workforce and killed many games that were currently in development. It was then revealed that, even though employees weren't getting paid what was owed to them and the publisher was filing for bankruptcy, executives were still raking in a great deal of cash during all this.

NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which spent the summer in Mars' northern polar regions performing a variety of science experiments, caused quite a stir when rumors circulated that it had discovered signs of life on the Red Planet. NASA eventually held a press conference to dispel the rumors, promising that more details would eventually be revealed when scientists got around to publishing papers that would describe the experiments in detail. That day has finally arrived; today's issue of Science contains four papers that describe various findings from the mission. There's no sign of alien life, but the studies do reveal an active water cycle on Mars—including night-time snowfall.

The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings.

On Wednesday EFF called the move "outlandish" and "a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies." The advocacy group filed a friend of the court brief with the United States District Court for the Southern District New York this week, which is hearing the dispute between ASCAP, AT&T, and Verizon over whether the telcos have to pay the music licensing body royalties for wireless ringtones. Joining the amicus brief are Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Meanwhile CTIA - The Wireless Association, to which the big telcos belong, has also filed an amicus brief in the case.

"MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports. Violating a website's terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all.

The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor. Drew was due to be sentenced today.

But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a website without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns.

One of the recently leaked builds of Windows 7 has more juice in it than just a new default wallpaper. In the Windows 7 Home Premium edition—as noticed by Kristan Kenney—, the Microsoft Software License Terms has an additional clause that mentions a Family Pack licensing plan that would cover up to three computers in a household. This is no accident: other editions like Professional and Ultimate do not contain the Family Pack wording. 

Here's the whole clause:

Behavioral advertising, in which users are fed ads based on the interests revealed by their Web browsing habits, has an obvious appeal to advertisers, as it will ostensibly allow them to serve ads to the most relevant audiences. It also raises a host of privacy concerns—to work effectively, the Web surfing histories of consumers have to be aggregated and analyzed by those providing the ads. 

Both the Federal Trade Commission and Congress have asked questions about whether advertisers were doing enough to protect and inform consumers, raising the prospect that regulation of behavioral advertising was only a matter of time. In an attempt to head off the government, a coalition of advertising groups that includes Google has now issued a series of principles that will guide their self-regulation.

The industry didn't need to look far to see the downsides of a failure to respond to public concerns. One of the more aggressive approaches to behavioral advertising, the deep packet inspection used by NebuAd, saw the company's CEO dragged before Congress, and the resulting bad publicity turned the company into a pariah. It ultimately closed its doors last month.

Social networks like MySpace still cannot be held responsible for assaults that happen offline, according to California's Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. The court was asked to review the case of four underage girls (referred to as Julie Does) who, along with their parents, had sued MySpace for gross negligence and strict product liability after they were all sexually assaulted by older men whom they met on the service. 

Despite the scary circumstances in which these events took place, the judge said that MySpace was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and could not be held liable.

Once again, news has arrived from the land of Hollywood that another major video game franchise is being adapted for the silver screen. Last week, it was announced that Uncharted would get a celluloid makeover; this week, it's a much older franchise that's being adapted. It turns out that Asteroids, the Atari game from 1979 (thus making it older than many in the current generation of gamers) will be coming to theaters sometime in the future.

Astonishingly, not only is Asteroids being made into a movie, but there was an actual bidding war between four major studios for the rights. Universal Studios has emerged the winner.

As a result, Matthew Lopez is set to write the script and it will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Lopez has written the screenplays for the recent Disney films Escape to Witch Mountain and Bedtime Stories, as well as for the upcoming The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Meanwhile, di Bonaventura's latest ventures include Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the soon-to-be-released G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

While there are some big Hollywood players involved with this project, the inherent problem with making a movie out of Asteroids is that it doesn't have a plot, or characters, just a triangular spaceship blowing up some oddly-shaped polygons. 

On the other hand, one could look at this with the perspective that it's pretty much impossible to screw up the game's story. However, this news implies something much larger and much more unsettling: Hollywood may officially be out of original movie ideas.

Attention, all high speed Internet lovers—the government has released its first Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) and is asking for applications to spend that broadband stimulus money. This is phase one of the roll-out of that $7.2 billion worth of broadband stimulus cash contained in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. You can bet your best router that folks across the country are reading the NOFA backwards and forwards in preparation for the application window, which begins on July 14, 2009 at 8:00am eastern time and closes on August 14, 2009 at 5:00 pm.

Here's the thumbnail version of what the key agencies are looking for—they being the Department of Commerce's Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utility Service's Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).

Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday. The new version of the popular open source web browser has attracted considerable attention and is already seeing rapid adoption. It was downloaded over 5 million times during the first 24 hours. This falls short of the record-setting 8 million downloads that Firefox 3 had during its first day, but it still reflects the intense enthusiasm of the browser's fans.

Firefox's popularity has rapidly climbed over the past few years, bringing it up to between 20-30 percent of the global browser market, according to various Web analytics firms. Based on data collected from 850,000 web sites, tracking firm whos.amung.us says that Firefox 3.5 by itself now accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of the browser market, more than the total marketshare of rival Opera.

On Tuesday, the US Department of the Interior announced plans that should radically streamline the process of building utility-scale solar facilities in the US Southwest. After having surveyed terrain administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the DOI has identified the best sites for solar facilities. It will now withdraw these areas from consideration for other uses and undertake a single environmental review for all of them. Assuming their use for solar power production is approved, the land may be able to produce roughly 30 percent of current US residential energy use.

The program, which was published in the Federal Register in order to solicit public comment, was jointly announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Senate leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, one of the states included in the program; the rest are Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. The move follows a general solicitation for comments on solar production using BLM lands that was initiated last year. Participants obviously thought it was a good idea, and the stimulus bill provided the DOI with $41 million specifically to promote the production of renewable energy on public land.

Microsoft's recent lawsuit against TomTom, alleging infringement of filesystem patents, has left many questions unanswered about the legal implications of distributing open source implementations of Microsoft's FAT filesystem. A new Linux kernel patch that was published last week offers a workaround that might make it possible to continue including FAT in Linux without using methods that are covered by Microsoft's patents.

The patent dispute erupted in February when Microsoft sued portable navigation device maker TomTom. Microsoft claimed that TomTom's Linux-based GPS products infringe on several of its patents, including two that cover specific characteristics of FAT, a filesystem devised by Microsoft that is widely used on removable storage devices such as USB thumb drives and memory cards. The dispute escalated when TomTom retaliated with a counter-suit, but it was eventually settled in March when TomTom agreed to remove the relevant functionality.

There are two competing ideas on the process that governs the formation and maintenance of beliefs: 1) people maintain a belief because they have limited access to opposing beliefs, or 2) because they actively filter information in a way that avoids conflicting views. A new meta-analysis of past studies confirms the existence of active avoidance; when people are offered an opposing viewpoint, they will ignore it in favor of a supportive viewpoint in two out of three instances.

The meta-analysis was performed by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida. They managed to identify a total of 91 relevant studies that included nearly 8,000 participants. The studies were all on the subject of selective exposure, or how people filter out incoming information based on how it jibes with their current beliefs. The studies attempted to determine whether people wanted to view or read something that either supported their point of view or challenged it.

Microsoft's recently relaunched search engine, Bing, has managed to win the company some market share during its first month of operation. According to numbers gathered by StatCounter, Microsoft gained a full percentage point during the month of June, stealing bits and pieces from both Yahoo and Google.

The firm says that Microsoft's share of the search market increased from 7.21 percent in April of this year to 8.23 percent in June. Comparatively, Google's share was at 79.07 percent in April and 78.48 percent in June—a drop of just over a half a percentage point. Yahoo had 11.04 percent of the market in June.

Some black holes are too big. Some black holes are too small. A letter appearing in this week's edition of Nature describes how astronomers may have found one that is just right.

The letter, written by a team of British and French astronomers, does not state that they have found an intermediate mass black hole—one that could be termed just right—but that they have found an object where most other explanations fail to explain its behavior. 

The object, 2XMM J011028.1-460421 or (more conveniently) HLX-1, is a source of ultraluminous X-rays near the spiral galaxy ESO 243-49. These X-rays have been postulated to be the product of an intermediate mass black hole, one between 100 and 10,000 solar masses, but to date no candidate object has been widely accepted.

It's not hard for Americans to work themselves into a lather over the state of broadband in this country, which is improving but still not on par with the 100Mbps fiber lines widely offered in countries like South Korea and Japan. But it's worth taking a step back every once in a while to consider the global picture: much of the world has broadband penetration rates under 20 percent, and the largest single group of countries has penetration rates of between 0 and 5 percent.

The consultants at TeleGeography track broadband deployment in 127 countries and have released a chart that shows world broadband deployments by percentage of households that have service. Out of the 127, only 10 countries are above 80 percent—mostly small places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Denmark, and South Korea. Together, the ten countries in this bracket account for only two percent of the world population.

Joost, the P2P online video service once hailed as the new way to watch TV, has announced that it's ditching its consumer video offerings. Instead, the company plans to offer services to other media companies—such as cable and satellite providers—as a "white label video platform." The company will be doing quite a bit of restructuring in order to accommodate its new role by shedding employees and replacing its CEO.

Joost originally sprang forth from the minds of Skype's Janus Friis and Kazaa's Niklas Zennström in 2006, dubbed originally as The Venice Project. The service was launched with the goal of offering ad-supported television content over the Internet, but through a distributed streaming model like that of BitTorrent—instead of pulling video content from a central server, it would instead stream it from multiple users around the 'Net.

The Obama administration came to office with promises of greater openness about government activities and improved technical capabilities. On Tuesday, the US CTO, Vivek Kundra, announced a new Web resource that promises to allow citizens to track IT spending across all government agencies. Although this undoubtedly represents a positive step towards more useful public disclosure, on some levels it's simply the latest example of an ongoing trend in the US government's approach to public information.

The new site is called the IT Dashboard. (In a sign that the government truly gets the latest trends in Web services, it bears a prominent beta label.) The Flash-based application allows you to select any one of ten government agencies (or an "Other" category), and get a glimpse into what they're spending on IT projects, as well as whether the projects are considered on track. So, for example, Health and Human Services is spending $2.3 billion on IT, spread over 65 major projects. Although only one of these is rated as being of significant concern when it comes to cost, 15 are apparently behind schedule.

A federal judge yesterday found Usenet.com liable for just about every copyright infringement claim on the books: direct infringement, inducement of infringement, contributory infringement, and (just for good measure) vicarious infringement. Not content to be loud and proud about its pro-pirate agenda, Usenet.com also resorted to stonewalling legal questionnaires, sending employees to Europe to avoid depositions, wiping hard drives, and failing to turn over e-mail after being sued in 2007 by the music labels.

The recording industry's high-octane litigation campaign has on many occasions suffered from "poor targeting," but it's hard to see any complexities in this case. When Usenet.com employees privately suggested that the service's tag line should be "piracy, porno, and pictures —Usenet," "Usenet is full of music and movies so get your pirate on!," or "Bless the Usenet and all that it steals!," it's clear they knew why people were paying $4.95 to $18.95 a month for the privilege of accessing the newsgroups. And not only did they know, they allegedly took steps to encourage the infringement.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski gave his first pep talk to the whole Commission staff on Tuesday. He promised to "green the agency, and improve overall operations of the FCC—running efficiently, communicating effectively, and opening the agency to participation from everyone affected by the FCC's actions."

"And, stay tuned," he added, "we will have a new FCC website." It is not immediately clear what any of these things mean, but a day earlier Genachowski announced his own staff. That is something that an FCC watcher can work with.

There are many reasons for Chicagoans to poke fun at the northwest suburb of Schaumburg, but the existence of red light cameras soon won't be one of them. Officials expect to get rid of Schaumburg's sole red light camera in July after the local police department has determined that it provides no appreciable safety benefits.

The city originally installed the camera at a busy intersection near the ever-popular Woodfield Mall sometime last year as a testing ground before the city installed more cameras. According to Schaumburg Mayor Al Larson, the city had been sold on pitches from red light camera companies claiming that the devices would help prevent serious accidents.

If you're a parent, or a soon-to-be parent, the noise about gaming and children can be deafening. Video games turn kids into killers. Video games are addictive. Video games get in the way of learning. There is nothing good to be gained from playing games.

If you don't play games yourself, it can be an intimidating thing to have a child who is into video games. You don't understand the hardware. The controller looks complicated. You don't get the games. At the same time, isn't it a little drastic to simply not allow video games in the house?

In this article, we'll take a look at some of the issues that surround video games and the family, and we'll give you some real-world advice on what to look for, what the dangers are, and what you can do to have gaming be a safe and fun part of your household. What we hope you'll find is that most of this advice is common sense, and that by using your head and doing a bit of research you'll eliminate most of the problems that can pop up with children and gaming. In fact...

Kodak last week announced that it was discontinuing its venerable Kodachrome film, sending it gently into that good night after 74 long years. Like Polaroid's discontinuation last year of all instant films, Kodachrome's demise makes it the latest victim in the transition from chemical, film-based photography to digital sensors, Photoshop, and archival inkjet printers. Though it may seem like an anachronism that has lived far past its prime, the oldest color film was a mind-blowing revolution when it was first introduced in 1935.

I don't mean to suggest that color photography didn't exist before Kodachrome—not by a long shot. The first known color photographs were taken in 1861 by James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's process, the foundation upon which later commercial processes were developed in the early 1900s, involved exposing three plates, each filtered by red, green, or blue. The resulting plates could then be projected simultaneously using the same red, green and blue filters, creating what was at the time the most accurate reproduction of color available. Photographic plates in those days weren't fully sensitive to the full visible spectrum, so this method wasn't fully exploited until the photographic documentation of Russia by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky between 1909 and 1918.

Even at the best of times, Internet traffic in Iran is subject to extensive filtering. But in the wake of the disputed election and the civil unrest that has followed, the government appears to have taken more aggressive steps to police online communications. Nevertheless, news and images continue to make their way out of Iran, and a limited amount of organization by groups within the country appears to be continuing despite both online and real-world crackdowns. This can be ascribed in part to a number of volunteer efforts to provide Iranian citizens with secure ways of accessing the 'Net through secure proxies.

According to the OpenNet Initiative, Iran is ranked up with places like China and Burma as having pervasive filtering of online content. The ONI completed a report on the nation immediately before the election that suggested the country was following a trajectory similar to China's. Internet use is booming, having grown roughly 25-fold in this decade alone. The government had initially relied on off-the-shelf software to block sites deemed offensive for political or cultural reasons, but has developed an expertise and sophistication that matches the growth in the number of users it must police.

The settlement between Google and book copyright holders has been examined by everyone from librarians to the US Department of Justice. Most of the issues identified by outside parties have focused on two issues: the market power it cedes to Google, and the ability of the public to access the knowledge that is contained in out-of-print works. The latest organization to weigh on the settlement is Oxford University Press, which occupies an interesting position, as it's both a publisher of copyrighted works and has a mission of disseminating knowledge. As such, the position taken by the head of its US division is quite nuanced: the deal is flawed, but may be essential for maintaining the public's access to knowledge.

Tim Barton, the head of OUP USA, discussed his views on the settlement in an essay that appeared at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He starts it off with a telling anecdote: a professor at Columbia, when grading an essay assignment, found that most of the class cited a work that had been published in 1900, which had largely been forgotten since. Why so many citations? It was in Google Book Search. More recent and relevant work isn't.

Verizon's fiber to the home system is wicked fast and fires lasers through tiny glass tubes—undeniably cool stuff. But Verizon claims far more than the mantle of "cool;" the company says that its FiOS system is now the "leading real estate development amenity."

"Home shoppers use to scan the prospect for a Jacuzzi or an intercom," says Verizon vice president of corporate marketing Bill Heilig. "Now, not so much. They look for the Verizon Optical Network Terminal and the Verizon broadband home router so they know they'll have the best Internet and TV service over the best home network available today."

The Chinese government has decided to delay the implementation of its controversial client-side filtering software, Green Dam Youth Escort. The deadline for PC makers to preinstall or package the software was originally set for July 1, but it has now been pushed back to an unspecified date.

A representative from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) confirmed to Xinhua that the deadline had been moved at the request of some computer makers. As a result, the deadline of July 1 won't be enforced for PC makers, though the ministry still plans to provide free downloads of Green Dam for schools and Internet cafes as of that date. "The ministry would also keep on soliciting opinions to perfect the preinstallation plan," wrote Xinhua.

In a world of increasingly virtual human interactions, the idea of money is becoming more fluid than authorities find comfortable. China has officially outlawed the practice of exchanging virtual currency for real goods, and minors are no longer able to buy the virtual cash. These rules will help the government control trade in China, but they could also impact the huge gold-farming industry that exists in the country.

Mozilla has announced the official release of Firefox 3.5, the next major version of its popular open source Web browser. The new version boosts performance, introduces useful new features, and delivers strong support for emerging Web standards.

Mozilla aims to "upgrade the Web" by improving the Firefox user experience and expanding the range of tools that are available to Web developers. The company boasts that Firefox 3.5 includes over 5,000 enhancements that span nearly every aspect of the browser's functionality and behavior. Among the most compelling advancements in this release is support for the HTML 5 video element, which enables native video playback in the browser without requiring proprietary plugins such as Flash.