Gamasutra is reporting on a panel put on by the folks at Media Molecule, just hours after Phil Harrison's keynote yesterday. There, they talked about the formation of their ambitious company. They began with just a lot of hopes, and knew hard work was in store for them. Just the same, using techniques they'd picked up in the mod community, they drew up a very successful game concept and got someone else to pay for it. "[Essentially], the company's sole mission at the start was to do the most ambitious game it could produce, asking 'how hard can we make it for ourselves.' 'If we were jumping into the abyss,' said Evans, 'we were going to do it with rockets on our back.'"

Parallax Blue writes "The Washington Times reports that Homeland Security has developed and is testing a new computer system called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) that collects and analyzes personal information on US citizens. Relevant data 'can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.' The program apparently uses the same process as the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project, which was aborted in 2003 due to privacy concerns."