Wagner James Au reports from the New World Notes blog about events in Second Life. Today, he's got a discussion with a woman growing her own garden of Eden in the alternate reality that is 2L. From the article: "The result of a year's work, Laukosargas Svarog's island of Svarga is a fully-functioning ecosystem, adding life or something like it to the verdant-looking but arid pallette Linden Lab offers with its world. It begins with her artificial clouds, which are pushed along by Linden's internal wind system. 'If I was to turn off the clouds the whole system would die in about six hours,' she tells me. 'Turn off the bees and [the plants stop] growing, because nothing gets pollinated ... '"

An anonymous reader writes "ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Slyck.com is reporting their servers have been seized by the Swedish police." What's really interesting about them is the strange political power that they held in their homeland. There was much discussion even of a political party. This will be interesting to watch unfold.

A few months back we went and redesigned Slashdot with fancy new CSS templates. The idea was that with a new clean CSS framework under the skin, we could more easily redesign the look & feel of the site. At that time I mentioned that we wanted to have a contest to redesign Slashdot. Well that time has come. Read on for the rules, instructions, and timeline. Oh, and did I mention that the top prize is a new laptop?

cgenman asks: "My girlfriend is currently living abroad, but needs to make calls here in the States. I'm investigating Skype to phone gateways, but none seem to allow the person who is trying to Skype in remotely to initiate calls on the local phone network. What experiences have people had with Skype gateways which give remote people full local access? Are there other setups better suited for this purpose?"

SimuAndy writes "Elonka Dunin, game developer at Simutronics and author/editor of the new book, 'The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms', reports that what everyone had thought was the answer to part 2 of the CIA's encrypted Kryptos sculpture, wasn't. Sculptor Sanborn announced this week that everyone had gotten it wrong, because of a mistake on the art piece. For more info, check out the Wired story, or the Kryptos Group announcement."

An anonymous reader writes "Ghyslain Raza, who gained instant online fame as the 'Star Wars Kid' settled this week with the families of the three classmates who posted his two minute Lucasfilm screen test on the Internet. No details were released but the suit sought damages of $351,000. A victory for the victims of cyber-bullying, or missed chance by thin-skinned Ghyslain to cash-in as the next William 'She Bangs' Hung?"

.yosh, who's totally cool I know him textd me to say that Wizards of the Coast is totally making a My Little Pony Roleplaying Game!! OMG! Now I don't have to play with that stupid dungeons and dragons book with all the impossibly clothed women characters. Ponies 4EVA! From the site: "If it's on Butterfly Island, it's in the My Little Pony RPG core rulebook, and we expect the book to be an invaluable tool for RPG fans and game developers alike,' said Jonathan Tweet, senior game designer with Wizards of the Coast. 'Not only will this RPG appeal to current fans of My Little Pony, but it will also help core roleplayers come to appreciate the depth and possibilities in this unique fantasy world. I know I did.'"

Iran Contra writes "Security researchers at F-Secure in Finland have discovered a rootkit component in the Bagle worm that loads a kernel-mode driver to hide the processes and registry keys of itself and other Bagle-related malware from security scanners. Bagle started out as a simple e-mail borne executable and the addition of rootkit capabilities show how far ahead of the cat-and-mouse game the attackers are."

Prof. Jonathan Ezor, Touro Law Center asks: "Is anyone using a third-party application on a Treo, Blackberry or other handheld to access login-protected Internet resources such as eBay, satellite radio services, and the like? (I'm thinking of programs like Abidia or MiniXM.) If so, have you thought at all about who might be running those services, and who is getting access to your login information via the service in addition to the site you want to access? If this does concern you, what have you done about it?"

John Seyton asks: "A recent posting regarding Internet Explorer 7 has me pondering what impact this next release will have on the web market. Firefox has fought hard to make a small dent in Internet Explorer's armor, to the point that we can browse most of the web with no loss of functionality, yet if Internet Explorer 7 recaptures a sizable chunk of that market share, web authors might once again create offensive 'please upgrade to Internet Explorer' web pages. Based upon the known features, what does the Slashdot community think the impact of Internet Explorer 7 will be on the web in general? Will we be forced to live a two-browser life once again?"

Next Generation reports that Wal-mart is dumping the UMD format, because no one was buying movies with the media. Above and beyond that decision, the studios are unimpressed as well. From the article: "One unnamed president of a major studio is quoted as saying, 'No one's watching movies on PSP. It's a game player, period.' Universal Studios Home Entertainment has ceased UMD production. One exec told Reuters, 'Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb.' Paramount is also considering its future with PSP's format. An exec said, 'We are on hiatus with UMD. Releasing titles on UMD is the exception rather than the rule. No one's even breaking even on them.'"

DevanJedi writes "Google recently started offering GMail hosted email service, with 25 free 2 GB email accounts, for universities and beta-testing private domains. Science Addiction has a review of the GMail for Your Domain service and its features including screenshots and speculation on future Google free and paid hosting efforts."

christopherfinke writes "I've been working on Slashdotter Firefox extension for Slashdot users, and version 1.2 has been approved by the Mozilla admins. Features include the ability to auto-add cache links after story links (from any of Coral Cache, Google Cache, or Mirrordot), a quick-reply feature that adds a 'Reply' option to the right-click menu when you select text in a comment, the option of styling all of Slashdot's pages like a chosen Slashdot section, links in the comment sections that allow you to toggle open/closed all of a comments replies, and more. All of Slashdotter's features are optional, and the extension is compatible with Firefox, the Mozilla Suite, Seamonkey, and Flock."

CNN's Game On column has a look at Gears of War developer Epic Games. The piece goes into the company's success as a tools merchant as well as a game developer. They discuss the excitement that Unreal Engine 3 has generated, both for AAA and less ambitious titles. From the article: "Several titles, including the forthcoming 'HoopWorld' and 'RoboHordes,' will use the engine for less than AAA games. And don't be surprised if educational titles or children's games use the engine as the Xbox 360 reaches the end of its life cycle. While Epic will continue enhancing and improving Unreal Engine 3 for the next four or five years, work has already begun on Unreal Engine 4, which the company sees as a powering force for the fourth PlayStation and third Xbox machines."

A reader writes: "Business version is on time, but the company won't make the key holiday consumer sales season. After another delay in the release of its Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft last week put a new executive in charge of future Windows projects and replaced several other managers. The changes are designed to better align Microsoft's desktop and Internet software teams and get products to market faster." There's also a NY Times piece that discusses why Windows has been so slow (to come out). Worth the reading.