WiiWare
Strong Bad Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free (Telltale Games, 1,000
Wii points): The Homestar Runner characters are back in the second episode of the WiiWare series. This time, Strong Bad is faced with an unfair e-mail tax and is placed on house arrest for his failure to comply.
Potpourrii (Abstraction Games, 800 Wii points): Potpourrii is a puzzle game that revolves around the four seasons. It makes unique use of the Wii controller and even lets you use your Nintendo Mii characters in game!
Virtual Console
Mega Man 2 (1989, NES, 500 Wii points): Mega Man 2 is the second game is one of the most popular action platformers of all time. Battle Dr. Wily and various classic enemy robots in this timeless title.

This week brings us the second episode in the Homestar Runner series as well as a classic NES action-platformer!

(Credit:
Asus)

Asus announced last week the release of two new monitors featuring DisplayLink technology. DisplayLink allows devices such as monitors and projectors to be connected to PC’s solely through USB.

The VW202B is a 20 inch LCD that will ship in July.

Asus VW223B

The DisplayLink technology also lets you daisy-chain up to seven monitors at once just by plugging them in. Once the monitors are plugged in, the DisplayLink DL-160 chip takes care of the rest the setup–in theory at least. In our experience, we’ve found that the technology does not always work as smoothly as it should. When we tested the LG Flatron L208 last year, we had a few problems. Check out the Design section of the review for details. Also, look for an upcoming post that goes into more detail on DisplayLink’s usability.

Unlike many people, my usage of
Firefox 3 has been restricted to test and virtual machines. Thus, I may have stumbled across a bug that goes unnoticed on more actively used systems. There seems to be a problem installing the Flash and Java plugins, at least on Windows machines.

To test this yourself with Java, you can use the version page at my JavaTester.org site. To test Flash, try the Adobe Flash tester page. You can double check that neither plugin is installed by entering “about:plugins” in the address bar, without the quotes.

It’s not all bad news. Every time I manually installed the Flash and Java plugins things went fine.

On a Vista machine, Firefox never found the missing plugins, either Flash or Java. It just kept searching and searching. On Windows XP, both plugins were “not available” (see below). I tried this on XP Home and Professional and with both a normally installed copy of Firefox 3 and with the portable version. I even tried this on Windows 2000 and got the same results as with XP. None of these Windows machines had any anti-malware software installed.

NOTE: I posted this as a question in the Firefox Forum, but it went unanswered. The price we pay for free software is the lack of tech support. I will follow-up, as best I can on this, with Mozilla, Adobe and Sun. This is a Firefox 3 issue, I tested the auto-install of Flash on Windows XP with Firefox 2 and it worked fine.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

A search of the Firefox tech support website and forum turned up nothing about this. Here’s a search for “flash player” and one for “Java plugin”.

I haven’t tried this with other plugins and not being a
Mac person, haven’t tried it there either. But, I did try it under Ubuntu 8.04 where the auto-install of both plugins ran fine (but you may have to restart Firefox).

My best guess is that this is a Firefox bug. If you’re running Firefox 3, and don’t have one of these plugins already installed, please try it and let me know. You can email me at michaelhorowitz at gmail. Thanks.

The overall market should continue its decline by another 1 percent to about 128 million from 2009 to 2010, but growth should return and the market should reach 148 million units in 2013, IDC said.

Canon's new Rebel T1i SLR

Thus far, SLR camera sales have been a bright spot in the camera market, but analyst firm IDC expects the recession will hit the higher-end models, too.

SLR cameras are bulkier and more expensive, but offer better responsiveness, interchangeable lenses, and higher image quality. With the compact camera market largely saturated, SLRs have shown relatively strong growth.

Worldwide camera shipments are expected to drop 6 percent to 129 million units in 2009. Single-lens reflex (SLR) shipments won’t be hit as hard, but still will drop 5 percent to 9.2 million units, according to an IDC forecast released Monday.

(Credit:
Canon USA)

“Countries will emerge from the global recession in mid-2010, starting with the U.S. However, unemployment will lag behind the recovery, dampening consumer spending for the next two years, particularly on big-ticket items like digital SLRs,” analyst Christopher Chute said in a statement.

In a few clicks, you can see VirtualBox create a Vista instance and run it on the
Mac. There are many options for virtualization at this point, but I would expect Sun to make this its weapon of choice (versus Xen), since it owns it and can tweak it for Solaris.

VirtualBox is a free download available under the General Public License, or GPL.

On the Mac, I’m not sure it’s any better than Parallels, but it is open-source, which should be very appealing for many users.

I’ve done more than my share of rummaging around the ribbon in Office 2007 trying to find a particular command, and I’ve even used Microsoft’s user-interface guides to hunt down the feature I needed. Now Microsoft Office Labs has developed the free Search Commands add-on for Office 2007 that lets you type in a command and access it in an instant.

Microsoft claims that Office 2007’s ribbon interface saves time by putting the features people use most often closer at hand. For those of us who spent years learning where those functions were in previous versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the changes aren’t the productivity boosters Microsoft envisioned.

For example, the other day I was looking for the Reveal Formatting option in Word 2007. I eventually found it under the Display tab in Word Options (off the Office button menu). It would’ve been much faster for me to simply open Search Commands, type “reveal formatting,” and enter the number that appears next to that option (”5″ in this case).

The free Search Commands add-on for Office 2007 makes finding options almost instantaneous.

After you download and install the add-on, the Search Commands tab is added to the ribbon. Click it (or press the Windows key and Y) and type the name of the command you need.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Office Labs’ only other offering to date is the Community Clips add-on designed to facilitate finding and sharing how-to videos relating to Office 2007. The site describes three other projects: one that creates a wiki on a SharePoint server, one that is intended to improve the Tablet PC pen interface, and one designed to serve as a marketplace for freelancers.

Had Apple bundled Safari with iTunes, the way they bundle Quicktime, I can see where Windows users would have more of a complaint. Being forced to install something you don’t want just to get updates for something you do want is not cool. You can download standalone versions of QuickTime or iTunes on Apple’s site, but sometimes they appear bundled in Software Update and people don’t realize they have other options.

Look, people, it’s 2008: You’re responsible for what you install on your PC.

That doesn’t mean Apple’s move is any less annoying, but it’s hardly ground-breaking. And in this case, at least you have options. Apple made Safari 3.1 a standalone update option, so you can choose to uncheck the box next to the title and download just the iTunes updates. The company tells you exactly what you’re downloading, and offers a link to its site for more information.

(Credit:
Apple)

But that’s not what’s happening with Safari. If you don’t want Safari, don’t click “install.”

If you don't want to download Safari for Windows, don't download Safari for Windows.

Hell, Sony is actually charging people $50 to prevent software they don’t want from being installed on their PCs.

The outrage is spewing forth over Apple’s move to include
Safari 3.1 as part of its Software Update program. The new twist is that Windows users who never had installed Safari are now seeing it pop up in Software Update, where they are accustomed to seeing updates for iTunes and Quicktime, and that’s not sitting well with many who inadvertently installed the browser.

It seems that at some point people became conditioned to downloading anything that shows up from an official source, like Microsoft, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, or whoever. Remember, it’s your PC; spend your installation capital wisely.

To me, none of these policies make Classmates.com customer friendly, or easy to use. I contacted Classmates’ media representative in November for comment, but I have not received a response. To top it off, I received spam from the company today. Nowhere in the e-mail did the company give an option to “unsubscribe.” Argh!

(Credit:
M2E Power)

There are still researchers developing technologies to convert motion into usable energy, but M2E Power had had to restructure. Executives at M2E Power told Earth2Tech last month that it was no longer developing a human-powered charger and was changing its focus to the vehicle market.

The company had designed and tested a human-powered charger for cell phones and other tech gadgets. The idea is that the charger could be placed in a purse or backpack and charged by motion.

Motionetics plans to use the technology behind M2E Power for military applications, Motionetics co-founder Layne Simmons told Vator News. The company’s one-page Web site only states: “Motionetics, Inc. designs and builds next generation energy devices.”

M2E Power, a company developing a way to charge batteries through motion, has sold its assets to Motionetics.

M2E Power, which received $8 million in venture funding in 2007, had planned to use its energy-harvesting technology, which converts motion into electrical charge, in military and consumer electronics applications.

That led some high-ranking House Democrats, including Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell, to circulate a letter (PDF) advising their colleagues to look skeptically at a Republican proposal that would grant retroactive immunity to companies that illegally let the Feds plug into their networks. The Republicans’ blanket of retroactive immunity would likely cover e-mail providers, search engines, Internet service providers, and instant-messaging services too.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kurt Opsahl posted a stinging critique of the data-dragnet’s legality. Here are some excerpts from what Opsahl wrote, referring to the Journal article:

Add in FBI Director Robert Mueller’s acknowledgment last week of additional surveillance abuses, and his admission that retroactive immunity may not be all that necessary, and retroactive immunity looks a lot less compelling a prospect than it did a week ago. Then again, the NSA didn’t need it to create an electronic dragnet in the first place.

“According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called ‘transactional’ data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns,” the article said.

A survey CNET News.com published in February 2006 asked the major telecommunications and Internet companies this question: “Have you turned over information or opened up your networks to the NSA without being compelled by law?” AT&T, Adelphia, Google, Level 3, Verizon, and Yahoo would not answer the question; the rest said they had not.

The National Security Agency was once known for its skill in eavesdropping on the world’s telephone calls through radio dishes in out-of-the-way places like England’s Menwith Hill, Australia’s Pine Gap, and Washington state’s Yakima Training Center.

If the reports are correct, what this transactional-data-dragnet amounts to is a rebuilding of the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program, which promised to do extensive warrantless data-mining to identify “information signatures” that could identify criminals. After a public outcry, the department renamed it Terrorism Information Awareness; Congress zeroed funding for it in September 2003.

If you get the feeling that a lot of this depends on a set of legal definitions that the NSA would like to keep as fuzzy and ambiguous as possible, you’re probably right.

Recent evidence suggests that the NSA has been focusing on widespread monitoring of e-mail messages and text messages, recording of Web browsing, and other forms of electronic data-mining, all done without court supervision. Taken together, those activities raise unique privacy and oversight concerns greater than those posed by large-scale monitoring of voice communications.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an article saying that the NSA can, “without a judicial warrant,” obtain the Subject line and other header information from e-mail messages, plus information about Web sites visited and queries to search engines. Phone records, credit card usage information, and airline passenger data are also reportedly vacuumed up by the NSA.

Elements of this data dragnet have been disclosed before. USA Today
reported two years ago on how the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth; the latter two have narrowly denied it. Qwest reportedly was approached but rejected the request.

The infobox asserts that the NSA can get cellphone location data without a warrant. “The information [obtained by the NSA] can give such transactional information as a cellphone’s location…” The issue of obtaining cell phone location information has been contentious for some time, but the vast weight of judicial interpretation is that a probable cause warrant is required.

Documents released last week by a security consultant (PDF) indicate that an unnamed major wireless provider has opened its network to the U.S. government, allowing customers’ e-mail, text messaging, and Web use to be monitored. And Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein said last week that surveillance of e-mail was the real concern raised by the debate over amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A subsequent article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker said the NSA had returned to “intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans”–the same kind of legally dubious tactic that led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act being enacted in 1978.

The infobox incorrectly asserts that the subject lines of email are not “content,” and can be obtained without a warrant… But this is contradicted by the Department of Justice’s own 2002 Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations manual, which states that “the subject headers of e-mails are also contents.”

FISA reinforced the notion that the NSA could conduct widespread surveillance of foreigners, but specified that a court order (or authorization from the attorney general) was needed to spy on American citizens. That means the world’s largest intelligence agency is, legally speaking, on very shaky ground when operating its e-mail/text-messaging/Web-site-visiting/search-term dragnet.

For its part, the NSA says that it abides by U.S. law. Last week, Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, blamed critical reports on the NSA’s culture of “stand-offishness” and said “we’ve lost something we never knew we needed until we didn’t have it–the support of a grateful nation. The question we have to ask now, and this is something everyone here should help think about, is how do we get it back?”

Today those massive installations, which listened in on phone conversations beamed over microwave links, are becoming something akin to relics of the Cold War. As more communications traffic travels through fiber links, and as e-mail and text messaging supplant phone calls, the spy agency that once intercepted telegrams is adapting yet again.

One thing the recent disclosures are likely to do is put the Bush administration on the defensive, which will happen just as Congress is preparing to vote on extending retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. It has looked likely to pass if the House Democratic leadership had held an up-or-down vote; the Senate already approved its version by a 68-29 margin.

But that law referred only to “the program known either as Terrorism Information Awareness or Total Information Awareness, or any successor program”–leaving the door open, given sufficiently clever lawyering, to a similar program that wasn’t quite close enough to be called a “successor” to TIA.