Prepared for a career dealing with casual gaming, well-respected group manager for the Xbox Live Arcade Greg Canessa has left Microsoft for PopCap Games. Citing an interest in mass appeal for videogames and now helming PopCap's platform business, Canessa will be responsible for pushing the company's casual games out to new places. He says, of his new position: "I think we are looking at what could be the next Blizzard or EA in the game industry with PopCap, and I want to be a part of that." How important do you think casual games are to the future of the industry? Is the 'mass appeal' of these games really such that we could see a casual developer rise to the prominence of an EA or a Blizzard?

weibullguy dropped us a link from the IEEE's site. They've voted the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project as a 'Dream Job 2007'. Held by Mary Lou Jepsen, a former CTO for Intel, the position entails world travel, speaking with heads of state, and dealing endlessly with the technological challenges of a project designed to change the world. In the article, she relates some of the details of her first task on the job - redesigning the OLPC's display. "According to Jepsen, the display her team eventually marshaled into existence requires, depending on the mode, only between 2 percent and 14 percent of a typical laptop display's power consumption. ... To save watts, the display can switch between color with the backlight on, in low light, and black-and-white with the backlight off, in sunlight. OLPC's engineers trimmed battery usage further by, among other things, adding memory to the timing-controller chip, which decides how often a display refreshes. That trick enables the display to update itself continually without using the CPU if nothing changes on the screen."

1up has a piece up looking at the fine folks at Tose, the secret development ninjas behind a number of popular games. This group takes contracts from other developers, and purposefully keeps its name off of the final product. They're the developers of many high profile games, and very few gamers have ever heard of them. If they do sound familiar, it may be because we had a discussion about these folks back in May of last year. 1up's article covers some of the same ground as Gamasutra's, dealing with Tose's unique relationship with developers and their unusually secretive nature. They do, however, dig up the names of some of the shops Tose has worked with, including outfits like Nintendo, Capcom, Namco, Sony, Square Enix, Electronic Arts and THQ. They also point out a few games they know to be Tose's handiwork; the GBA ports of the Final Fantasy titles, Super Princess Peach, and Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel all bear the company's mark. The veil is cracking, then, but for the most part this group stands as a unique company in the games industry: a development house with little interest in press attention.

An anonymous reader asks: "I got a R&D job offer with a large company in Philadelphia area last week. It includes a relocation package that they told me was standard for my position. After I accepted the offer and made plans to terminate my current job, the recruiter handed me off to their relocation department, where I was told that my relocation package is significantly less than what I was promised. The relocation manager tells me that whenever there is conflict between their relocation policy and the offer, their internal relocation policy supersedes. Is this type of switch-and-bait common practice in corporate America? If you have gone through this nightmare before, any advice on how to respond to it?"

Steve Cerruti asks: "My credit union is implementing multi-factor authentication for online banking. They are following guidelines provided by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council as outlined in Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment (PDF). As you are already required to enter a password, 'something you know' is covered. 'Something you are' has significant technical hurdles while 'something you have' is familiar to credit unions in the form of ATM cards. My credit union chose to implement 'something you have' as a two dimensional lookup table that they email to an address you supply when you initially log in to the online banking service, further access is blocked until you enter a code from the table. New Measures to Make Online Access Safer describes the plan and a short video (FLV) provides further details." For the security conscious among us, do you think this is a decent way to implement the 'something you have' portion of a well secured system, or are there better ways to do it?

An anonymous reader asks: "My domain name is being stolen by spammers; they forge outgoing mail using my poor innocent domain name. First, I'd like to plead with mail server administrators out there: please REJECT spam and undeliverable mail. If you reject instead of bouncing then legitimate mail senders will still know there is a problem. Second, do you have any tips for dealing with a flood of spam bounces? Exim is pitching the bounces pretty quickly, but my server is still getting overwhelmed." In the case of stolen sender addresses, SPF attempts to address this problem but has it been effective?

MarkWatson asks: "I keep two Windows machines: a Windows 2000 laptop (bought with XP, but installed an old Windows 2000 license and Linux) and a desktop with XP (dual boot to Linux). I would like to avoid ever buying a PC with Vista, a situation that looks good because I believe both my Windows systems are reliable, fast, and will service my Windows needs for the long term. My problem is this: I like Windows 2000 better for a few reasons, but mainly because the license is transferable. I would like to still be using Windows 2000 5 years from now in a secure and reliable way (again, just for when I need Windows). Since I am far from a Windows expert, I would like to know your strategy for archiving Microsoft's latest Windows 2000 updates, and generally dealing with security issues. My strategy is to set my firewall up to run in stealth mode and not use Windows for general web browsing. Any suggestions will be appreciated!" How would you keep an old Windows OS (like Win98, and WinXP in another year or two) running long after official support for it has ended?

chrisd writes "When we first released the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) we were focused on building a great tool for people to build AJAX apps with. Now, we're happy to announce that all of the GWT source code is available, including the Java to JavaScript compiler and the debugging browser, under the Apache 2.0 license. If you'd like to see how we pulled off letting you avoid dealing with nasty browser quirks, you should take a look. More importantly, we're running this like a true open source project now: we'll be developing GWT completely in the open, as per our project charter. More info on the GWT blog."

NewsCloud writes "What does Firefox have to do with social justice? How will the one laptop per child project discourage genocide? How soon will Microsoft collapse? Watch Eben Moglen's inspiring keynote from the 2006 Plone Conference (Archive.org: mp3 or qt; or YouTube). The video presentation is ordinary, so the mp3 is an equally good format. 'If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; If we know that what we are trying to do is build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; If we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep problems of human injustice; If we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, when this is the moment for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it done.'"

eldavojohn writes "Earlier this year, UK citizen & hacker of NASA Gary KcKinnon was extradited to the United States (also interviewed twice). Now, another hacker has been indicted for hacking more than 150 U.S. government computers. Victor Faur, 26, of Arad, Romania claims to have led a 'white hat team' to expose flaws in U.S. government computers. It seems everyone else has been busy hacking into government systems while I've been wasting my time playing Warcraft." From the article: "The breached computers were used to collect and process data from spacecraft. Because of the break-ins, systems had to be rebuilt and scientists and engineers had to manually communicate with spacecraft, resulting in $1.36 million in losses for NASA and nearly $100,000 in losses for the Energy Department and the Navy, prosecutors said. Several suspected NASA hackers have been dealing with law enforcement recently."

mikesd81 writes "The Associated Press has an article about a robot named George that plays hide-and-seek. Impressively, the robot can actually also find a place to hide, and then hunt for its human playmate. Scientists are calling this 'a new level of human interaction'. The machine must take cues from people and behave accordingly. Researchers aim to imply humanity in robotics by creating technology that can connect with humans in a more 'thoughtful' way. The places to first see this technology are in the most human-oriented fields — those that require special care in dealing with the elderly, young and disabled." From the article: "'Robots in the human environment, to me that's the final frontier,' said Cynthia Breazeal, robotic life group director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'The human environment is as complex as it gets; it pushes the envelope.' Robotics is moving from software and gears operating remotely - Mars, the bottom of the ocean or assembly lines - to finally working with, beside and even on people. 'Robots have to understand people as people,' Breazeal said. 'Right now, the average robot understands people like a chair: It's something to go around.'"

You posted your questions for Herbert H. Thompson, PhD, on November 3rd and 4th. He decided to wait to answer until after the election in case there was a flagrant voting machine problem he could include in his answers -- and there has been at least one, but it is probably not a "security" problem per se, and is a long way from being resolved in any case. So here we go. Good food for thought here.

Thomas LaSusa writes "In this year's reader survey, Network Computing Magazine editors invited IT managers to vent about the tech challenges they face every day and how they wish vendors would address these problems. Read the unvarnished truth about what your peers are thinking." From the article: "This isn't the Top 10 worst vendor list, though. The largest tech companies tend to get the blame because they're the easy targets. Individual experiences with a particular company will vary widely; for every person who blasted Dell or Symantec for poor equipment or lousy service, someone else sang their praises. Instead, we find it more worthwhile to identify key areas where technology vendors as a whole aren't living up to their own boilerplate marketing. Some of the vendors contacted for their reactions to this story explained that today's enterprise networks are bewilderingly complex and run a vast number of OSs, applications and protocols. They all defined customer support as a top priority, but recognized that problems can't be solved by first-level support. Whether you consume or sell technology products, read on for an unvarnished look at what 755 IT decision-makers want — and don't want. You might just come away with new strategies for dealing with your vendors or serving your customers."

simoniker writes "Over at Game Career Guide, they're looking at how to become a video game journalist, and exactly what that 'infamous' job entails. An extract: 'An [apparently simple] task roster belies the complexity of the role of games journalist. For example, playing a game with an eye towards reviewing it differs from playing it purely for fun and, if it happens to be a terrible game (which you will see more than your fair share of in time), it may not be such an enjoyable experience. Dealing with PR people ... can be tiresome to degrees depending on the nature of the PR person (some are more tiresome than others, let's just say).'"

The venture capitalist is, of course, Richard Gorman, of Bay Partners, to whom we sent your questions earlier this week. He prefaces his answers by saying: "Thanks for all of your questions. They were very insightful and I enjoyed answering them. I also want to thank Salil Deshpande of Bay Partners who contributed to these answers and provided some healthy discussion. Salil is a successful two-time entrepreneur and is very knowledgeable."

kog777 writes "The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to claim the word as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails. EU trademark officials rejected Hormel Foods Corp.'s appeal, dealing the company another setback in its struggle to prevent software companies from using the word 'spam' in their products, a practice it argued was diluting its brand name. The European Office of Trade Marks and Designs, noting that the vast majority of the hits yielded by a Google search for the word made no reference to the food, said that 'the most evident meaning of the term SPAM for the consumers ... will certainly be unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail, rather than a designation for canned spicy ham.'"

BrewerDude asks: "I've set up a blog about programming (URL withheld: this isn't about self-promotion). I'm currently using one of the popular blog hosting services, but find it lacking when it comes to handling source code snippets in posts. It's even worse when it comes to dealing with code snippets that people include in their comments. At this point I'm frustrated enough that I'm ready to move from that service to something else. Ideally, I'm looking for something that will handle syntax highlighting for a variety of languages and do this for both the posts and the comments. I'd prefer a hosted solution, but am not opposed to installing and maintaining my own instance of a blog application if necessary. What have you found to be the best blog application when it comes to supporting posts and comments that include source code?"

Lauren Weinstein writes to tell us about CIFIP, the California Initiative For Internet Privacy — his attempt to get search engines off the dime on questions such as how long they retain search data. The initiative aims to explore "cooperative and/or legislative approaches to dealing with search engine and other Internet privacy issues, including a possible California initiative for the 2008 ballot." There is a public discussion list.

Y-Crate writes "It seems Wal-Mart is threatening retaliation against studios who decide to offer movies on iTunes. The Bentonville, AR retailer seems a bit miffed that someone would dare to undercut their prices. This wouldn't be the first time they've turned on a supplier for dealing with Apple." From the article: "Last year when Disney announced it would begin offering episodes of the hit shows 'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives' on Apple's iTunes, the reaction of the world's largest retailer sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry. Wal-Mart, worried that offering the shows for viewing on iPods would cut into DVD sales at its stores, sent 'cases and cases' of DVDs back to Disney, according to a source familiar with the matter."

Holy Mother of Thor writes to mention an eWeek article about a third-party patch for Internet Explorer. A dark horse security group formed after the WMF attacks in late 2005, the ZERT (Zero Day Emergency Response Team) has released a patch to attempt to slow the malware attacks on Windows. From the article: "'It is clear that we are dealing with an underground group of people who are writing exploits for profits. They are waiting for Patch Tuesday to pass, then it becomes Exploit Wednesday. We're seeing these zero-days in the wild, timed precisely to guarantee at least an entire month to spread,' Stewart said in an interview with eWEEK. Stewart, who is volunteering his reverse-engineering skills and time to ZERT in his private capacity, wrote an early version of the VML (Vector Markup Language) patch the group released Sept. 22 and worked closely with others to fine-tune the update to minimize potential glitches."