wjamesau writes "A group of Second Life Residents have created an amazing-looking RPG inspired by the city of Midgar from Final Fantasy VII , with a scripted combat system and game masters who run SOLDIER versus AVALANCHE action set-pieces. An interesting twist is that Squaresoft, the owners of the Final Fantasy IP, apparently gave the non-commercial project their blessing — or maybe not. The island of Midgar has changed ownership so no one's quite sure, but several hundred players keep it going through donations. 'Operating as if Square gave approval has made them act as if they work for Square. They have rules about never sharing information about pirating Final Fantasy gear, and are the best promotion of any brand in Second Life. If Square were ever to come to Second Life, no PR manager could dream of creating a more dedicated player base than this one.'"

Despite an accidental slip-up on the part of Sony CEO Howard Stringer, the PlayStation 3 is set for launch in the EU this March. When it does launch, folks in the UK and Ireland will be paying a pretty penny for Sony's new console. From the article: "Sony has confirmed ... that the 60GB PS3 will cost EUR 629.99 in Ireland, as suggested on the official website. 'Ireland is traditionally more expensive than other territories,' a spokesperson explained. 'The VAT rate there is 21 per cent, whereas it can be as low as 16 per cent in other EU countries.' However, the spokesperson continued, the PS3 will still cost EUR 599 if you're buying it elsewhere in Europe. Of course, here in Britain we're still using the funny old money with the picture of the rich lady on it, so we'll get a price point all of our own. And according to our old friend Senior Retail Sources, that price point will be set at GBP 425."

Kuzulu Kuhuru writes "Researchers in Microsoft's anti-malware engineering team are using distance measure and machine learning technologies to automate the process of classifying new strains of computer viruses, Trojans and other malicious software programs." From the article: "Microsoft's proposal will take a 'holistic approach' to tackle the classification problem, Lee said, pointing out that the machine learning aspects will deal with everything, from knowledge consumption, representation and storage, to classifier model generation and selection. It aims to consume knowledge about the malware sample efficiently and automatically and represent that knowledge in a form that results in minimal information loss. "