Q Entertainment's spiritual successor to Rez, Child of Eden, will be out for PlayStation 3 on September 20.

Ubisoft confirmed the release date earlier today with IGN. It'll carry the same $49.99 price as the Xbox 360 version, which was released last month to strong reviews but relatively quiet sales -- it sold only 34,000 copies in June.

After failing to provide a definitive answer on the subject for quite some time, PlayStation Move support in the PS3 version was confirmed back in April, just as that version was delayed.

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If you’re a regular Ars reader, the concept of "astroturf organizations”—fake grassroots movements backed by large corporations—won’t be new. In the past, we’ve covered astroturfing by AT&T, cable companies, and even the Chinese government. But we haven't really addressed a key question: does astroturfing actually work? 

The question hasn't been studied much, but new research in the Journal of Business Ethics says that yes, astroturf does work; however, some of the details in the results did surprise the paper's authors.

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Over the years we have posted many, many cases of Americans being sued over unauthorized BitTorrent sharing.

A few of these cases, however, have been so ridiculous that there are little redeeming factors for the groups that brought them, such as the RIAA, MPAA and others. Some of those cases involved grandmothers, others involved kindergartners, one involved a networked printer and one even involved the recently deceased.

Today, another such case has hit the media, with a 70-year old widow being accused of sharing hardcore porn via torrents.

The group that brought the case will allow her to settle for $3400, or she will have to go to court and risk a fine of $150,000.

Without giving into the horrendous suit, the grandma (who admits she does not even know what a torrent is) will not settle and will fight the case, defending herself.

The Jane Doe says she has a quick line of defense (via TF)

I’d say to the judge, ‘I have no idea how this happened. If Sony can get hacked, if the Pentagon can get hacked, my goodness, what chance does an individual have?

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Whenever I know Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is going to speak at a major public event, I get two feelings at once: Excited anticipation that the chances are high that he'll say something controversial and dread that the chances are high he will say something, well, controversial.

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As far as the destructonamiacs here at Joystiq are concerned, Prototype's sandbox mayhem was one of, if not the main selling points for the title. Judging by the latest trailer for Prototype 2, it looks like Radical Entertainment knows exactly what we want, in a big way.

New Prototype 2 trailer explores the power of tendrils originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We first heard inklings of this deal last month, but it's as official as can be now, having just been proclaimed by EA execs and Texas governor Rick Perry at EA's BioWare Austin campus: Electronic Arts is establishing a new EA Sports operation in Austin, TX.

"We're going to be adding 300 jobs to our operations here in Austin," EA's Frank Gibeau said -- half full-time, half contract. EA Sports COO Daryl Holt revealed that it will build a new team in Austin to support the teams in Florida and British Columbia, focusing on HD platforms and then expanding to "emerging" markets. The announcement was highlighted by a video of a Texas A&M-uniformed Rick Perry in NCAA Football 2012.

Update: The 300 jobs aren't entirely focused on EA Sports. EA Games president Frank Gibeau told me that the jobs would be distributed between EA Sports, EA Games, as well as IT and finance -- with EA Sports being the only new department to move into the two EA buildings currently occupied by BioWare.

EA Sports COO Daryl Holt told Joystiq "I think we'll probably start this first year somewhere around 30-35, just to get the team up and moving, just so they can start building features and working on HD platform development." He said the team could grow "exponentially, however we want," into new IP and "live services." EA has yet to decide which franchises to put the new Austin team onto.

"We're not going to disrupt what's currently going on," Holt said of the existing studios in Tiburon and Burnaby. "Orlando's expanding, Burnaby's expanding, EA's growing," he said, and moving into the sports-happy state of Texas is part of that growth. It will "absolutely not" replace any of the existing studios, which will "remain core to us." "They're growing as well," Holt clarified. "There's job openings and job postings in Florida in Vancouver."

Right now, the growth in Austin is open-ended, "but it's not something that's going to be open-ended while we recruit the team, because we want to recruit the right talent."

EA Sports opening up shop in Austin; EA adding 300 jobs across Sports, Games, and more [update] originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On Tuesday, Netflix announced that it has separated its DVD and streaming services, which means if you want both, the price just increased substantially.

1-DVD-at-time unlimited plans will cost $7.99 per month, the cheapest it has ever been, but if you want unlimited streaming you will need to pay an additional $7.99. That is a $6 price hike if you subscribe to the current $9.99 mixed plan.

BusinessInsider conducted a poll of over 2000 readers asking what they would do with their subscription and an overwhelming 52 percent say they will cancel.

29 percent said they will move to streaming only.

The full poll:

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A Star Wars themed game made by a graduate student attending the University of Illinois at Chicago might be the coolest game the franchise has ever seen. What was originally an attempt to adapt a real-time strategy game to a tabletop, multi-touch interface has become a Star Wars themed RTS played on a 20-foot wide multi-touch LCD screen.

After originally starting out as something called Planetary Defender in 2009, creator Arthur Nishimoto has since decided to drop certain elements in favor of focusing on "the fleet battle aspects," which amounts to combat featuring Star Wars ships, music, and sound effects.

Many of the bigger things, like Star Destroyers, were taken from Star Wars: Empire at War, while smaller units (fighters, bombers) were drawn in Paint.

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Internet Explorer 9's dual-pronged approach to blocking access to malicious URLs—SmartScreen Filter to block bad URLs, and Application Reputation to detect untrustworthy executables—provides the best socially engineered malware blocking of any stable browser version, according to NSS Labs' latest report. Internet Explorer 9 blocked 92 percent of malware with its URL-based filtering, and 100 percent with Application-based filtering enabled. Internet Explorer 8, in second place, blocked 90 percent of malware. Tied for third place were Safari 5, Chrome 10, and Firefox 4, each blocking just 13 percent. Bringing up the rear was Opera 11, blocking just 5 percent of malware.

The study only looked at sites that depended on tricking users into installing malicious software; anything that used browser flaws to run wasn't included in the test. The focus was also exclusively on malware targeting European users, though Internet Explorer 9 has also scored highly in other tests by the company with a global purview. The URLs visited were harvested from spam e-mails, instant messages, and social network posts.

The essentially identical performance of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome is because they use the same source data for their URL blacklisting: Google's Safe Browsing system. Some differences in lag were noticed—Firefox appeared to block bad URLs a little quicker than the other browsers—but overall performance was the same. Opera uses a service operated by anti-virus vendor AVG. Though it scored poorly, its 5 percent nonetheless represents an improvement on the zero percent it used to achieve, prior to integration of that feature. Opera was also substantially slower at blocking sites, averaging 48 hours to block, rather than 13 hours for the other browsers.

Internet Explorer's SmartFilter URL scanner yielded substantially better results than the other browsers tested. The Application Reputation feature then picked up any malicious executables that the URL scanner didn't trap. This shows the potential value of the Application Reputation feature; applications earn reputation by being downloaded regularly. An executable that nobody else has ever downloaded has no reputation at all, and so Internet Explorer 9 warns about the file. This means that its behavior is the reverse of the other filtering options in both Internet Explorer and other browsers: they default to permitting access to unknown URLs (as to do otherwise would break the majority of the Internet), only blocking locations that appear problematic. Application Reputation defaults to blocking.

Though this clearly bolsters Internet Explorer's safety, it comes at a cost, in the form of false positives. Unsigned and unusual downloads generate a warning, even for harmless programs. A Microsoft add-on for Visual Studio fell foul of this problem, for example. Even with the false positives, Microsoft's approach appears to be more secure.

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Transport for London (TfL), the integrated transport organisation responsible for the United Kingdom’s capital city, wanted to give its customers more real-time data about journey options. By encouraging developers to use TfL data to create new applications for commuters, the transport operator hopes to relieve congestion and encourage more people to use options such as bicycle hire which achieved 5 million bike trips in its first year of operation.

   

Giles Bailey, Head of Group Marketing Strategy and Integration at Transport for London, says: “Our customers lead busy lives, so they need to know what routes are crowded or running slowly in order to plan alternative routes. Travelling in London is all about choice—whether that’s hiring a bicycle, getting on a bus, or using London Underground or National Rail. It’s important that customers understand what the options are and choose what’s most appropriate for them.”

Microsoft Services worked with TfL and the developer community to deliver open data that people can access through their mobile devices—a move that also fits in with government policy on open information. With its Trackernet solution, a commuter sends a travel query to the application programming interface (API) hosted on Windows Azure. The API responds rapidly with the data from the cache, which is frequently updated with live information received from the London Underground network. The data is also replicated in the Microsoft SQL Azure database. TrackerNet uses Windows Azure features to separate the API from the live information processing, resulting in high scalability for the application and rapid response times for end users.

Without Windows Azure, delivering on the Mayor of London and the government’s vision for open data would have cost TfL millions of pounds in a new physical IT infrastructure and upgraded data centres. Michael Gilbert, Chief Technology Officer, Transport for London,says: “The cost to the taxpayer and the travelling public is marginal in comparison to what it would have cost to build a new infrastructure inside our own data centres. We’re now able to deliver a series of open data initiatives for travellers that would have not been financially achievable otherwise.”

Developers can register to access TfL Trackernet here

You can read the full case study and watch the video of TfL Trackernet here

Check out Windows Phone 7 smartphone applications using Trackernet live date feeds at the Zune marketplace

Posted by Ian

 

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