mjasay writes "At the Mobile World Congress, Steve Ballmer took aim at Apple's closed iPhone ecosystem with an ironic plea for openness: 'Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice.' Ballmer has apparently forgotten his company's own efforts to vertically integrate hardware and software (Zune, XBox), its history of vertically integrating software (tying SharePoint into Office, IE, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc.), as well as years of illegally tying Windows to Internet Explorer that only the US Justice Department could undo. Indeed, Microsoft's effect on the browser market has pushed Mozilla to get involved in a recent European Commission action against the software giant, with Mozilla's Mitchell Baker recently declaring that 'A number of illegal activities were also involved in creating IE's market dominance,' now requiring government intervention to open up the browser market to fair competition. Putting aside Microsoft's own tainted reputation in the field of openness, is Ballmer right? Should Apple open up its iPhone platform to outside competition, both in terms of hardware and software?"

iminplaya writes to tell us that the band "The Presidents of the United States of America" (yes, the peaches guys), are trying to expand their engagement with fans by selling their music via Apple's App store, something others have experimented with but never dealt with on this level. "The app, called 'The Presidents' Music — PUSA,' sells for $2.99 on the App Store (iTunes link) offers users access to four full albums, including the band's early 'lost' recordings. This includes the previously-unavailable FroggyStyle — 'unless you have one of the 500 cassettes the band sold in 1994, you've never heard this before,' reads the app description. The app also features a number of extras and exclusives that the band says are updated regularly, and fans can read the band's blog directly from the app on their iPhones or iPod touches. The music, however, is not actually contained within the application itself; instead, it is streamed to the app from a server, requiring the user to be connected to a network of some kind (iPhone users on the cell or WiFi network, iPod touch users on WiFi) in order to access the media."

b8fait writes "The head of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows development confirmed that Windows 7 will take the unusual path of moving straight from a single beta, which was launched earlier this month, to a release candidate. Sinofsky fleshed out the plan today and hinted that just as there would be no Beta 2, the company would also not provide a RC2 build. In other words, there may be only one released build of Windows 7 before it ships, possibly much sooner than even some of the most aggressive rumors about Windows 7. How much different can Windows 7 really be with such a shortened beta cycle?"

Gamasutra has an interview with Ubisoft's Patrick Redding about the development of Far Cry 2. He explains his team's reasoning behind some of the decisions they made while trying to innovate in the very well-established first-person shooter genre. Ubisoft is also trying to crowdsource a guide for the game. "We don't want to be necessarily spoon-feed everything to people, because that gets insulting. It's also tiresome if you're constantly interrupting them to remind them things about that system. I like to learn things through trial and error, and I know a lot of players are like that. But accessibility isn't just about it being easy to pick up the controls. It's also making sure that you're supporting a certain kind of readability, giving the player a certain kind of feedback. Maybe the way to put it is that it might be less a function of the kind of low-level mechanics of the game at the control level, and more about how you're using the output of the game as good feedback for the player, so they at least are clear on the causal link between what they're doing and what's happening."

Pandanapper writes to tell us Yahoo is reporting that if you find yourself watching an ad on a video screen in a public venue, the ad may be watching you as well. "Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity -- and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens."

theodp writes "At the World Economic Forum, Michael Dell's pitch to help Russia with its computers got the cold-as-Siberia shoulder from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 'We don't need help,' shot back Putin. 'We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity' (video — rant starts at 1:24). 'Our programmers are some of the best in the world,' Putin continued. 'No one would contest that here — not even our Indian colleagues.'"

CWmike writes to tell us that artificial intelligence and robotics have made another wobbly step forward with the most recent robot from Stanford. "Stair" is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing. "It also marks a transition of AI from narrow, carefully defined domains to real-world situations in which systems learn to deal with complex data and adapt to uncertainty. AI has more or less followed the 'hype cycle' popularized by Gartner Inc.: Technologies perk along in the shadows for a few years, then burst on the scene in a blaze of hype. Then they fall into disrepute when they fail to deliver on extravagant promises, until they eventually rise to a level of solid accomplishment and acceptance."

mikemuch writes "IE8 has left beta as of noon Pacific time today. The development team now considers the browser platform- and feature-complete, but won't say how long until it goes gold. PCMag.com got an early look and has posted a full review of Internet Explorer 8 RC1. The release candidate differs only slightly from Beta 2, most notably in tweaks to its InPrivate Browsing feature, aka porn mode. That feature has been decoupled with InPrivate Filtering, which blocks third-party content providers from creating profile of your browsing habits. RC1 also improves on performance, especially in startup time, but still trails Firefox and Chrome in JavaScript speed. Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added — the first browser to include such protections. Versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Vista, as well as for 32-bit XP are available, but Windows 7, which will ship with IE8, is stuck with an older beta for now."

An anonymous reader writes "A new bill is being introduced called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, which would require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the phone's camera. It would also prohibit such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone."

stoolpigeon writes "Have you ever been reading a book or watching a film and as the plot moves to involve some use of technology you begin to brace yourself, and the cringe as you are ripped out of the story by what is an obviously ignorant treatment of matters you know well? Do you find the idea of creating a "gui interface using visual basic" to see about tracking an ip address as more fit for a sitcom rather than crime drama? And if so, have you ever wondered what it would be like if one of us, a geek, wrote a techno-thriller? What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something? Would it be great, or would it just get bogged down in the techno babble?" Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Julie188 writes "Opera Software's year-old antitrust complaint against Microsoft took another step toward being vindicated, and the Oslo-based browser maker can't help crowing over the European Commission's decision. Opera had filed a complaint with the EC in December, 2007, contending that Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows violated antitrust rules. Yesterday, the EC sent a 'Statement of Objections (SO)' to Microsoft with a preliminary finding that bundling IE with Windows does indeed constitute an antitrust abuse. Microsoft has eight weeks to plead its case and change the EC's mind, an unlikely outcome if ever there was one. Opera's CEO said, 'On behalf of all Internet users, we commend the Commission for taking the next step towards restoring competition in a market that Microsoft has strangled for more than a decade.'"

theodp writes "So where do you turn to for great ideas when tough times force you to abort your engineers' brainchildren? If you're Google, reports Nicholas Carlson, you simply outsource brainstorming to your users. Google's launched a new Google Product Ideas blog as well as a Product Ideas for Google Mobile site where users can submit feature and product ideas and vote on others. So what's in it for you if you come up with Google's next billion-dollar-idea? 'If you post an idea or suggestion and we put it into action, we may give you a shout out on our Product Ideas blog,' explains Google, 'but we won't be compensating users for their ideas.' Lucky thing don't-be-evil Googlers don't have to live up to the IEEE Code of Ethics, or they might have to credit properly the contributions of others." So what's wrong with a shout out among consenting adults?

HSRD writes "Web-savvy moms who breast-feed are irate that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace restrict photos of nursing babies. The disputes reveal how the sites' community policing techniques sometimes struggle to keep up with the booming number and diversity of their members."